Just another note: Studies of Napoleonic eras revealed that bayonets only caused about 2% of the casualties, and that bayonet charges were largely mythical in nature.
And when I say mythical I don't meant that entire battalions didn't charge with bayonets drawn - they certainly did. However, the charge was usually conducted when the defender was already wavering and the charge itself was just one massive bit of posturing to put them to flight. If the defender didn't run then the result was the attacker usually taking an entire volley at point-blank range resulting in the attacker getting routed instead.
In fact, Jomini - one of the big Napoleonic references of the period - claimed that he in fact never witnessed a battalion ending up in a melee with another battalion. One side or another always broke first. The bayonet injuries, when they do happen, tend to happen to men who are running and are caught by the pursuit charge; or they occur during smaller charges by skirmishers (usually of only a few dozen men) fighting each other for good positions. That the French had to study the Civil War to find out the dubious utility of bayonets when their own Grand Armee actually hardly relied on it goes to show how institutions can easily end up mythologizing its own past into unsound doctrines for the present.
Modern fighter aircraft have very little free space in them. Almost every cubic centimeter inside is filled with something:
There are gigantic bays crammed full of electronics with just enough space around them to ensure adequate air circulation, and there's fuel stuffed into every available space to feed the thirsty jet engines.
Second World War fighters are quite a bit more open inside. Above is a shot of the inside of the rear fuselage of a Spitfire. As you can see, there's a whole lot of nothing back there.
I'll skip a detailed derivation of it, but the Breuget Range Equation explains that the cruising range of an aircraft is a linear function of cruise airspeed, lift to drag ratio, specific fuel consumption, and the natural log of the fully fueled weight over the empty weight. This looks sort of like the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation, and I suppose it's a distant relative.
So why not just cram every single corner of the fighter full of fuel? That ought to do the trick!
Very simply, they couldn't.
Back in World War Two the designers didn't have the luxury of computer-controlled everything. That means that, if the aircraft had multiple fuel tanks, the pilot needed to manually select which ones were feeding to the engine. It meant that flight computers couldn't automatically re-trim the aircraft if the balance shifted in flight. Also, they didn't have fancy fly-by-wire systems, so the aircraft had to be statically stable with the center of gravity in front of the center of lift:
Moreover, since we're talking about fighters here, the center of lift has to be fairly close to the center of gravity, or the fighter will suffer from pitch stiffness and the pilot will really have to pull hard on the stick to get the nose to move. Again, the vast majority of WWII fighters relied on the pilot's muscles to actuate the flight controls, so having heavy control forces was out of the question.
All this together meant that the fuel tanks in a Second World War fighter could really only be placed close to the center of gravity so that consuming the fuel would affect the stability and trim of the aircraft as little as possible. Ideally the ammunition for the guns would be near the center of gravity as well for the same reason.
On a typical WWII fighter the center of lift will be located somewhere a little bit back from the front quarter mark of the chord length of the wings. Airfoils generally have their aerodynamic center around 25% of of the Mean Aerodynamic Chord, but the horizontal stabilizers push it back a little further. The center of gravity will be in front of that. So, basically, a designer would want the fuel tanks to be centered at about the leading edge of the wing.
That's the reason that most WWII fighters only have fuel tanks in the fuselage, often immediately behind the engine or under the pilot. Surprisingly few have fuel tanks in the wings, given the amount of volume the wing represents. Generally speaking the wings were already full of landing gear, guns and ammo, and sticking gas tanks in there wasn't worth the bother. It may have been possible to put auxiliary fuel tanks in the wings further outboard of the guns, but this would have reduced roll rate at least until that fuel was consumed. I'm not aware of any designs that did this, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
One big exception is the P-51 Mustang. The P-51 had those wonderful laminar-flow wings that did everything except actually make the airflow laminar. Laminar flow airfoils can be much larger for a given amount of drag than their conventional counterparts, and the P-51 had gigantically thick wings. This meant that there was plenty of room for guns, ammo, landing gear, and a generous amount of fuel:
So, practically speaking, most designers were stuck with the amount of internal fuel they could pack under the pilot and behind the engine.
Increasing lift to drag ratio typically optimizes for aircraft with very smooth, cigar-shaped fuselages and long, skinny wings. So, basically B-29 shaped sorts of things. That synergizes well with optimizing for sustained turn rate, but as we've seen, optimizing for sustained turn rate conflicts with just about everything else.
Most WWII engines tended to have samey fuel efficiency, although the British sleeve-valve engines had a small edge in fuel economy. The Soviets did try using diesel engines in bombers, but for a variety of reasons this didn't really work. This may not have been a total loss; according to some sources the V-2 diesel in the... well, just about every Soviet medium and heavy tank was derived from a diesel intended for aircraft. I've never seen the final word on whether that's true or not. @EnsignExpendable, do you know?
Flying at higher altitude tended to result in better range.
At the end of the day, the best way to solve the problem was probably drop tanks.
Fighter aircraft became much better during the Second World War. But, apart from the development of engines, it was not a straightforward matter of monotonous improvement. Aircraft are a series of compromises. Improving one aspect of performance almost always compromises others. So, for aircraft designers in World War Two, the question was not so much "what will we do to make this aircraft better?" but "what are we willing to sacrifice?"
To explain why, let's look at the forces acting on an aircraft:
Lift
Lift is the force that keeps the aircraft from becoming one with the Earth. It is generally considered a good thing.
The lift equation is L=0.5CLRV2A where L is lift, CL is lift coefficient (which is a measure of the effectiveness of the wing based on its shape and other factors), R is air density, V is airspeed and A is the area of the wing.
Airspeed is very important to an aircraft's ability to make lift, since the force of lift grows with the square of airspeed and in linear relation to all other factors. This means that aircraft will have trouble producing adequate lift during takeoff and landing, since that's when they slow down the most.
Altitude is also a significant factor to an aircraft's ability to make lift. The density of air decreases at an approximately linear rate with altitude above sea level:
Finally, wings work better the bigger they are. Wing area directly relates to lift production, provided that wing shape is kept constant.
While coefficient of lift CL contains many complex factors, one important and relatively simple factor is the angle of attack, also called AOA or alpha. The more tilted an airfoil is relative to the airflow, the more lift it will generate. The lift coefficient (and thus lift force, all other factors remaining equal) increases more or less linearly until the airfoil stalls:
Essentially what's going on is that the greater the AOA, the more the wing "bends" the air around the wing. But the airflow can only become so bent before it detaches. Once the wing is stalled it doesn't stop producing lift entirely, but it does create substantially less lift than it was just before it stalled.
