Very interesting concept!

Just a remark: flying on one engine in a configuration like that is a massive chore as unequal thrust is trying to spin your aircraft around. Countering that torque requires a lot of control surface deflection and constant attention from the pilot.

Having both engines on and on low thrust might actually be more fuel-efficient.

I have a book about the Horton Ho-229 from Podzun-Pallas, a book company focused on books on military equipment.
One of the Ho-229's prototypes was lost because, close over the ground, one engine failed.
As a flying wing it lacked sideward stability, but if the damage would have occurred higher in the air, the pilot could have engaged the drag-rudders and by that stabilized the aircraft.

So, basically it is possible to stabilze even exotic aircraft configurations in case of an engine failure.

The idea I follow with the Geier's long-distance travel mode is that modern fighters almost always use two turbines, and - whilst surely loosing a lot of their power and stability - are able to fly safely with only one engine.

Accordingly, I checked what informations I got about the A-10 Warthog, and it seems to fly reliably with only one engine working.

As the long distance transit is done in the fashion of a powered glider, the single engine in operation runs at a rather low speed, so the thrust-offset compared to the two engine mode is on a low level...

I guess that pilots tasked with long-range flights are the more experienced ones.
And the less experienced ones fly operations closer to home where they can use both engines all the time.



The mode of transit isn't primarily about fuel efficiency.
Early german jet engines were chronically maintenance hungry. Likewise are the engines of the Geier and the larger aircrafts.
To reflect this in my stories, flying on half the drives is a common method to extend range.
With the larger aircrafts , where engines can be coupled in pairs, that is easier, as that way the thrust remains balanced.
The fuel efficiency in single engine mode is achieved for the greater part by turning the aircraft more or less into a glider by maximizing it's wingspan.
Folding them in to an inverted Stuka configuration aims at reducing the load on the wingtips whilst maneuvering, and basically to provide the same advantages the Stuka had from it's folded wing design ( the same as the US dive bobmers had, too ).
And don't tell me about the loads on the joints doing that folding... When you fly a Geier you do it because you want to fly, not because you are on for high flight safety standards.

A crash a year is considered a great track record for an airbase with about 50 Geier aircrafts stationed.
Literally, they always have a few stored in crates, ready for unboxing.


The one solution I found for the Geier that would make the thrust issue easy would, however, have looked pretty odd:
Two engines stacked atop each other. Or, one under, one above the airframe. A design that actually was contemplated in late WW2.
That way the changed thrust could have been compensated by up/down settings of the control surfaces.


I guess that Geier have a mechanical switch which adds a default offset to the control surfaces depending on how the engine configuration is at the moment.

That's absolutely true that you can stabilise an aircraft running on one, asymmetrical engine; it is, after all, a reason why most long range aircraft have multiple engines.

This kind of setup, however, is not very stable: the turning moment of an unbalanced engine can be really massive, putting a large strain on the airframe and control surfaces. On top of that, balancing it with *drag* means that your aircraft becomes far less energy-efficient; it simply is possible that this kind of measure would *decrease* rather than increase range.

Nonononono - the Geier doesn't use drag.
The flying wings of the Horton brothers used drag based rudder with great success.
As their designs were pretty extreme designs, I took them as a "worst case" reference for an asymmetric thrust setup.

The Geier can use it's tail-rudders to offset the thrust vector of a single drive.
German aircraft designers had / have experience with odd thrust "vector" designs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blohm.....26_Voss_BV_141

Smart design of the different aspects involved can produce an aircraft stable at desired speeds with assymetric thrust.
Sadly I don't understand enough of avionics, but it could be that in single drive mode one of the wings folds in lightly, reducing it's effective uplift power whilst
also producing a slight sideward pull which offsets the single drives thrust offset.

The wing design, well, Stuka, http://www.luft46.com/heinkel/hep1078c.html , it seems to be a common design feature for german aircrafts intended on dive bombing and / or high speed, high maneuverability.


When there's an avionics engineer that's happy to do the maths for me... I'm the last to say no.

I just needed a concept that on the one hand keeps the engines as maintenance intensive as they are whilst also allowing for long time, long range operation - which would be counterinducive to being high maintenance. Running the engines only half-time, however is a pretty simple solution, doubling the overall systems time of operation For actual combat, starting and landing, both engines are under power.

