Nerd1000

My trackclip pro has outlasted 2 sets of headphones with no damage.

Indeed, which is why we need to eat far less meat. Intensive 'battery' farming of animals is both cruel and wasteful, but IMO grazing still has a place so we shouldn't stop eating meat entirely- just cut back on our consumption a great deal, so that we're only using the sustainable methods of obtaining it. The other animal based foods that are more viable are eggs and milk- eggs in particular are much more efficient than eating the chicken itself, IIRC you get a bit less than 50% of the energy fed to the chicken back in the eggs. Chooks of course can be fed scraps, which means you can cut back on waste of food- this isn't gonna happen if you're battery farming, but we could reap those benefits by encouraging people to keep them in their back yard. We'd probably live longer if we cut back on meats too- red meat consumption is a cancer risk after all.

There is one argument you can make in favour of farming animals for meat from an environmental standpoint: Not all land is suitable for growing food crops. If you go somewhere like western Queensland you'll see what I'm getting at here: It's too dry and the soils are too poor for crops humans can digest. Grasses and weeds that are edible for ruminants grow well enough to support them, albeit at a considerably lower population density than you'd be able to sustain on prime pasture. I'm not sure there's enough arable land to feed the world on grains, tubers, legumes, fruits and so forth unless you supplement it with something else- fish works nicely, but I worry that a lot of commercial fishing is unsustainable. That said, us westerners eat far too much meat.

Greetings, Earthlings!

gotta love that inertial starter!

So it was night fighters, not photo recon! Thanks for the references, both on Mozzies with NOS and the other stuff.

I think there's more to the DB's light weight than that, as the similarly sized Jumo 213 (which seems to have been designed using a very similar paradigm) was over 900kg, not far off the weight of a 60 series Griffon. Maybe they were doing some clever things with materials choice and structural design to shave off weight. On the intercooling- It's worth noting that the 60 series Merlin was originally designed for a high altitude version of the Wellington bomber. Where water/methanol injection is the logical choice for a short range fighter (as you demonstrated, it is easy to carry enough fluid for a 1 hr fighter sweep) the intercooler makes a lot more sense for a high altitude bomber which might need to use high boost for long periods of time. It so happened that this new 'bomber engine' was also the best option for upgrading the Spitfire's altitude performance, so the high altitude Wellington project was shelved and production devoted to the Spit. The Brits would probably have loved to develop a water/methanol system for their engines but never did so until after the war (though I have read something suggesting that they tried Nitrous oxide on one squadron of Photo-recon Mosquitos). Presumably time/resources issues prevented it.

Interesting that the smoke trail is so faint. Maybe the old non-smokey R-3R exhaust was correct after all?

The other thing to note is that the supercharger itself takes energy to run- if you make it bigger (for more power) you must burn more fuel to turn it. Now the compression stroke of the engine does the same thing, but the power cost of a higher compression ratio is balanced by the larger expansion ratio that goes along with it, so a higher compression ratio usually gives better economy (thanks to higher combustion temperature and more expansion) along with more power. On the other hand, upgrading the supercharger (and applying MOAR BOOST!) is probably the quickest way to extract more power from an engine, so that is what Rolls-Royce did. The results speak for themselves: the Merlin, in spite of its relatively small displacement, was able to compete with much larger engines right up until the end of the war though as we can see this approach wasn't great for fuel economy. As a point of reference, the Bf109's DB605 displaces 35L to the Merlin's 27L, making it more comparable to the 37L Griffon in size (though the Griffon is around 150kg heavier than the 605- don't ask me how DB made such a large engine so light).

Makes sense that they would allow enough MW50 for a full interception, seeing as it was needed for full performance. Interesting that the Merlin is so thirsty- I guess that's the price of using lots of supercharging to get your power rather than increasing displacement and compression ratio. Massive speculation here, but I'm guessing they kept compression ratio the same to avoid re-designing the pistons and cylinders: keeping them the same means less re-tooling, and R-R were always under more demand for engines than they could supply (hence the Packard deal).

Surely at that point you'd be low on fuel yourself? It's not like the MW50 replaces your normal petrol, indeed it works because it allows you to burn more of the stuff! Fuel capacity of the two planes isn't particularly different: 88 gal for the 109, 85 gal for the Spit, and the 109 has a much bigger displacement engine delivering more power, which makes higher fuel consumption a certainty (unless the Merlin was abnormally inefficient, and I've seen nothing that suggests that was the case).

Don't pull on the stick so hard.

Just put a sim rig with DCS installed inside your coffin. Problem solved.