Drag
Drag is the force acting against the movement of any object travelling through a fluid. Since it slows aircraft down and makes them waste fuel in overcoming it, drag is a total buzzkill and is generally considered a bad thing.
The drag equation is D=0.5CDRV2A where D is drag, CD is drag coefficient (which is a measure of how "draggy" a given aircraft is), R is air density, V is airspeed and A is the frontal area of the aircraft.
This equation is obviously very similar to the lift equation, and this is where designers hit the first big snag. Lift is good, but drag is bad, but because the factors that cause these forces are so similar, most measures that will increase lift will also increase drag. Most measures that reduce drag will also reduce lift.
Generally speaking, wing loading (the amount of wing area relative to the plane's weight) increased with newer aircraft models. The stall speed (the slowest possible speed at which an aircraft can fly without stalling) also increased. The massive increases in engine power alone were not sufficient to provide the increases in speed that designers wanted. They had to deliberately sacrifice lift production in order to minimize drag.
World War Two saw the introduction of laminar-flow wings. These were wings that had a cross-section (or airfoil) that generated less turbulent airflow than previous airfoil designs. However, they also generated much less lift. Watch a B-17 (which does not have a laminar-flow wing) and a B-24 (which does) take off. The B-24 eats up a lot more runway before its nose pulls up.
There are many causes of aerodynamic drag, but lift on a WWII fighter aircraft can be broken down into two major categories. There is induced drag, which is caused by wingtip vortices and is a byproduct of lift production, and parasitic drag which is everything else. Induced drag is interesting in that it actually decreases with airspeed. So for takeoff and landing it is a major consideration, but for cruising flight it is less important.
However, induced drag is also significant during combat maneuvering. Wing with a higher aspect ratio, that is, the ratio of the wingspan to the wing chord (which is the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge of the wing) produce less induced drag.
So, for the purposes of producing good cruise efficiency, reducing induced drag was not a major consideration. For producing the best maneuvering fighter, reducing induced drag was significant.
Weight
Weight is the force counteracting lift. The more weight an aircraft has, the more lift it needs to produce. The more lift it needs to produce, the larger the wings need to be and the more drag they create. The more weight an aircraft has, the less it can carry. The more weight an aircraft has, the more sluggishly it accelerates. In general, weight is a bad thing for aircraft. But for fighters in WWII, weight wasn't entirely a bad thing. The more weight an aircraft has relative to its drag, the faster it can dive. Diving away to escape enemies if a fight was not going well was a useful tactic. The P-47, which was extremely heavy, but comparatively well streamlined, could easily out-dive the FW-190A and Bf-109G/K.
In general though, designers tried every possible trick to reduce aircraft weight. Early in the war, stressed-skin monocoque designs began to take over from the fabric-covered, built-up tube designs.
The old-style construction of the Hawker Hurricane. It's a shit plane.
Stressed-skin construction of the Spitfire, with a much better strength to weight ratio.
But as the war dragged on, designers tried even more creative ways to reduce weight. This went so far as reducing the weight of the rivets holding the aircraft together, stripping the aircraft of any unnecessary paint, and even removing or downgrading some of the guns.
An RAF Brewster Buffalo in the Pacific theater. The British downgraded the .50 caliber machine guns to .303 weapons in order to reduce weight.
In some cases, however, older construction techniques were used at the war's end due to materials shortages or for cost reasons. The German TA-152, for instance, used a large amount of wooden construction with steel reinforcement in the rear fuselage and tail in order to conserve aluminum. This was not as light or as strong as aluminum, but beggars can't be choosers.
Extensive use of (now rotten) wood in the rear fuselage of the TA-152
Generally speaking, aircraft get heavier with each variant. The Bf-109C of the late 1930s weighed 1,600 kg, but the Bf-109G of the second half of WWII had ballooned to over 2,200 kg. One notable exception was the Soviet YAK-3:
The YAK-3, which was originally designated YAK-1M, was a demonstration of what designers could accomplish if they had the discipline to keep aircraft weight as low as possible. Originally, it had been intended that The YAK-1 (which had somewhat mediocre performance vs. German fighters) would be improved by installing a new engine with more power. But all of the new and more powerful engines proved to be troublesome and unreliable. Without any immediate prospect of more engine power, the Yakovlev engineers instead improved performance by reducing weight. The YAK-3 ended up weighing nearly 300 kg less than the YAK-1, and the difference in performance was startling. At low altitude the YAK-3 had a tighter turn radius than anything the Luftwaffe had.
Thrust
Thrust is the force propelling the aircraft forwards. It is generally considered a good thing. Thrust was one area where engineers could and did make improvements with very few other compromises. The art of high-output piston engine design was refined during WWII to a precise science, only to be immediately rendered obsolete by the development of jet engines.
Piston engined aircraft convert engine horsepower into thrust airflow via a propeller. Thrust was increased during WWII primarily by making the engines more powerful, although there were also some improvements in propeller design and efficiency. A tertiary source of thrust was the addition of jet thrust from the exhaust of the piston engines and from Merideth Effect radiators.
The power output of WWII fighter engines was improved in two ways; first by making the engines larger, and second by making the engines more powerful relative to their weight. Neither process was particularly straightforward or easy, but nonetheless drastic improvements were made from the war's beginning to the war's end.
The Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp R-1830-1 of the late 1930s could manage about 750-800 horsepower. By mid-war, the R-1830-43 was putting out 1200 horsepower out of the same displacement. Careful engineering, gradual improvements, and the use of fuel with a higher and more consistent octane level allowed for this kind of improvement.
The R-1830 Twin Wasp
However, there's no replacement for displacement. By the beginning of 1943, Japanese aircraft were being massacred with mechanical regularity by a new US Navy fighter, the F6F Hellcat, which was powered by a brand new Pratt and Whitney engine, the R-2800 Double Wasp.
The one true piston engine
As you can see from the cross-section above, the R-2800 has two banks of cylinders. This is significant to fighter performance because even though it had 53% more engine displacement than the Twin Wasp (For US engines, the numerical designation indicated engine displacement in square inches), the Double Wasp had only about 21% more frontal area. This meant that a fighter with the R-2800 was enjoying an increase in power that was not proportionate with the increase in drag. Early R-2800-1 models could produce 1800 horsepower, but by war's end the best models could make 2100 horsepower. That meant a 45% increase in horsepower relative to the frontal area of the engine. Power to weight ratios for the latest model R-1830 and R-2800 were similar, while power to displacement improved by about 14%.
