True, but then Grumman's F4F Wildcat wasn't any special either and it provided good service.
What if no Gloster Gladiator.
- Thread starter Peg Leg Pom
- Start date
Did serving as a fighter cost the Skua much as a dive bomber? As a dive bomber there doesn't seem to have been anything wrong with it.
If nothing else you can probably cut in half the number of forward firing machine guns from four to two and save some weight. I'm not sure if there are other subtle aspects of the design that can be changed.
Do two .303 Brownings plus ammunition and mountings weigh that much I am going to guess 100lb per gun. Barely noticeable in a quite big aircraft.
The Skua gets a bad press but it was fine at doing what it was designed for. It wasn't intended to tangle with land based fighters. There was at least one ace on the type. All it really needed was a bit more power - the Perseus wasn't that reliable but had a fraction more HP than the Mercury flown by the prototype before the RAF and the Air Ministry decided to corner the market in them for Blenheims.
The Roc on the other hand was an absolute parcel of cack.
The Roc on the other hand was an absolute parcel of cack.
You could be right, I'm thinking about it from an every little bit helps standpoint.
By that argument the Skua's armament should be cut back to that of the land based light bombers. 1 fixed forward firing gun and 1 on a flexible mount in the back.
So 3 - 400 pounds in weight of guns, mounts and ammunition saved, leave some fuel behind and get the bomb load up to 1000lb over short ranges?
Or longer range with a 500 pounder and a bit better top end speed. Save some weight and I don't know make a few other adjustments and maybe you can get performance close to that of a Dauntless only two years earlier.
Or give it Taurus at 1000+ HP and keep the guns as well. Or better still navalise either the Bristol 148 with the same engine or the Henley. Both aircraft would fulfill all the Skua's roles better IMVHO. A Henley with the Hurricanes wings and Armament in 1939 would have amongst it's contemparies been a competent fleet fighter at least, faster and with a longer range. The Bristol 148 reputably had excellent low peed and landing characteristics which would have come in handy of the RN's slower carriers also again much faster than the Skua. The Skua was a good aircraft at the time but the RN could have done better.
The usual comparison I would make is the Polikarpov I-16, which had the flaws of being developed too early to fix certain problems, but was a purpose-designed monoplane fighter with retractable undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit, designed at the same time as the Gloster Gauntlet. It could make about 282 mph (454 kph) on 700 hp (522 kW) for the Type 5. By 1939 it had been uprated to 1,100 hp (820 kW) and made about 326 mph (525 kph) on that power in the Type 24. But this was the limit of the airframe's performance and its development potential had been exhausted. It was still further developed, but with bigger changes to the airframe as the I-180.
The aircraft you're looking at is a converted biplane (Gladiator), so there's some limits and lower performance from that airframe compared to a clean-sheet design, so those numbers seem to be about accurate (they are lower than the I-16s). However, it may also reach its development potential sooner (unless more extensive revisions are made) due to the less advanced basis for the design.
No...I was thinking of a total redesign - in the same way that the Wildcat was a redesign of the XF4F-1, not a "conversion"
Grumman began design of the XF4F-1 in 1935 and the F4F was in production in 1940. The first flight of the Gladiator was in 1934. So if this was abandoned and work started on a monoplane replacement in 1934-5, it seems reasonable that this could also have been produced by 1940?
This will be no competition for the Spitfire, or possibly even the Hurricane, but if the FAA had a Wildcat equivalent in service, even in small numbers...?
203 more Gloster Gauntlets, delivered February 1937 to February 1938
378 more Gloster built Hawker Hurricanes September 1938 to April 1940
See post #16
Edit
All other things being equal 98 of the Hurricanes built instead of the last 378 Gladiators, would have been Sea Hurricanes.
I'd also like to see 200 extra Gloster built Hurricanes instead of the 200 Henleys. Even better if the order wasn't cut from 350 or 400 (depending on the source) to 200.
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Then it wouldn't be a monoplane Gladiator, that would have nothing to do with a Gladiator and would be a clean-sheet aircraft.
It would be an earlier F5/34 which offers some interesting options, chiefly for the navy but also potential production in the Commonwealth. Australian and Canadian built versions with the US Twin Wasp don't seem an unreasonable development.