Interesting trivia: The Spanish built a copy of the Bf-109G with a Hispano Suiza 12Z engine in place of the original DB-605 (as no DB engines could be obtained). Unfortunately the Hispano Suiza's propeller rotates the opposite direction to that of the DB-605 and the Spanish neglected to change the airfoil of the 109's tail, resulting in a plane with totally unmanageable yaw on takeoff. I can't imagine that it was much easier once you were flying at speed either- the pilots must have developed a very strong left leg.

The method of operation of a MAWS is quite simple really- you have a number of sensors not unlike IR homing missile seekers (but with a much wider FoV) arranged around the aircraft. These sensors look for an IR signature matching that of a solid rocket motor- there are certain wavelengths where the exhaust products have strong IR emissions, and the sensors are tuned to detect only these wavelengths. If a signature matching that of a missile is detected the MAWS activates an alarm in the cockpit and possibly also alerts the pilot as to which sensor detected the launch so he/she has some idea where the missile is coming from. The real difficult part is obtaining info on the operation of the software and computers that distinguish real missiles from spurious signals. A guy who works on software for the RAAF told me that even they don't know what's inside the control boxes for their MAWS- if something stops working they send it to the US and a little while later it comes back fixed. I gather he knew a bit more about some aspects of it, but naturally it's all super classified and not for the ears of nosy civilians. ED could probably 'fake' that side of the system with a simple probability based model: a certain % chance of correctly detecting a real launch, combined with a chance of giving a false alarm every now and then. This would still be more detailed than the in-game A-10C's MAWS, which never gives false alarms and seems to correctly detect any launch it can see.

That area ruling :thumbup:

No.

It is likely that the laser designators of the A-10 and the Ka-50 have essentially the same frequency: my guess is that they're both Nd:YAG infra red lasers. The issue is that the laser codes are incompatible- the GBU will only home in a dot that flashes the right coded pattern.

GE = General Electric kN = Kilonewton. The Newton (N) is a unit of force- 1N accelerates 1kg at 1m/s^2

Where I come from a liquid hydrocarbon mixture used for fueling spark ignition engines is known as 'Petrol' not 'Gasoline'- the terms mean the same thing, but are used by different dialects of the same language. Being a non polar liquid of relatively low average molecular mass, petrol or gasoline is (as you and I both said) an excellent solvent for oils or greases. I'm not sure about ice though- as these light hydrocarbons are non-polar compounds they generally won't interact with polar substances like water in any meaningful way. The main way that chemical de-icing works is by adding a substance that acts as a freezing point depressant. In order to do this, the substance has to form inter-molecular interactions with the water molecules in the ice, disrupting the ice crystals and forcing the water to revert to a liquid state. Octane and other hydrocarbons have no polar groups and thus don't form strong polar interactions with water (only dispersion forces, which are very weak due to water's low molar mass), so they can't do this. The above changes if your petrol/gas contains a water soluble additive like methanol, ethanol or MBTE. These compounds can interact with water molecules and potentially alter the melting point.

I don't think spraying fuel would do much to remove ice, unless the fuel is sprayed out very hot (even then, the ice layer would have to be quite thin) or contains a lot of alcohol. You might even make it worse by having the evaporating petrol cool your windscreen down. Petrol is an excellent solvent for many kinds of contamination though, so I can certainly see it being used to clean the windscreen of oil, grease etc.

WW2 fighters have a low wingloading compared to modern jets, and most would at least in theory be able to take off from a carrier without the assistance of a catapult. This presents a very convenient way of transporting planes to remote island airfields- just load them onto the carrier with a crane, and when you get in range of the airfield you just have the planes takeoff from the deck and fly to their new base. This trick is what the photos depict- they're normal P-47s, being delivered to an airfield by a carrier.

Another thing to note is that German pilots essentially flew until they were killed, while Allied aces often got re-assigned to training units so that they could pass on their expertise. This (and differences in situation and tactics) was another factor in many German aces getting claimed kill counts in the hundreds.

I don't understand. Didn't ED elect to develop that particular model? Or did someone else start K-4 development, only to fold and leave ED to finish the job?

Soooo, your point is that the G-14 isn't that much worse than a K-4? It's still a more representative version than the K-4. Of course ED didn't choose the K-4 because it is representative- I suspect that available documentation and the 'glamor' of having the ultimate 109 were bigger factors in that decision. That said, I don't really see a need to make a G-14 now that the K-4 is in game. If we're to have another 109, I want it to be the F-4 or early model G so that mid-war planes like the upcoming P-40 have a realistic opponent.