So at your next job interview can I make false accusations against you to make sure that you don't get the job? Also, are you familiar with the concepts of slander and liable? How about the concept of common law? Critical thinking?
Presumption of innocence is a legal standard because it comes from a cultural standard. I love all these people mindlessly crowing about how presumption of innocence only applies in courts, without thinking about the ramifications of what they are saying. Presumption of innocence in the courts means nothing if it does not exist in society at large. We have gotten a taste of what it looks like over the years, and it's been a very bitter taste every time. The presumption of guilt is a direct product of prejudice, when the judgment is handed down before the case is even heard.
There were a few things I wanted to do with this rifle. First and foremost, I wanted a roughly "AR-like" rifle that incorporated all or most of the reliability elements I had identified in the AK series: Friction reducing anti-rotation devices, long bolt overtravel, a large degree of underslide, and a clear ammunition feedway, to name some of them. At the same time, I wanted my execution of those features to be different than the AK, as "stuff an AK up the ass of an AR" has been done about thirty fucking times by this point. I also deliberately eschewed some of the design characteristics of the AR-15, such as the tube-shaped receiver and cylindrical bolt carrier, because I did not want the end product to be basically just a "redux" of the AR, either.
Another feature I wanted to include was an extruded upper receiver because I had some ideas about how to do it while making it lighter, cheaper, and more adaptable. Also, three years ago I designed an optimized bolt lug contour, which I modified slightly and used as the basis for my bolt configuration. This contour was designed to maximize lug contact area, minimize lug rotation angle, and clear the rifle's feedway. You can see images of the study I did in 2015 below:
The lug configuration I ended up using was the one in the second row of the last image, far right.
I knew at the beginning that I wanted the rifle to be in 5.56mm by default. I also wanted it to be expandable to other calibers, so the diameters and lengths of the bolt, barrel extension, and other elements are hybridized between the AR-15, AR-10, and SCAR. It should be able to take conversion kits for rounds as big as .308 without any issues.
I deliberately chose not to use USGI magazines for the rifle, for several reasons. Chiefly, the magazine is one of the most significant elements of the rifle and I wanted to design it myself. Second, AR mags are crap and designing your rifle around them is like designing a Formula-1 car to run on 87 octane. Third, the AR magazine well interior (which is necessary to make AR mags work) would not have allowed me to design a highly reliable and efficient drum magazine, which is something I am interested in.
For the gas system, I chose to use a gas-tube-to-tappet arrangement because of the chosen bolt carrier configuration and to prevent gas from being blown into the receiver. Not that this is a major limitation of the AR series, but... Why not?
Beyond all that, I designed everything to be both lightweight and durable, which means being very conscious of volume economy. Bigger guns are heavier and more fragile. Smaller guns are lighter and more robust. Because that's how mass works. So being small (within the parameters I set for myself) was important to me.
I'm currently in the middle of North Carolina. Most of the immediate concern here is the flooding. Aside from simply swamping things with water, the other big issue is that our sandy soil doesn't absorb water well, meaning that things like trees and telephone poles have tendency to become loose and then fall.
In what world is calling the Israeli Military the Waffen SS even handed? Am I missing the firing squads, gas trucks, forced labour camps, confiscation of all valuables (including gold teeth), and extermination camps? How about the fucked up medical experiments? The only people who do not want a two state solution are the Palestinians. Like the Nazis, the Palestinians want to exterminate the Jews, they do not want to coexist with them. After everything that happened in world war two, I don't blame Israel for being extremely hostile to anyone who wants to remove them from existence. "Never again" is a very powerful motivator.
That doesn't even get into how insulting it is to compare Jews to Nazis, but that's such a minor point here that it hardly matters. I would say that it would trigger some SJWs, but they hate Israel, too.
How many times did your drunken mother drop you on your head as a child? Is that why your name is Sgt Sqaurehead?
So, firstly, there has been no uncompensated siezure of land. And the compensated seizure of land fell over because it was at market rate. In fact, it was such a non-issue that Jacob Zuma (our previous president recently deposed in an internal party battle by Cyril Rhamaphosa) actually let the funding for the paid expropriation scheme drop to around 20% of the Thabo Mbeki era. The result is that whites currently own well over 70% of farm land in South Africa.
