Fighting for Horsepower: WW2 Aircraft Engines w/ Eng. Calum Douglas

and hello everyone we are live to this very special stream together with engineer Colin Douglas of course the author of The Secret horsepower race and I'm very happy that the camera is picking this and hello everyone our life to this very I'm getting my own history of and there we go can everybody hear us hello hello how are we on this uh on this Saturday looking forward to talking to so many people yes it's going to be absolutely fantastic we have a good lineup of questions already from our patreons and channel members and I think we're going to have a fantastic discussion here on engines of course and then we're also always putting up it up on the for the stream to support your own questions you can already go ahead and submit your questions looking out there uh our a fantastic volunteer moderator is going to collect them as well and let me know but first we're going to go through the patreon and channel questions and before I forget I should also add that this stream is in corporations with Mortons who are the publisher of callum's Epic tome and if you want to get any sort of book and especially this book and it is really essential reading uh you can do so at 10 off we're using the exclusive discount code ma 10 links are also in the description below so make sure you use those okay everybody can hear us this is fantastic I think we'll jump right into it then and Callum I'm going to be asking you the first question here from Nick buyer and he has he's coming at this with a very broad question but uh specifically on World War II engines how much room for engine Improvement really was there over to you column so are we I'll be showing the slides Chris yes we are showing the slides I'm setting that up just now um one second there we go we've got it on the screen now okay so this is a a gigantic question because um that that covers uh everything so let's just make this a really really short and sweet um so at the bottom there that is a current Formula One V6 turbo compound engine which is probably the most advanced engine in the world so it's 50 percent thermal efficiency which means if you take the fuel 50 of the energy in the fuel comes out of the engine so that's uh that's how efficient it is so if we look at the graph on the right so that's the German one so um there's a lot of stuff on there what I'd like you to concentrate on is the vertical axis that is um the energy flow from the fuel and if you go right to the top the very top one the dosh that is the dashed line is that's the total energy in the fuel that's going into the engine and across the bottom is Altitude that's not really that important to answer the question so you can just look at where these lines hit the y-axis on the left so there's two million two hundred thousand kilocalories per hour going in to this with the fuel flow rate so with the World War II engine typically what you're actually going to to get out of that in from the crankshaft that's actually what I've indicated there energy delivered to crankshaft in 1940 so it's about four hundred thousand a little bit over four hundred thousand so you can basically see you're looking at something like uh it's maybe 25 percent thermal efficiency and I've just put a little red node there to show where we are today with this F1 engine so I think that's it there's excuse me I have an absolutely terrible cold so we didn't want to cancel though because um that's there you have to just go go for it with these things so you can see roughly how much more of the fuel energy we're using today than we did then and that's kind of uh three-quarter of a century of progress for you so could you have got there in World War II no um but we certainly improved on where we were at the bottom there during the war but it's very very difficult to get much Beyond um 50 where we are now and mind you everyone has always said that where they are so roughly speaking we probably can use about twice as much of the fuel energy today as we could in the best World War II engine so that's a fairly short answer to your question fantastic now uh scarecrow repair has asked what if Rolls-Royce had given a higher priority fuel fuel injection whatever aspects would have had lower priority and how would engine engines history have changed and I'm going to change the slide here as well for you so um so I'm not seeing the slides here Chris so at the moment I'm just looking at my own PowerPoint I don't know if we can um get them on on screen yeah yeah just a new one should be on screen so I'm just seeing you in my background at the moment so I can't I've always been showing on the screen it's showing on the screen for the stream but not on okay got it okay that's how tech savvy I am so um this is an interesting one so Rolls-Royce didn't really need to develop um fuel injection themselves because um the British actually did their first tests with direct fuel injection in 1920 if you can believe it um everyone thinks it's a German thing it's not it's just that they used it in the war and we didn't not to the same extent so what you were developing since 1920 um in our Research Laboratories and essentially when the negative G problem came along which is really the the main thing which we could have solved in the Battle of Britain with fuel injection or a pressure carburetor um but all the work had already been done to fix it at the Royal aircraft establishment so they had already made a pressure carburetor uh which is it's called a carburetor which really isn't because it the fuel comes in at high pressure so the air going through a pressure carburetor isn't sucking the fuel out so it's not really a carburetor at all it's actually what is called a single point fuel injection which is because the fuel is going in at a single point so there's nothing complicated about it so it's a very primitive fuel injection system so rosewush didn't really have to refocus their development efforts because all the work had been done for them what they really needed to do was just accept from the Rae which is the Royal aircraft establishment their own carburetor in the late 30s and then they wouldn't really have to have done anything and in fact they probably would have had more development time to use their own uh efforts to develop other aspects of the engine if they had used this particular fuel injection because when the negative G issue came around um it's assumed that Beatrice showings restrictor actually solved it all um it actually didn't it just made it a bit less worse it was still a really serious problem even after the restrictor was put in and so Rolls-Royce actually developed their own carburetor with the Su company to try to solve this so you can imagine how much work that was and that was done Cyril loves he was doing that and Cyril Luxy was in charge of Merlin development so Rolls Royce had their top guy developing their own carburetor and they tested it the two squadrons were spit buyers and it didn't work so in months of work completely wasted but they couldn't just put the Rae carburetor on when they found this problem because it wasn't adapted to fit the Merlin they had you know the the pattern of the bolt bolts connecting it to the engine wasn't the same and all this kind of thing so you couldn't just bolt it on so by that point it was too late to use the work they already had done um so I think if Rolls-Royce had taken our basic fuel injection stuff it would have saved them a lot of time and effort this is is my um my rough conclusion okay thank you for that uh then Timothy Mulligan asks um I have slightly adapted this question Timothy I hope you don't mind um considering the planes that we saw at the start of the war in how far did the new German engine and aviation industry managed to catch up to their peer counterparts in other countries and I'm switching over to your slide as well here okay um so if you graph the power that the Germans got from the engines Through Time and they pretty much kept up with the Merlin throughout the wall um but to do that they were using different engines so yumo went from the 210 to the 211 to the 213 and Daimler Benz went from 601 to the 605 to the 603 so those were all fitted to different aircraft and in terms of power they did keep up with everything the moon was putting out so they did a pretty good job um the main problem is that this is the power at sea level it's not the power at high altitude which is what became really critical very quickly in the second world war so um I haven't put the grass on there because it gets really complicated if you start looking at the engine power at sea level in high altitude it's it's quite a long essay to talk about that but um the real problem was they didn't develop two-stage supercharging in time um but that's very similar story to Rolls-Royce and the fuel injection because Daimler Benz in 1936 had db600 engine with a two-stage supercharger on their test stand so it's not true to say the Germans couldn't do it although they haven't done it um they had just had a lot of misdirection from sort of higher planning levels and so they didn't get it into production and um when they realized there was a problem it was too late um I think the aircraft situation excuse me it's probably a bit more serious um I think the the bf-109 is really by the time the G model