Aircraft question

chrisd wrote:

ewlandmine99 wrote: I'm not certain anyone has ever put a diesel engine on an airplane or not.

Finally, bombs, not rockets. I've already mentioned the issues with launching rockets from a dirigible. The early airplanes were made of wood with lacquered cloth covering the wings. We did not start shooting rockets from airplanes until we had advanced to all metal aircraft.

1) See the "Junkers Jumo" series of airborne diesel engines deployed by the Luftwaffe in several aircraft types during WW2
2) See the use of "Le Prieur" rockets from Nieuport fighters against balloons in WW1
3) See the "Fairey Swordfish" for the use of RP-3 Rockets from a "sticks and string" Biplane - originally a torpedo bomber latterly equipped with radar and rockets for use in an anti-submarie role in he Mediterranean Sea and the North Sea

The swordfish at least had to be modified with metal inner wings because of the catching fire from exhaust problems.

Don't forget to give credit to Pasquale and the writ: they probably already have the Bernoulli principle for spray bottles as an accepted miracle of Creation. Ie: for weed killing, fertilizing, perfume, and spraying vinegar as a cleaner/disinfectant.

Also they have already developed some serious rockets, artillery and kites/parachute. I believe the concepts of flight are already being developed in the background throughout Safeholdian society as a whole. Flight may be limited to wervyns and angels, but we have not been specifically told that it is proscribed and God isn't swiping artillery out of the air so it has to be in the minds of the average Safeholdian.

Silverwall wrote:

OrlandoNative wrote:Even if that doesn't pan out, tethered balloons high enough or far enough behind the battle line to be out of typical rifle range could still make a significant difference. Not only could they be used for observation platforms, but even as airborne artillery. All one would need is something to hurl explosives a reasonable distance. A arbalest, a catapult, or even a rocket with good flight characteristics could end up being more accurate than the current ground artillery; especially in rough terrain.

Tethered balloons are catastrophically BAD platforms for artillery. In fact I am not aware of ANY serious attempts to use balloons as ordinance delivery systems. Observation was strictly the way to go with military ballooning.

Problems in using a balloon as an ordinance platform are in no particular order are:

* Lack of overall lifting capability
* Inaccuracy due to lack of stable firing platform. They are worse than a ship in this regard and unlike aircraft or zeps do not have engines to provide orientation and thrust.
*Buoyancy changes as ordinance is expended
*Reaction forces - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The force required to launch any decent sized projectile a mile has a massive kick
* Sitting duck for ground fire.

They are also most useful in set piece actions such as sieges or static trench warfare as getting them set up and filled with either hot air or hydrogen is a complex technical process much at the mercy of the weather.

It should also be noted that aircraft delivered ordinance is inferior to tube artillery until some time about WW2 for a variety of reasons. The big advantage of aircraft is that they increase the range and don't have the same problems of trailing behind the leading infantry as to be out of range (this is a big issue even with modern mechanized warfare.

None of those "problems" were ever addressed simply because by the time we had appreciable ordinance light enough to use from such a platform, we had better aircraft to use to deliver it.

With Merlin and OWL to "tweak" existing Safehold ordinance to work with a balloon type craft; that shouldn't be the case here

Peter2 wrote:

OrlandoNative wrote:[snip]

The only problem would then be one of navigation. Traditional hot air balloons are at the mercy of the wind. But there might be some temporary solutions until the groundwork for a true airship has been laid.

[snip]

Not the only problem – weather would be another. I seem to remember reading about some pretty vicious storms on Safehold, and balloons are very susceptible to high winds. Airships will be less so, but they are pretty slow, and unless one of the inner circle is on board to receive advance warnings of adverse weather, a storm is likely to be on them too quickly to be avoided. Weather was thought to be contributory to the crash of the R101, and the USS Akron broke up in a thunderstorm.
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Weather generally isn't a problem with balloons today, simply because one doesn't launch one if one expects bad weather. Or, for the tethered variety, one brings them down and relaunches once the weather clears.

Outside of some rather fanciful films, balloons weren't historically utilized as a method of serious distance travel.

OrlandoNative wrote:[q
Weather generally isn't a problem with balloons today, simply because one doesn't launch one if one expects bad weather. Or, for the tethered variety, one brings them down and relaunches once the weather clears.

Outside of some rather fanciful films, balloons weren't historically utilized as a method of serious distance travel.

USPS used them for "Air" mail!

During the first aerial flight in North America by balloon on January 9, 1793, from Philadelphia to Deptford, New Jersey, Jean-Pierre Blanchard carried a personal letter from George Washington to be delivered to the owner of whatever property Blanchard happened to land on, making the flight the first delivery of air mail in the United States.

