Idea for WWII Planes with Guns in Wing Fins

[NARSES2]

Another "trainable" project was the Curtis XF-87, although she flew the weapons system was delayed and never fitted. Nice looking airplane though, and I might get the Anigrand one of the stash - P-61 replacement, Italian Front 1948 ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XF-87_Blackhawk

[jcf]

Another "trainable" project was the Curtis XF-87, although she flew the weapons system was delayed and never fitted. Nice looking airplane though, and I might get the Anigrand one of the stash - P-61 replacement, Italian Front 1948 ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XF-87_Blackhawk

Hi Chris,
the Anigrand XF-87 has some serious shape issues, the Olimp XP/XF-97 kits are much better.

http://olimpmodels.com/catalog_3.html

Jon

[NARSES2]

I appreciate that Jon, but I already had the Anigrand kit when the Olimp one came out, and as it's a kit I'll only build one of I didn't get the Olipm one. Thanks though

[redstar72]

Post-war various 'nose-turret' schemes were tried, including an Emerson turret that
took up the entire nose of an F9F Panther. The turret featured 360 rotation and the guns
were trainable to 20 degrees aft of vertical.

The Russians also tested a similar prototype, the SN from Mikoyan's OKB-155. Designed by the chief engineer N. Volkov, it was based on the MiG-17, but the nose part was completely new. The aircraft got lateral air intakes, and in the nose was the original SV-25-MiG-17 turret with three movable 23-mm TKB-495 prototype cannons (also called AM-23). The guns could elevate upwards to 20 deg. 26' and depress to 9 deg. 28' by the electrical gear. The turret weight was 469 kg.



The production tests of the SN have been done in 1953 by Georgi Mosolov. In 1954 there were state tests of the turret: 130 flights were done, but most of them - on the Il-28 flying testbed, and only three on the SN aircraft. The turret allowed to strike on the enemy plane flying above the SN, and also to attack the ground targets from low altitudes (100-200 m and even lower, due to the pilot's skill). But also it became clear that performance of the SN is considerably worse than "normal" MiG-17 had: for example, maximum speed became 60 km/h lower, and the manoevrability decreased very much. Also, when all three cannons were shooting, the recoil changed flight traectory. So, the program was cancelled.

The info about SN in Russian is here: http://www.airwar.ru/enc/attack/sn.html
And some rare fhotos are here: http://avia-museum.narod.ru/russia/mig-17sn.html

[kitflubber]

Wow, very cool info! Thanks!