came along I think that was the end of the road for it um I think the F model was very very good I think that's actually the best bf-109 in relation to the entry point in the war um to its capabilities when the 109f came in it was actually really good it's probably better than the best Spitfire when it came in whereas the G model really was um maybe just about as good as a Spitfire nine at certain altitudes but it certainly wasn't better and it didn't really get a lot better it just got heavier and by the time the K came along because the 109 is even smaller than a Spitfire um by the time they put all the extra weapons in it if you look at a 109 G even the K which has some improvements oh the aerodynamics of the original 109 if you go and look at really messes smoke I'm in a 109 C or D it's very you know it looks very sleek um the later models they're just covered in bulges and bits sticking out and you know everything it's just so the aerodynamics are very bad um so really the fog wolf 190. um is much better than a spitball I mean it's an outstanding aircraft but again um only maybe below 20 000 feet um because the engine doesn't have two-stage supercharger and even the D9 um although it's a lot better with the UMO 213 that's still and you've got a single stage supercharger it's the High Altitude performance even in D9 is actually not not particularly outstanding and really they only rectified that with the D13 and the TA excuse me one five two with the UMO 213e because that's got a two-stage supercharger but if you want to ask me how many of those planes actually fought in World War II I think it's a tiny number I mean it can't be more than I can't imagine there's more than 50 planes of both of those combined ever saw combat so it's uh it's immaterial militarily and then the next question comes from Jim Smitty uh why did the British not want to make that switch over to uh fuel injection and I'll update this slide here as well for you so I already kind of hinted to a little bit of that in one of the previous answers but um I've put in here for you I know everyone hates text on PowerPoint right but this is history okay it's not it's not it's not Biggles or something or the Discovery Channel where we can just get away with saying anything we want histories about documents so I'm putting I like to put documents on my slides because I like you to be able to see it I'm not just making this stuff up so I've highlighted some text for you okay so if we just start on the right hand page um so this is this is a historical review document from the Royal aircraft establishment so written after the war they went and interviewed all the top people at the Rae and it's about it's a it's about hundreds of pages so the idea of this was to try and find out what happened so they interviewed all sorts of different engineers and they got different opinions and if you read the whole lot you can get quite a good balanced view of what happened so Farren was in charge of the Rae so he's the the chief scientist and he's a he's a very very clever man uh you know by the end of the war he's probably one of the most respected um aeronautical scientists in the world he's an extremely capable scientist so I've just highlighted some text that that he wrote um through the the interview that he did so I already made their own carburetor and um basically the firm's making carburetors um as is so often the case they're going to start it off with you know let's get a hold and we'll put some fuel in it and they did it all by trial and error really and so they didn't really understand the science because um corporators are a bit counter-intuitive because they're actually unbelievably complicated that the physics that goes into a carburetor if you actually want to understand it is it it's um it's absolutely horrendous I I certainly don't understand all of it they're not in real detail so basically they already come up with this carburetor and said to the firms look we've done this amazing thing these companies have been doing this for 20 or 30 years and um they had all their little tricks and tweaks and they just sort of you know they just didn't want to believe that this um these bunch of scientists had just in a few years just solved the whole thing and they didn't want anything to do with it so but it wasn't all um the firm's fault so the Rae didn't know really what the biggest benefit was going to be which is immunity from negative G cut out in the dive so they go They're going to Rolls Royce and said look come and get our injection carburettor and um as I've said before I keep saying carburettor but the injection carburetor is primitive fuel injection that's what it is because the fuels coming in under pressure and um Rolls-Royce said well why should we have this one and you know they just say oh well you know it doesn't ice up and then roll so I sort of said well yes but we've realized that if you put two or three percent alcohol in the fuel it stops it freezing up anyway so um the Rae couldn't actually sell their own product effectively because they didn't even know what some of the benefits were um so I think it's a combination of different errors [Music] um and it's hard to blame any any one person but I think that they didn't really realize what the what the benefits could be that the true benefits and I think um it all comes down to the testing if the testing had been done properly they would have realized the negative G problem in the mid-30s and then they could have maybe sold this to Rolls-Royce you know they could have said hey we can we can solve this problem but they didn't know it was going to solve that problem so their sales pitch wasn't good enough basically okay uh next question then here from Frank C the obvious is more horsepower equals a better aircraft that's uh uh then there must have been the environmental constant which is a barrier to performance at some point a spinning propeller must of course reach an RPM at a blade angle any faster x no performance Improvement yeah so you do really need to speak to a neurodynamicist to to get a proper answer on this but I've spoken to her dynamicus so I'm basically just going to repeat what they've told me because it's not my profession but I dabble so essentially um if you I don't have a graph I didn't have time to go and get a graph but there are some if you graph different propulsion methods like a propeller a turboprop and a turbo jet um across the speed range of efficiency the propeller is very efficient at low to medium speeds um that's why it's still used today for for low medium speed aircraft it's the most efficient way of doing it and propellers are coming back um for some low to medium speed stuff in the middle speed range you want a turbo prop because you get a degree of jet thrust but if you want to go supersonic you need to have a turbo jet so the propeller the efficiency goes down as the speed goes beyond a certain point so it's almost impossible to go supersonic with a propeller I I believe it is theoretically the it's not outside of the laws of physics but no one has actually managed to do it and even um the Thunder Screech which is an unbelievable plane um didn't manage to do it so that had a specially designed power that was spawned supersonic which you're not supposed to be able to do with propellers right the tips the tips are not supposed to go supersonic this one was designed to go Supersonic and even it um which is a turbo prop with nearly 6 000 horsepower didn't go supersonic so I think probably about the best you're going to get is with Arena racer so that's a P51 Mustang or what's left of one um there's probably not very much Mustang left in there actually it's an unlimited racer um so that's been flying with about 4 000 horsepower so that's over double World War II power you can do about Mach 0.75 so 550 miles per hour so but that is probably the Practical limit that you're gonna get okay fantastic then uh Joe asks uh why did uh Europe go with the V12 mostly water cooled um there were a few air ones but mostly water cooled um when there were already some radial engines but still simply that the belief that the radio is causing too much drag uh Japan of course and mainly with air cooled radios the same reason the US Navy went air-cooled radials uh simply because they were easier to maintain so I don't have enough data to answer the question for you on Japan or the US Navy uh I don't like guessing I don't have the data so I'm going to answer the bit I can answer so um I've put another bit of history there for you this is a really funny memo so I really encourage you to read this it's really funny so this is an air Ministry 44195 and it's just after they've started uh encountering it and you can see this this guy is just it's a really stupid letter isn't it he's just getting annoyed is what is this about the world 190 I've highlighted the bit at the bottom and just read it please you know I I don't want to read all the text but he's basically saying you know this can't really be a serious aircraft because it's air cool then everyone knows that to be able to have a good fight you've got to have a water cooled engine so I think in Britain um all of our policy was really uh around um the success in the Schneider trophy so that's a liquid cool v12s um so I think that impacted our thinking so really the the Americans I think roughly