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Molentik posted:Here is my contribution; the Schelde S.21. It's the result of a shipyard trying to build a plane. It was supposed to have a 20mm cannon in the nose and two MG's in the wingroots. The cannon would be fixed for air-to-air combat, but the pilot could engage the autopilot and swivel the gun around to be able to strafe ground targets. That's the most GI Joe looking thing ever
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May 5, 2019 02:32
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Savoia Marchetti S.55  It was a luxury airliner designed in the late 20s. Passengers would travel in the split hulls while the pilots would sit in a cockpit embedded in the wing beneath the puller-pusher engine. They ended up being converted into bombers for the Regia Aeronautica during WW2.
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May 5, 2019 03:15
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Shame Boy posted:I was wondering when tipjets would get mentioned This had to be insanely loud.
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May 5, 2019 13:50
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oh dope posted:This had to be insanely loud. Speaking of loud planes, how about the XF-84H? It was nicknamed "Thunderscreech" for reasons that are about to become obvious:  It was a turboprop and was kind of an experiment to see just how far you could push a propeller with modern engines. The result is a plane where the propeller spins at supersonic speed even when idle. So this thing emanated a sonic boom even when it was just chilling on the runway warming up. It was so loud that it could be heard from 40 km away. It was so loud that it once incapacitated somebody in an entirely different plane on the same airstrip. It was so loud it actually caused a seizure in somebody who was too close when it was on full power. As for its actual performance, it didn't turn out too well. It was ludicrously fast, but also severely unstable, to the point where test pilots outright refused further flights. Besides, there wasn't all that much point to it aside from bragging rights. A regular jet-powered plane could do pretty much the same without loving up your entire ground crew every time it exited the hangar.
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May 5, 2019 14:40
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Shame Boy posted:I was wondering when tipjets would get mentioned Should have made cockpit look like a skull 
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May 5, 2019 19:17
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Aesop Poprock posted:That's the most GI Joe looking thing ever Needs more handles on the wings to carry extra sailors and football players.
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May 6, 2019 01:30
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Perestroika posted:Speaking of loud planes, how about the XF-84H? It was nicknamed "Thunderscreech" for reasons that are about to become obvious: All the photos of it have a little chunk of plane missing at the root of the vertical stabilizer. There was more than one Thunderscreech, but that bit kept falling off; they decided it wasn't important.
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May 7, 2019 07:00
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oh dope posted:This had to be insanely loud. It is. There is one flyable example at a museum in California (IIRC). They cranked it up a while back and got noise complaints from miles away.
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May 7, 2019 19:59
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Perestroika posted:Speaking of loud planes, how about the XF-84H? It was nicknamed "Thunderscreech" for reasons that are about to become obvious: "You aren't big enough and there aren't enough of you to get me in that thing again." -Test Pilot Lin Hendrix, after his first and only flight of this aircraft, to the project manager.
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May 7, 2019 20:18
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Some planes aren't inherently weird, but they're painted that way. Some of these are models, since color pictures from the war years can be hard to come by.    Lacking autopilot and GPS navigation, but needing to coordinate the flight of sometimes literal hundreds of bombers, the USAAF and friends came up with a pretty simple visual recognition system - paint incredibly garish planes, then have everyone form up on them to get into formation.    You definitely can't miss some of these things. There were also experiments with aerial camouflage. Typically, this would be picking a color that would blend in from a standard viewing angle - sky blue or white on the belly, green-grey on the top. Others got weirder.  The idea is that the pink will blend in against cloud cover from the ground, and practically vanish against a dusk or dawn sky. Apparently it was at least a little effective.  This critter worked more like dazzle camouflage from the first World War. Here, the objective isn't to blend into the scenery, but to make it harder for someone at a distance to get a read on exactly what direction you're going, which is sort of a big deal if you're headed toward them at several hundred miles an hour and want to get an accurate shot off. Even in the modern global air forces, where allowing fun would damage morale, you occasionally get some neat paint jobs. Sometimes you get a plane painted up for a special event, or better still, you get some stylish paint to go with your Russian LARPing in an aggressor squad during wargames. This stuff gets pretty Ace Combat at times.    And that's to say nothing of commercial airline liveries, which can range from pleasingly subdued design work to being a literal Pikachu. I love familiar planes done up in weird styles, so if you have any favorites, I'd love to see them.
