Classic British Flight Sim

I must admit that I am very much looking forward to the TSR.2, which I love, but we have two real ones that we can touch!!!

It's not a plane that never left the drawing board!

My reasoning, of course, is that there are many designs, worldwide, that promised much - on papar - and that for one reason or another, economics, politics, etc., weren't taken any further. One only has to leaf through past Jane;s, Air Enthusiasts, Aeroplane, etc. magazines to see.

For the US, there was the MD-12 double-decker jumbo - (actually, if you want to see how it would have looked, just look at the A-380) - then there was the Lockheed L-1011 twin jet ...

Sometimes the "what ifs" are as much fun as the real airplanes, and in the "what if" environment of Flight Simulator, these designs finally have a place to "fly".

How boring FS would be if we could only fly models that are in current service! When was the last time a Comet 4 came for a landing at Heathrow? There may be lucky people to hear and see an HS.748 passing overhead, but the only way I can hear it is by opening up Rick's model in FS.

I built a BAC 3-11 for FS98/FS2000... that got only a very short way off the drawing board (a few fuselage frames at Brooklands or Wisley). BEA/BA would have had them instead of L-1011 Tristars.

I suppose for those lucky enough to own a copy of Derek Wood's "Project Cancelled" theres a vast array of potential subjects that never made it!

i was just kidding guys

Erich - kies 'n vinnger boet

Okay, if the Pratts don't work, then would you at least have considered the Allison T56 installation? Would've been kinda cool to see a quartet of those big turboprops on a Shack.

TobyVickers wrote:I built a BAC 3-11 for FS98/FS2000... that got only a very short way off the drawing board (a few fuselage frames at Brooklands or Wisley). BEA/BA would have had them instead of L-1011 Tristars.

I suppose for those lucky enough to own a copy of Derek Wood's "Project Cancelled" theres a vast array of potential subjects that never made it!

Yep.

AndyG

Chris Trott wrote:Or even better, imagine what would have happened if the Shack had been re-engined with T56-22 engines instead of adding Napiers? The CV-580 performance was nearly doubled by adding a pair of 501D-13s (4000 HP to 8000HP) imagine going from 4000HP to 12000 HP?

The airframe has to be capable of using the power, though. The Shackleton 3/Ph3, with the Vipers (not Napiers) fatigued fairly quickly because they were routinely going out at overload weights. The extra power given by (lightweight) Vipers was only a takeoff boost (5 min or less) and the Griffons were more than capable of powering the aircraft on the rest of its mission.

A interesting and more realistic mod would have been the Napier Nomad turbo-compound engine: this got as far as being type-tested (in a Lincoln or Shack) before being abandoned. It offered a very low SFC, but was a piston engine in an increasingly jet era.

Kevin

Actually, looking at it from the other side, what about the proposal (BAC222?) to re-engine the C-130 with RR Tynes; with BLC it could have been a stunning STOL transport.

AndyG

Kevin wrote:A interesting and more realistic mod would have been the Napier Nomad turbo-compound engine: this got as far as being type-tested (in a Lincoln or Shack) before being abandoned. It offered a very low SFC, but was a piston engine in an increasingly jet era.

But wasn't the Nomad still liquid cooled? I would think that the Wright R3350 would be a better fit if you want turbo-compound power.

Wright R3350-
HP - 3400
Weight - 6000 pounds
Fuel Consumption - 118 gal/hr

Napier Nomad-
HP - 3135
Weight - 3580 pounds
Fuel Consumption - 180 gal/hr (.345lb per hp per hour)

The question here would end up being - liquid over air, and is the extra 1400 pounds worth it.

Well, what I was trying to introduce was what was realistically probable as a line of development as opposed to what COULD theoretically have been done.

The customer and manufacturer saw nothing wrong with continuing to use highly-reliable Rolls-Royce power in what was after all a developed Avro Lincoln wing: just going from the Merlin to the Griffon wasn't difficult in development terms, with the RR 'power egg' concept.

Liquid cooling was the Avro choice for the remainder of the piston era. There was a very good production alternative British air-cooled engine available, the Bristol Centaurus, and if the customer had wanted more power than the Griffon could provide, that would have been the alternative to the Nomad. In the end, the customer wasn't overwhelmed by the advent of the hybrid engine anyway and decided to wait a generation; in the meantime, the 'quick-fix' was to get a boost on takeoff from auxiliary jets just as Convair did on the B-36J.

Also, in the real world of the 1950s, it is very difficult to see precious foreign exchange being used to buy engines for which there was a perfectly adequate home-built requirement: this was a very real issue in the first 15-20 years or so after WWII when the UK was close to being bankrupted by the phenomenal war effort. Things are rather different nowadays.

Cheers

Kevin