in parallel with the Germans but I think the Americans might have got there slightly earlier started doing really serious aerodynamic studies on how you would streamline a radio engine and so I think the Germans took this research and did their own stuff on it uh roughly fraction later than Americans did so there's just a little wind tunnel model that's done in Germany I've put in there just show you some very early experiments they did with saying what okay how do you shape a duct around a radio engine in a way that's going to be aerodynamic so the prop 4190 really existed because the scientific work had been done in Germany in the late 30s and it had also been done in America and in Britain that work hadn't really been concentrated on so we didn't think you could have this sort of aerodynamically streamlined engine cowling around a radio engine which the wolf on 90 definitely does um and you had all these these stick in the muds fighting it's pretty stupid letters like this so it I think in in Britain it was a pretty a pretty late realization um Chris could we have the next slide please of course uh there we go by the way I think I also saw this letter in the National Archives ones it's a it's a good one it's a good one yeah yeah the next slide is up cool so uh but we did realize so you can see about 1941 they started proposing putting the Bristol Centaurus into the the Hawker tornado so I think it didn't take us a long time to realize that you can make a very fast fighter with a radio engine so I think once the fog Rock 190 came along that completely changed um the British thinking on it but as I say the Schneider trophy um and the fact that the scientific research on streamlined cowlings was done in Germany and America is what drove the sort of British reluctance to to believe that you could have a streamlined radio fantastic now uh transitioning to the next questionnaire thank you Joe for uh supporting the previous one there we have Nicholas why was the German Aero engine development and over-related areas so fractious and mismanaged as it was I think this is going to be a fun one too to reply to yeah so it's it's all down to politics so um there's absolutely no question that uh Germany at the time uh actually probably still now um really has a very unusually um High number of very very highly qualified scientists and engineers um Germans are very rigorous with their work and um oh yeah I know it I know a German guy I'm this is a joke but I think there's a lot of truth behind it I once asked a German guy I said um what's your worst nightmare in a work situation and he said oh that's easy it's just to be asked to do something that I haven't been trained for yes whereas if you ask someone in Britain to do that they would probably say have a think from they didn't think I think it's 50 50 I could probably pretty much figure it out in time to do the job you know but uh Germans don't like that so when we're talking about what went wrong in Germany it is not that the German Engineers are stupid this is not the problem so um it's a management problem so I I we can talk for hours about that but there's just one example I'd like to make here so on the right we've got a page from uh Bowman's Memoirs the unpublished ones are better they were published by Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust but they've trimmed out some of the more fractious remarks so the unpublished one is best you can go and look at it at the RAF Hendon archives in London so Borman was in charge or British Airway engine development at the air Ministry and later Ministry of aircraft production so that's Bullman in the middle sitting at the desk and to his left that's um Helmut saxa and he was his opposite number of the German air Ministry and the two of them were very good friends so they used to meet all the time in the 30s got drinking all this kind of thing um meeting at conferences they knew each other very very well um and uh so Bowman went to meet saxo in Germany and in 1937 and other dates as well and um so actually basically saying to him you know I've been talking too much I'm I just don't get on with these military people who are running things now but he means the Nazis obviously and um he basically said to Bowman I'm gonna be sacked any day you know he knew it at that point he was in charge of engines at the German air Ministry so um that's exactly what happened so he was too good an engineer to just get rid of so um the Nazi sent him to BMW so he was so good that even getting sacked he was sent off to BMW to basically be the chief engineer so you're it's that's how good he was um and so sassa should have been managing German engines through the whole of the war in the late 30s but he was sacked so the quote underneath the photographs is um from Bowman's unpublished memoirs so he's relating here to his last conversation with saxa which he had in a brow house in Munich so that's that's what he says is his last conversation with saxo and Borman said Germany had lost a great leader so that's the opinion of the British head of Aero engine development so without spending hours on it that's basically what if you want me to name one thing that's what went wrong with the big German air engine development management and it's a very interesting story how individuals can happen very profound impact on the future of the industry especially in a situation like this um moving over to the next question here once again by Nicholas was there any Merit in developing the BMW 801 where the German spec are better off focusing on V12 now that's an interesting question um yeah yeah it's a very good engine they they should have kept developing it but um there were two big problems one is that because Germany had run out of a lot of key uh precious metals or strategically significant metals like like nickel not run out but at such a low level they couldn't really use them in the right amounts um this made the engines very thermally sensitive so there were parts of it which basically would start corroding at high temperatures when they shouldn't this is a real problem for air-cooled engines because they run hotter than liquid cooled engines right so when the German valves in the engine started going wrong BMW were the first firm to encounter the problem that's because the 801's an air-cooled engine so the exhaust valves had the amount of nickel reduced they corroded induced detonation and the Pistons start melting also all kinds of problems uh not very good problems you know and um so that's that's that's a problem which is exaggerated if you have an air-cooled engine so they expended huge effort just trying to keep the thing running properly um so that was a big problem so there's a bit of alternative history going on here you know um it was difficult because they'd run out of the metals but I think what you'll really I think what you're probably asking me is was it fundamentally a good engine I think that's really what you're asking me and and yes it is a good engine and there's a bit of a weakness in the supercharger um but BMW had done a great job so the BMW J turbocharger here it's really fantastic piece of Kit so um if you go to that it's very Advanced you've got hollow turbine blades it's it's a very very nice piece of engineering there if we go to the next slide please Chris there we go we see the whole engine Now set up yeah so that's the BMW 801 TJ so that pretty much flew right at the end of the war I think only in the junkers 388 um there might have been a couple of different uh models of that but it only flew right at the end of the war but it's a really really good engine um if they haven't had some of the problems maybe they could have got this flying a couple of years before and then it could have been a really very militarily useful piece of kit um so yeah I hope that answers the question fantastic then the next question is here on uh also from Nicholas uh assuming the Germans managed to implement proper timely workarounds to material shortages and avoid it a developmental policies they committed much more potent would have loved to have a fighter Force have been is this yeah this this is a bit multifaceted because you've got to solve several different things it's not just the materials um to try to answer it yeah it it would have made a huge difference had certain other things also been fixed so to give you some idea um so this is Edgar Peterson he's in short he's the chief he's basically in charge of wreckling so that's the look buffer testing establishment so that's like right field in America or farnborough in the UK and um so this is his report 16 December 1941 on the 44th 190. so it says Luft flutter three have no confidence in safety of the BMW 801 having to run it under 50 full power that's because of the valve problem that I was talking about with the low nickel valves that were corroding and destroying the engine so you can see what he said um so if that hadn't happened um we all know what the RAF thought of the fuckworth 190 and I don't mean the stupid letter that Chris and I just showed you the pilots did not enjoy fighting the 190. but most of the 190s they fought early in the war were all running d-rated engines so they were not allowed to run full Boost um because it was uh they couldn't they blew up so the 4490 was really dangerous and it could have been even more dangerous