Warbird Information Exchange

....which may help explain the fashionable styling of twin (or more)vertical fins on mid to late 30's multi engined airframes.

The B-314 tried several sizes, dimensions, and numbers of verticals before settling on triple tails, my dad (now 91) grew up very close to Matthews Beach on Lake Washington and recalls watching the 314's skid all over the Lake and Puget Sound trying different fins, he said his mom, my grandma hated the thing rattling every window in the house on take offs.

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

some good healthy feedback here from you guys!! my only point is i find it rather coincidental that so many of the physical lines on a number of post war russian aircraft resemble the phyical lines of ours. i'm not trying to start a conspiracy theory, & no i haven't watched to many james bond movies either!!

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tom d. friedman - hey!!! those fokkers were messerschmitts!! * without ammunition, the usaf would be just another flying club!!! * better to have piece of mind than piece of tail!!

When the Tupolev SB twin-engine bomber first showed up in the Spanish Civil War, Western analysts assumed it was a rip-off of the Martin B-10..despite only a very rough similarity in layout. "Everybody" knew the Russkies couldn't have come up with such a modern aircraft on their own.

Similary, the myth still persists that the Zero fighter was a Japanese version of a rejected U.S. design. Certainly the Japanese were influenced by Western technology (in the '30s they bought examples of aircraft from all over the world in an effort to bring their aviation industry up to speed) but the Zero was an entirely indigenous design. I understand Japanese propellers were copies of Hamilton Standards, and their early war aero engines copied many features from US designs..but the Japanese were already building them under lisence, and it just made sense to use the manufacturing infrastructure that was already in place. The one attempt I'm aware of to "steal" a US design was the attempt to turn the DC-4E airliner prototype into the G6N bomber..which was a dismal failure (that doesn't count Japanese-built DC-3s..once again, they were already building them under lisence before the war broke out.)

As for modern jets, I don't know much about the chronologies, but I heard somewhere once that some features of the F-15 were actually "inspired" by the MiG-25 (after Western techies analyzed the example flown to Japan by a defecting piot.)

SN

There are a lot more evolutionary designs than revolutionary designs when it comes to aircraft. Engineering dictates that to occur. I don't know why people really debate the issue. It's not like one side has all the technical knowledge and not the other. Use what works...if it doesn't work good enough...evolve the design concept. Designs aren't pulled out of thin air, they are systematically built in top of a mountain of previous designs regardless of source.

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Only one Lisunov Li-2 left flying...

A great example of form following function and parralell development. We were, after all, competing with each other so it makes sense that our use of the current knowledge would lead to similiar solutions. Big difference to me has always been the lack of elegance (in my eye) in the russian designs. The always seemed more of a tractor solution... They also went a little lower tech, depending on numbers to overcome sophistication and I think if we had ever gone toe to toe that might have made the difference IF fighting lasted any time at all.
For technology exchange, Ben Rich tells in his book how much of our early stealth design (Pave Blue leading to the F-117) was built on theories published (and largely ignored) by a russian physicist before WWII.

Will Ward's crew chief (MiG-17) likes to point out that the MiG17 was designed to be maintained by potato farmers, in a potato field, using only the tools you'd need to repair a potato truck.

There's some merit in that approach.

The story goes that in the 1960's NASA spent about a million bucks developing a ballpoint pen with a pressurized ink barrel that would write in zero-g, yet not leak all over the place.

The Soviet cosmonauts used pencils.

I did not know for this- any more info please?

This is correct about the MiG-17 and this is overal aproach to all of their industry. It is about the mentality. La-15 was much better then MiG-15 but it need sophisticated craftsmans and MiG-15 could be built by peasants. Also MiG-25 use simple method for the 3M flight then contemporary west plane.

But best at all is that there was not war between west and Soviet Union... cold war was enough I think.

