Whirlwind Update
Been doing a bit of scanning around and I have found another Sim that models the Whirlwind. I just read a review on this bird and the writer confirms a lot of data that is currently available about the plane.
The pictures are very nice. Eye Candy!
http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/review/whirl.htm
With regard to the performance, I was basically wondering how much of it was due to the unreliabilty of the engine as opposed to the design limitation of the Engine - Airframe combination?
From reading the history of Rolls Royce Aircraft Engine development, I see that they had a number of engine in development.
I gather that the Peregrine was a developement and a hoped for replacement of the V-12 Kestrel Engine, which had powered a lot of the 1930's British Fighters. I suspect that the chaps at Rolls Royce, in an attempt to make an engine that perfromed as specified for the requirements of this new fighter, developed a powerplant that was 'overblown' , which is to say that it was red-lining at maximum rated power. You can expect some catastrophic failures when this happens.
The Supermarine R Engine that powered the Sea-racing plane, was to be developed into a 1500HP engine, since it was originally a developement of the Buzzard, which powered flying boats.
Then there was the S6 engine which eventually was developed into the Griffon engine.
This left a power gap in engine develpoment and the Merlin was developed as an interim powered engine to fulfill the power range from 700HP - 1500HP. It started as a private venture, the PV-12, because there was no money allocated for it's development. It was originally designed with an inovative evaporative cooling system and was first placed in the Hawker Hart. When the merits of the evaporative cooling system became suspect and supplies of Ethylene Glycol from America (Prestone) became available, the cooling system was redesigned.
In 1936 the Airministry called for designs of 2 new monoplane single engine fighters and both Supermarine and Hawker designed them around the PV-12 Engine, largely because they were available, not committed to other projects and fell within the design specifications. Once the 2 prototypes
were ready, the PV-12 was moved to the front burner of engine developement.
The Merlin had it's own reliability problems, and the Rolls Royce company developed a program to address this, by basically pulling engines at random from the line, and running them full tilt until they broke, then disassembling them, finding the parts that failed, and redesigning them. This method proved successful and eventually the Merlin became a very dependable engine.
Interestingly, the Vulture engine was 2 Peregrines bolted together at the base and sharing a common crankshaft. As you can well imagine, bolting 2 troublesome engines together did not fix the problem, but compounded it. 2 aircraft in development, the Hawker Tornado and the Avro Manchester bomber were cancelled because they were based on this powerplpant. These 2 aircraft lived on in other incarnations as the Hawker Typhoon and Temest (with the replacement of the engine with the Napier Sabre engine and the Avro Lancaster ( with a Merlin engine ).
This reprieve almost happened with the Whirlwind, when the need for a high altitude interceptor became apparent. The Welkin was developed around 2 Merlins and performed pretty well, but the Luftwaffe abandoned very high altitude bombing and the need evaporated. As a testbed, it was valuable for the developement of the pressurized cockpit.
So, in conclusion, the Whirlwind was unreliable, short ranged, low ammo load, high landing speed, poor time to altitude statistics and not manueverable enough. The Welkin with iit's thick wing and low Mach number was 'too little, too late'.
Ah, well, it's kind of pretty to look at anyway.
Regards,
Arkaler
