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Subject: How to fix the design defects of the Spitfire airplane of WW-II.
Shooter    5/26/2005 5:12:16 PM
Given 20-20 hind sight, It is easy to see where R.M. went wrong with the Spitfire! The following list of items is my idea of how they should have done it, IF THEY HAD READ ANY OF THE COMMON TEXTS instead of designing a newer SPAD for the last war! 1. Start with the late Seafire or even better the Martin Baker MB-5! they have contra props and wide track gear. The MB-5 also has a much higher LOS out of the pit forward. This is also one of the Spits larger problems. 2. Change the shape/planform of the wing and eppinage from eliptical to trapiziodal. The eliptical surfaces caused the construction time and cost of the Spitfire to be more than double that of the Mustang and almost as much as the P-38. 3. Reduce the wing cord and thus area by 35-40%! This reduction in surface aria will increase the cruising speed substantialy! This is probably the single biggest defect in the design. The change in aspect ratio will also help fuel ecconomy! 4. To compensate for the increased landing and take off speeds install triple slotted fowler flaps with a long hinge extension. This gives a huge increase in wing area and changes the camber for supirior "DOG FIGHT" ability, should you ever need it! ( because the pilot really screwed up!) At full extension and deflection, they would reduce the landing speed by 11~13MPH? (Slip Stick calcs!) 5. Remove the wing mounted radiators and install a body duct like the P-51 or MB-5! This one change would add ~35MPH to the plane? 6. use the single stage griphon engine and install a "Turbo-charger" like the P-38 and Most American Bombers had. This would increase power and save weight, both significant contributers to performance. 7. Remove the guns from the wings! This would lower the polar moment of rotation and give the plane snappier rates of roll! It also makes room for "wet wings" with much more fuel. A chronic Spit problem. It also fixes the Spit's gunnery problem of designed in dispersion! 8. Install the Gun(s) in the nose! Either fireing threw the prop boss/hub or on either side 180 degrees either side of the prop CL. This fixes the afore mentioned dispersion problem. One bigger gun between the cilinder banks or upto four 20MMs beside the engine or both, depending on what your mission needs were! 9. Make a new gun based on the American 28MM or 1.1" Naval AA ammo! This shell was particuarly destructive, had a very high MV and BC and was all ready in service. A re-engineered copy of the existing gun to reduce weight and increase RoF is a faily simple task. Pay the Americans for it if British spring technology is not up to the task! it also frees up much needed production capasity for other things. 10. Design a new drawn steel "Mine" shell for the above gun! Spend the money to load it with RDX instead of the TNT used for the first 4/5s of the war. 11. Pay North American or Lockheed to design it for you, since the Supermarine staff was to tied up fixing the origional spitfire design to get it done any time soon. Did I miss anything?
 
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Shooter    RE:How to fix the design defects of USAAC P-40 fighters in WW-II....   12/1/2005 10:00:44 PM
Dear yimmy? But you would have been very desperate waiting for it while the Germans invaded. But if your going to pick a later gen plane at least take a winner, like the f-15 or 16!
 
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Shooter    RE:How to fix the design defects of USAAC P-40 fighters in WW-II....   12/1/2005 10:02:29 PM
Thank you Mr. Bear! It is great to be appriciated and aknowledged! ;) to you too!
 
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DropBear    RE:How to fix the design defects of USAAC P-40 fighters in WW-II....   12/1/2005 10:12:41 PM
Smirk. ;)
 
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AussieEngineer    RE:How to fix the design defects of USAAC P-40 fighters in WW-II....   12/1/2005 10:22:18 PM
lol
 