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May 7, 2019 21:05
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Aircraft carriers were very new in the 1920s. But the Royal navy thought that aeroplanes could be very useful for finding enemy fleets. The only trouble was that the sort of biplane fighters that were able to take off from a tiny carrier sucked for doing that. They could only fly for a few hours and would be constantly coming and going without actually reconnoitering anything and if they actually found anything of interest then they'd have to fly back to report. So they took designs with nice powerful (big) engines, gave them lots of (bulky) fuel. Since you'd be out for a long time in a featureless void, you need a navigator to work out your position while you're looking for the ships, and someone to operate the radio. Worse, since you have a 1920s radio tranceiver (not small) which isn't going to react well to flying through squalls or fog, this guy needs to be inside! So you take all that and put it in the most compact configuration possible to fit onto a busy ship's deck. What I'm getting at here is that in early 20's Britain, a design trend for enormously ugly naval search planes began and arguably has continued unbroken to the present day.  Parnall Panther  Blackburn Blackburn  Avro Bison Some weren't ugly enough to make it into service, but they were pretty good efforts anyway:  Blackburn Blackburd torpedo bomber  Blackburn Cubaroo  Parnall Pike  GAL Fleet shadower  The subtly different Airspeed Fleet shadower Jaguars! has a new favorite as of 01:24 on May 8, 2019 |
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May 8, 2019 00:50
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Perestroika posted:Think that's insane? Well, Focke-Wulf would go ahead and one-up that with the Triebflügel. They took the same general concept, and somehow added jet engines in possibly the most insane way possible: If anyone wants to see this in 'action', the bad guy in the first captain america movie uses it at some point to make his escape.
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May 8, 2019 08:55
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grassy gnoll posted:
What I heard about that (admittedly it could be an urban legend) is that pink actually worked really well, it's just that the pilots hated flying pink planes.
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May 8, 2019 09:05
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:What I heard about that (admittedly it could be an urban legend) is that pink actually worked really well, it's just that the pilots hated flying pink planes. I agree that the faded pink works drat well; I could barely tell it was actually pink against the sky.
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May 8, 2019 14:38
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Jaguars! posted:Aircraft carriers were very new in the 1920s. But the Royal navy thought that aeroplanes could be very useful for finding enemy fleets. The only trouble was that the sort of biplane fighters that were able to take off from a tiny carrier sucked for doing that. They could only fly for a few hours and would be constantly coming and going without actually reconnoitering anything and if they actually found anything of interest then they'd have to fly back to report. I love the idea of an entire plane being built around giving one guy his own little room like this 
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May 8, 2019 14:43
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grassy gnoll posted:
These were specifically used for bombing assessment missions over cities, when the fires would create a pink hue in the sky. These aircraft were unarmed (both to save space for the photographic equipment and to give the aircraft a speed advantage if it was intercepted) and missions over cities were considered especially dangerous as the enemy would likely still have fighters in the air to attack them and any damaged bombers which had fallen out of formation. Assessment missions against other targets like bridges, dams, railways, even airfields weren’t considered as dangerous as the enemy would rarely bother to scramble interceptors for a lone aircraft which could easily escape and would be unlikely to still have fighters in the air. There was even one example of an RAF assessment aircraft (a Mosquito in this case) being shot down by an RAF Lancaster bomber who mistook it for a German fighter. The pilots didn’t hate flying a pink aircraft but they did REALLY hate bombing assessment missions over cities; far higher chance of encountering enemy aircraft, a higher chance of friendly fire, a city full of anti-aircraft guns which are now really loving pissed off at you and the fact that it takes far longer to photograph a city which has just been raided by 300 bombers than to photograph a bridge which has been raided by 3. Oh, and you don’t have a gun.