By war's end Pratt and Whitney had the monstrous R-4360 in production:
This gigantic engine had four rows of radially-arranged pistons. Compared to the R-2800 it produced about 50% more power for less than 10% more frontal area. Again, power to weight and power to displacement showed more modest improvements. The greatest gains were from increasing thrust with very little increase in drag. All of this was very hard for the engineers, who had to figure out how to make crankshafts and reduction gear that could handle that much power without breaking, and also how to get enough cooling air through a giant stack of cylinders.
Attempts at boosting the thrust of fighters with auxiliary power sources like rockets and ramjets were tried, but were not successful.
Yes, that is a biplane with retractable landing gear and auxiliary ramjets under the wings. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
A secondary source of improvement in thrust came from the development of better propellers. Most of the improvement came just before WWII broke out, and by the time the war broke out, most aircraft had constant-speed propellers.
For optimal performance, the angle of attack of the propeller blades must be matched to the ratio of the forward speed of the aircraft to the circular velocity of the propeller tips. To cope with the changing requirements, constant speed or variable pitch propellers were invented that could adjust the angle of attack of the propeller blades relative to the hub.
There was also improvement in using exhaust from the engine and the waste heat from the engine to increase thrust. Fairly early on, designers learned that the enormous amount of exhaust produced by the engine could be directed backwards to generate thrust. Exhaust stacks were designed to work as nozzles to harvest this small source of additional thrust:
The exhaust stacks of the Merlin engine in a Spitfire act like jet nozzles
A few aircraft also used the waste heat being rejected by the radiator to produce a small amount of additional thrust. The Meredith Effect radiator on the P-51 is the best-known example:
Excess heat from the engine was radiated into the moving airstream that flowed through the radiator. The heat would expand the air, and the radiator was designed to use this expansion and turn it into acceleration. In essence, the radiator of the P-51 worked like a very weak ramjet. By the most optimistic projections the additional thrust from the radiator would cancel out the drag of the radiator at maximum velocity. So, it may not have provided net thrust, but it did still provide thrust, and every bit of thrust mattered.
For the most part, achieving specific design objectives in WWII fighters was a function of minimizing weight, maximizing lift, minimizing drag and maximizing thrust. But doing this in a satisfactory way usually meant emphasizing certain performance goals at the expense of others.
Top Speed, Dive Speed and Acceleration
During the 1920s and 1930s, the lack of any serious air to air combat allowed a number of crank theories on fighter design to develop and flourish. These included the turreted fighter:
The heavy fighter:
And fighters that placed far too much emphasis on turn rate at the expense of everything else:
But it quickly became clear, from combat in the Spanish Civil War, China, and early WWII, that going fast was where it was at. In a fight between an aircraft that was fast and an aircraft that was maneuverable, the maneuverable aircraft could twist and pirouette in order to force the situation to their advantage, while the fast aircraft could just GTFO the second that the situation started to sour. In fact, this situation would prevail until the early jet age when the massive increase in drag from supersonic flight made going faster difficult, and the development of heat-seeking missiles made it dangerous to run from a fight with jet nozzles pointed towards the enemy.
The top speed of an aircraft is the speed at which drag and thrust balance each other out, and the aircraft stops accelerating. Maximizing top speed means minimizing drag and maximizing thrust. The heavy fighters had a major, inherent disadvantage in terms of top speed. This is because twin engined prop fighters have three big lumps contributing to frontal area; two engines and the fuselage. A single engine fighter only has the engine, with the rest of the fuselage tucked neatly behind it. The turret fighter isn't as bad; the turret contributes some additional drag, but not as much as the twin-engine design does. It does, however, add quite a bit of weight, which cripples acceleration even if it has a smaller effect on top speed. Early-war Japanese and Italian fighters were designed with dogfight performance above all other considerations, which meant that they had large wings to generate large turning forces, and often had open cockpits for the best possible visibility. Both of these features added drag, and left these aircraft too slow to compete against aircraft that sacrificed some maneuverability for pure speed.
Drag force rises roughly as a square function of airspeed (throw this formula out the window when you reach speeds near the speed of sound). Power is equal to force times distance over time, or force times velocity. So, power consumed by drag will be equal to drag coefficient times frontal area times airspeed squared times airspeed. So, the power required for a given maximum airspeed will be a roughly cubic function. And that is assuming that the efficiency of the propeller remains constant!
Acceleration is (thrust-drag)/weight. It is possible to have an aircraft that has a high maximum speed, but quite poor acceleration and vice versa. Indeed, the A6M5 zero had a somewhat better power to weight ratio than the F6F5 Hellcat, but a considerably lower top speed. In a drag race the A6M5 would initially pull ahead, but it would be gradually overtaken by the Hellcat, which would eventually get to speeds that the zero simply could not match.
Maximum dive speed is also a function of drag and thrust, but it's a bit different because the weight of the aircraft times the sine of the dive angle also counts towards thrust. In general this meant that large fighters dove better. Drag scales with the frontal area, which is a square function of size. Weight scales with volume (assuming constant density), which is a cubic function of size. Big American fighters like the P-47 and F4U dove much faster than their Axis opponents, and could pick up speed that their opponents could not hope to match in a dive.
A number of US fighters dove so quickly that they had problems with localized supersonic airflow. Supersonic airflow was very poorly understood at the time, and many pilots died before somewhat improvisational solutions like dive brakes were added.
Ranking US ace Richard Bong takes a look at the dive brakes of a P-38
Acceleration, top speed and dive speed are all improved by reducing drag, so every conceivable trick for reducing parasitic drag was tried.
The Lockheed P-38 used flush rivets on most surfaces as well as extensive butt welds to produce the smoothest possible flight surfaces. This did reduce drag, but it also contributed to the great cost of the P-38.
The Bf 109 was experimentally flown with a V-tail to reduce drag. V-tails have lower interference drag than conventional tails, but the modification was found to compromise handling during takeoff and landing too much and was not deemed worth the small amount of additional speed.
The YAK-3 was coated with a layer of hard wax to smooth out the wooden surface and reduce drag. This simple improvement actually increased top speed by a small, but measurable amount! In addition, the largely wooden structure of the aircraft had few rivets, which meant even less drag.
The Donier DO-335 was a novel approach to solving the problem of drag in twin-engine fighters. The two engines were placed at the front and rear of the aircraft, driving a pusher and a tractor propeller. This unconventional configuration led to some interesting problems, and the war ended before these could be solved.
