WinSPMBT

[oragus]

Wow, that is quite a bit of detail Monty. It sounds cool. With WWII not ending till 1950, there would have been lots of new technology fielded. You got your hands full there. lol...

Keep us up to speed on this project, very interesting.

Have you thought about looking into all the Heavy tanks the US experimented with? Bunch of monsters that never went past prototype. They were thought up to counter the Soviet Heavy Tanks, but they could find a home in this reality maybe. For example, the T29, T30 & T34. Just food for thought.

[RecruitMonty]

Here is a little bit of background on the political situation in the UK in the lead up to the invasion. A brief comment, nothing more.

Something I noticed about British politics during the war years was the rise in popularity of socialist, communist and populist figures. From what I read there were
two particularly influential men, both leftists, one visited Russia and was a keen supporter of Uncle Joe, the other remained in the British Isles and agitated a bit, in
support of the government, but only just.

It seems that when defeats etc occured and when America was still out of the war in Europe a lot of people looked to these men and men like them for inspiration. If the British continued to sustain defeats, like they do in this timeline, then they might have gone further to the left. They did pick a Labour government after the war after all. I am not saying they would get rid of Churchill or anything like that, but it is possible that by the time the Reich (not the historical one) came knocking the government could very well have lost its support.

When the invasion comes, and it did, Churchill and co. pull out leaving the lefties behind to take the heat.

[MarkSheppard]

Although a lot of what the Soviets and Americans built after the war had its roots in pilfered German technology or plans

This is a common misconception. The MiG-15 was not inspired by the Ta-183 Huckbein; it was a completely separate line of development.

From a Friend of mine, Stuart Slade; a defense analyst:

The Russians first started work on jets in the early 1920s. They set up a specialized gas turbine engine reserach group in 1926 and in 1930 the group was headed by V Oovarov. At that time, the primary focus was on turboprop engines and, in 1936, the group developed the 1,150 shp GTU-3 turboprop that was proposed as a powerplant for the TB-3 bomber. The prototypes of the GTU-3 were first test-flown in 1938. That year, the group split into two parts, one of which developed turboprops, the other of which started work on turbojets. That part was headed by Arkhip Mikhailovich Lyulka. By 1941, he had developed the RD-1 jet engine that delivered 1,100 pounds of thrust. Meanwhile, the Oovarov group were assembling a turboprop that could deliver 4,400 shp.

When the Germans invaded Russian all that work came to a halt. Development design continued but all actual production capacity was devoted to war production. When work restarted in 1944 Lyulka was responsible for the production of the TR-1 turbojet engine that delivered 2,866 pounds of thrust. The prototypes flew in 1946 and were installed in the Il-22 bomber in 1947.

In 1944, the USSR established two specifications. One was for their production jet fighter. There were three primary requirements for this aircraft, these requirements were called "whales" by the USSR because it was recognized they presented an enormous challenge. These whales were (a) the use of a turbojet rated at over 4,400 pounds thrust, (b) the use of swept wings and (c) the use of an ejector seat. In addition the aircraft had to be equipped with a heavy armament and be easy to both manufacture and maintain in the field.

Why swept wings and high power? In elementary terms (please remember I'm not an aviation engineer) there is a shockwave that stretches outwards from the nose. At slow speeds, this is a straight line but as the aircraft gets faster, that line starts to form a V with the nose at the front and the shockwave angled backwards. Eventually, the shockwave angle gets so acute that the shockwave itself touches the wingtips. that causes a dramatic increase in drag and it gets worse as more and more of the wing becomes immersed in the shockwave. If the wing is swept back, the tips are kept clear of the shockwave longer so the sudden increase in drag is delayed. The sharper the sweepback, the longer the delay. By the way, one can get the same effect by havinga long fuselage and short, razor-thin wings. Now you know why the F-104 looks like that.

The original work on swept wings was done by a German, Dr Alfred Busemann in around 1935. There was nothing secret about it, the work was published in open literature and everybody knew about it. It was of theoretical interest only since nobody could get up to speeds where the effect mattered. What wasn't in the open literature was that a Russian, V Stroominsky had carried on with research into swept wings in the early 1940s and made some discoveries that Busemann had missed completely. One was that if wings are swept, the airflow over the wings had two components, not one. The air flowed from the leading edge to the trailing edge as normal but also flowed spanwise along the wing causing the tips of the wings to stall. Another aspect of that was that the airflow along a swept wing significantly reduced the effects of the aircraft's controls. The other discovery was that the swept wing is much less efficient at generating lift than a straight wing.

So, unless the aircraft had a powerful enough engine to drive the aircraft up to the point where the drag reduction characteristics of a swept wing were significant, the advantages of a swept wing were much offset by its disadvantages. The critical speed turned out to be around 600mph; if a fighter could get up to 600mph, then the benefits of a swept wing kicked in and the aircraft got a lot faster (or, more precisely, it didn't show the dramatic increase in drag exhibited by straight-wing aircraft). If it couldn't get that speed, it didn't get the benefits and was a lot nastier to fly - and, by the way, since altitude performance is directly related to engine power and lift, underpowered swept-wing aircraft suffered severe altitude penalties.

By 1945, the basic layout of what would become the MiG-15 were already determined. A 35 degree swept wing, a single engine generating enough thrust to push the aircraft over 600 mph, a tail that was high enough to keep the tailplane out of the turbulence form the wings but not a T-tail (that suffered problems all of its own). This aircraft was known as the object I-310 and models of this configuration were test-dropped from Tu-2 aircraft in 1945 and 1946. Those test-drops validated the configuration of the I-310 (which became the MiG-15) and the La-160.

