Vickers 279 Venom derivatives?

[cluttonfred]

The Vickers 279 Venom has always seemed like a missed opportunity to me, a solid little eight-gun fighter almost as fast as a Hurricane on only 625 hp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Venom
http://www.1000aircraftphotos.com/APS/1960.htm (source of images below)

I have never understood why the design was not adapted to use a more powerful British or American radial engine (825 hp P&W Twin Wasp Junior?) or, alternatively, perhaps lightened with a reduced armament for use as a modern second-line fighter with the existing engine. If nothing else, an operational Venom-derived fighter would have provided a useful backup in case Merlin production was disrupted for any reason. The Venom might also have made a useful starting point for a ground attack aircraft thanks to the more damage-resistant radial.

Does anyone know of any actual designs or proposals for Venom derivatives?

Cheers,

Matthew

 

[Abraham Gubler]

The Aquila was a 750 lb engine and the Twin Wasp Jr a 1,000 lb engine. I doubt something as lightweight as the Venom could handle a 25% increase in engine weight. Which is the problem with such lightweight fighters so dependent on their deisgn engine being a success. But a Venom upsized to handle a Taurus would be an interesting option. With the production advantage of the Venom design (constant chord wings, etc) they could have been churned out at a rate far higher than Spits or Hurricanes.

 

[hesham]

Hi Matthew,


we can say,the Vickers Type-151 Jockey fighter,was inspired the engineers in the company
to develop Venom,but it's only my opinion,I think this design was a new one,and was
never derivative from any previous concepts.

 

[cluttonfred]

Yes, Hesham, it appears that the 151 and up-engined 171 helped blaze the trail for the 279 but the latter was a new design.

 

[cluttonfred]

Oddly, though the Venom is often touted for having flown with its full complement of eight .303 Browing MGs right from the start, unlike the Hurricane and Spitfire, I have yet to see a photo that actually showed the gun muzzles or a photo or sketch of their installation. Anyone have any such details?

 

[Jemiba]

You're right, in "The British Fighter" by Mason, "Vickers Aircraft since 1908" by Andrews and several other sources
it's stated, that the Venom was fitted with its full armement during its first flight. But no photo I've found, shows
a sign of it and as it was the one and only prototype, that's contradicting to me and I would rather believe in those
photos of the pre-PS era.

 

[CostasTT]

They may have not had photoshop back then, but censoring photos by airbrushing and/or other means was a science. There is the possibility of the official photos having been doctored to conceal the nature of its armament. Just saying...

 

[Jemiba]

True, but then no undoctored photo seem to have survived. Although, if the installation shown in the
3-view of Andrews "Vickers Aircraft ", Putnam is correct, the real reason could just be, that those tiny
little muzzles just got lost on the photos, not to mention the pixelated photos mostly to be found on the net.

 

[royabulgaf]

I just imagine a crop duster as a derivative.

 

[cluttonfred]

From the front view, I was struck by the fact that they could have saved some landing gear weight with a straight center section and a little more dihedral on the outer panels. That would have also provided a logical place for the wing folding break in the naval version. ;-)

 

[Jemiba]

... they could have saved some landing gear weight with a straight center section and a little more dihedral on the outer panels. ...

But that would have necessitated two kinks in the spar, so added complexity and maybe even weight, I think.

 

[cluttonfred]

I don't think there would be much extra weight from slight kinks in the spar at this shallow dihedral angle, but I don't really know enough about the wing structure to be sure. The photos I have seen do not seem to indicate any break in the visible wing structure, which implies either two separate panels cantilevered out from the fuselage or a one-piece wing tip to tip.

 

[Stargazer]

From the front view, I was struck by the fact that they could have saved some landing gear weight with a straight center section and a little more dihedral on the outer panels.

What actually strikes me more in the front view is the thickness of the wing up to its very tip.

 

[cluttonfred]

What actually strikes me more in the front view is the thickness of the wing up to its very tip.

I guess we are so used to seeing aircraft of that era with tapered wings that a plain Hershey bar wing looks odd.