without these problems so can we have the next slide please Chris uh yes it is up so there's a few other things you need to solve too um on the water cooled side so this is a stenographic meeting record 27th November 1942 so this is recorded by like a court stenographer or a shorthand typewriter at the rlm conference this is spoken word record this is not um a summary or what someone thought they said years later this is It's word for word what was said well it's my translation so you'll have to trust me um but um unfortunately you can't get to these records at the moment because iwm have not reopened their archives so you can't get to the microfilm being the iwm again yeah uh anyway so uh Messiah Smith is getting really fed up at this meeting being criticized and um so he basically says well yeah okay the water 101 needs to be faster but I'm having to put radiators on my planes that are twice the size of the English who's not an engineer he's pretty sharp guy but he's not an engineer he says how have we not noticed this Eisen law now do you remember where we were a couple of slides ago and I was talking about saxa and guess what guess you took over from zaxa eisenlaw so eisenmore says we can't use small radiators because you need to use very high water pressure and we get leaks so the reason the British had very small radiators compared to Germany's because they use very high water pressure so you can use very high what coolant temperature if the temperature of the coolant is much higher you've got a bigger temperature difference between the cooler and the outside air you get much better heat transfer so you can have a much smaller radiator so that's what we were doing but it requires years of work you can't just put a big pressure cap on the release valve and say it's high pressure because everything you know you have to develop high pressure fittings all kinds of things and they haven't even though it had been written in the specification document in 1928 that the Germans need to develop high pressure Cooling and they didn't do it so at this point MILF gets pretty annoyed and this is this is seriously what he says he threatens to dissolve the Daimler Ben's design office and send them to junkers that's how annoying so seriously what he said so can we have the next slide yes it is up so um that's what happens to um a German radiator of the type that's in a 109 if you put high pressure through the cooling system so the radiator on the right it's the same design method I think it's actually the one on the right is actually from a uh sorry um an annular radiator around the nose so I think it's probably from something like um uh it could be too a it could be a TA 152 radiator actually or D9 anyway on the left that's the radiator tube from a measure Smith 109 at the Royal aircraft establishment in 1940 and they've cut it down the middle and how they made that is it's a round tube which they squashed flat and there's a little Pip in the middle so that when you squash it flat it doesn't close up and you can get water through it so what do you imagine happens if you pressurize that it blows up like a bicycle tire because it was a tube and you've squashed it and now you pressurize it so when the Germans try to run high pressure Cooling the radiators um did what you see on the right hand photo so the tubes will blow up and of course measure Smith didn't make the radiators these were all made by companies like SKF or Bayer and um it's it's years of work you can't just pressurize this stuff and start doing this at the drop of a hat it takes years of development work and people like Eisenberg hadn't put time in and they waited till they were getting shouted out in a conference to do it and then you've got no chance that's it so um there's a lot of different factors to address um they would have needed to short the material shortages out and solve a couple of key technical difficulties like this with the radiator they knew what to do they knew they needed to do it in the 30s but they just didn't go around to it so there's a few things to solve there but I think it would have made the luftwaffe um I'm not going to say it would have changed the course of the Battle of Britain but I think at the very least it would have made the RAF missions over France in 1941 basically impossible um but they already became impossible when the football 90 came in but I think it would have been far worse and the I think the uh the 109f would have been rendered much more lethal can I just add a question to that since we know that Eisen lore uh replaced her um what was eyes eisendor's credentials in this fact I mean this is not a random guy that was put into position or is that in fact what happened um eisenberg's got a similar history to most of these people so he's a pilot from World War One um he's not a stupid guy he's he's reasonably technically trained um so after the war Eisen law um was quite a respected person in German Aviation he was involved in German Aerospace you know into the 50s and 60s so the I'm guessing a bit here my best guess is that Eisen law was a bit of a buffing type I I think he probably just wasn't cut out for for sort of high technology management which is you could have a you know it's no good just being clever you know you've got to have um you've got to be taking information from numerous sources doing a very complex constantly developing situations you've got to be able to deal with pressure and stress you know if you can't do all of those things you can't do that job and I think um he wasn't stupid but I I don't think he was cut out to be a a sort of top level um scientific administrator okay then moving on to the next question this is a fun one what unexpected fact or opinion did you take away from researching and learning about the development of these engines and those who actually made them I'll update the slide here as well okay so there's there's a few fun things um one of them was so the first presentation I ever gave is when I was working at the F1 engine Factory at brixworth which is the Mercedes engine Factory and a few guys aboard at lunchtime and I knew I was researching for this book and they said um let's not walk to the sandwich shop at lunch time let's go through to one of the Leisure theaters and hey why don't you go and do a PowerPoint so I'll put this PowerPoint up and um so this is the little um piece of the UMO 213 so this goes in the end of the crankshaft the oil comes in here and you get better bearing lubrication because the oils going through the middle of the crank instead of fighting to put it in through uh journals drilled in the sides because you've got the centrifugal action of the crank spinning tries to Chuck the oil out right so if you're trying to put the oil in it it doesn't work as well so I put this up on the screen and one of the Mercedes Engineers just he did that it's it's I think it's a meme that's going around Twitter at the moment but there's Leonardo DiCaprio just sort of sitting on his couch and he points at the TV yes yes yeah so he literally did that and he's like that's exactly what we've got in the F1 engine it's identical it's I mean even the size of the drillings is the same it's it's indistinguishable so that that was really stunning that there were there were several things that were you know not just conceptually the same but um like basically identical so that that was pretty stunning so could we have the next slide Chris yes this was amazing as well and it just goes to show you that you've got to go and read archive stuff because so often it just has no bearing on what you think you know about the subject so um open up this file British tests of direct fuel injection date date June 1920. yeah top right area I see that so you know that that was unbelievable so that was just I really just do that there and then okay I'm gonna forget everything I thought I knew about this subject I don't you know forget about it so there's loads of things but I think that's that's two little examples of things that really shocked me fantastic now for the next question uh what was the octane values the Germans produced during the war um that was from Joe I'll just slide this up thanks so this is so hard to answer um my recommendation is you completely forget about octane numbers um they're almost worthless and I wish everyone would stop talking about them so um they don't mean very much um so we don't have time to go into all that there right now but just just to show you here so this is a test at the Shell fontenero engine laboratory of BMW 801d and so the y-axis there on this graph you basically just consider that to be the power output of the engine okay so blue fuel that's the German service fuel B4 so that's about 88 octane according to the tests that we would have done bam 100 that's British Air Ministry 100 grade so and the top Greenfield that's German C3 that's their their sort of high power stuff so on the BMW engine um Allied 100 octane makes less power than the German high octane fuel but depending on how you test them see our fuel it's called ended up being called 100 130. and there are some tests of the German fuel where it's it's rated at about 98. so um it just forget about octane it's a really stupid rating so if we could please go to the next slide Chris yeah that's up so this just starts to show you that the horrible um the