The J2M Raiden had a long engine cowling that extended several feet forward in front of the engine. This tapered engine cowling housed an engine-driven fan for cooling air as well as a long extension shaft of the engine to drive the propeller. This did reduce drag, but at the expense of lengthening the nose and so reducing pilot visibility, and also moving the center of gravity rearward relative to the center of lift.
Designers were already stuffing the most powerful engines coming out of factories into aircraft, provided that they were reasonably reliable (and sometimes not even then). After that, the most expedient solution to improve speed was to sacrifice lift to reduce drag and make the wings smaller. The reduction in agility at low speeds was generally worth it, and at higher speeds relatively small wings could produce satisfactory maneuverability since lift is a square function of velocity. Alternatively, so-called laminar flow airfoils (they weren't actually laminar flow) were substituted, which produced less drag but also less lift.
The Bell P-63 had very similar aerodynamics to the P-39 and nearly the same engine, but was some 80 KPH faster thanks to the new laminar flow airfoils. However, the landing speed also increased by about 40 KPH, largely sacrificing the benevolent landing characteristics that P-39 pilots loved.
The biggest problem with reducing the lift of the wings to increase speed was that it made takeoff and landing difficult. Aircraft with less lift need to get to higher speeds to generate enough lift to take off, and need to land at higher speeds as well. As the war progressed, fighter aircraft generally became trickier to fly, and the butcher's bill of pilots lost in accidents and training was enormous.
Turn Rate
Sometimes things didn't go as planned. A fighter might be ambushed, or an ambush could go wrong, and the fighter would need to turn, turn, turn. It might need to turn to get into a position to attack, or it might need to turn to evade an attack.
Aircraft in combat turn with their wings, not their rudders. This is because the wings are way, way bigger, and therefore much more effective at turning the aircraft. The rudder is just there to make the nose do what the pilot wants it to. The pilot rolls the aircraft until it's oriented correctly, and then begins the turn by pulling the nose up. Pulling the nose up increases the angle of attack, which increases the lift produced by the wings. This produces centripetal force which pulls the plane into the turn. Since WWII aircraft don't have the benefit of computer-run fly-by-wire flight control systems, the pilot would also make small corrections with rudder and ailerons during the turn.
But, as we saw above, making more lift means making more drag. Therefore, when aircraft turn they tend to slow down unless the pilot guns the throttle. Long after WWII, Col. John Boyd (PBUH) codified the relationship between drag, thrust, lift and weight as it relates to aircraft turning performance into an elegant mathematical model called energy-maneuverability theory, which also allowed for charts that depict these relationships.
Normally, I would gush about how wonderful E-M theory is, but as it turns out there's an actual aerospace engineer named John Golan who has already written a much better explanation than I would likely manage, so I'll just link that. And steal his diagram:
E-M charts are often called "doghouse plots" because of the shape they trace out. An E-M chart specifies the turning maneuverability of a given aircraft with a given amount of fuel and weapons at a particular altitude. Turn rate is on the Y axis and airspeed is on the X axis. The aircraft is capable of flying in any condition within the dotted line, although not necessarily continuously. The aircraft is capable of flying continuously anywhere within the dotted line and under the solid line until it runs out of fuel.
The aircraft cannot fly to the left of the doghouse because it cannot produce enough lift at such a slow speed to stay in the air. Eventually it will run out of sky and hit the ground. The curved, right-side "roof" of the doghouse is actually a continuous quadratic curve that represents centrifugal force. The aircraft cannot fly outside of this curve or it or the pilot will break from G forces. Finally, the rightmost, vertical side of the doghouse is the maximum speed that the aircraft can fly at; either it doesn't have the thrust to fly faster, or something breaks if the pilot should try. The peak of the "roof" of the doghouse represents the aircraft's ideal airspeed for maximum turn rate. This is usually called the "corner velocity" of the aircraft.
So, let's look at some actual (ish) EM charts:
Now, these are taken from a flight simulator, but they're accurate enough to illustrate the point. They're also a little busier than the example above, but still easy enough to understand. The gray plot overlaid on the chart consists of G-force (the curves) and turn radius (the straight lines radiating from the graph origin). The green doghouse shows the aircraft's performance with flaps. The red curve shows the maximum sustained turn rate. You may notice that the red line terminates on the X axis at a surprisingly low top speed; that's because these charts were made for a very low altitude confrontation, and their maximum level top could only be achieved at higher altitudes. These aircraft could fly faster than the limits of the red line show, but only if they picked up extra speed from a dive. These charts could also be overlaid on each other for comparison, but in this case that would be like a graphic designer vomiting all over the screen, or a Studio Killers music video.
From these charts, we can conclude that at low altitude the P-51D enjoys many advantages over the Bf 109G-6. It has a higher top speed at this altitude, 350-something vs 320-something MPH. However, the P-51 has a lower corner speed. In general, the P-51's flight envelope at this altitude is just bigger. But that doesn't mean that the Bf 109 doesn't have a few tricks. As you can see, it enjoys a better sustained turn rate from about 175 to 325 MPH. Between those speed bands, the 109 will be able to hold on to its energy better than the pony provided it uses only moderate turns.
During turning flight, our old problem induced drag comes back to haunt fighter designers. The induced drag equation is Cdi = (Cl^2) / (pi * AR * e). Where Cdi is the induced drag coefficient, Cl is the lift coefficient, pi is the irrational constant pi, AR is aspect ratio, or wingspan squared divided by wing area, and e is not the irrational constant e but an efficiency factor.
There are a few things of interest here. For starters, induced drag increases with the square of the lift coefficient. Lift coefficient increases more or less linearly (see above) with angle of attack. There are various tricks for increasing wing lift nonlinearly, as well as various tricks for generating lift with surfaces other than the wings, but in WWII, designers really didn't use these much. So, for all intents and purposes, the induced drag coefficient will increase with the square of angle of attack, and for a given airspeed, induced drag will increase with the square of the number of Gs the aircraft is pulling. Since this is a square function, it can outrun other, linear functions easily, so minimizing the effect of induced drag is a major consideration in improving the sustained turn performance of a fighter.
To maximize turn rate in a fighter, designers needed to make the fighter as light as possible, make the engine as powerful as possible, make the wings have as much area as possible, make the wings as long and skinny as possible, and to use the most efficient possible wing shape.