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AussieEngineer    RE:Larry - from the horses mouth... Larry   12/1/2005 11:18:30 PM
RE: mission profile So if you include 10 gallons warm up and taxi, which is very generous, you end up with a 25 minutes reserve instead of 45. However, it seems the only way you can attempt to refute my hypothetical mission profile is by saying it will actually use twice as much fuel in cruise for some unjustified reason. Not a very strong argument by any standards. If the average mission time was 40 minutes the spits must have been starting up with less than full tanks and flying continuously METO power. Even with 10 gallons of warm up and taxi and 40 minutes at METO only 60 gallons would be used. Where did the other 25 gallons go shooter? What makes that even worse is that a real mission is going to be using a combination of METO and cruise settings which would imply an even smaller amount of fuel used. So you might be actually looking at 40-50 gallons for a 40 minute flight. Where did the fuel go shooter? Did it vanish into your perceived brilliance. Your numbers have never and still fail to add up?
That 40 gallons equates to between 77 and 81 miles more RADIUS of intercept! How many more successfull missions would that equate to? Untill you and the rest can answer the last set of questions you do not have a valid argument. The burden of proof is not on me shooter. If you want to argue that 50-70 miles more radius would have resulted in some huge increase in effectiveness you have to provide the proof to back up your claim. I have shown that the radius of action of a spitfire easily encompasses all of southern england. I have shown that that radius could be increased to that of the P-40 with a relatively simple and common modification. Myself and others have pointed out time and time again the multitude of problems and holes in your supposedly brilliant strategy yet you continue to put your fingers in your ears and start trying to justify your rediculous position with attempts at making childish bets and references to your apparent genius and ability in wargaming.
 
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oldbutnotwise    RE:Larry - from the horses mouth... Larry   12/2/2005 4:33:19 AM
shooter returns after getting rubbished on the autogun site same arguements i see, the spit was bad because it had less range - well as the p40 would have required an extra 20 minutes to get to altitude to intercept the aircraft would have been scrambled whilst the germans were forming up over france, where you you direct them to? or do you get them to altitude then have them shoot acroos to the germans? the radar the british had was not actually the best the german systems of 1940 were actually superior in both indentifying range, altitude and numbers. the majority of failed interception during the BOB were the result of placing the aircraft in the wrong position either by the ground controlers or by the pilots, extra range at that point would have only increased the interception by a small amount. The p40D/E of 1942 was completely outclassed by the me109e above 9000ft as was proved beyond doubt in the PTO so why would the inferior P40(no suffix) have been better in 1940? nearly all the bob was fought at altitudes of 15000ft+ you state that running the merlin at full power for more than 20mins would cause it to blow? where is your evidence of this? as has been pointed out to you before there is documented evidence of the merlin running at full power from england to berlin, and i guess that took more than 20mins. the 5 minutes at emergency that you quote was a standard entry on pilot notes, the pilot notes for the gladiator has the same entry, yet in defence of malta the gladiators ran emergency power constantly from takeoff to landing. during the bob hurricanes often ran emergency power for the length of combat 30min+ in some cases. this did lead to some engine problems mainly fouling of plugs if ideled to long the merlin never had a reputation for unreliability, something that cannot be said for the alison. I have always read that the alison was unreliable in europe because of the fuel provided, however this it seems it totally a red herring, the fuel itself was fine the problem was that the early p38s had such long routing between turbo and engine that aat altitude over europe the lead seperated out between the turbo and the engine causing the problem, not a fault of the fuel but a fault with the design. the same design issue was a major cause of another p38 problem, whilst the twin engine allowes many pilots to get home after engine failure the alsion made sure that most pilots new this by giving them so many. your recomended tome on the p38 the forked tailed devil states that is was a rare pilot that managed 2 weeks of flying without an engine failure, it also is very scornfull on the gerneal relaibity of alsions. another problem with the early p38 was that as the ducting for the turbo went all the way out to the wing tips before getting to the turbo(or was it from turbo to engine i forget) it meant that any hit to 60% of a p38 would be likely to at least nick a part of the fueling system, now not fatal in itself, if the pilot failed to notice(very likely as hes has other things on his mind, like being shot at) the mixture to that engine is changed by the hole, this required a manual change to the mixture setting or the engine would fail, and fail quite quicky as the alison was tempermental to mixture settings. a reson why a large proportion of p38s returned on one engine.
 