Was this process perfectly squeeky clean? Heck no. Even under the paid compensation scheme dubious land claims were put through (the one which included my folk's shared farm went in literally on midnight on the last day for claims to be submitted) and the resulting handovers had a disturbing tendency to go to politically well-connected businessmen operating "on behalf of" the communities that had a usable claim wherever there were, say, potential mining rights involved.
This new idea of making expropriation without compensation only came up about 10 minutes before Rhamaphosa captured the internal ANC vote and became the next leader of the party (and thus the president) by a whisker over his opposition, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma (who is a story all by herself). It seems that, in the horse trading which got him the vote, Rhamaphosa had to agree to back the expropriation-without-compensation scheme once he became president. This must have been a bitter pill, because he is basically a Davos drone come to power and one of his early crowning political achievements was to help draft our Constitution (which the expropriation-without-compensationists maintain needs to be amended to make this work). So the whole thing has been a bit of a slow-roll so far, with lots of committees and hearings before anything too drastic happens.
The current news is that government has gone forwards with a 'test case' to see if expropriation-without-compensation can be done within the confines of our existing Constitutional provisions. Which it can't. This will inevitably turn into a giant, years-long fiasco in which our courts look at the issue before deciding that its bullshit and axing the whole thing. By which point the ANC will be safely past the 2019 elections and can go about pretending that this all never happened. That is, unless the EFF manages to out-maneuver them and so on.
Make no mistake: this is all very worrying. There is a good chance that the ANC, if it wants to retain power and not slide into an era of coalition government, will play on this obvious sore spot in our national dialogue to keep the EFF from gaining more traction and help differentiate themselves from the DA. And, since a bunch of our minority parties do actually want honest-to-goodness expropriation, communism, rains of blood etc, a constitutional vote may actually take place and an amendment may pass. Which will promptly make king Goodwill Zwelethini explode and will also end up getting declared un-constitutional (improbable as that sounds), but that's a story for another day.
1)
Chimera Gun: This gun was home built from scavenged parts by one of the Iraqi SWAT team members I trained. It consists of an AK-47 receiver, a Browning Hi-Power pistol grip, PKM barrel, BB gun scope, and a custom made butt stock, magazine, and M16 style charging handle! I watched him shoot it on a number of occasions so I know it worked, but I always stood at a safe distance just in case.
https://thenewsrep.com/77164/us-army-special-forces-weapons-report-card/
2)
They say necessity is the mother of all invention and the extreme poverty often found in Iraq certainly creates a need. Readers of this website are surely familiar with the inventiveness of their adversary, many of you have seen the improvised remote detonators and home brewed microchips that have been jerry-rigged to a set of batteries to trigger an IED.
Thankfully, some of these masters of improvisation work for the good guys. I worked with an Iraqi SWAT team member named Shahab who had a habit of creating bizarre chimera type weapons in his home workshop. Despite Shahab being a great soldier and a strong leader, I always made sure to stand off at a safe distance when he fired this thing out on our range.
Look carefully and you can see that he cannibalized parts of various weapons and fabricated a few of his own. He took a AK-47 receiver, a Browning Hi-Power pistol grip, and a PKM barrel, cobbling them together with what I think was a bb-gun scope. He cut the stock himself and created a M16 style charging handle that actually worked!
As a 18B, this Franken gun made me a little nervous but I never saw him have a malfunction with it much less the kind of catastrophic failure you might expect from the picture.
A co-worker rotated back into Iraq the next year to work with Shahab again, who had by now built himself a home made 40mm grenade launcher. He kept bugging my friend for a M203 grenade to “test fire” but needless to say he had to decline...
Bullpup, system of "recoil impulse shifted in time", 2-stage feed system (a year before it was implemented by Nikonov on his ASM), ejection to the front above a trigger grip, non-reciprocating charging handle. 3 firemodes - "2" - 2 round burst (at around 2000 RPM), and "O-A" - combined semi-auto and full auto (pressing trigger intil first "step" will fire weapons in semi-auto, pressing it futher will swtich to full auto fire in 600 RPM).