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In his book "Skunk Works" Ben Rich goes fairly into depth on the development of the stealth fighter and it's testing, the competitions, etc. The base theories of electromagnetic reflection were originally put together and published by a russian physicist. Since there was little practical use at the time they were shelved, then rediscovered by one of his team. These were primitive but gave the foundation that was built on and eventually led to the test aircraft that were essentially invisible to radar, and helped in the development of the SR-71. The final growth of these test aircraft was the F-117. The later B-2 and other stealthy aircraft owe their more blended shapes (versus the hard angles of the 117) to the ability of computers to handle more complex calculations between the development of the different aircraft. It is fascinating reading.
[/quote]I did not know for this- any more info please?[quote]

And what about the origin of the US space program? Remember how the US got an in-depth knowledge of rocket propulsion? Does the name Wernher von Braun ring a bell? This man developed the first WMD: V-2. He became a member of the N.S.D.A.P. (the Nazi-party) and an officer in the feared SS, to secure ongoing funding and his privileged position as a scientist. It is assumed that he knew about the horrible conditions under which his forced-labourers in the labour camps had to live and work. As the US wanted to deny the Soviet Union to acquire similar knowledge of rocket science and keep him in the US, no questions were asked after his arrival in the US (try a search for 'operation paperclip'). And he even became a US citizen in 1955.

Actually, V-2's have been launched in the US at the end of WWII to find out if that kind of propulsion could be of any use for the US. We all know the results of those tests: ICBM's, the US space program. You cannot deny that the US is one of the biggest and most succesfull end-users of certain inventions made under the nazi regime.
And don't forget: under the nazi-regime most of the scientists and the labourers from the labour camps were forced to continue their work in their field of science, under the threat that unspeakable horror was to overcome their families and friends if they refused to co-operate with the nazi's. So remember the pain of those people next time you watch a Space Shuttle being launched.

History has proven two things: Hitler was an idiot with abject ideas and a criminal against humanity of the worst kind, but some scientific and technical achievements made in that black period in time were just brilliant. But -was it worth all the suffering?

Bribing, plagiarism, copying ideas, spying, taking each others scientists away: it's all in the game.

Tillerman.

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Jets are nice. Props are nicer.

In a conversation with Dassault engineers at the Paris Air Show in 80 or 81, they mentioned to me that the Concorde team was aware that the Russians were intent on stealing their blueprints so they designed a believable, but false fuel system that the Russians then copied and installed.

According to the engineers, this lead to the crash at an earlier Paris Air Show of the "Concordski".

Thank you Leo

It is possible that Soviet try to stil many things, everybody do that. This is why the inteligence service is made. So how about the fan jet engines? This is patented in Yugoslavia after the WW2 and as I know Yuogoslav engeneer Nerandzic has give that plans [he is not designer] to Brits and they are made worlds first turbo fan engine RR Convey on base of this document.

During the conversation with one French researchers I get info that Germans has captured plans for jet engine in 1940 and this become later Jumo 004.

This is interesting world

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I can't cite chapter and verse, but as memory serves, the radar-stealthiness of the SR71 was a happy accident. It was designed to go damn-the-torpedoes high and fast, and turned out to scatter RF as well.

And Tillerman, both sides took advantage of German knowledge about rockets after the war. We added von Braun and his team to Goddard. They added [anonymous?] to Tsiolkovsky.

I remember back in the 80s before the F-117 went public, Testor's released a model kit of the fictitious "F-19 Stealth Fighter." The kit caused an uproar in some circles, with I believe even one congressman publicly complaining about a model company getting access to our military secrets and making them public.

The "F-19" was a sleak, graceful design with lots of curves. Testor's released another fictitious model of a "MiG-37B Stealth Fighter," which was angular and clunky. The notes on the box said that the Russians would have to use faceting for stealth, because unlike the U.S., they didn't have the sophisitcated computers necessary to design graceful curves that were stealthy. Ironically when the F-117 was made public a couple of years later, it much more closely resembled the hypothetical Russian design.

SN

Do you really think that's likely? It's about the level of Clive Cussler.

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James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

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