Design your own aircraft!

1. What 1939/40 bomber justifies the installation of six 20mm cannons?
All of them. 20mm cannons are fed through drum magazines, usually 60 rounds per gun. More guns means more rounds. It also means more damage can be done in one pass, therefore reducing risk to the bomber destroyer.
2. What single engine fighter would not make mincemeant out of this plane?

Heavy fighters were a wrong idea and IMO the last the Dutch needed.
I wasn't thinking about the Dutch air force. In the Battle for Britain for example no single engine fighter could escort the bombers. A heavily armed bomber destroyer would hunt at leisure.
 
Another sort of 'what-if' rather than a new design

ITEM: The USAF experiments with gunships started in Vietnam with a variant of the DC3: the AC-47D (Attack-Cargo) call-sign "Spooky"

ITEM: The Russians built a copy of the DC3 (Lisunov Li-2) which could be equipped with bombs and a dorsal turret

What if the Soviets had decided to use gunships in WW2?
)
Gunships worked in Vietnam because of the lack of AAA. The Germans OTOH had plenty of them. The European theater was too hot for gunships. Maybe in the Pacific or Burma-India.
 
Squarre soft has a programme for design your own warship with the bulk of the various formulas built in. You just enter the dimensional figures armaments fuel and propultion and it feeds back review of performance.

Has any one ever thought of doing the same for aircraft designs?

I used to have a bookmark for that site with the ship stuff... but I don't have it anymore :(
Could someone please post the link here?
Pretty please? :)
 
VO-1.gif


Light Unarmed Two Place Prop Fan Observation Aircraft
 
A more radical variant on the Boulton-Paul Defiant concept - or resurrection of the WW1 pusher concept.

Boulton-Paul P.42

A twin-engined, two-seat, pusher heavy fighter of canard (or twin boom w/tandem engines driving a single prop) configuration, with four .50 MGs or two 20mm cannon grouped in a small manned power turret at the extreme nose. The design acknowledges the main flaw in the original Defiant concept by placing the gun armament in the nose where the pilot can fly and fight with standard fighter tactics. However, the turret allows these guns to be trained separately from the direction of flight to facilitate deflection shooting or maintaining fire on a turning target even if the plane cannot match the enemy's turning radius (the Soviets experimented with this concept in some of their early single-seat jets - including the Mig15 - but the trainable guns had to be aimed by the pilot which made it difficult. This pushes the concept back 15 yearsand adds a separate crewman to do this. Of necessity the plane would be larger and heavier than a standard single-seater - the hope being that the moveable nose battery would compensate for the larger turning circle. Because of all the weight and space associated with the turret and its operator, the plane would also be undergunned -only 4 mgs or 2cannon in a plane the size and weight of a P-38 lighting or Bf-110
 

Markus

Banned
All of them. 20mm cannons are fed through drum magazines, usually 60 rounds per gun. More guns means more rounds. It also means more damage can be done in one pass, therefore reducing risk to the bomber destroyer.

Germany had the Do17, the He111 and a few early Ju88 at that time. Even the RAF´s weak .303 ammo was good enough to down the two former. The latter ws VERY hard to kill with 12*303 in 1941, but that´s a) the future and b) two to four 20mm guns could do it.

So there is no reason for half a dozen 20mm guns when the enemy has just medium bombers.

I wasn't thinking about the Dutch air force. In the Battle for Britain for example no single engine fighter could escort the bombers. A heavily armed bomber destroyer would hunt at leisure.

German bombers stayed either within fighter range or operated at night.
 
Germany had the Do17, the He111 and a few early Ju88 at that time. Even the RAF´s weak .303 ammo was good enough to down the two former. The latter ws VERY hard to kill with 12*303 in 1941, but that´s a) the future and b) two to four 20mm guns could do it.

So there is no reason for half a dozen 20mm guns when the enemy has just medium bombers.

I can see the case for the four nose mounted cannons, future proofing and more fire power is always nice, but the motor cannons seem a needless complication to me, but then I'm prejudiced against motor cannon.

What about a licence produced G-1 with four nose cannon as an alternative to the Westland Whirlwind?
 

Markus

Banned
I can see the case for the four nose mounted cannons, future proofing and more fire power is always nice, ...

It comes at a price: weigth! A cal. 303 gun weights 22lb, a 20mm cannon app. 90lb. Four would be a lot of weight to carry for two 1,000hp engines.

For a bomber-killer two to three nose mounted guns would fine in 1939/40 and not exceed the weight of the 8 and 12 .303 guns fighters had.
 
