Gloster Meteor

[entlim]

Now that, rather reminds me of the experimental one on Hanger 3 at Cosford- with the prone bit grafted on in front of the standard pit....

Yeah, something like that Greg, I think the cockpit would be closer to the original position, maybe like this?



This opens up a whole new what-if line, how would fighter design have changed had the prone position been adopted?

[Mossie]

Yeah, Greg based the original on a profile of that Meteor, I modified it a little.  The basic premise was how would fighter design have changed if the prone position had worked out.  Greg opened a thread on it:
http://www.whatifmodelers.com/index.php/topic,19434.0/highlight,prone.html

[Weaver]

The Metrovick F.3 had an aft thrust augmentor fan and the F.5 was to have an aft mounted contra-rotating blade thrust augmentor ... basically an unducted fan.

Wow - nothing new under the sun eh? I wonder if GE took a look at that patent before producing their aft-UDF engine?

I think the aft fan would give a Meteor sever rotate-clearance issues, but it's an interesting thought for something else.... 

[Weaver]

Kit - yeah I thought of that and nearly modified my post, but then I thought nah, I'll see how long it takes him to come back....

The TF-33 conversion was a whole new engine inserted into the front of a Canberra (or in your case, Meteor) engine pod and so was quite long in front of the leading edge. I rather imagined a fan fitted straight on the front of a Derwent would be shorter, with the cowl overlapping the body of the pod more.

4 hrs and 5 mins then......... 

Rolls-Royce's early fan engines had full length cowls, the Conways on the VC10 as an example, and by today's standards would hardly count as fan engines because of the low by-pass ratio. Your history would require some serious time shifting to enable the engine designers to learn about high by-pass ratios 20 years earlier, but then we are in Whiffland after all. 

The big problem with doing anything radical to a Meteor engine mounting would be the ring frame around the engine itself. The standard Derwent ones were pretty big, a full length fan engine ring frame would be ginormous by comparison. Somewhere there's a published photo of the Sapphire engined Meteor test bed with the cowling removed, and the ring frame looks like it used to be part of the Forth Bridge!

Of course you could invent Unobtanium, which is MUCH stronger than titanium and weighs almost nothing, plus every Whiffer has vast stocks of it anyway.........

But does the ring frame have to go around the fan duct? Surely it could remain unchanged, with the duct being just a non-structural "cowling" bolted onto the wing and some internal struts where it touched? In essence, you're just reducing the diameter of the Trent's prop, increasing the number of blades, and putting a dustbin around it....

If you want to see some Forth-Bridge engineering, you want to see the "spectacle frames" in the new Nimrod MRA.4's wing spar.... I'd pop out of my office and take you a picture, but security forbids.....

[kitnut617]

In the Aerofax book 'Gloster Meteor' by Phil Butler and Tony Buttler, there's a whole chapter on all the FTB Meteors with a ton of photos.  With some of the big diameter engines that were tested, the engine was mounted in front of the spars, others which were not quite as big were mounted more to the bottom so that the spar had a straighter line over the top (still curved quite a bit but not as much as the bottom).  Some of the really odd ones were the 'lift augmenter' engines, prelude to the VTOL stuff.

[TsrJoe]

hehehe, re 'unobtanium' (first time i heard of it was in that naff film 'Core'!) i once mentioned to a student of mine that his design would have to be made of this exotic alloy in order to give the strength/weight ratio required, i suggested the student did some further research on the 'material' and come back to me with his findings. imagine my surprise when the next time the student mentions it was in his final year submission as an 'actual' material stating that this was an exotic alloy with properties suitable for the design spec..aaarrgghh... just goes to show the current state of design engineering (or the sarcasm of their tutors, lol!)

cheers, Joe

[Weaver]

The thing to remember about Unobtanium is that you have to give it a thick coat of Bolloxoprene to avoid  optomentallicly-induced credibility-stress fractures......

[Weaver]

Y'know I've just been looking at the wing-swap problem again, with actual NF.14 and F.8 kits in my hand (neither of which I had when I posed the original question), and it just isn't worth it. The NF wing would have to have it's tip cropped to take a tip tank anyway, and the gun bay scribing on the Matchbox kit is no better than you could do yourself with a little care. Overall, it'd be easier to simply add cannon barrels to the F.8 wing.

[simmie]

Similar to the Me-262, what if Gloster first trialled the Meteor with piston engines:

How about Bristol Centaurus, instead of the Griffons??

[kitnut617]

Similar to the Me-262, what if Gloster first trialled the Meteor with piston engines:

How about Bristol Centaurus, instead of the Griffons??

Your main problem would be prop diameter, the Trent Meteor with it's turbo-prop engines, had a prop diameter of less than 9 feet and it still had to have extended u/c legs.  Griffon prop on a Spitfire is 11 feet diameter (Shackleton was about 12'-6) and the Centaurus is nearly 13 feet.  But 'what-if' the wing was moved to the shoulder position (something like what I'm doing to my STOVL Canberra) and the u/c retracted into the engine nacelles, any engine would be possible then I think.

[GTX]

What if Gloster went for a similar seating position to the Me-262:



Regards,

Greg

[ElectrikBlue]

Wooooow.... 
She looks really different! 

[PR19_Kit]

And it rather begs the question why Messerschmidt (sp?) went to such lengths to make life difficult for their pilots? Especially on the prototypes (V-Typ....) which had tailwheels for goodness sake!

The only answer I can come up with is that the Me-262 had BIG guns in the nose, perhaps the Hispanos in the Meteor were smaller?

[jcf]

While the 30mm Mk 108 cannon weighs more than an HS404 (60 kg vs. 50 kg for HS404 Mk.I/II) it is much shorter overall
(105 cm vs. 250 cm), so I don't see the Mk 108 per se driving the cockpit location. Some proposed developments of the
262 had the cockpit moved forward.
As the 262 had fuel tanks forward and aft of the pilot, it may be that the cockpit placement had to do with older theories of
having the pilot at the center of gravity of the aircraft for best performance. If so then the Meteor was actually the more
advanced aircraft in terms of design. 

Jon

[Weaver]

Also, the long barrels of the Hispanos lend themselves to an "L" or "U" shaped installation, with the barrels either under the cockpit floor (Seahawk) or along the cockpit sides (Meteor) and the ammunition cans behind the cockpit, nearer the centre of gravity. Putting the short Mk.108s in similar positions would put their muzzles, with possibly severe blast effects, next to skin panels which would therefore need reinforcing, so the designers may well have concluded that they were better off in the extreme nose.