Slitherine

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Originally posted by Greg Wilmoth: Finally, we can’t always assume engineers really know what they’re doing. There is a book called “What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History,” by Walter Vincenti. It’s not an easy read, but one of the chapters is on the “Davis Wing,” which was used in the B-24 and was written up in Life magazine as “The Wing that Could Win the War.” Davis was a self-taught inventor, and he was working probably just at the end of the period in aeronautical history when a non-technically trained person could still make a design contribution. The Davis wing did seem to decrease drag and therefore increased range, at least for the B-24. Davis had an elaborate explanation using algebra and geometry to explain how it worked, but engineers couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until later with more sophisticated analysis that engineers were able to understand what Davis apparently stumbled onto. Air moving over the curved top of a wing ends up in turbulence. His design moved the starting point of that turbulence further aft. Since the area of the top of the wing covered in turbulence was proportional to drag, moving it back reduced the turbulent area, and hence the drag. Davis had a good design, but he really didn’t have a clue as to how it worked. For awhile, at least, neither did the engineers.

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Originally posted by Greg Wilmoth: Hey Matrix! If you guys get serious about doing in-depth production in the game, put these three books on your research list. You'll find lots of books on the technical aspects of the warships, but these will get into the politics and economics of fleet building: The Unsinkable Fleet: The Politics of U.S. Navy Expansion in World War II, but Joel R. Davidson. (Naval Institute Press, 1996) Davidson says the small US capacity to manufacture armored plate in 1940 put a cap on the number of battleships the US could build before 1948. Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy 1887-1941, by David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie. (Naval Institute Press, 1997) These guys say the IJN pressed for qualatative superiority in all their weapons, but they often ended up with just over-specialization. British Seapower and Procurement Between the Wars: A Reappraisal of Rearmament, by G.A.H. Gordon. (Naval Institute Press, 1988) In the late 1930s the Brits had an armor plate bottleneck too. They ended up buying armor from Czechoslovakia, and bizarrely, from German controlled Czechoslovakia after May 1939.

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Originally posted by RevRick: Regarding the P-51 - known as the A-36 Apache and given the name Mustang by the Brits. Didn't the NACA information wind up in the hands of the North American design team by some under the table slight of hand?

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Seems that I read that somewhere - and the Brits did two conversion of the Mustang I's using Merlins in place of the Allisons. I have seen pictures of them, and got the USAAF's attention with their raw data. Of course,this also begs the question of what would have happened if the P-38 had been similarly retrofitted somewhere - which was proposed but never got of the ground. Seems that someone objected to Allison losing all of that business.