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May 8, 2019 14:46
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:What I heard about that (admittedly it could be an urban legend) is that pink actually worked really well, it's just that the pilots hated flying pink planes. not very likely, pink wasn't associated with femininity until during/after ww2
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May 8, 2019 14:48
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Just chiming in that this thread is awesome and it just stole about an hour of review time from me. 
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May 8, 2019 14:54
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This one is fairly normal-looking for the era (1919), but it's got a bit of a story: That's the Christmas Bullet. It's a biplane, but you'll note that there's no struts between the top and bottom wing. All biplanes of the era had struts, because the wings need the added rigidity and support. Cantilever designs were only really possible once we developed stronger, lighter materials to make wings out of. So does this plane have some magic experimental alloys in it or something? Let's find out! Wikipedia has a short but good summary of the whole thing, bolding mine: quote:Dr. William Whitney Christmas (1865–1960), who had no experience in aircraft design or aeronautical work, claimed to have built an aircraft of his own design in 1908 that was lost in a crash. After a second aircraft was supposedly built, called the Red Bird, later modified into the Red Bird II, Christmas founded the Christmas Aeroplane Company based in Washington, DC, in 1910. No evidence beyond his own claims has ever been found for the existence of either of these aircraft. Hmm. Well I'm sure he did lots of research and would hire competent people to help and stuff, so it's probably fine. quote:Christmas convinced two brothers, Henry and Alfred McCarry, to back him. They then paid a visit to the Continental Aircraft Company, of Long Island, where Christmas convinced management that his planned aircraft would be the key element in an audacious plot to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. ... Sure. quote:The "Bullet" was powered by a prototype Liberty 6 engine. Although the US Army had been persuaded to loan an engine, the proviso was that the prototype engine was to be fitted into an airframe for ground testing only. Well it was war time, I'm sure they... made due with what they had... Also It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article, but when the actual engineer Burnelli pointed out to Christmas that the wings weren't nearly strong enough to do what he wanted, he replied that that was intentional, and that they should "flap like a bird" to make it go faster  Anyone wanna take a guess at how it worked out during test flights? quote:On its maiden flight in January 1919, the wings of the "Bullet" peeled from the fuselage and the aircraft crashed, killing the pilot, Cuthbert Mills. Hm. Well that might have just been a fluke, I still trust this Christmas guy, let's try again: quote:The destruction of the prototype Liberty engine was never revealed to the US Army and a second Bullet was built powered by a Hall-Scott L-6 engine. Uh huh I assume Dr. William Whitney Christmas later went on to have a successful career selling monorails.
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May 8, 2019 15:07
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Check out the XC-120 Packplane:   This was based off of the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, the concept was not unlike containerized shipping, the airplane carried a detachable container pod which could conceivably be all manner of things. Cargo, personnel, a complete machine shop, a mobile hospital, a water purification plant, a big rear end fuel tank, really anything that weighed 20,000 lbs or less and could be made in the shape of the pod. The idea was, the plane would fly in carrying the pod, it would be detached, and then the plane would fly away empty to get another, like a semi-truck delivering a shipping container. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgxiXxu3nY
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May 8, 2019 17:35
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Hermsgervørden posted:Check out the XC-120 Packplane:
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Jul 27, 2019 17:59
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Hermsgervørden posted:Check out the XC-120 Packplane: I am sure that the Berlin Airlift had something to do with the design of this aircraft. I am surprised that no one else has done this recently. Someone should tweet to Elon Musk and tell him this is the future. I am guessing that the lack of pressurization also contributed to the demise of this idea also.
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Jul 28, 2019 05:29
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I just found something in the depths of the Military History thread that absolutely belongs here.Rocko Bonaparte posted:Okay so I just saw this: FrangibleCover posted:That's not all, the Gannet was fitted with Fairey's usual Youngman flap design:
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Jul 29, 2019 18:54
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They've got one of those at the Fleet Air Arm museum at RNAS Yeovilton. What you don't get an idea of there is those things are *massive*. Got a bit of a soft spot for the Gannet. Also 2 torpedoes, 4 nuclear depth charges and 16 rockets? drat. Roblo has a new favorite as of 20:46 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 20:36
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xS0EDo0PYM
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Jul 30, 2019 10:03
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