On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 20:44:52 +0000, ANDREW ROBERT BREEN wrote:

[snip]

Freeman Dyson, who did the Op.An, on the night bombers, is worth

As in "Dyson Sphere?"

reading on this. Essentially - lose the ventral turret: speed goes up,
losses down. Lose the dorsal and nose turrets on the Halibag - and losses
went down. Lancaster was already good enough to not mess much more with
(it upset the production lines), but certainly H2S in ventral was much
better for bombs-on-target and crews back home than the dustbin turret.

Is Dyson possibly the origin of the perhaps apocryphal story
concerning placement of armo(u)r on bombers? As the story goes
this individual made a careful analysis of the damage patterns
on returning bombers and reported that the best use of the limited
amount of weight allocated for armo(u)r was to put it where his
analysis showed no damage.
This, at first, seems counter-intuitive until you realize that the
aircraft he examined had survived, so it could be assumed that
there was little point in armo(u)ring the places that were damaged.
It also seems reasonable that the undamaged places he noted on
returning aircraft might be sites of increased vulnerability.

IBM

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