Radial or Inline?

[Wilbus]

Thank you

Sounds like a Great man for sure, wish I could have known him.

[BUG_EAF322]

porsche invented the 4 cyl boxer in one night
for the world greatest car ever seen the beetle
Aircooled boxers are great an very reliable also have alot off bottom power.

inline engine mostly have more power in high rev.

I believe this bottom power on radials gives the torque effect.

How reliable now i talk from experience i took my beetle on vacation a few years ago i went from holland to venice and went via Monaco, St. tropez to lloret de mar near barcelona (spain) and back to holland. I did it all with my old 44 hp boxer wich i had to start up with after- shave through my carburator. Probably my cylinder head leaked a bit. I went full gas all the road i notice some power loss in the end against hills. But it went on and on
And brought me through a 5000 km trip with no problems at all.


I have seen a lot off modern watercooled cars having probs standing a side on the highway.
It was a hot summer and the traffic help had 20% more cals from cars that went broke.

could never made with it water cooling.

The beetle rocks IMHO

[Ghosth]

You guys did a great job on most of Wilbuz's question. But I did not see anyone address battle damage.

Inline engines like in the P51 had to have a liquid radiator cooler just like in a car. (That thing under the hood right behind the bumper)

There is no way to armour a copper radiator.
A single 30 caliber slug to the radiator ruins a pony's day.

Radial engines are more durable in battle, Coming back with 2 or more cylinder heads shot off. No liquids to lose except hydraulics & oil. Plus it would take more firepower to damage a radial.
Instead of a copper radiator, your looking at damageing a cast iron cylinder head big as your head.

That's part of why the P47's, F4u's, & F6f's have such a good reputation for ground attack. All have big radial engines, lots of power and tough as nails.

[Wilbus]

Thanks Ghosth
The reason the 190 A/F/G Used radial (one of the reasons) aswell, wish that would be more modelled for all planes in AH, read stories, specially about P47's that had their engines running without any oil (didn't sound too good acording to the pilot reports) but they "worked"

Think I like radials better, love the sound, only need to hear a Boeing Stearman to fall in love with it.

Then again, P51 has got a lovely sound, so does spitfire, this is tough

[BUG_EAF322]

An aircooled engine makes more noise also
it's not damped by a water layer.

[Wilbus]

The more noise there is the more happy will I be

[milnko]

The Best of the Breed
Airpower, July, 1976 Vol. 6 No. 4
by Col. "Kit" Carson
(FW.190)[/i]
The BMW 801D was a 14 cylinder, twin row radial with direct fuel injection. A 10.9 foot diameter, 3-bladed VDM prop was used and was provided with hand lever or automatic pitch control. The 801D radial air cooled engine first appeared on the Dornier 217 and the Fw-190. Its most novel feature was the oil cooler system which was a number of finned tubes shaped into a ring of tubes a little larger in diameter than the cooling fan. This ring was fitted into the rounded front portion of the cowling just aft of the fan.

I don't think this was a good idea. For example, my principal aiming point was always the forward portion of an enemy ship; the engine, cockpit, wing root section. If you get any hits at all, even only a few, you're bound to put one or two slugs into the engine compartment. Having a couple of bullets riccochet off the engine block and tear up some ignition harness is not too bad at all, at least not fatal. But to have all those thin-walled oil cooling tubes ahead of the engine is bad news. Any hits or riccochets in the engine section are bound to puncture the oil tubes. Then the whole engine is immersed in oil spray, and sometimes it would flash over into a fire. All of the 12 Focke-Wulfs that I shot down sent off a trail of dense, boiling oil smoke heavy enough to fog up my gun camera lens and windshield if I were so close.

The Best of the Breed
Airpower, July, 1976 Vol. 6 No. 4
by Col. "Kit" Carson
(Me-109)[/i]
In principle the DB601 and 605 series engines were the same as the Allison or Merlin, except they were inverted and had direct fuel injection; otherwise they were 12-cylinder, 60 degree Vee, glycol cooled engines. The prop was a 10.2 foot, 3 blade variable pitch mechanism of VDM design. here is another major difference between their design approach and ours. The pitch on the Me-109 prop could be set at any value between 22.5 and 90 degrees, a visual pitch indicator being provided for the pilot. There was no provision for automatically governing the rpm. We did just the opposite, using a constant speed governor and flying by a constant tachometer indication of rpm. For any flight condition the rpm remained constant. We didn't know, or care, what the blade angle was.

Much has been written about the which was better, the US Navy used radial engines almost exclusively due to thier reliability, that and if the engine took a few hits the it continued to run, whereas an "inline" typically would sieze up if the coolant (i.e radiator, engine block) took any damage.

For this reason pilots felt secure using the P-38 for ground support, as they had TWO engines, kinda like having one in reserve to get home on.

And of course the P-47 reknown for it's JABO work was a radial engined A/C, practically immune to small arms fire from the ground.

The P-51 although it too did much ground support work had it's radiator mounted low, and was therefore quite vunerable to ground fire.