horrible Rabbit Hole of fuels that you've just gotten yourself into so um what the Germans realized way before anyone else realized is that the octane value of the fuel changes completely depending on how rich or lean the air fuel mixture is so it's a complete waste of time testing the fuel at one point and saying that's the octane number because for example if you look at the line the solid line that is Allied 150 octane fuel and according to the German method there one of them is 107 at Rich mixture and it's about 102 at lean and um the the patterns change so um if you some of them are very flat and some of them are very uh sweeping and curving so what this basically means is um under this particular test rating so the Allied fuel would get very high power a rich mixture and then at lean the power drops right off then there's a different test method I've said dvl test method there and um they rated the 150 octane about the same as the German C3 at Rich mixture so that's the kind of dashed pencil line that's been using a different test method so honestly it it's um it's a complete waste of time thinking about octane number because it's completely dependent on the engine the octane numbers are all derived from standard test engines which are like these great big static cast iron things which are from about 1910 you know they run at about a thousand RPM and they turn out these numbers they're okay to compare fuels but it doesn't really have any meaning compared to how it's going to behave in the aircraft so to answer your question very badly so the German fuels the octane according to their rating would be about 100 is the best they produced um that's actually about the same as we did because 100 150 the two numbers um a 100 is the octane at lean 150 is the obtainer rich so they're that number is at two different air fuel mixtures and it's not dissimilar from the German one which on the mon octane scale is 98. so um yeah it's all a bit difficult so if you can go to the next slide please Chris uh that's up yes so what you end up with here is that to understand what feels gonna do you end up with a 3D map so the y-axis is the maximum boost you can put through the engine without getting knocked the axis coming in and out of the page is the temperature after the supercharger and the axis going left to right it's the air fuel ratio so how much boost you can put on the engine is a function of all these different things you can't just say I've got fuel 100 octane I'm going to put this on much boost on because it depends on all the things that are going on so I'm sorry that's not a very nice answer but it's really complicated so I hope you've at least um learned a little bit there okay the next slide please there we go is that the next question then for French engine development yes okay uh in that case we'll just have a very quick uh reminder to everyone in the chat um to of course consider picking up the secret horsepower race put that up on the screen right now it is a fantastic Treasure Trove of information and Callum here is of course Very uh graciously giving us his time to answer all these precipated questions we have a couple of pre-submitters questions still coming up from patrons and channel members and then we're going to open up on the floor for about one more hour until 7 00 PM local time here in the United Kingdom and we're going to give priority of course to Super thanks and uh and then also uh hookahnot in chat uh our volunteer is in fact collecting all your questions as well so make sure you submit those and uh just as a reminder as well we do have this fantastic offer here by Morton's the publisher of the book secret house power raise 10 off any book you order at Morton's if you don't order it directly at Morton's with the link in the description below so if you want to give yourself a fantastic run of books including the secret horse power race I highly suggest that you uh check that out now uh let's go back to uh the questions column then and I will be jumping into this question interesting question here about the French engine development why was the French engine development so behind asks Airborne cigar uh now there's another offer who touches on the politics of it and the uh bakeries of the air Ministry the French air Ministry and then you have other accounts that look at the political reasons um of Hispano and zuza and of course I hope I pronounced that correctly had the potential to produce much more powerful engines but that didn't happen and this is also similar to a question submitted by Miss K and fuke they go and I will be changing to the next slide here we go so I'll be looking at the SE5A now yes we are good so um I only have quite a limited number of our card files on this but I'll tell you what I've got it's not a full answer but it's a partial answer um so basically the history is roughly in World War One French era engines were really World leading uh they're pretty much the best for most of world war one so um Britain was using French Aero engines in many of their Fighters so the the se5 um which many people will tell you is the best fighter that we fielded use the French engine um roughly speaking um France kind of dropped the ball at the end of the war because it was the end and Britain sort of caught up by maybe 19 22 um many of you will know that the Napier Alliance so Hispano farming and Renault basically all made copies to some degree of the the Napier lion layout and um essentially in the mid-20s the French um had a lot of very lucrative contracts to supply engines and basically it was just a complete Cash Cow and they were just happy and said look we're making so much money we're just gonna keep making the same engines for years and years and years and they made loads of money and then the Schneider trophy started progressing a bit and it got to about 1929 and the French realized oh God we are we're light years behind um this is actually a really big problem and we can't just keep all our lucrative contracts have come into an end and we're really behind so roughly speaking as far as I can tell um they basically just stagnated for too long in the 20s um because they had all these contracts to just keep making the same engines for a while and they just fell really far behind so um can we have the next slide please Chris yes that is up so this is another this is some from Bowman's papers so Boomin so this is the guy running error engine development of the air Ministry in Britain so these are from his papers so this is also RAF Hendon um not from his diary so these are from uh papers he wrote just prior to the war so I think he'd been on a visit to France so um this is just what what he's what he's written so he wrote an essay on what had gone wrong with the French Aero engine industry because you know he was aware they used to be very good so he was trying to work out in this essay um what they had done wrong so he's basically saying I don't have more information on this there seems to be a divided technical control between the French War office and the ministry of marine um so that seems to be something that was taken advantage of by some of the firms to um sort of probably pull the wall over the eyes of some of the administrators um so that's it's about an eight page essay but that's kind of um a pertinent bit with regards to the politics of it so come here for the next slide please Chris yup that's the farm and engine up so um so the farm and engines they're quite interesting so a lot of this French stuff it's all inverted so that's very very interesting so um we can see again that having upside down engines as is nothing unique to Germany at all and to have a land also so that's quite an interesting one can we have the next slide please close yeah so this yeah this is this is probably my favorite French Aero engine from 30s um it's not perfect but it's so this is a delage it's very small eight liters but 440 PS is really powerful and I think it's it's a really nice engine um so basically um the French air Ministry I don't know if that's the proper name for it didn't give Del Raja a contract to develop this and um they went bust no no not all that long afterwards but um if we can have the next slide please Chris yep this little engine was used in the I'm not going to pronounce this correctly Kelner beckerell yeah very good um aircraft so that's um 1933 air race so it was used um there was a crash involved but um I think that's the point is I think it's a really nice engine and so I think um I think if I think the threat if the French air Ministry had really just I think what they really should have done is invested in delage um because they look like they had some really really good designers and they probably just needed some more resources and some money and um that wasn't forthcoming so I think that was a problem can we have the next slide yeah can I just ask do you know if the Lage was a private company or if it was already nationalized at this time I don't know the answer to that because I'm sorry uh yep next slide is up um I could have just Googled it and lied and pretended that I knew that I'm afraid I don't Google will know probably but I don't so the the Hispano is so he's a 12y um so it's a Spanish company but the the main manufacturing place for these engines is in in France so that's that's the French Connection um so this engine