My model is that Trump is an insurgent, populist candidate. His opposition is what could loosely be termed "the establishment," which consists more or less of the entire US government minus the military and some law enforcement. There are exceptions here; there are plenty of anti-Trump officers in the military, although his popularity with the enlisted is near-universal. There are probably also some anti-Trump law enforcement officers. I can't imagine that many senior FBI members are fans, for example. Trump's opposition also includes organizations that are not formally part of the US government, but work in concert with it so closely that they might as well be. These are organizations such as all accredited institutions of higher learning, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), most of the press, any respectable publications such as scientific journals or magazines that people read to look smart, like The Economist, and the trendy and cool part of the tech industry (e.g. Google and Facebook), which has been in bed with spooks and worse for at least the past ten years.
Trump's base consists of an extremely ad-hoc coalition of evangelicals, manufacturing-sector union workers, certain sectors of industry but not others, nationalists, anti-immigration hardliners (who substantially overlap with the union workers for obvious economic reasons), the NRA (although they're not exactly in love with him), and various ideological cranks. Also, much was made of Trump's support among extremist racialists, but it's been pointed out before that those people are too rare to matter when it comes to counting votes.
Think tanks, libertarians and churches can go either way, no way to safely generalize. However, Trump is extremely polarizing so there are relatively few people in the US who are entirely indifferent to his presidency.
Trump has very few friends in the government, his base of support lies almost entirely outside of it. So he has to make frequent appeals to that base, and keep them excited and fired up otherwise his many enemies could dismantle his presidency. He is, again, so polarizing, that if Trump were to lose power, the results would probably be extremely painful and humiliating for him.
Therefore, if Trump did anything to strongly alienate what little support he has in the government, I would be shocked and conclude he had lose his mind. For example, if he tried to win over socially liberal opponents and bolster some of his libertarian-leaning base by de-funding and publicly humiliating the DEA for the years of awful and pernicious shit they've done, I will conclude that he's nuts. It would make some people happy, but it does not fit into the model of a dispassionate and Machiavellian Trump that I entertain. The Trump I envision always puts practical concerns before ideological ones; he simply has too many enemies to do otherwise.
If Trump were to concede on the border wall in any public way, I will conclude that he's mentally incompetent. This is not the same thing as not building the wall, although at this point I think he will. If Trump publicly says that, no, on second thought the wall is a stupid idea and he spoke to some economists at the Reason Institute and actually free trade and immigration is totally a good idea, he's fucking screwed up. A lot of Republican politicians have tried to make peace in the past by publicly sacrificing some previously held principle (c.f. Dubya's "I'm a uniter, not a divider.") Trump has so far not taken that bait, but if he does on the wall, I will have to conclude that everything he did heretofore was some sort of gigantic fluke. If he gets politically outmaneuvered and is unable to build the wall because he can't secure funding, that's different. If that happens, you'll know because he'll be screaming that the only reason there isn't a big, beautiful chunk of concrete standing proud above the Rio Grande is that the goddamn Democrats just couldn't get their act together. That is the tactic he's using now, but the Democrats have proven so feckless that I don't think they can deny him his wall in the long run.
That's also why I disregard any piece that talks about how wrong Trump is on issue XYZ and he really needs to change his mind. For starters, nearly the entire media hates Trump and will publish any fool thing that paints him in a negative light. It's beyond parody at this point. Second, that's exactly the sort of bait that previous Republicans became notorious for chomping down on. Even if Trump actually is wrong on issue XYZ, he's maintaining the stance he has for a reason. He can't afford to break up his coalition by suddenly changing course. Even if an important part of his coalition really is wrong on issue XYZ (see DEA above).
Similarly, in the international arena, if Trump were to start talking about how the Saudis are horrible allies really, and frankly they deserve to lose all US support and weapons sales, and if that results in them all being dragged out into the street and messily murdered so much the better, and then if he were to actually withdraw US support, I would conclude that Trump was crazy. If he were just to say it as a way to put pressure on the Saudis, and then squeeze them for something he wanted before going back to being friends, then that would be classic Trump. Again, abandoning the Saudis would make some people happy, but the Saudis make themselves too useful to Trump to just abandon like that, odious though they are. Particularly if you believe the rumors that MBS had his close relatives tortured, and then passed the juicy information about whom they were making campaign contributions to on to Trump. I don't know if I endorse that particular theory, but I suspect something like that did happen.