You probably noticed that two of these requirements, make the plane as light as possible and make the wings as large as possible, directly contradict the requirements of good dive performance. There is simply no way to reconcile them; the designers either needed to choose one, the other, or come to an intermediate compromise. There was no way to have both great turning performance and great diving performance.
Since the designers could generally be assumed to have reduced weight to the maximum possible extent and put the most powerful engine available into the aircraft, that left the design of the wings.
The larger the wings, the more lift they generate at a given angle of attack. The lower the angle of attack, the less induced drag. The bigger wings would add more drag in level flight and reduce top speed, but they would actually reduce drag during maneuvering flight and improve sustained turn rate. A rough estimate of the turning performance of the aircraft can be made by dividing the weight of the aircraft over its wing area. This is called wing loading, and people who ought to know better put far too much emphasis on it. If you have E-M charts, you don't need wing loading. However, E-M charts require quite a bit of aerodynamic data to calculate, while wing loading is much simpler.
Giving the wings a higher aspect ratio would also improve turn performance, but the designers hands were somewhat tied in this respect. The wings usually stored the landing gear and often the armament of the fighter. In addition the wings generated the lift, and making the wings too long and skinny would make them too structurally flimsy to support the aircraft in maneuvering flight. That is, unless they were extensively reinforced, which would add weight and completely defeat the purpose. So, designers were practically limited in how much they could vary the aspect ratio of fighter wings.
The wing planform has significant effect on the efficiency factor e. The ideal shape to reduce induced drag is the "elliptical" (actually two half ellipses) wing shape used on the Supermarine spitfire.
This wing shape was, however, difficult to manufacture. By the end of the war, engineers had come up with several wing planforms that were nearly as efficient as the elliptical wing, but were much easier to manufacture.
Another way to reduce induced drag is to slightly twist the wings of the aircraft so that the wing tips point down.
This is called washout. The main purpose of washout was to improve the responsiveness of the ailerons during hard maneuvering, but it could give small efficiency improvements as well. Washout obviously complicates the manufacture of the wing, and thus it wasn't that common in WWII, although the TA-152 notably did have three degrees of tip washout.
The Bf 109 had leading edge slats that would deploy automatically at high angles of attack. Again, the main intent of these devices was to improve the control of the aircraft during takeoff and landing and hard maneuvering, but they did slightly improve the maximum angle of attack the wing could be flown at, and therefore the maximum instantaneous turn rate of the aircraft. The downside of the slats was that they weakened the wing structure and precluded the placement of guns inside the wing.
leading edge slats of a Bf 109 in the extended position
One way to attempt to reconcile the conflicting requirements of high speed and good turning capability was the "butterfly" flaps seen on Japanese Nakajima fighters.
This model of a Ki-43 shows the location of the butterfly flaps; on the underside of the wings, near the roots
These flaps would extend during combat, in the case of later Nakajima fighters, automatically, to increase wing area and lift. During level and high speed flight they would retract to reduce drag. Again, this would mainly improve handling on the left hand side of the doghouse, and would improve instantaneous turn rate but do very little for sustained turn rate.
In general, turn performance was sacrificed in WWII for more speed, as the two were difficult to reconcile. There were a small number of tricks known to engineers at the time that could improve instantaneous turn rate on fast aircraft with high wing loading, but these tricks were inadequate to the task of designing an aircraft that was very fast and also very maneuverable. Designers tended to settle for as fast as possible while still possessing decent turning performance.
Climb Rate
Climb rate was most important for interceptor aircraft tasked with quickly getting to the level of intruding enemy aircraft. When an aircraft climbs it gains potential energy, which means it needs spare available power. The specific excess power of an aircraft is equal to V/W(T-D) where V is airspeed, W is weight, T is thrust and D is drag. Note that lift isn't anywhere in this equation! Provided that the plane has adequate lift to stay in the air and its wings are reasonably efficient at generating lift so that the D term doesn't get too high, a plane with stubby wings can be quite the climber!
The Mitsubishi J2M Raiden is an excellent example of what a fighter optimized for climb rate looked like.
A captured J2M in the US during testing
The J2M had a very aerodynamically clean design, somewhat at the expense of pilot visibility and decidedly at the expense of turn rate. The airframe was comparatively light, somewhat at the expense of firepower and at great expense to fuel capacity. Surprisingly for a Japanese aircraft, there was some pilot armor. The engine was, naturally, the most powerful available at the time. The wings, in addition to being somewhat small by Japanese standards, had laminar-flow airfoils that sacrificed maximum lift for lower drag.
The end result was an aircraft that was the polar opposite of the comparatively slow, long-ranged and agile A6M zero-sen fighters that IJN pilots were used to! But it certainly worked. The J2M was one of the fastest-climbing piston engine aircraft of the war, comparable to the F8F Bearcat.
The design requirements for climb rate were practically the same as the design requirements for acceleration, and could generally be reconciled with the design requirements for dive performance and top speed. The design requirements for turn rate were very difficult to reconcile with the design requirements for climb rate.
Roll Rate
In maneuvering combat aircraft roll to the desired orientation and then pitch. The ability to roll quickly allows the fighter to transition between turns faster, giving it an edge in maneuvering combat.
Aircraft roll with their ailerons by making one wing generate more lift while the other wing generates less lift.
The physics from there are the same for any other rotating object. Rolling acceleration is a function of the amount of torque that the ailerons can provide divided by the moment of inertia of the aircraft about the roll axis. So, to improve roll rate, a fighter needs the lowest possible moment of inertia and the highest possible torque from its ailerons.
The FW-190A was the fighter best optimized for roll rate. Kurt Tank's design team did everything right when it came to maximizing roll rate.
The FW-190 could out-roll nearly every other piston fighter
The FW-190 has the majority of its mass near the center of the aircraft. The fuel is all stored in the fuselage and the guns are located either above the engine or in the roots of the wings. Later versions added more guns, but these were placed just outside of the propeller arc.
Twin engined fighters suffered badly in roll rate in part because the engines had to be placed far from the centerline of the aircraft. Fighters with armament far out in the wings also suffered.
The ailerons were very large relative to the size of the wing. This meant that they could generate a lot of torque. Normally, large ailerons were a problem for pilots to deflect. Most World War Two fighters did not have any hydraulic assistance; controls needed to be deflected with muscle power alone, and large controls could encounter too much wind resistance for the pilots to muscle through at high speed.