There are a lot of "better suited" flying wing designs for fighters than the Geier ist.
However the Geier is still a somewhat conservative design.

http://www.luft46.com has tons of designs, the http://www.luft46.com/junkers/jugap.html actually serving as the original idea for the Geier, the
http://www.luft46.com/mess/meschwlb.html a close second initially.

But reading on how convoluted development of aircraft before and durign the war was in germany, I thought, okay, how weird would the 4th Reich go. First order a simple straightforward aircraft design. Then bolt on features that contradict some aspects of the original design. Finally asking the engine manufacturer to produce a different engine for a different type of aircraft, and demand fro mthe engineers to cobble it all together.

That, more or less, is the parental history of the Geier in short. And like a baby-vulture, it's not exactly a sweet chick.


The larger aircrafts ( Stratosphere monitors, flying wings ) like flying radars, launcher platforms and cargo aircrafts are based on designs such as:
http://www.luft46.com/arado/are555s.html
http://www.luft46.com/bmw/bmwii.html
http://www.luft46.com/fw/fw1000b.html
http://www.luft46.com/horten/ho18a.html
http://www.luft46.com/horten/ho18b.html
http://www.luft46.com/junkers/juef130.html
http://www.luft46.com/lippisch/lip11.html
http://www.luft46.com/mess/mep08.html

As they are fulfilling more important roles, and better disambigued roles, the larger aircraft have less a stack of problems on their backs.

Some observations. For ground attack, the Mk108s are a less than great choice, slow cycle rate, low, short range lobbing velocity with no armor penetration performance. Mk103 would have slightly lower rate of fire, but a useful velocity against harder targets an much longer range. The Mk112 would need a large and heavy turret to handle it, would be more simple/light/effective in a fixed mount. Would also preclude the need for a two-man crew. (the gunner forward is a bit anachronistic- too much like modern attack helios) Early engines didn't have much range of function, not quite but almost on-off, and even at "idle" were still fuel guzzlers. The short service life had nothing to do with how hard they were used, but simply that they were on at all, as the materials and design were still kind of marginal.

Finally, the un-named Junkers ground attack design is a recent hoax, not an actual wartime design. The various Luft'46 sites have an uncritical mix of vague paper projects and an increasing number of hoax designs, some dreamed up in the '50s and '60s, and a new surge starting around the turn of the century.

Thank you for that input!
I'm *looking at my hand* Shivering a lot realizing it's you writing.
=)

As for the AKs:
I've been looking for input on recoil, and there was pretty much nothing in my Podzun-Pallas books, and neither on Wikipedia.

As for Strafing capability:
The logic for the decision for large calibre is because the Reich has it easier to build single, variated munition types ( Napalm, Shrapnell, HE, Phosphorous, Slug / AP ) than manufacturing large volumes. In case there is a defined area where there is "Prey", a Geier carries, depending on mission profile, between two larger and 24 smaller bombs / bomblets under the wings. Bomblets have far less need to be as uniform as AK/MG munition.
Seriously, I have no idea if what I just wrote makes sense on a technical basis.
In any case: The main target to us agaisnt are unarmored people on the ground. Asgardians can't ship heavy vehicles down, and their shuttles, whilst using titanium, are mostly tinfoils.
Using airmines or rather shrapnell, a single shell can thus pepper a great volume of air. Smaller rounds with shrapnell would be more difficult to manufacture ( I imagine ) and at the same not really more effective.


As for the german jet engines:
One big drawback was the lack of high temperature alloys, meaning the fanblades were operating at their thermal maximum, wearing out due to heat fatigue.
With a large amount of high end alloys available to them, the Reich should be able to, even with the same technology manufacturing wise, make better engines simply due to better materials available.
Plus: Locating most of their research and manufacturing below their cities, the Asgardians, humans and doggygirls alike, are not going to bomb the Reichs manufacturing capabilities on a sufficient scale on short notice.


