Recent content by AerialTorpedoDude69

Why do so many people trash talk the R-2800. Once the bugs were ironed out, it looks like it became one of the best piston engines ever made. Was there a much better radial that I've never heard of or something? I tried looking for four-valve engines of the 40s but never found one. Regarding...

You're right because there was no production R-2800 in 1941 and Allison engines weren't being used by the Navy. and US strategic planners made the best of a bad situation. The 1830 was the best engine available for carrier aircraft at that time and the Sakae 21 was a marginally superior engine...

Good comment. But I'm not sure about some of your points. If you mean to say that the R-2800 was a small engine, that isn't true as it was larger and heavier than the r-2600 IIRC. Although the smaller frontal area on a 9x2 engine compared to a 7x2 engine is impressive engineering, but my point...

Just a note, the 1,200 HP R-1830 engine in the Wildcat and 1820 in the Buffalo were technically inferior in most ways to the Zero and Oscar's Sakae 11/12 and 21, which made around 975 and 1,115 horsies respectively, with smaller displacement, weight, and frontal area. On paper, the Wasp and...

That's a well written article but it reads like propaganda. In some ways it oversimplifies certain aspects of the political and economic conflicts that occurred during the lead up to the war. It also relies on stereotypes to explain the expansionist logic used by (according to Robert...

Thank you for the correction! 👍There's a lot that I should learn or refresh myself on about pre-war trade before writing about it. Here's what I remember and/or just read: Japan first undervalued the Yen during its early industrialization period and exported vast quantities of gold. However it...

Yes, I did mean that, but sorry for sounding dismissive. It's true that early Japanese industry relied more heavily on manpower than industrial equipment. Were they classified as an industrial power? Yes. Did their products require a lot of man hours? Japanese aircraft needed more manhours per...

@JoblinTheGoblin I forgot to mention is that there are two issues regarding Japanese aircraft top speeds: 1. There is a recording discrepancy possibly. Going off the raw data available (such as horsepower and wing area), Japanese aircraft are consistently showing slower speeds than what...

@tomo pauk I know the Ha-43 was also high RPM but I think there may have been other prototype late-war models that had over 2,800 RPMs. @JoblinTheGoblin That seems like a reasonable line of conjecture. The most important point to make is that Japan was far outspending most other nations in...

As always, good comment. I would also like to add that the frontal areas of Japanese engines were oftentimes very small, compared to similar output engines from other nations. As pointed out by Greg (from YouTube, not these forums), some of the better Japanese engines used RPMs to achieve higher...

@MiTasol your knowledge and understanding of flight dynamics is amazing, thank you for taking the time to explain the flaps' probable function. There's a video of a Ki-43 doing snap-roll, or a roll that's been assisted by a wingtip stall...

@Shortround6 as Fowlers were originally designed to shorten landing rolls on heavy aircraft, they probably increased camber and lift but also drag. However, in a fighter, they'd want to minimize drag to improve sustained turn rate. With drag in mind, it looks like the Butterfly flaps have...

@Wild_Bill_Kelso thanks again for chiming in, those were great photos. AFAIK the Ki-43 flaps were almost certainly not automatically deployed. Nakajima fighters of the time had moved the flap deployment trigger to the control column, which normally contains gun control. The inventor of the...

@MiTasol brilliant work, thank you so much for your insight! 👍👍👍💯👍👍👍 It's pretty clear now, thanks to what you've provided, that the George's flaps combine a Fowler with a split. I don't know what this arrangement is called but the function is clear: The extra wing area and camber from the...