Basically, if Trump were to do anything to attempt to win over detractors but at the expense of part of his base, I will become convinced he doesn't know what he's doing. If he says one thing and then does something that seems completely at odds with what he said, then I am not convinced that it is a sign of incompetence necessarily. Trump posturing just to put pressure on people I can buy. That's smart, in a cutthroat sort of way, and Trump is definitely cutthroat. Trump actively undermining his own support in any sort of attempt to appease or win over his opponents would genuinely surprise me. That isn't going to work, and he should know better.
If Trump were to carelessly reveal what he actually believes in a way that alienated his base, I would consider that a mistake. How grave a mistake would depend on the circumstances.
I have only a vague notion of what Trump actually believes or what his actual motivations are. But let's suppose he's actually a snobbish elitist who views most of his supporters as ignorant mud-yokels. Actually, I think it's pretty unlikely he thinks like that; he has trophy wives and gold-plated hair and everything. He's so nouveau riche it's painful to look at, and he probably thinks of himself as a man of the people, just rich thanks to hard work, talent and some luck. But for sake of argument. If he were to publicly indicate that he actually holds his supporters in contempt, that would convince me that he'd either gone senile or just gotten astronomically lucky thus far.
Or let's suppose that Trump really is a white nationalist. Again, I'm having difficulty reconciling that idea with what I've seen, but for sake of argument. If he were to publicly disclose this, it would make a very small part of his base overjoyed and the majority of them disgusted. Pumping up a tiny portion of your base at the expense of the greater portion is just stupid politics. So if Trump has any wildly unpopular opinions that would drive away voters, he'll keep them private.
That's what it would take. I would be looking for a large, unforced error that cost Trump his political base. If he says things that sound idiotic, that doesn't necessarily mean he's an idiot. He could be posturing to make his opponents spend money they don't have to, like he did in 2016 when he held rallies in states he had no hope of winning, but did anyway to get the Hillary campaign to waste more money on their safe states because her campaign and events were more expensive than his. If Trump says something that seems at odds with his previous stances, again, it's not necessarily a fuck-up. I think we can say in retrospect that his tweets about being willing to continue DACA were a ploy, and a very successful one at that. The ploy did make his base anxious, but only the most drama-prone actually split with him over it. As Trump took no concrete actions to actually reverse his position, the vast majority of his base were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and where rewarded by the conspicuous public humiliations that the Democrats suffered from the ploy. If Trump says something that is only dubiously in English and doesn't make any logical or semantic sense, that doesn't necessarily mean he's an idiot or that he's had a stroke. I mean, it could be, but it will be a while before we know because Trump says complete nonsense every once in a while. I am convinced that he does this for the sheer joy of watching people go ballistic on Twitter. If I could make thousands of people lose their shit just by typing "covfefe" with my thumbs, I can't imagine it's a vice I would or could resist.
Put this in its own topic instead of the space thread because it deserves its own discussion, and is darkly hilarious.
SpaceX and its low launch costs for the Falcon 9 have already been squeezing Russian launch providers and ULA out of the market. This will only get worse if the Block 5 Falcon 9 provides the advances in reusability that are promised (and if BFR lives up to Elon's dreams it will blow everything out of the water). European launch provider Arianespace has been feeling the heat too; their Ariane 5 is a reliable but dated (compared to Falcon) architecture, and the Ariane 6 is an incremental improvement at best, which lacks reusability (and uses a hydrolox/solid first stage for some reason).
The major German publication Der Spiegel recently interviewed Alain Charmeau, the head of Arianespace; http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-die-amerikaner-wollen-europa-aus-dem-weltraum-kicken-a-1207322.html
An English summary/discussion can be found here; https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-frustrated-with-spacex-for-driving-down-launch-costs/
There are some choice quotes in that article;
Still cheaper than ULA. Also, US government payloads have more oversight/stricter requirements than commercial payloads, which drives up costs.
About two sentences later he admits that Arianespace couldn't exist without subsidies from European governments.
Next part;
Obviously Elon Musk thinks it is, otherwise he wouldn't be telling his for-profit business to develop reusability. Also, considering that Falcon 9 (especially Block 5) isn't an utterly ridiculous architecture like STS, it's certainly cheaper to reuse.
Here's the real money quote;
"My subsidized jobs program can't compete with SpaceX because they get government contracts!"
Still better than SLS though.
Also, Blue Origin is going to steal your identity;
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.
GMerlon got a reaction from D.E. Watters in The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.
GMerlon got a reaction from Donward in The Meteorology Thread: Hector Lives