Gunner position & function:
The Design of the Geier itself IS a "modern" one, With the Geier being not exactly easy to fly, navigation, communication, controlled weapons such as guided rockets or the gunturret ( *whines* I want a rotating gunturret under the nose! *bwahahaha* ) are controlled by the gunner.
The gunner can try to identify a target on the ground whilst the pilot is busy controlling the plane. And whilst the pilot keeps the aircraft steady the gunner can take potshots at what is, usually a stationary soft target ( Asgard Shuttle ) or infantry. And there yo udon't need penetarion, but a huge load of happy shrapnel or napalm is just a nice thing.



Okay, that's the thoughts I had put in there.
So, what is total gibberish - and why - and what only needs some polishing to make sense?

Okay, didn't know this was an other than "real world" luft'46 setting. Some additional notes anyway.

The Jumo 109-004 TL would have been, even with better materials, a rather mediocre jet engine, originally designed very early on and to be as dirt simple as possible(for an over-engineered German item). It was heavy and not all that thrusty and had fairly poor "mileage". The BMW 109-003TL was smaller but a bit better design and had more growth potential. The little known HeS109-006 could have been a still better engine, smaller, like the 003, but with a lot more potential. Was not developed further as it came a bit later and it wasn't felt that it could be got up to production in time to add to the war. A missed opportunity. The HeS 109-011 was going to be the next generation higher thrust type, but was too difficult to manufacture and never got the hoped for performance.

The problem with the MK 108 for even soft target attack was that it had a rather slow cycle rate so it would be hard to concentrate on a target and get many rounds on it before over-flying it. At the same time, due to its low velocity/short range/ unremarkable accuracy, you could not hose a lot of fire up ahead. Mine/fragmentation shells can be very effective, but they don't do any good if you can't saturate the target area. The 30mm shell would be too small to carry an effective amount of napalm, though the other types, except for AP (too low velocity, too small for an effective shaped charge, doubly so for a rifled round) are okay. A 20mm frag though a Mg151/20 would actually be more effective for ground attack.

Lastly, the variable wing is pretty much a waste of time. The extra structure and mechanisms adds a LOT of weight, and the "low drag" configuration is actually more draggy than the straight wing, especially with underwing stores.

Okay, as for the variable wing geometry - as bent / folded as they are theyd still be usable for dive bombing? German and US Divebomber had their wings always starting out down and then up again, Here the design is inverted. Any idea if that might make sense?

And:
The Geier is built by *ahem* the 4th Reich ; a group of ...
=> https://www.furaffinity.net/view/18279202/
=> https://www.furaffinity.net/view/15554806/
=> https://www.furaffinity.net/view/15444997/

long story short: drop a pile of humans in another solar system, and see what happens.

The cranked wing was mainly to accomodate a shorter landing gear, and had no particular aerodynamic advantage. A 'gull' wing like yours was used on some aircraft mostly to make them more docile and stable, like in trainers and light passenger types. Not so good for agile combat types. To have a wing convert from one shape to another in this way provides no real net advantage aerodynamically for lift/drag, if anything a straight wing works a bit more efficently.

Okay, so... *hummms*

1) I can retain the cranked wing on the logic that the Geier is not really that well maneuverable as advertised.
2) The turreted gun I can retain, but it has to become a smaller calibre as not to throw the aircraft itself out of the air.
3) The "in-world-logic" is not overly out of the blue as to permit me retaining the the Reichs preference for low firerate / large bore and frag/FE for the other weapons.
4) Geiers on long range will simply have to lug a lot more external fuel tanks along, or have to be in-flight refuelable from a Manta or Harpy air tanker.
5) More reliable engines due to better materials and about 20 years more experience. Also, no afterburner, but very good fuel efficiency for a turbine.

Well, if the tech base is a generation or two removed from '45, then any number of better options would be available. The Mk108 was a choice of expediancy, not of preferred performance. The Mk213/30 or other designs would be more desired, with better firing rate and velocity. Same with engines, twenty years on you could have low-bypass turbo fans.

In the end, you'd be better off simply doing your fantasy tech without public explanation or justification. Just have fun. Throwing out 'technical' explanations is to engineers as chum is to sharks, they'll want to eat you alive. (and shows off how little you know about how these things really work)

:)
Thank you!

Okay, I'll just let the guys USE the stuff and will jsut avoid anythign which would need handwavium or unobtanium.
Aside of AC's and AI's in the Asgard habitats.
And the biotech needed to have created the furries i nmy stories.