Lancastrian I/O Lancaster as RAF's night heavy bomber?

With the Shackleton (Griffon)and Wyvern (Eagle) and Lincoln (Merlin) Rolls Royce went for annular radiators.

One ex-Lancaster gunner told me that his crew preferred the 4x.303 to the 2x 0.5 as they loaded the guns with all tracer on the principle that the purpose of firing the guns was to frighten the night fighter away, not to necessarily shoot them down and make them look for an easier target.
 
Well since the Lancastrian was a variant of the Lancaster for this to see service I think you would need to either have them decide on using speed rather than turrets for protection from pretty much near the outset, in my opinion highly unlikely, or get the Lancaster into service earlier so that operational experience leads them to the conclusion and it's built instead of the Lincoln. So how do you speed up the development of the Lancaster? Perhaps they build it to meet the previous specification for a four-engine bomber that saw the creation of the Short Stirling. IIRC the Handley Page Halifax was originally being built to the same Air Ministry specification but was able to jump almost straight to a four engine model due to engine troubles, any way to have the Manchester re-designed to become the four-engine Lancaster much earlier in the process?
 
Well since the Lancastrian was a variant of the Lancaster for this to see service I think you would need to either have them decide on using speed rather than turrets for protection from pretty much near the outset, in my opinion highly unlikely, or get the Lancaster into service earlier so that operational experience leads them to the conclusion and it's built instead of the Lincoln. So how do you speed up the development of the Lancaster? Perhaps they build it to meet the previous specification for a four-engine bomber that saw the creation of the Short Stirling. IIRC the Handley Page Halifax was originally being built to the same Air Ministry specification but was able to jump almost straight to a four engine model due to engine troubles, any way to have the Manchester re-designed to become the four-engine Lancaster much earlier in the process?

The driving force behind the failure of the Stirling relative to the success of the Halifax/Manchester/Lancaster was the airfield requirements demanded of the heavy bomber. The Stirling was designed for short grass runways in existence, much to its detriment. The mediums, which became heavies, were designed for launch by catapult or rocket assist. It was much later that the Ministry realized that they had forgotten to initiate research and development of a catapult system, about the same time as they determined that the system wouldn't work. They improved airfields instead.
 
Does anybody know why Stirling have had so big (= not light) a fuselage, both long and tall, some 5 meters longer than Halifax or Lanc?
 
Does anybody know why Stirling have had so big (= not light) a fuselage, both long and tall, some 5 meters longer than Halifax or Lanc?
AIUI, it was intended to have proportionally wider wings. However the Air Ministry complained that the Stirling wouldn't fit in conventional hangars, and thus demanded the ungainly stub wings. I think Shorts should have stayed with the original wing, but added a fold for hangar use.
 
Does anybody know why Stirling have had so big (= not light) a fuselage, both long and tall, some 5 meters longer than Halifax or Lancaster?
Because it was in large part based on their previous Sunderland flying-boat design but with the lower deck and boat hull removed, as well as some other modifications.


AIUI, it was intended to have proportionally wider wings. However the Air Ministry complained that the Stirling wouldn't fit in conventional hangars, and thus demanded the ungainly stub wings. I think Shorts should have stayed with the original wing, but added a fold for hangar use.
It wasn't the hangar width that was the limitation, the Air Ministry merely set the maximum width as a way of keeping the aircrafts weight down IIRC. That's why they ended up having to fix the wings at such a high angle to attain the necessary take-off performance, the unfortunate side-effect being that the aircraft apparently then flew with a noticeable, and performance limiting, nose down profile. In an ideal world a little more time would have been spent on the design to create a better design, one that might also have been able to do second duties as a very long range maritime patrol aircraft. Alas it was not to be.
 
Does anybody know why Stirling have had so big (= not light) a fuselage, both long and tall, some 5 meters longer than Halifax or Lanc?

Somewhere in the specification limited the wingspan, which required the wing to be broader at the root, to meet required wing area for take-off performance, which required the tail group to be moved an exceptional distance aft to avoid turbulence, and double-tall undercarriage legs. Four-engined bombers were also required by specification to carry torpedoes, until someone at Coastal told the AM they were nuts.

Bottom line to the question, I have no idea. Neither did Shorts, or the AM. I don't even know if they noticed. The Short Sunderland looked perfectly normal, but it had a longer wing.
 
Because it was in large part based on their previous Sunderland flying-boat design but with the lower deck and boat hull removed, as well as some other modifications.



It wasn't the hangar width that was the limitation, the Air Ministry merely set the maximum width as a way of keeping the aircrafts weight down IIRC. That's why they ended up having to fix the wings at such a high angle to attain the necessary take-off performance, the unfortunate side-effect being that the aircraft apparently then flew with a noticeable, and performance limiting, nose down profile. In an ideal world a little more time would have been spent on the design to create a better design, one that might also have been able to do second duties as a very long range maritime patrol aircraft. Alas it was not to be.