they did a lot of work putting some nice widgets on it um so there were versions done with some really nice things like the sidelowski Plano supercharger and stuff but the problem is the base engine is just about World War II this is 10 years out of date so we've got two valves per cylinder that's just it's just not going to cut it um and if we could have the next slide please Chris yes it is up so the the exhaust pipes and the inlet system are on the same side and this is typical of um really old car engines you know this is really bad um the reason that's bad is that um the exhausts are really hot and you're putting the fuel in where it's really hot the fuel and all the inlet air is getting really hot which is the worst thing for efficiency you can possibly have so um I I think the the engine is just 10 years out of date um which is not to say it couldn't have been updated because you know when the Merlin came in the mark one Merlin is a disaster it doesn't work at all so it's not to say that you know you need to have something which is perfect and Endeavor develop it but I think that this engine needed to have yeah at least half a decade of development put into it which and the basic uh architecture which which wasn't done so that meant that despite some clever things that were tried on the 12 wide the the fundamental architecture is too outdated okay moving on then to the next question by Miss K what sort of problems were faced with the Merlin and Parker engines early on and how did they compare to each other in terms of reliability and maintenance oh sorry that's actually sorry I was reading the wrong question here yes yes uh slim shade millionaires up here after capturing some beer 409s the Allies would have seen the variable speed supercharger installed in the Daimler Pence engines but never to my knowledge adopted the system why did the Allies did not utilize this variable speed supercharger the pilots despite the benefits that seem to be there um so um they did use it but it didn't really come out in time for combat but um just to describe it a little bit so on the right there that's my photograph that's the fluid coupling so um it's basically um it's not really a gearbox it's a variable slip so you can't speed it up but you can remove speed from something so by varying the amount of oil in this sort of cavity in the middle you can you can slip the speed so it's more efficient because you can slip the speed instead of using a throttle so um that's that's kind of what it is so it's maybe worth 10 engine power at sea level so if we just have a look at the next slide Chris uh yes there we go it's a graph so that's a graph so um that's a German graph from the papers of Dr Coleman so Coleman patented the uh the fluid Drive coupling so um I translated Coleman's Memoirs which are now available to purchase from the American Society of mechanical engineers we've only sold about 70 books because it's an academic publisher and they are unbelievably expensive so no one can afford to buy it um it's it's ridiculous it don't buy it it's like it's like 100 pounds or something it's completely crazy um just email me a question or something okay um go to the next slide yes uh yeah that's not a craft oh no that's uh overlay now it's an overlay okay so um basically if you've got a two-speed mechanical supercharger like a Merlin XX so the this is engine power on the y-axis and altitude across the bottom so with a Merlin XX you'll get the engine power will be like the blue the blue lines so it's a Sawtooth double tooth Sawtooth so um these are the gear change points basically and you lose the power because you're having to throttle blow it so that you you make a loss there so if you've got a con a perfect variable speed drive you get the red dashed line um so what you actually get from a fluid coupling is the yellow line because there's some inefficiencies there which mean you don't get the perfect so basically the the hatched area is a power Advantage area from fluid drive to not fluid drive so it's worth about 10 engine power uh at sea level so this is pretty important in a plane for takeoff so it's quite a nice Advantage um which is there's more to that Advantage than just combat um so can we go to the next slide yeah that is two engines yeah so so on the left that is the Allison v1710 two-stage supercharger um so that it's like they it's an auxiliary supercharger which is it sticks like a foot out the back of the engine and people say why wasn't it used in stuff like the Mustang instead of man well you can see why it wasn't used because it's too big it's it's very nice though in a lot of ways but if you have a look just behind the supercharger in power so it's kind of um if you look at the sectioned bit right at the back there's a bit of yellow paint just above that yellow paint that's a fluid coupling so the Allison engine has fluid coupling which is identical to the Daimler bends version um and we wanted to use it in the Merlin so Jeffrey Wilde of Rolls Royce um he had worked um with with Daimler UK and knew about fluid drives and he he went to Stanley Hooker and um said we need to we should use fluid drives so he went to a company called Sinclair fluid drives in London with hooker very soon before war broke out and they had a scheme laid out so this is a scheme from the Merlin to have the fluid Drive coupling for the supercharger and basically when they were right in the middle of scheming this the Battle of Britain happened um you know it was chaos and they just said I need hundreds of millions made now and it got dropped they they had to count it um so it's not quite true to say we didn't use it so can we have the next slide please Chris yeah so also if you look this is a bit of a cheat because it's not quite World War II but it was designed in World War II so if you look at a B Boeing b29 so the version of that which was flown a little bit after the end of the war has turbo compounding on the r3350 engine and governing the speed change between the turbines and the crank are three fluid couplings so and they're identical to the couplings used in the Domo Benz engine so I I'm cheating a little bit there because they designed it in World War II but it did not see operational combat in World War II over Japan the plane did but that specific engine did not but um yeah okay then moving on to the next question here by uh again slim say uh millionaire why did the British go Central Hugo flow uh jet engines over actual flow engines and what are the benefits and downsides of this choice um so I I would I would question your question I'm going to show you why um I I wouldn't say we did go for the centrifugal certainly not exclusively um and there's a lot of um I think slight misunderstanding about the timeline here so um Griffith on the left here gets a lot of flack um because he was one of the first people who spoke um with Whittle and said I don't think your idea is going to work and everyone says oh this Griffith guy must have been some sort of you know real because he was getting in the way of Whittle I don't think Griffith was a bad person or he was trying to to delete um the idea um Griffith himself wanted to have an axial jet but his idea was not to use the thrust of the jet specifically his ideas were basically a turbo prop but they were axial so that's Griffith's first little test jet in the middleware and um Griffith did that years before Whittle did so career the next slide that is up so I'm I I I feel a bit guilty here because it's a slight um I was not able to ask for permission to use these images but because sadly Dr Armstrong who wrote this paper died a couple of years ago so Frank Armstrong who wrote the paper I've taken this from he was the director of the national gas turbine establishment and I knew him and met him so I'm just going to say that if he was still alive I think he would said yes it's okay you can put this in your PowerPoint so let's just have a look at the timelines here so Griffith is really doing all the he's three years ahead of whittle with his thinking about Jets and um so I feel like 1935 so this and compressor that's on the top right there and the F2 engine so that's axial Turbo Jet so that's running um out of 1942 so it's just it's a few it's a few years behind the first engine run with the the Whittle jet but Britain was was running axial and centrifugal turbo Jets so we did we went for both it's just that the centrifugal design is a lot simpler to get right the axial there's a lot there's you need a lot of extra science to get the actual design working it's it's quite a tricky thing so it takes a bit more development effort but but um Griffith was right the axial design um is the winner for for a military jet uh who's flying the military jets now with centrifugal turbo Jets you get them into some helicopters so Griffith was right so I think we should try not to be too harsh about um what he what he um his early opinions about that so if we could just have the next slide yep that's up so um Griffith also didn't make his life uh as easy as he might have done so the the centrifugal jet is on the right so you've basically got a double-sided supercharger disc which is pretty much identical in shape to the what you would have on the supercharger from the Rolls-Royce R engine which was double-sided so you've just got a supercharged narrow engine a shaft a