On Sun, 21 Sep 2003 00:12:09 -0400, (Peter
Stickney) wrote:

A couple of points - the Warwick has always struck me as one of those
"It's nice, but why?" airplanes.

Good point. The Lancaster and Halifax were in production and had been
operationally proven by the time the Warwick started to appear. I
presume it clung on due to some production commonality with the
Wellington plant which allowed Vickers at Brooklands to cling on to
stubbornly turning out at least a few of their own design before the
MAP could bear down on them and get them to change over to Lancasters.

It really didn't do anything that
other airplanes did better.

Or even as well.

By the time it came off the line, the
RAF's Medium bombers were teh B-25 and B-26, (Excuse me, Mitchell and
Marauder) except in those parts of teh world where the Wellington was
still viable. The Oceam Patrol stull has being handled by the
Catalina, the Sunderland, the Liberator, the Fortress, and the
U.S. Navy's patrol forces. So why all the effort? Was it an
Industrial Policy Effort to keep Vicker's Geodesic Structures skill
up to par, in case there was an urgent need to rebuild the R-100?

Probably due to all the expense and effort of getting the original
machine tools on line to produce the Wimpey airframes. Writing off
that stock would have been painful after all the problems they had in
1937-39 actually reaching Wimpey production targets.

As for the Stirlig's wing thickness. It's not all that bad, really.
It's just, lke the B-24 and the Davis Wing, that they stuck it onto
that godawful fuselage. (Which ended up being mainly empty space,
anyway.)

It's waaay thicker than the Lib wing - the wing root is practically as
deep as the fuselage. I suspect, knowing wartime working practices at
Shorts, that t was used as a bunk for snoozing workmen during
construction.

It's not like Critical Mach Number improvement is going to be
high on the list of Stirling Improvements. As for teh altitude
perfomance of the Hercules, in the VI and XVI models, they really
weren't all that different than the corresponding Merlin XX-24 series,
epsecially in terms of cruise power.

The Stirling III and Halifax III still seem to have a major
differential in terms of operational ceiling, which I can only put
down to structure weight and the wing.

Sabre engined Stirling? If you're not careful, MI-? shall be visiting
you, sir, to see why you'd wish to damage the War Effort so.

True, given the total failure of Napier to even reach production
targets, let alone type reliability tests, we'd have no engines for
them anyway given that we already have several dozen Typhoon airframes
being churned out to sit in purgatory storage while Napier get their
act together. We could always use the airframes as the world's
heaviest glider or something equally critical to winning the war.

Gavin Bailey

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