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Baron-Engel β Flying boat fighter
Published: 2013-09-02 21:37:18 +0000 UTC; Views: 4818; Favourites: 74; Downloads: 86
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Description
So this morning I went to do the laundry at our apartment complex. The washer was working fine, but when it came time to dry the clothes I discovered the dryer was inoperable. Now you may be wondering what that has to do with these quick little sketches. Well I had to take my laundry over to a laundromat and dry them there, and that is where I did these doodles.As I was sketching these I imagined a designer in the late 1930's coming up with this design. Flying boat fighters had been out of fashion for about a decade, but this designer remembered them fondly from the Great War.
True land-based monoplane fighters were slowly eclipsing all other designs, but that didn't mean the flying boat fighter was dead. No sir! It could take advantage of some of the same breakthroughs in design that land-based monoplanes had. Streamlining, flushed rivets, no retractable landing gears but the wingtip floats could fold up into the wingtips. Why you could even use the floats as additional fuel tanks! A teardrop canopy would improve visibility, struts and wires were reduced to the minimum.
Since the fighter would be used in a maritime patrol/ strike role I imagined the designer giving the fighter some real punch for the time. Four 12.7mm machine guns and a 25mm cannon gave the fighter the ability to destroy larger patrol flying boats, and even inflict serious damage on smaller, unarmored enemy surface vessels. The designer may have even thought of including light bomb racks under the wings.
Alas, his passion for the design was in vain and his design remained only an idea on piece of paper.
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Comments: 38
Looks like an updated version of Porco Rosso's fighter.
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Late 40s British attempt: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saundersβ¦
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You know, These sketches helped me with a problem in Simpleplanes. Β I needed to build a better 'boat fighter, and this formed the basis. Β There's a number of differences, but they're both parasol 'boat fighters.
Don't worry, the next couple of designs I built were completely original.
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I love it! I recently drew a boat plane fighter, though it's rather conventional, the boat hull pulls up into the aircraft. Feel free to check it out!Β
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Putting the wing ahead and above the cockpit creates a huge blind spot for the pilot, not a good trait for a fighter. Move the wing back a bit and the cockpit forward and I think you'll have a contender.
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The blind spot is also actually smaller there than in a rearward position, and it doesn't restrict downward visibility (important when the cockpit position already limits that.)
Balance is vital in aircraft design, especially in high-performance craft. Placing the pilot ahead of the wing can be difficult, and having a blind spot directly behind them is likely to be even more deadly! Placing it above the cockpit is also an obvious non-starter for combat, and placing it at the top of the fuselage directly in front of the cockpit means you can't see your target, or the runway...
Placing it low, and either under or just ahead of the cockpit became the standard in land based fighters, but that isn't really an option a flying boat.* Thus, this position, which it shares with the vast majority of fighters from mid-WWI to circa 1930.
*There is now one low-wing flying boat (as opposed to pontoon plane), the Be-103.
It is a six-seat transport made by the Russian firm Beriev, and its wing acts as part of the hull, planing on the water's surface and displacing water at rest. It would likely have been quite hard to make this design anything but a constantly leaking headache before modern composite materials.
Riveted sheet metal is really quite hard to get watertight seams in even when it isn't constantly flexing under flight loads.
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Yep but lots of parasol and biplane fighters in real world had their wings in that location. Often when I do concept design I do not create optimal design instead I'll put elements that give the design certain weakness because throughout history that is how things more often really got built.
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Something about high-wing monoplanes just doesn't seem good for a fighter to me.
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But parasol fighters were rather in vogue in the 1920's and 30's. Especially in Europe.
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Yeah but, I dunno, it seems like the center of gravity is too low for certain maneuvers to be done easily as you can with mid or low-wing monoplanes. Not to mention the additional drag from the support structures that have to extend from the hull to the wing that ordinarily would be buried under the skin of a mid-wing/low-wing plane, and then there's the whole engine position and the offset thrust it'd develop.
It's a stylish design, very eye-catching, but it feels like something more for a sport craft for rich folk than a fightercraft made to clear the skies.
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Look for videos of aerobatic performances in planes like the Citabria, Decathlon, and certain Piper Cub variants. You'll likely be surprised.
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Completely did not address my points. 1/10. Would not read again.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gull_win⦠Maybe this could help in aerodynamic departament. Plus, with it's great hull volume and stability thanks to high wing design it would propably make a great attack plane.
a bit more firepower would also be nice, now it's a streamlined and elegant design meant for better times, not war machine.
It's also something that would make more sens on water based world, where land infrastructure is a problem. Some sort of archipelago kingdom? >]
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Actually it is roughly based of some Italian and French designs from WWI the 1920's and very early 30's.
Remember this is not necessarily monocoque construction. I wanted the design to represent that period of transition from fabric and wire biplanes and the completely stressed skin designs of just a decade later.
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I guess, but it just still rubs me wrong way for a "fighter".
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It's also worth noting that during the "parasol" era, there wasn't any plane-to-plane combat happening in the world. Design weaknesses that aren't made obvious on the battlefield could therefore be swept under the carpet or ignored by Air Marshal Wellconnectedfamily and his pet aviation company, and thus be perpetuated. As soon as plane-to-plane combat actually began to happen, the amount of advance in fighter design in a very, very short period of time was nothing short of astonishing.
Nothing quite like bullets to reveal engineering truth, is there...
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Today it doesn't look the part, but at time I visualized some designer proposing this aircraft the line between the high-performance civilian aircraft and military bomber/ fighter were sometimes hard to tell. Look at how many aircraft designs that began in the 1930's as fast mail/airliners that at least served in the early years of WWII as bombers.
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Reminds me of the planes in El Porco Rosso (H. MiyazakiΒ - Ghibli).
Nice design series. If this would have caught my eye some years ago, it would been turned to either styrene or resin.
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Oh that is not a surprise since I so love Porco Rosso.
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If you see the designer, tell them I thought their designs looked great!
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Hmm, I'm reminded of a P-51D, so maybe it's a bit more of a postwar design with its use of heavy machineguns and autocannon as versus medium machineguns and autocannon.
"Hmm, maybe with a cabin, this could possibly take off as a high-performance leisure plane for retired (and well heeled) American pilots."
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Interesting. I'm a fan of those old boat-planes (in no small part thanks to Tale-Spin coming out when I was a young teenager), and this would have been an interesting design. I really get a kick out of the way those pontoons folded up and into the wingtips, that is damned clever!
- Polecat
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Well several flying of the time employed a similar idea. The PBY Catalina being one that immediately jumps to mind. Oh and Tale-Spin was a good series. Remember it well.
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hallo! I am here 2Β make a deal with u! u give me a llama and i give u a llama
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