The FW-190 overcame this in two ways. The first was that, compared to the Bf 109, the cockpit was decently roomy. Not as roomy as a P-47, of course, but still a vast improvement. Cockpit space in World War Two fighters wasn't just a matter of comfort. The pilots needed elbow room in the cockpit in order to wrestle with the control stick. The FW-190 also used controls that were actuated by solid rods rather than by cables. This meant that there was less give in the system, since cables aren't completely rigid.
Additionally, the FW-190 used Frise ailerons, which have a protruding tip that bites into the wind and reduces the necessary control forces:
Several US Navy fighters, like later models of F6F and F4U used spring-loaded aileron tabs, which accomplished something similar by different means:
In these designs a spring would assist in pulling the aileron one way, and a small tab on the aileron the opposite way in order to aerodynamically move the aileron. This helped reduce the force necessary to move the ailerons at high speeds.
Another, somewhat less obvious requirement for good roll rate in fighters was that the wings be as rigid as possible. At high speeds, the force of the ailerons deflecting would tend to twist the wings of the aircraft in the opposite direction. Essentially, the ailerons began to act like servo tabs. This meant that the roll rate would begin to suffer at high speeds, and at very high speeds the aircraft might actually roll in the opposite direction of the pilot's input.
The FW-190s wings were extremely rigid. Wing rigidity is a function of aspect ratio and construction.
The FW-190 had wings that had a fairly low aspect ratio, and were somewhat overbuilt. Additionally, the wings were built as a single piece, which was a very strong and robust approach. This had the downside that damaged wings had to be replaced as a unit, however.
Some spitfires were modified by changing the wings from the original elliptical shape to a "clipped" planform that ended abruptly at a somewhat shorter span. This sacrificed some turning performance, but it made the wings much stiffer and therefore improved roll rate.
Finally, most aircraft at the beginning of the war had fabric-skinned ailerons, including many that had metal-skinned wings. Fabric-skinned ailerons were cheaper and less prone to vibration problems than metal ones, but at high speed the shellacked surface of the fabric just wasn't air-tight enough, and a significant amount of airflow would begin going into and through the aileron. This degraded their effectiveness greatly, and the substitution of metal surfaces helped greatly.
Stability and Safety
World War Two fighters were a handful. The pressures of war meant that planes were often rushed into service without thorough testing, and there were often nasty surprises lurking in unexplored corners of the flight envelope.
This is the P-51H. Even though the P-51D had been in mass production for years, it still had some lingering stability issues. The P-51H solved these by enlarging the tail. Performance was improved by a comprehensive program of drag reduction and weight reduction through the use of thinner aluminum skin.
The Bf 109 had a poor safety record in large part because of the narrow landing gear. This design kept the mass well centralized, but it made landing far too difficult for inexpert pilots.
The ammunition for the massive 37mm cannon in the P-39 and P-63 was located in the nose, and located far forward enough that depleting the ammunition significantly affected the aircraft's stability. Once the ammunition was expended, it was much more likely that the aircraft could enter dangerous spins.
The cockpit of the FW-190, while roomier than the Bf 109, had terrible forward visibility. The pilot could see to the sides and rear well enough, but a combination of a relatively wide radial engine and a hump on top of the engine cowling to house the synchronized machine guns meant that the pilot could see very little. This could be dangerous while taxiing on the ground.
Don't have any pictures unfortunately but I was reading a French document ( http://1951.polytechnique.org/URL/Launet_DCA.pdf) on anti-aircraft warfare and it reported that the French had a project to put a twin 90mm anti-aircraft gun on an AMX 13 chassis. Man the French loved that tank, its amazing all of the shit they tried to cram onto it.
Ce matériel bitube de 90 mm résultait d’une évolution entreprise dès 1948 et qui devait aboutir à la définition d’un équipement en 1951. En effet la DEFA avait demandé à la Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot (SFAC), du groupe Schneider, par lettre du 17 septembre 1948 (44 94 ST/ART), d’établir un avant projet de «matériel de 90 mm DCA bitube sur affût automoteur à chenille», et dont la masse ne devait pas excéder 15 tonnes (9 ). La SFAC établissait alors un projet utilisant un châssis du char AMX 13 (10), mais ne parvenait pas à satisfaire toutes les spécifications.
This twin 90mm gun resulted from a project undertaken in 1948 and which had an intended completion date in 1951. DEFA had asked the Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot (SFAC), of the Schneider Group, by a letter on September 17 1948, to establish a pilot project of a "twin 90mm anti-aircraft material on a tracked self-propelled mount", and that the mass must not exceed 15 tons. SFAC thus established a project utilizing the chassis of the AMX 13 tank, but this did not manage to satisfy all of the specifications.
"Did not seem to satisfy all of the specifications"
Hmm, however could that have been.
Bonus:
Finalement on renonça au début des années 60à l’un et l’autre de ces matériels, trop lourds et trop complexes. Certains les qualifièrent de «délire d’ingénieurs».
Finally one renounced both of these equipments at the beginning of the 1960s, being too heavy and too complicated. Some people qualified them the "delirium of engineers".
Don't have any pictures unfortunately but I was reading a French document ( http://1951.polytechnique.org/URL/Launet_DCA.pdf) on anti-aircraft warfare and it reported that the French had a project to put a twin 90mm anti-aircraft gun on an AMX 13 chassis. Man the French loved that tank, its amazing all of the shit they tried to cram onto it.
Ce matériel bitube de 90 mm résultait d’une évolution entreprise dès 1948 et qui devait aboutir à la définition d’un équipement en 1951. En effet la DEFA avait demandé à la Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot (SFAC), du groupe Schneider, par lettre du 17 septembre 1948 (44 94 ST/ART), d’établir un avant projet de «matériel de 90 mm DCA bitube sur affût automoteur à chenille», et dont la masse ne devait pas excéder 15 tonnes (9 ). La SFAC établissait alors un projet utilisant un châssis du char AMX 13 (10), mais ne parvenait pas à satisfaire toutes les spécifications.
This twin 90mm gun resulted from a project undertaken in 1948 and which had an intended completion date in 1951. DEFA had asked the Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot (SFAC), of the Schneider Group, by a letter on September 17 1948, to establish a pilot project of a "twin 90mm anti-aircraft material on a tracked self-propelled mount", and that the mass must not exceed 15 tons. SFAC thus established a project utilizing the chassis of the AMX 13 tank, but this did not manage to satisfy all of the specifications.
"Did not seem to satisfy all of the specifications"
Hmm, however could that have been.