A Stirling lifted off a Sunderland would have looked as depicted.

The nose-down aircraft you describe is the Whitley, not the Stirling.

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The nose-down aircraft you describe is the Whitley, not the Stirling.
I could have sworn that I read somewhere that the Stirling suffered the same problem thanks to the angle of its wing, which also caused them to need the extra-long landing gear. I'll have a check of the books at some point tomorrow.
 
Does anybody know why Stirling have had so big (= not light) a fuselage, both long and tall, some 5 meters longer than Halifax or Lanc?

Have a look at the upper fuselage of the Short Sunderland, then examine the Short Stirling. You'll note that the Short Stirling looks very similar, right down to the upward angle towards the tail where the boat hull would have joined it. IIRC what happened was that Short Bros. basically removed the boat part of a Sunderland, faired it over and added landing gear, then called the job a good'un and took the rest of the day off.
I was going to say that I had no idea how they managed to sleep at night, but they probably slept beautifully on the fat sacks of cash they got for this.
 
One ex-Lancaster gunner told me that his crew preferred the 4x.303 to the 2x 0.5 as they loaded the guns with all tracer on the principle that the purpose of firing the guns was to frighten the night fighter away, not to necessarily shoot them down and make them look for an easier target.
That's also a function of visual range at night and hence the short engagement ranges and durations. .303 loses energy pretty fast compared to .50 or 20mm, but if visual range at night is only 50m that isn't a big effect. Also, as soon as the fighter breaks away and the bomber starts corkscrewing, both aircraft will probably lose visual and radar contact forcing the fighter to try and re-acquire. This means that the bomber will be a very poor gunnery platform, the gunner will be concentrating on getting a warning to the pilot rather than getting rounds on target, and unless things go wrong the gunner will only have a few seconds to engage the enemy fighter.

The result is that the primary job of a gunner is to act as a lookout in order to try and spot incoming fighters (hence the attractiveness of something like Village Inn to make that job easier), with their secondary job being to make any attacking fighter pilot flinch and lose contact (hence the emphasis on lots of tracers) and a tertiary job being to shoot down the incoming fighter. Shooting the fighter down would be lovely, but it's also going to be exceptionally difficult without radar-aimed guns because of the effect of surprise on the gunner and their workload during the very short engagement. Hence .303 tracer - lots of bright lights whizzing around the enemy's ears to distract them, and you might still get lucky.
 
The Short Stirling was required to be able to transport troops as well as bombing, hence the large fuselage and it reverted to transport in it's last examples. Strength was assisted by an internally braced bomb bay which could only take bombs of the largest in RAF use in the 1930's so was unable to accommodate the later larger bombs even if it could carry a total of twice that of a Whitley. By 1939 Shorts were proposing a higher altitude version with 20mm cannon armed turrets.

The Halifax was required to change to a x4 Merlin arrangement to cover for the Vulture when it began to display problems. The Manchester was to introduce the Vulture to service in parallel. Both were stressed for catapult take off and the Manchester to carry x4 torpedoes. It was this last which required the Manchester to have a large unobstructed bomb bay which proved so useful later on to carry huge bombs.

Had the Manchester been unarmed from the start the twin tail may not have been chosen as there would be no need for a clear arc of fire for a mid upper turret nor the heavy structures to mount turrets. If one adds in all the speed improvements using the base Manchester/Lancaster airframe then a Lancaster could probably match or exceed an Me110 night fighter with a full aerial drag for top speed. The cruising speed would still be below that but the slow closing speed would make interception slow and reduce number of interceptions in a raid.
 
The interesting paper about development of Merlin engines can be downloaded from here: link One can read there that Lanc IV (2-stage supercharged Merlins) was supposed to cruise as fast as the Lanc I/III were maxing out, at 280+ mph, and at greater altitude. Delete two turrets, add the pointy nose and 300 mph cruise should be attainable.

There is the test report of the same site about the Lanc IV.
 

hammo1j

Donor
I guess the gunners could be used as lookouts. Fitting a window in the bottom of the Lancaster would be one of the best value improvements.

Again I assume why this was never done was down to the inertia of thought that exists in large organisations.
 
I could have sworn that I read somewhere that the Stirling suffered the same problem thanks to the angle of its wing, which also caused them to need the extra-long landing gear. I'll have a check of the books at some point tomorrow.
I believe that Armstrong-Whitworth (and Boeing, the B-52 has the same characteristic) went for level landing gear and a nose-down attitude in flight. Shorts went for a level attitude in flight and extra-high landing gear.

Wasn't there some odd requirement for one RAF bomber of the era that it had to be able to be broken down into sections for rail transport? :confused:
 
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