However, it was also apparent that the engines available didn't develop enough thrust to push the airframe fast enough to gain the advantages of a swept wing. So the Russians decided to build an intermediate generation of aircraft using whatever engines were available. At that time, these were the BMW-003 which the Russians built as the RD-20 (it generated 1,750 pounds of thrust) and the Jumo-004 which the Russians built as the RD-10 (it developed 1,950 pounds of thrust). They mated these with interim airframes, essentially converted piston-engined fighters and they were a stopgap until The Real Thing (TRT) arrived.

The Russians also captured a whole load of experimental aircraft, a lot of dirty paper that purported to be 'advanced designs" and some prototypes. They made an interesting discovery; the Germans had lots of swept wing fighter designs but no engines to power them. They had the BMW-003 and the Jumo-004 and that was it. 2,000 pounds of thrust, tops and that was nowhere near enough to push a plane fast enough so that it would benefit from the swept wings.

There were three "more" engines. They were the Heinkel-Hirth He-011 that was to be rated at 2,800 pounds of thrust, the Jumo-012 that was supposed to be rated at 6,600 pounds of thrust and the BMW-018 that was supposed to generate 7,700 pounds. None of these engine sactually existed; they were all nothing more than designs on paper. (Note, in Wikipedia it states that the Jumo-012 was test flown in 1944 and was "the most powerful jet engine in the world". This is untrue; only a few non-critical metal components of the 012 had been made and the engine was far from completion. Likewise claims that the BMW-018 whad been test flown were also false; the engine was even less advanced than the Jumo-012).

The Russians spent a lot of time trying to get those engines working and couldn't. There were fundamental design errors in them all that made it impossible that they could work. None of them were practical and the Germans (now the Russians) were stuck with the BMW-003 and the Jumo-004). The Rusisans decided to solve the problem by buying British Nene and Derwent engines which they built as the RD-45 and the RD-500 respectively. Important note that - the Russians were forced to buy British engines because German ones couldn't cut the mustard. Mikoyan selected the RD-45 to power the I-310 and he was in business.

The Russians also captured a semi-complete Ta-183 prototype. They looked at it, compared it with their I-310 and decided that the German aircraft was already obsolete. It was grossly underpowered - less than 2,000 pounds of thrus - and the Russians had already realized that 4,400 was inadequate - and it was structurally much inferior to the MiG being badly overweight and complex. In addition, the russians realized the germans had no idea of the problems caused by spanwise drift and the aircraft would have viciously bad flying characteristics. What was even worse, the Russians couldn't put their new RD-45 into it because the RD-45 was a centrifugal flow engine and had too great a frontal area for the Ta-183 that was deisgned around an axial flow engine.

It got worse, as the Russians experimented with swept-wing fighter models, they found something very interesting. Before the drag reduction benefits of a swept wing cut in, the aircraft would drop one wing, stall and spin out. A vicious flat spin that prevented the pilot getting out. the reason was that the complex airflow over a swept wing was such that both wings had to be exact mirror images. Even slight differences caused tip stalling and the loss of the aircraft. Swept wings couldn't be built the same way as conventional wings and a different manufacturing technique was needed. The Ta-183 had its wings built the older way and would have suffered from wing-drop.

The Russians concluded that the Ta-183 would be a slow, clumsy, treacherous dog and they rejected any possibility of proceeding with it. (By the way, the Argentines did build the Ta-183 and found the Russians were quite right; the aircraft was a flying death trap.)

The I-310 with a 5,000 pound thrust RD-45 was completed in mid-1947 as the S-1 prototype and was test-flown by the end of the year. It became the MiG-15. Later, it was re-engined with the 6,000 pound thrust VK-1.

Yefim Gordon wrote the definitive history of the MiG-15; its published by Aerofax. Worth getting - in fact all Yefim Gordon's books are.

Also; in Wide Body, a book on the development of the 747 it's revealed that an engineer in the USA, Robert Jones, independently invented the Delta Wing separate of German work by Lippisch.

Sorry if I do come off a bit pedantic Monty, but this is a brainbug that I hate.

[RecruitMonty]

So other than the Mig 15 and Delta wings what else did the allies come up with during the war in terms of jet aircraft? The Gloucester Meteor... thats about it really. I was going to keep the allied and Soviet jets anyway.

Just out of interest does anyone know the answer to my questions on aircraft design in-game. I need to know where to put the new icons and how to convert speeds etc for them.

[MarkSheppard]

So other than the Mig 15 and Delta wings what else did the allies come up with during the war in terms of jet aircraft? The Gloucester Meteor... thats about it really

Well, there was the P-80, it actually flew a few combat missions in europe...at least the YP-80A did...Linka.

And there were lots of whacky allied proposals as well:



Just out of interest does anyone know the answer to my questions on aircraft design in-game. I need to know where to put the new icons and how to convert speeds etc for them.

Well, you put them into any SHP file that is single icon slot, e.g. the same SHPs that you use for non turreted vehicles.

As for speed:

Fighter-bomber and level bomber Aircraft Speed: 1 pt of Speed for every 100 km/h (round up past 50)

Helicopter speed: 1/3 of actual maximum speed in km/h

[MarkSheppard]

And now we can do this with the das reich mod:

[RecruitMonty]

?

[MarkSheppard]

Recreate Commando 3118 "Time Trap" in which a pair of Chieftains get sent back in time to the Battle of the BUlge in 1944!

[Suhiir]

Reminds me of the movie "Final Countdown" where the USS Nimitz winds up at near Pearl Harbor on Dec 6, 1941.

Ya know, I think the Nimitz could destroy the entire Japanese navy all by it self *chuckles*

[RecruitMonty]

Oh... right, I get it now. That would be interesting. I bet you not one Chieftain would evenhave it's paint scratched, well maybe it would get scratched but not much else.