Thanks.

Still looks good.

Yeah, I can see this with wings folded, being dropped nose-first out of the belly bay of a giant armoured zeppelin, needing to light the engines and unfold the wings in freefall.

Vertical cell bomb carriage like the Heinkel 111? It almost looks like the bombs are leaving the bay tail-first.

Yeah it was popular idea in the 1930s for being able to fit more bombs into modest fuselages. Although I am pretty certain that dropping the bombs tail first was not optimal for bombing accuracy.

At the time a level bomber was doing good to hit the right neighbourhood no matter how the bombs were dropped[1]. A little more scatter wasn't a big deal when the target was "the factory, nearby rail lines and the worker's housing," and even less of a deal for "hit the city with a mix of HE and incendiaries to demoralize the population."


[1] The B-17 was the best, and it was _still_ a total failure at its intended role as a flying coastal defence fortress.

Yeah Billy Mitchell sank a battleship primarily because it was at anchor and not shooting back. However it did confirm that in the most basic of terms that air power could potential deal capital ships a lethal blow, which up to that point many of its critics weren't even willing to entertain. You have to start somewhere.

The problem was that, even by the 1940s, a level bomber was lucky to even score a near-miss on a ship under steam. The problem was never the damage a bomb could do, but the need to use dive or torpedo bombing to actually score a hit.

The primary reason for it being done that way was because the He 111 was designed as a transport aircraft. A low-wing aircraft doesn't have room around the wing spars to be able to rack bombs horizontally, and the fuselage design didn't allow for the large doors necessary for that kind of bomb bay; vertical bomb storage was a relatively minor modification to the airframe. With that airframe, if there's no need to be able to move into the aft fuselage, it would be possible to mount 'normal' bomb racks. In the B-17, with the angle of the inner racks, the walkway to the back of the plane was only about 9" wide, and you had to be careful getting between the bomb racks not to snag your gear on something (speaking as someone who ripped off a belt loop doing that in the Collins Foundation's "Nine-O-Nine").

rwpikul's right in that the accuracy of a level bomber, even with technical assistance like the Norden bombsight, was never that great; with no way to adjust for vagaries in the flight of the bomb after release -- even something as simple as a minor uneven distribution of the bursting charge could shift the impact point tens of yards. With the Norden bombsight, the aiming became more precise than the fall of the bombs permitted, and even with the shortest release interval, the bombs from any given bomber would be spread over a hundred yards by the time they hit. Being dropped into the airflow tailfirst will increase the spread somewhat, but with a prewar-technology bombsight you're probably not going to notice the difference.

Also looks like Jumo211 oil coolers used for early Ju87s

Ah! Thank you for spotting that!

Sexy, sexy plane.

Very nice!

There's one possible issue with this configuration: At medium AoA, wingtip vortices from the canard may go straight into the engine air intakes.

Fortunately those intakes are just cooling systems for the engines which are not traditional internal combustion.

On the subject of airframe interference, would there be a 'bump wheel' at the back corner of the ventral tail fin as protection against the pilot over-rotating the plane on takeoff, like the J7W Shinden, or just a bump plate, like the Do 335 Pfeil?

Yep! It even has a couple of caster-style solid wheels on it just in case that happens.

Ever see the Russian short film Fortress?
check out the designs here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKmZnIHzldk

is there a translation of the text?

English version https://vimeo.com/67768281

Thanks!
(Huh, it was all obvious from the context. I should have been been able to guess. Makes me feel kinda dumb.)

I like it too. Less streamlining makes it feel MORE futuristic to my eye, like a Star Trek shuttlecraft, ironically.

No gun turrets?

Only a three man/ pony crew. It does have a single flexible machine gun in the rear but it counts the tow fixed rifle caliber machine guns and two fixed 20mm cannons to deal with front threats. Besides most prewar bombers lacked the gun turrets we think of. Even the much heralded B-17 lacked power turrets in the early models.

i dont know why but for some reason i am reminded of tale spin