turbine and some a combustion chamber so it's quite simple Griffith came up with this counter rotating design here I mean you don't need to understand what's in it to see that there is a difference in complexity here so um the axial stuff took a lot longer to get going but we did both if we could have the next slide is up so I also like to say it's not just Whittle who struggled with getting funding so this is a report this is what was said to Griffith in 1930 when he tried to get funding for his axial jet the panel considers this is not Griffith this is addressing Griffith the panel considered that a present state of knowledge is superiority of the turbo I know of the reciprocating engine cannot be predicted and I've got no intention of application large expenditure so everyone was struggling to to get this stuff through so you can't just level this uh at Griffith so we've got the next slide please Chris yep that's up so again just saying here so re test if you've got the the F2 axial Flow gas turbine that's 1940. so and then the Whittle on 1942 um the winter One Flew was was tested first that's just the date and this the particular test of this this photo I'm just making the point that we did both so um I I'm not sure it's easy to say that we concentrated on one more than the other and then uh a question here from Boomerang pitching uh I would like to know if Callum has been able to do any research on Japanese Aero engine specifically I am curious to know how the Technical Solutions to shortages of alloy elements compared to the Germans so I've got very little stuff on uh Japanese stuff um parsley because I can't read Japanese also because um Japanese are not uh terribly open society and my Approach is to Mitsubishi heavy Industries to be allowed into their archive in Japan have not proved successful so far um I'm gonna I'm gonna keep trying I'm gonna keep trying I'll get there one day well I do have a few things from our intelligence reports so sort of U.S naval Mission reports and some British stuff so um a few interesting things is the the Americans are here really saying that uh well you can see what they're saying there Japanese propeller design is five years behind the USA so that's a really really serious problem um so they basically said um that the we've got some background noise going on Chris can you hear that or is that just me I don't hear any background noise at the moment okay okay it's gone okay I don't know what's going on there so um yeah so they basically said that the poor propeller design was really hampering Japanese efforts to make high altitudes um high performance Fighters uh I would say aviation fuel supply was probably also really really really serious problem so um it says here the fuel was basically all 92 octane or less going back to what I was saying before you have to treat these figures with a degree of Suspicion but I think you can basically say that's a big enough difference that the fuels are probably pretty primitive so if we can have the next slide yeah that's up so this is a pretty good one so um this is an evaluation of uh Japanese soccer 12 radial engine um captured inside pan um this is quite interesting so it says basically saying that um from the inspection of earlier engines that alloying elements were used lavishly and wastefully so obviously in Japan near the start of the war they were probably in pretty good position um but you can see here they've written that this these changes started to um be made in [Music] a bit later on started to make the same changes that the Germans made in 1914-41 so that's reducing the amount of chromium and nickel in their Steels they said they didn't go as far as the Germans did as of December 1943 um and they said that even the Japanese economy Steels still leave a considerable room for further savings so um I would say that probably the Japanese with respect to shortage of materials were not in quite as bad a position as the the Germans were um if we could have the next slide please Chris yeah so um there's some pretty good evidence that there are behind in some areas so this is spark plugs um no one's interested in spark plugs so no one ever writes about spark plugs um but the engine doesn't work if you don't have spark plugs so they're important just because they're small doesn't mean they're not interesting so um this is a comparison British comparison of German and Japanese spark plugs so what's interesting is look at the electrodes so the Siemens plugs are all pure tungsten so tungsten um is very well known for having an incredibly high melting temperature so you need to it's you know about four thousand degrees melting temperature for Tungsten and that's why you have it used as um elements in light bulbs because um expensive flight bulb and the Japanese ones were just made of heat resisting Steel interestingly uh the Bosch spark plugs um uh they look pretty crappy to be honest so um I don't know what the reason is for that but um I know Bosch German spark plugs in the war were um are pretty ropey actually so the insulators uh the German ones are all um their ceramic centered ceramic insulators um and the Japanese ones are all Mica the reason that's really important is um what everyone discovered including the Americans who loved to use Mica or even up to about 1942 um so the tetraethyl lead in the fuel eats mica so they started putting more and more lead in the fuels from sort of 1930 almost to get the power up um but it destroys the mica it literally like eats it away very quickly so the um the ceramic insulators are not affected by tetraethyl lead so the Japanese plugs are pretty pretty bad so they obviously did have some problems um it's interesting they haven't used tungsten for the the electrodes because I have seen German documents saying that they were hoping for supplies of tungsten from Japan by U-boat so that's interesting um so the career the next slide please Chris yeah so there's a really good series of reports which you can find some of these are online so I think if you go to the Fisher trops archive online um if you Google that you can find PDFs of some of these and they're just in black and white um so I've got some of the ones which are color which just gives me bragging rights that I photograph The Originals it's not more useful so um I just want to say that I think fuels is maybe a very important thing so can we have the next slide please Chris yeah that's up so um basically when the US Navy went into Japan to look at fuels they discovered that um actually um Japanese people uh they're pretty clever and this Japanese stuff wasn't all backwards and even when they were really struggling they were still doing very very clever stuff so um Japan also made synthetic oil facilities because and they needed to convert coal into oil paralleling the work in Germany so that's very very interesting so that was all driven by shortages and the Japanese started heavily investing in this from 1921 so really ahead of schedule if you like so can we have the next slide please Chris yeah that's another table yeah so that's just um again you don't need to memorize that that's just that's just the location of Japanese synthetic oil and fuel plants so just to give you an indication you can see that the fuel output so this is quite a big program and uh again everyone talks about German synthetic fuel but actually the Japanese were doing a lot of it too so that's um I think something we should um know more about um so the next slide please Chris yep so um this is this is really fun I think so the Germans definitely were not doing this so the Japanese are so short of fuel so they were um they developed processes to develop aviation fuel from um pine needles and pine root oil birch bark Orange Peel camphor tar soya beans uh sweet potato alcohol you know so um they did a lot of very very clever scientific did this work uh so yeah yeah yeah okay it works yep if you can make enough of it to to to to conduct the wall you want is another question but yes it absolutely works so um yeah that's a brief summation of what I know about Japanese shortages okay uh copy them to the final pre-submitted question here by Joe uh what was the influence of British and U.S engines in Germany and the Aero engine industry in the 20s and in the early 1930s uh so this is this is a pretty difficult one to answer briefly but I'll try my best so I'm gonna again I'm gonna use the papers of Bowman um so this is from 16th October 1937 after he's just got back from a visit to to Germany so he's been to investigate their engines so this is just a an essay he's written for the the air Ministry um which I think helps answer your question so BMW and Siemens have basically been licensing American and British air-cooled engines to try and catch up basically so in terms of air cooled stuff the influence from America and Britain upon German design is quite high and even if you look at lots of BMW 801 it's pretty much the same as the Pratt Whitney stuff that they first started building just slightly changed [Music] um whereas um Daimler Benz and junkers uh really just really went for trying to really surpass um the Merlin performance I mean this is what he's writing in 1937. so if we go to the next slide please Chris so um yeah so he's just saying here you know BMW and bramo so this air called German radials so he's saying that's a gallon