Name: Aichi A4M
Country: Japan
Entry into service: October 1940
Type: Two-seat multi-purpose seaplane
Armament: 2 x 7.7mm MGs above engine, 1 x 7.7mm MG in rear cockpit, two 30-kg bombs
Max. Speed: 227mph (253mph in Type II)
Engine: 800hp (950hp in Type II)
Max. Range: 880 miles (910 miles in Type II)
Allied code name: 'Rick'
Number built: 500
Theaters served in: Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Burma
Exit from service: July 1942

I hope you will forgive me a moment of quite staggering geekiness but you have your designation all wrong. It would be E12A, not A4M. the Japanese navy used the Latin alphabet for its designation system. An 'A' before the number signifies a carrier born fighter and an 'M' behind the number signifies that it is a Mitsubishi product. IIRC there was in fact no A4M but there was an A4N - a biplane carrier fighter from Nakajima. If there had been an A4M it would have been one of the competitors to the same specification.

The aircraft you describe above is similar to another Nakajima product, the E12N, and also its successor the Aichi E13A Allied code name 'Jake'.
 
BAe Vengeance B.2- In service since 2020 with 9, 44 and 617 Squadrons RAF. Currently Britain's sole nuclear deterrent after US Trident replacement did not fit missile-tubes of Black Prince-class SSBNs.
General characteristics

  • Crew: 4 (pilot, navigator, engineer, weapons officer)
  • Length: 455ft 11in (139m)
  • Wingspan: 134 ft 6 in (41 m)
  • Height: 40 ft 8 in (12.4 m)
  • Wing area: 9680 sq ft (900 m²)
  • Empty weight: 374,000 lb (170,000 kg)
  • Loaded weight: 880,000 lb (400,000 kg)
  • Max takeoff weight: 880,000 lb (400,000 kg)
  • Powerplant: 4x Reaction Engines Ltd Scimitar
  • Fuel capacity: 198 tonnes liquid hydrogen
Performance

Armament

  • Typically 6x MBDA ASLP Storm Hammer long-range stand-off missiles, each with nuclear warhead selectable up to 200kt.
  • Also up to 30,000 kg conventional weaponry (usually specially-modified Paveway 5H hypersonic-release gravity bombs).
Related Development:
Vigilant high-altitude reconnaisance aircraft (significantly smaller, only 2 engines)
Vanguard airliner
Skylon space launcher

Image credit: Reaction Engines. I added the roundels.

I'd be extremely grateful if anyone can photoshop some of the images of the LAPCAT A2 airliner (what this is based on) in flight or taking off to get rid of the EU flag on the tail and add RAF markings and a decent-looking weapons bay.

lapcatb.jpg
 
Last edited:
BAe Vengeance B.2- In service since 2020 with 9, 44 and 617 Squadrons RAF. Currently Britain's sole nuclear deterrent after US Trident replacement did not fit missile-tubes of Black Prince-class SSBNs.
What's the US doing if they've just obsoleted all their own subs!? Unless you're suggesting the US built an entire new fleet of boomers?
 
What's the US doing if they've just obsoleted all their own subs!? Unless you're suggesting the US built an entire new fleet of boomers?
There are currently worries that this could happen. The Ohios come up for replacement well after the Vanguards, and the US studies for a replacement missile to arm the new SSBNs include some much bigger than a Trident.

Of course, more likely than awesome hypersonic bombers are either the UK going it alone with Trident like we did with Polaris, or going for a stealthy cruise-missile-based deterrent, or abandoning it altogether.

And Darkmaster- THANK YOU! Not precisely what I'm looking for, but an awesome thread nonetheless.
 
Could we maybe have gotten the AC-47 in World War II? If not, what transport or heavy bomber would have been best for conversion into a low altitude gunship? I'm thinking along the lines of a World War II version of the AC-130, with a 75 mm gun, a dozen or so .50 cal machine guns, and 20 mm and 40 mm cannons.
 
Could we maybe have gotten the AC-47 in World War II? If not, what transport or heavy bomber would have been best for conversion into a low altitude gunship? I'm thinking along the lines of a World War II version of the AC-130, with a 75 mm gun, a dozen or so .50 cal machine guns, and 20 mm and 40 mm cannons.
There were gunships based on the B-25:
The B-25H had 14 .50 cal machine guns (8 fixed forward-firing, 2 in the top turret, 2 in waist turrets, and 2 in the tail), and a 75mm cannon in the nose. It also had space for a 3,000-lb bombload and 8 rockets.

The B-25J solid-nose variants replaced the cannon with 4 more machine guns, for a total of 18.
And here's how they fit it all in to the B-25H:
b25h_cutaway_color.jpg
 
Top