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oldbutnotwise    RE:Larry - from the horses mouth... Larry   12/2/2005 4:39:52 AM
shooter I cannot understand why you fail to bring up the major weakness of the spit, its low ammo storage, in nealy all the bob engagements the spits(and hurris) landed without getting close to empty tanks, because they had exhausted their ammo, aircraft were often short filled during the busiest times to get them airborne as soon as the guns were rearmed. during the height of the bob the raf were flying 6 or 7 sorties a day barely time on the ground to rearm and refuel yet you claim that the merlins needed a plug change and even a rebuild in that kind of fight hours ps still waiting on the web site for the b17 with tallboys, and stop strying to fob me off with that earlier link as you know very well it refers to b29 not b17's
 
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oldbutnotwise    RE:How to fix the design defects of USAAC P-40 fighters in WW-II....   12/2/2005 6:00:14 AM
>>yes the hurricane scored more than the spit in the BOB there was more of them!<< If the hurry downed more planes than the Spit, a plane like the P-39/40 would have downed more than the hurry. only if there had been more p40/39 than hurricanes and as the first p40 didnt reach service till april 40 and the first p39 was december 40 the chances of being more than a handfull of p40 available would have been slight so even if the p40 scored as many as the hurricane(on later war experiance an unlikely occurance) then the spit would have shot down some 20 - 30 times as many (based on the likelyhood of there being 20-30 times as many spits as p40s) so that makes makes (by your own accounting methods) the spit a vastly superior fighter! you cannot have it both ways either the spit was inferior becasue the hurricane shot down more or it wasnt as it shot down as many per spit in service as hurris in service. (as the p40 was deliveried to the raf within the bob timeframe yet scored no victories, yet the bolton paul defiant and the bristol blemheim both sored arial victories in this time period this would mean that by your reckoning that both these aircraft were superior fighters to the p40!) >>againg justify your flimsy structures, remember that the spit is credited with the fastest speed ever achieved by a piston aircraft! << Dives dont count, unless you average them with the ones that crashed because of failures! Under these rules the Spit IS the slowest plane on the planet! No Spit of the several that have tried has ever made the main event at any air race in the world. The fastest Mk-XIV hit 370.110MPH or more than 44MPH slower than the winner. When Modern air racers hit more 530MPH, in level flight, at low altitude, (Under 5,000') 370 seems a might slow to me? eh? dont understand how a rebuilt modern airracer with its honked out motor would be regarded as a fair comparison to a spit mk14? surely a fairer comparison would have been a mk24? has there been such a comparison or is it that the fury was a better bet? how many furies are used in air races against how many were actually built? you consistantly use air racing as a comparison yet air racing to combat is like compairing drag racing to nascar horses and courses. By the way, what was the VNE of the various models of Spitfire? Not the dive it till I survive(1 at over 600MPH) or auger in(7 or 8) test flights that you are thinking of, but honest to god speed in level flight! the spit was used as the test bed for dive trails, yes the spit achived it in recorded dives ones that only the foolhardy would re atempt, however it was always credited at being able to survive dives that would pull apart other aircraft, it certainly would survive better in a dive than the p38 which was renown for coming apart in midair. the later spits achived higher speeds tahn ealier ones but it dosnt take a genious to figure that, yet the mustang was never fitted with the bigger griffin why? (actually it was tried but the only place they could get it to fit was behind the pilot ala p39 and it was a dog and wouldnt get close to the speeds of a merlin vesion so was abandond) by the way you think the 109F was one of the best fighters of ww2? an aircraft that was slower, climbed slower, rolled slower, dove slower, turned slower, was out gunned by and had less range than a spit was somehow the best?
 
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oldbutnotwise    spitfire weak wings   12/2/2005 6:02:36 AM
shooter you claim the spit wings were weak, how about this a spit hit by at least 2 cannon shells by a 109G yet continued flying. dont believe then check http://www.tarrif.net/wwii/movies/ 109G vs spitfire
 
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gf0012-aust    RE:How to fix the design defects of USAAC P-40 fighters in WW-II....   12/2/2005 6:07:42 AM
"by the way you think the 109F was one of the best fighters of ww2? an aircraft that was slower, climbed slower, rolled slower, dove slower, turned slower, was out gunned by and had less range than a spit was somehow the best? " that would be news to Luftwaffe pilots like Heinz Knoke ("I Flew for the Fuhrer") who regarded the 109-Felix as inferior to the Spit but superior to the Hurri, and was much happier when the Gustav came along.
 
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