 

[hesham]

From Kryl'ya Rodine 1/1997,


here is a rare 3-view to Vickers Type-171,which led to develop Type-279 Venom,
but it was very close to Type-151 ?.

 

[pathology_doc]

I'll have to go back and re-read to be sure, but: IIRC from Jeffrey Quill's autobiography of his time with Vickers-Supermarine, there was nothing much wrong with the airframe but the Aquila kept seizing up and shearing its driveshaft. Evidently, taking time to find another suitable engine and adapt the airframe to it was more trouble than it was worth. Questions of resource allocation can't always be quantified; at the end of the day, a manager sometimes has to make a judgement call based purely on experience and "feel" for whether a project is appropriate or viable when one or another subsystem folds.


I suspect that if Merlin production had run into trouble, we would have seen the Hercules-engined branch of the Lancaster family take a much more prominent place in the history of the type, Hurricane production might have been sacrificed, and the Spit would have shifted over to the Griffon earlier. That in turn raises the interesting question of whether the Germans would have developed Schrage Musik if they'd more consistently had to go up against a Lancaster variant with ventral gun armament (or if the USAAF had taken up night bombing), but we're drifting off topic here.

 

[Stargazer]

A better version of the Kryl'ya Rodine plan and a few pictures of the Models 151/171 Jockey.

The Models 151 and 171 were developed to the 20/27 specification, while the unbuilt Model 196 Jockey III was designed to F.7/30E (OR.1) for a Single-Seat Day/Night Fighter with a speed of at least 250 mph and 4 machine guns.

 

[Schneiderman]

.... with a speed of at least 250 mph and 4 machine guns.

The speed requirement of F7/30 was not that demanding.......'horizontal speed at 15,000ft not less than 195mph'

 

[Stargazer]

.... with a speed of at least 250 mph and 4 machine guns.

The speed requirement of F7/30 was not that demanding.......'horizontal speed at 15,000ft not less than 195mph'

Thanks Schneiderman. Perhaps another case of confusion between miles and kilometers?

 

[Schneiderman]

Just a mistake that has been repeated in several books and magazine articles, especially when writing about the origin of the Spitfire.

 

[hole in the ground]

Not a derivative but I cannot find another thread on the Vickers Venom, but wanted to share my find. Looking for something else in the Imperial War Museum archives, I found this image:



Which is described as: Aquida AE3S engine of a Vickers Vernon biplane F5/34. Bristol sleeve-valve. (which is mostly nonsense) I've not seen this image of the Venom before and I've tried to find as many open source images as I could of it. The incorrect labelling could well be something to do with it!

The aircraft looks like its partway through construction in the photo and is having the landing gear retraction mechanism tested. Note the large manual crank on the outside of the fuselage. I especially like the clear view of the fuselage structure transition, from the curved and soon to be sheeted forward sections to the polygonal fabric covered tail.

 

[Apophenia]

... The incorrect labelling could well be something to do with it! ...

Great photo! And I suppose that we must be grateful that, at least, they got the specification right

 

[Justo Miranda]

In the mid-1930s, a design team from Fokker, under the direction of Erich Schatzki, concluded that it would not be effective to build a monoplane fighter with retractable undercarriage using the 600-700 hp engines available at that time.

Calculations indicated that disadvantages in increased weight and mechanical problems would not justify the three per cent increase in overall speed that would have been obtained by hiding the landing gear in the wings. In 1935 Fokker took the decision to build the D.XXI fighter, with fixed undercarriage streamlined to the greatest possible. During flight tests carried out in February 1936 with the FD-322 prototype, it was proven that the drag generated by the landing gear was only 10 per cent of the drag generated by the entire airframe.

The failure of the British prototypes, with which the firms Vickers,Gloster, Folland and Bristol tried to comply with the terms of the F5/34 specification, and the success of the Nakajima Ki.27 fighters in Khalkin Gol, confirmed Fokker's calculations.

 

[Schneiderman]

No failure, they were simply not required

 

[Schneiderman]

...... the polygonal fabric covered tail.

Despite the appearance the rear fuselage is actually skinned with duralumin, a form of construction carried over from the Jockey