Battle Flight: RAF Air Defence Projects and Weapons Since 1945 by Chris Gibson

[JFC Fuller]

Chris,

Firstly, another excellent work, thank you very much. I do however have a comment/question though, on pg.74 you state that the French Navy wanted a 16,000lb AFVG (I have seen this elsewhere too) which is of course about half the weight of the minimum weights being looked at by the other services involved. The requirement for a variant with an AUW half that (or less) of the one desired by the other interested parties seems completely ridiculous to the point of impossible. However, in "Always a Challenge: An RAE Scientist in the Cold War Years" Tom Kerr states that what the French were actually looking at was a 16,000kg aircraft meaning of 32,000lbs. He is quite explicit that the French were working in tonnes rather than tons and and that they wanted 16 tonnes (16,000kg or 32,000lbs). This seems far more reasonable from the point of view of it being a variant of the land based aircraft and would make it only slightly heavier than a loaded F-8 which the French operated from their carriers. I have also not seen any news reports from that time suggesting a significantly smaller aircraft, indeed there is one Flight article that talks about the weight growing to 42,000lbs thus effectively killing the idea of a French Naval version. I am curious about what you think?

 

[CJGibson]

Interesting observation, thank you.

I suspect you're correct, the lb/kg confusion is possible, especially in Whitehall. I shared the correspondent's obvious dismay and merely put it down to the usual French bloody-mindedness rather than thinking the unit was wrong.

Was AFVG drawn up in metric? I'd need to check drawings, but I suspect that it would have been. Don't get me started on Imperial (English to our US chums) measures. Anyone know if these collaborative projects had a common units set or did each company use their own in-house units set? The former would make sense but the latter is probably daft enough to be the norm.

I'm offshore and my copy is at home so can't check what I wrote. Glad you like it and hope there's many new subjects to discuss. I'll get Sandys on the fourth plinth yet.

Thanks

Chris

 

[pathology_doc]

Even when everything's in Imperial measures and there is complete agreement on what is to be built, trouble can arise. IIRC, Ian Skennerton, a Lee-Enfield riflle aficionado, wrote a (short) book, which might in olden days have been called a pamphlet, about standardisation issues re. the manufacture of .303 rifles in Australia, and something called the "Lithgow Inch", which from the title alone suggests that not all was as it should have been in calibration land!

 

[Tony Williams]

This is my first post on this forum, other than in the "Introduce Yourself" thread, and I found it as I searched for more information about Chris Gibson's new book.

First I would like to congratulate the author on a fascinating book with a lot of information which was new to me. That even covers my own speciality - military guns and ammunition - and I was particularly grateful for the summary of the various AA gun projects which resolved some things which had long puzzled me. Incidentally, there is a surviving example of a round of ammunition for the 5 inch Green Mace at the MoD Academy in Shrivenham, sectioned to show the different elements.

I was also very interested to read of the proposed 34mm recoilless gun in a Schräge Musik aircraft installation. I only learned of this gun recently, from a reference in an appendix to Morgan and Shacklady's book on the Spitfire. If anyone can point me to a source of information about this weapon and its ammunition I would be most grateful.

I have only a couple of comments on points of detail. First, concerning the Aden gun on Page 92. The account in the book compresses a complex development story. The Aden came in two major production versions: the first, known as the 3M or simply the LV (for low velocity) was a finalised version of the 30mm variant of the Mauser MG 213C which was nowhere near production-ready at the end of WW2. It had a short (86mm long) cartridge case and fired a large shell at a low muzzle velocity of just 600 m/s. This velocity was felt to be too low so the ammunition was redesigned with a longer (113mm) case containing more propellant and the gun altered to suit, forming the Mk 4 or HV (High Velocity). The muzzle velocity went up to around 780-790 m/s. The Aden Mk 4 entered service in the late 1950s and replaced the LV thereafter.

The second comment concerns the 3.7 inch AA guns from WW2. As the author says on page 21, the original 1938 AA gun design (Mks 1-3) was supplemented from 1943 by the Mk 6, using a bigger cartridge case from the 4.5 inch AA gun. However, I found the account on page 17 to be rather confusing, with data for the two guns mixed up. They were actually very different, with the Mk 6 being in effect the 4.5 inch gun fitted with a 3.7 inch calibre barrel. The significant data for the two types follows:

Mks 1-3: available on mobile or static mountings, weighing 9.2 or 10.3 tons respectively. Barrel length 50 calibres, muzzle velocity 2,600 fps, effective ceiling up to 32,000 feet.

Mk 6: static mounting only, weight 17.1 tons. Barrel length 65 calibres with Probert rifling, muzzle velocity 3,425 fps, effective ceiling up to 45,000 feet.

It was, as the author says, the massive, high-performance Mk 6 which formed the basis of the postwar Ratefixer and Longhand rapid-fire developments.

Incidentally the Probert rifling of the Mk 6 was mainly chosen to reduce the effect of barrel wear (which it did for complex reasons to do with the shell's driving band design). In addition, while it didn't increase the muzzle velocity, the cleaned-up shell did lose velocity more slowly in flight, helping its long-range performance.

I hope this is helpful!

 

[DWG]

Was AFVG drawn up in metric? I'd need to check drawings, but I suspect that it would have been. Don't get me started on Imperial (English to our US chums) measures. Anyone know if these collaborative projects had a common units set or did each company use their own in-house units set? The former would make sense but the latter is probably daft enough to be the norm.

I can only speak for my experience on Typhoon, which is a generation later, and that solely on the FCS side, but the boundaries between the companies tended to blur - I had Germans, Italians and Spaniards working a couple of desks away in Rochester and British friends and colleagues working over at Ottobrun, in fact several of them are still over there, having hopped ship to EADS. The theory was EADS* Ottonrun defined the flight control laws, BAE Rochester implemented them, but that was really a theoretical position for workshare purposes, it wasn't entirely possible to distinguish between the two teams by company, only by location. Obviously this meant common standards were the only possible way of working, particularly as our boxes then had to talk to boxes being built by the weapons people in their team, the cockpit people in their team and so on. The standards all came out of Eurofighter Gmbh, and considering Eurofighter Gmbh grew out of the Panavia experience, it either brought its standards over from there, or created them based on lessons learnt.
* Company names changed regularly, so I've just used the currently familiar ones!

 

[Basil]

Chris, simply an excellent book.

 

[uk 75]

I would urge anyone who buys Tony Buttler's book on British Fighters Secret Projects: Fighters
to get hold of this work by Chris Gibson.
In particular Chris covers the gap between the Lightning and the Tornado which is not so well
covered in the Buttler book.