Bonus:
Finalement on renonça au début des années 60à l’un et l’autre de ces matériels, trop lourds et trop complexes. Certains les qualifièrent de «délire d’ingénieurs».
Finally one renounced both of these equipments at the beginning of the 1960s, being too heavy and too complicated. Some people qualified them the "delirium of engineers".
Don't have any pictures unfortunately but I was reading a French document ( http://1951.polytechnique.org/URL/Launet_DCA.pdf) on anti-aircraft warfare and it reported that the French had a project to put a twin 90mm anti-aircraft gun on an AMX 13 chassis. Man the French loved that tank, its amazing all of the shit they tried to cram onto it.
Ce matériel bitube de 90 mm résultait d’une évolution entreprise dès 1948 et qui devait aboutir à la définition d’un équipement en 1951. En effet la DEFA avait demandé à la Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot (SFAC), du groupe Schneider, par lettre du 17 septembre 1948 (44 94 ST/ART), d’établir un avant projet de «matériel de 90 mm DCA bitube sur affût automoteur à chenille», et dont la masse ne devait pas excéder 15 tonnes (9 ). La SFAC établissait alors un projet utilisant un châssis du char AMX 13 (10), mais ne parvenait pas à satisfaire toutes les spécifications.
This twin 90mm gun resulted from a project undertaken in 1948 and which had an intended completion date in 1951. DEFA had asked the Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot (SFAC), of the Schneider Group, by a letter on September 17 1948, to establish a pilot project of a "twin 90mm anti-aircraft material on a tracked self-propelled mount", and that the mass must not exceed 15 tons. SFAC thus established a project utilizing the chassis of the AMX 13 tank, but this did not manage to satisfy all of the specifications.
"Did not seem to satisfy all of the specifications"
Hmm, however could that have been.
Bonus:
Finalement on renonça au début des années 60à l’un et l’autre de ces matériels, trop lourds et trop complexes. Certains les qualifièrent de «délire d’ingénieurs».
Finally one renounced both of these equipments at the beginning of the 1960s, being too heavy and too complicated. Some people qualified them the "delirium of engineers".
It varies from police department to police department.
For instance at the Milo Yackoffinasock event held at the University of Washington on Inauguration Day, the UW campus police basically just sat back and watched as a riot unfolded. No arrests and only a handful of weapons from the protesters were confiscated. This is the same event, btw, where the wife of a Milo fan gut shot with her Glock a International Workers of the World wobbly enforcer who had jumped her husband during a back and forth. The couple turned themselves into the campus police the next day.
I've been through numerous protests/riots and with the Seattle PD, they basically let the kiddies have a good scream in the streets before the shield wall, bike cops, flash bangs and horse patrol come in to slowly and methodically push the protesters off the streets and into a direction that they want to go. Talking to the cops, it's basic phalanx and cavalry tactics.
They'll use the flashbangs to clear space. The bike cops ride in, dismount and use their bikes as temporary barricades and then the shield wall comes in to hold that ground. Bike cops move back and remount. The horse cops follow sedately and are actually kind of there to promote good will since Seattleites like pretty horses.
In the meantime, there are spotters on the high rises with binos trying to scope out anyone with real weapons, guns, knives or whatever and they have radios which they use to call down catch-and-remove orders to the plain clothes cops mingling with the protesters who will nab anyone really dangerous.
I've taken Mrs. The Captain to the small scale riot in Seattle after the Super Bowl win in Pioneer Square so she could see what one looks like. I got us up on the Sinking Ship parking garage and we had a nice view of the tactics and we chatted with the horse cops afterwards.
The funniest part of the evening were the black people - mostly middle aged black women - egging on the cops to beat the asses of the almost entirely white rioters.
I'll agree with Mad Mike on this one. Burning the flag (aside from doing it to properly destroy a damaged flag) is a dick move. But it's protected speech.
There's quite a bit more to add to SH's only unironic bash thread. Some excerpts from things I've written, starting with the Modern Intermediate Calibers episode on the .280:
Two short articles I did on the .280 and NATO rifle competitions:
Something from my notes for Light Rifle V - coming soon:
I have never handled an EM-2, but I know four or five people who have not only handled examples, but disassembled them (Those being: Ian McCollum, Matt Moss, Jonathan Ferguson, Trevor Weston, and maybe one or two others I correspond with). It's worth noting that at least three of those people believe that the EM-2 could not have been mass produced economically in the configuration of the test rifles - the receiver was simply too big and complex a workpiece.
Here at Sturgeon's House, we do not shy from the wholesale slaughter of sacred cows. That is, of course, provided that they deserve to be slaughtered.
The discipline of Military Science has, perhaps unavoidably, created a number of "paper tigers," weapons that are theoretically attractive, but really fail to work in reality. War is a dangerous sort of activity, so most of the discussion of it must, perforce, remain theoretical. Theory and reality will at some point inevitably diverge, and this creates some heartaches for some people. Terminal, in some cases, such as all those American bomber crews who could never complete a tour of duty over Fortress Europe because the pre-war planners had been completely convinced that the defensive armament of the bombers would be sufficient to see them through.
In other cases though, the paper tiger is created post-facto, through the repetition of sloppy research without consulting the primary documents. One of the best examples of a paper tiger is the Tiger tank, a design which you would think was nearly invincible in combat from reading the modern hype of it, but in fact could be fairly easily seen off by 75mm armed Shermans, and occasionally killed by scout vehicles. Add to this chronic, never-solved reliability problems, outrageous production costs, and absurd maintenance demands (ten hours to change a single road wheel?), and you have a tank that really just wasn't very good.
And so it is time to set the record straight on another historical design whose legend has outgrown its actual merit, the British EM-2:
EM-2ology is a sadly under-developed field of study for gun nerds. There is no authoritative book on the history and design of this rifle. Yes, I am aware of the Collector's Grade book on the subject. I've actually read it and it isn't very good. It isn't very long, and it is quite poorly edited, among other sins devoting several pages to reproducing J.B.S. Haldane's essay On Being the Right Size in full. Why?!!?!!
On top of that, there's quite a bit of misinformation that gets repeated as gospel. Hopefully, this thread can serve as a collection point for proper scholarship on this interesting, but bad design.
Question One: Why do you say that the EM-2 was bad? Is it because you're an American, and you love trashing everything that comes out of Airstrip One? Why won't America love us? We gave you your language! PLEASE LOVE ME! I AM SO LONELY NOW THAT I TOLD THE ENTIRE REST OF EUROPE TO FUCK OFF.