The first official air mail delivery in the United States took place on August 17, 1859, when John Wise piloted a balloon starting in Lafayette, Indiana, with a destination of New York. Weather issues forced him to land in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and the mail reached its final destination via train. In 1959, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 7 cent stamp commemorating the event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airmail

I think those examples illustrate perfectly the constraints facing any potential use of balloons on Safehold. Within those constraints, will they be useful enough for either side to pursue? Dunno.

Keith_w wrote:

OrlandoNative wrote:Weather generally isn't a problem with balloons today, simply because one doesn't launch one if one expects bad weather. Or, for the tethered variety, one brings them down and relaunches once the weather clears.

Outside of some rather fanciful films, balloons weren't historically utilized as a method of serious distance travel.

USPS used them for "Air" mail!

During the first aerial flight in North America by balloon on January 9, 1793, from Philadelphia to Deptford, New Jersey, Jean-Pierre Blanchard carried a personal letter from George Washington to be delivered to the owner of whatever property Blanchard happened to land on, making the flight the first delivery of air mail in the United States.

The first official air mail delivery in the United States took place on August 17, 1859, when John Wise piloted a balloon starting in Lafayette, Indiana, with a destination of New York. Weather issues forced him to land in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and the mail reached its final destination via train. In 1959, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 7 cent stamp commemorating the event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airmail

Louis R wrote:I think those examples illustrate perfectly the constraints facing any potential use of balloons on Safehold. Within those constraints, will they be useful enough for either side to pursue? Dunno.

I can see some use for them tethered far enough back from the line to avoid being targeted serving the same purpose as those towers that Hanth built at Thesmar. They could provide spotting for artillery and general recon, or even in specific situations serve as semaphores for coordinating maneuvers on the battlefield.

But that would probably be about it.

Don

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Silverwall wrote:

chrisd wrote:1) See the "Junkers Jumo" series of airborne diesel engines deployed by the Luftwaffe in several aircraft types during WW2

2) See the use of "Le Prieur" rockets from Nieuport fighters against balloons in WW1

3) See the "Fairey Swordfish" for the use of RP-3 Rockets from a "sticks and string" Biplane - originally a torpedo bomber latterly equipped with radar and rockets for use in an anti-submarine role in he Mediterranean Sea and the North Sea

The swordfish at least had to be modified with metal inner wings because of the catching fire from exhaust problems.

Modified "Zero-length" launch rails enabled the Swordfish to have the blast deflector plates removed which also removed the handling problems caused by the original installation.

n7axw wrote:
Probably not true. Wrights did a lot of their experimenting with kites. Also they studied birds and developed a wind tunnel. Their efforts were accomplished without modern precision and often fell into the category of the intuitive. All of it was eventually refined as time went on. But as crude as it was, they were successful in launching the first powered controlled flight.

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One of the primary reasons the Wright brothers made the wind tunnel was the discovery that the commonly published tables of aerodynamic performance of various shapes were wrong. The wind tunnel allowed them to test and generate correct - that is, accurate - data for a variety of shapes. Their measurements were, for the day, very precise and correct due to their fanatical attention to detail.

The incorrect information about aerodynamics is probably why a number of better funded competitors were so far behind them. It simply did not occur to the competitors that published data from highly esteemed researchers could be so far off. Also, some of their competitors were more intuitive, seat of the pants types. But the Wright brothers themselves were very methodical, researching what was known and discovered by others to create their initial designs, then performing detailed analysis of the failures - hence their discovery that the published data was wrong.

As an example of just how careful they were, one of the brothers (I forget which one) did a detailed analysis of the airflow around the propeller as he designed it. His diary recorded that he found the problem extremely challenging, but kept at the equations until he had a solution, and designed a propeller whose efficiency was not exceeded until the advent of modern computational systems, and which matches well in efficiency with many commercial propellers today.

They used science and mathematics - along with superior engineering talent - in every aspect of their work on aircraft.

WeberFan wrote:Dilandu:

Photography and lighting not really required. You can use colored smoke.

But further to the point, just understanding the concepts of lift, gravity, thrust, drag, and the basics of airfoil shapes I could easily come up with a SMALL prototype aircraft pretty quickly, then evaluate the performance empirically (in fact, I built model aircraft and model rockets that way when I was growing up, and before I went to college and "learned" about it all - "OHHH... So THAT'S why it works...").

With a "working prototype" in hand, I could "play with it" to improve the performance until I'm satisfied (remembering that "better is always the enemy of the good enough"). Then scale until you get something the size you want, testing along the way.

Consider me old school - before we had NASA, we had NACA... And their work was pre-computer and probably (in some cases) pre-slide rule empirical testing. I've still got an old book from college that was done by NACA and consisted of nothing more that airfoil shapes and their respective performance characteristics - all empirically derived!

The modern slide rule was invented in the mid-1800s. NACA didn't come along until 1915. And how do you think they determined the performance characteristics of the various airfoil shapes? They took pictures of the colored smoke flowing around them in wind tunnels, and THEN did the calculations.

George