Answer: I'm saying the EM-2 was a bad design because it was a bad design. Same as British tanks, really. You lot design decent airplanes, but please leave the tanks, rifles and dentistry to the global superpower across the pond that owns you body and soul. Oh, and leave cars to the Japanese. To be honest, Americans can't do those right either.
No, I'm not going to launch into some stupid tirade about how all bullpup assault rifle designs are inherently a poor idea. I would agree with the statement that all such designs have so far been poorly executed, but frankly, very few assault rifles that aren't the AR-15 or AK are worth a damn, so that's hardly surprising. In fact, the length savings that a bullpup design provides are very attractive provided that the designer takes the ergonomic challenges into consideration (and this the EM-2 designers did, with some unique solutions).
Actually, there were two problems with the EM-2, and neither had anything to do with being a bullpup. The first problem is that it didn't fucking work, and the second problem is that there was absolutely no way the EM-2 could have been mass-produced without completely re-thinking the design.
See this test record for exhaustive documentation of the fact that the EM-2 did not work. Points of note:
-In less than ten thousand rounds the headspace of two of the EM-2s increased by .009 and .012 inches. That is an order of magnitude larger than what is usually considered safe tolerances for headspace.
-The EM-2 was less reliable than an M1 Garand. Note that, contrary to popular assertion, the EM-2 was not particularly reliable in dust. It was just less unreliable in dust than the other two designs, and that all three were less reliable than an M1 Garand.
-The EM-2 was shockingly inaccurate with the ammunition provided and shot 14 MOA at 100 yards. Seriously, look it up, that's what the test says. There are clapped-out AKs buried for years in the Laotian jungle that shoot better than that.
-The EM-2 had more parts breakages than any other rifle tested.
-The EM-2 had more parts than any other rifle tested.
-The fact that the EM-2 had a high bolt carrier velocity and problems with light primer strikes in full auto suggests it was suffering from bolt carrier bounce.
As for the gun being completely un-suited to mass production, watch this video:
Question Two: But the EM-2 could have been developed into a good weapon system if the meanie-head Yanks hadn't insisted on the 7.62x51mm cartridge, which was too large and powerful for the EM-2 to handle!
Anyone who repeats this one is ignorant of how bolt thrust works, and has done zero research on the EM-2. In other words, anyone who says this is stupid and should feel bad for being stupid. The maximum force exerted on the bolt of a firearm is the peak pressure multiplied by the interior area of the cartridge case. You know, like you'd expect given the dimensional identities of force, area and pressure, if you were the sort of person who could do basic dimensional analysis, i.e. not a stupid one.
Later version of the British 7mm cartridge had the same case head diameter as the 7.62x51mm NATO, so converting the design to fire the larger ammunition was not only possible but was actually done. In fact, most the EM-2s made were in 7.62x51mm. It was even possible to chamber the EM-2 in .30-06.
I'm not going to say that this was because the basic action was strong enough to handle the 7x43mm, and therefore also strong enough to handle the 7.62x51mm NATO, because the headspace problems encountered in the 1950 test show that it really wasn't up to snuff with the weaker ammunition. But I think it's fair to say that the EM-2 was roughly equally as capable of bashing itself to pieces in 7mm, 7.62 NATO or .30-06 flavor.
Question Three: You're being mean and intentionally provocative. Didn't you say that there were some good things about the design?
I did imply that there were some good aspects of the design, but I was lying. Actually, there's only one good idea in the entire design. But it's a really good idea, and I'm actually surprised that nobody has copied it.
If you look at the patent, you can see that the magazine catch is extremely complicated. However, per the US Army test report the magazine and magazine catch design were robust and reliable.
What makes the EM-2 special is how the bolt behaves during a reload. Like many rifles, the EM-2 has a tab on the magazine follower that pushes up the bolt catch in the receiver. This locks the bolt open after the last shot, which helps to inform the soldier that the rifle is empty. This part is nothing special; AR-15s, SKSs, FALs and many other rifles do this.
What is special is what happens when a fresh magazine is inserted. There is an additional lever in each magazine that is pushed by the magazine follower when the follower is in the top position of the magazine. This lever will trip the bolt catch of the rifle provided that the follower is not in the top position; i.e. if the magazine has any ammunition in it.
This means that the reload drill for an EM-2 is to fire the rifle until it is empty and the bolt locks back, then pull out the empty magazine, and put in a fresh one. That's it; no fussing with the charging handle, no hitting a bolt release. When the first magazine runs empty the bolt gets locked open, and as soon as a loaded one is inserted the bolt closes itself again. This is a very good solution to the problem of fast reloads in a bullpup (or any other firearm). It's so clever that I'm actually surprised that nobody has copied it.
Question Four: But what about the intermediate cartridge the EM-2 fired? Doesn't that represent a lost opportunity vis a vis the too powerful 7.62 NATO?
Sort of, but not really. The 7mm ammunition the EM-2 fired went through several iterations, becoming increasingly powerful. The earliest versions of the 7mm ammunition had similar ballistics to Soviet 7.62x39mm, while the last versions were only a hair less powerful than 7.62x51mm NATO.
As for the 7mm ammunition having some optimum balance between weight, recoil and trajectory, I'm skeptical. The bullets the 7mm cartridges used were not particularly aerodynamic, so while they enjoyed good sectional density and (in the earlier stages) moderate recoil, it's not like they were getting everything they could have out of the design.
note the flat base
In addition, the .280 ammunition was miserably inaccurate. Check the US rifle tests; the .280 chambered proto-FAL couldn't hit anything either.
Agreed. While I absolutely hate the outcome of this election, I don't see how a recount does us much good. If it's found that Trump did not win the electoral college, then what? If the election was given to Hillary, her administration would have absolutely no legitimacy in the eyes of Trump voters. We would spend the next four years hearing how the Dems "stole" the election with a recount which the right will say was tainted. Things are bad enough right now. They would be even worse if we had a contested recount.
I've made some videos concerning topics of military, strategy, technology and so on. So far I'm getting pretty good feedback on them so maybe you too would be interested in seeing them.
Here's one on Turkey vs Russia: hypothetical air war
Or US AMRAAM D missile compared to Russian R-77-1 missile
AdmiralTheisman reacted to Zinegata in French Bayonets: A very rough draft
AdmiralTheisman got a reaction from Xlucine in Anti-air thread: Everything that goes up must come down, and we'll help you go down
AdmiralTheisman got a reaction from Sturgeon in Anti-air thread: Everything that goes up must come down, and we'll help you go down
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