attempt to to copy the the British Americans um but he's saying the water cooled inverted Domo benzo and junkas it's he's calling virtue virtuosity Queen original design so I think the German liquid cooled engines are quite unique they're very different um I I don't see evidence of there being copied from Allied designs from Britain or America at all I think they were really quite um clean sheet designs um which are really very different so it's it's 50 50. so I think they copied our our um our air cooled engines and they did their own thing on the liquid cooled engines uh why that is um I can't tell you that's that's a question I can't answer at this moment in time um so I think uh that is all the pre-submitted questions okay fantastic well thank you very much uh Callum for answering those we'll Now open up the floor to all of you um uh hooker not has already been collecting a lot of your uh questions we have about a little bit more than half an hour to go so we'll go to photos as quick as we can and of course uh priority to those who are also um sending those in wire uh Super Chat uh just as a quick question Chris can I interrupt you of course so um this is this is totally my fault because um that's that's my PowerPoint I've made to answer the questions and I've just gone I've gone a little bit crazy with um trying to make sure they're really good answers and we've really used a lot more time than I thought we were going to be doing that so Chris um I that's totally my fault that's not your fault so I'm happy to hang around for a little bit longer if you want to get through some of the questions that your your people have submitted so I know I said seven is the end but if you um if you want to go a little bit over I'm happy to do that because we've we've we've run on and that's that's down to me not you so that's fine uh yeah we'll we'll see how fast we can go for those and then um we'll go from there if that works for you um I am just going to go quickly for the questions here there might be a little hiccup on the stream as I go for the questions uh but Canon photo asks how did the British uh react to the access engines and the aircraft improvements or of the lack thereof thank you very much for Canon photo for also the uh support there over super thanks um my impression from reading the the files so I've got so much of the stuff from Britain it's it's a really it's almost a complete chronology so you can start to see the trends um some other nations like Italy I don't have that much archive stuff so I've only got spots so I can't pick out the trends but in Britain I can um what's really obvious is that the first year of the war um we were really studying everything Germany did um really with great speed you know so um if new German plane crashed we would have the engine out and to Rolls Royce in you know a couple of days um both 190 report was all done very very quickly they did like a preliminary report to send out to the firmers and they did very detailed report which took months and that went out to everyone after about 1940 two I think Britain realized um Germany's got their own very unique problems we didn't quite appreciate what they're dealing with with the lack of materials but I think we realized what Germany's doing from now on this is not relevant to our own development path so after 1942 the interest in in Britain of what Germany was doing with engines kind of nosedived um and you'll see that I mean there were reports from the Royal aircraft establishment from like 1944 of German engines that are sort of two years old and even even some of the reports at the end you know someone's sort of saying really you know is this is this useful you know um and that's that's not an insult to Germany it's because we sort of sensed that they were trying to deal with problems that weren't relevant to us um you know so we didn't have shortages of all these Alloys and materials so you know we didn't need to spend two years developing a new valve steel which didn't have Nickel in it or something like that you know um but we couldn't use that information to improve our own technology um so that's just a very brief answer to the question okay thank you very much and the next question here from viewer Olay comes in where is the borderline between burning and detonating in a piston can radiation from a flame front detonate fuel ahead of ahead by radiation so what starts as a flame front becomes detonations this is this is a very difficult one to answer um it's it's pretty difficult you you you would be much better off speaking to an engine calibration guy who's who's sitting with the instruments looking at this data all day long um because I'm a mechanical designer so I have to design the bits that work but I I'm not um a physicist or a chemist and I don't look at this stuff so um essentially I'm going to try and do something useful I'm probably not going to completely answer your question but I'm going to try and answer it in a way that might be useful for everyone else on the call so because this is a subject which is very very confusing for everyone even engine people because it's very very difficult um so normal combustion is is burning and that is a progressive thing so the the burning proceeds from a point you want like the end of the spark plug out to the end at the edge of the combustion chamber and it's controlled and predictable and that's what you've been like so detonation is when that happens um too fast and pre-ignition is when that happens at the wrong time so pre-ignition is it's ignited before you have sent the electricity down the ignition cable to spark the spark plug so there would be a hot part in the combustion chamber like an overheated valve or an overheated spark plug that cooked the fuel off before you fired the spark so that's pre-ignition and that is lethal and you can burn a piston through in um yeah seconds actually if it's a very very high performance engine in a few seconds um detonation is a much more mild phenomenon in that um there are engines which run their whole lives with detonation um stuff like uh I think I think probably the Alpha Romeo T Spark probably did that um so the Alfa Romeo taste box got terrible combustion so they put two spark plugs in it and then they called it t-spark and made it this sort of marketing thing it's actually because it wouldn't pass the admissions test without two spark plugs but they turned it into some sort of high performance Gizmo sort of um thing so um basically with detonation happening too fast um it the reason it makes a sound that it's called knock is because it's it's audible it sounds like there's a hammer going and it has a set um there's a there's a you can measure the speed so it turns into a shock wave um so essentially you need to have some conditions whereby [Music] um everything's is getting sufficiently hot in there that even though you've ignited it when you wanted it to start it all goes um too quickly so um you there's probably several different ways it can happen and even more complicated there's an interplay between pre-ignition and destination so if you have um detonation that can help everything getting hotter and hotter and hotter and then you can overheat the spark plug and you'll get pre-ignition or if you have a little bit of pre-ignition I can then start off detonation because the whole thing's getting hot so um I'm I'm not too sure about what the answer to your question is in terms of the the radiation making the flame front start a bit further on um well I would suggest doing is if you go onto my website there's a contact form can you send me um try and word your question um in more detail and I will try and get back to you okay uh then the next question here comes from Will uh why were the Germans married to the idea of driving the supercharger at 90 degrees I thought it was for packaging uh what you think seems like it really limited their ability to use a two-stage superchargers um it's it's all down to needing a cannon almond so 1928 specifications I've got a YouTube video on it where I read through the German document in German and translate it for you into English this like some bullet points in a specification document so um go and watch that video but you have to have the supercharger on the side because the specification requirement mandated you needed a Canon on the provisioned through the prop shaft which means you can't have a supercharger on the back so um that's basically it um some some of the German engineers make some additional justifications for it such as you to get the air into the engine it has to go through one less 90 degree Bend than if you have the supercharger on the back stuff like this but the reason is the the cannon through the prop shaft and then we just had Jack Ray coming in with a super thanks thank you very much Jack uh did you note any differences in the way that the research programs will run uh if so did you see a difference in the quality and pace of results having a relation to that so I assume comparing mainly let's say Britain and Germany uh wow that's that's a really big question it's very very interesting um so that that is probably a book seriously that's like a book at the very least of like a long essay so I have been doing some research into that because I'm I'm writing a paper on German aeronautical scientific organization which um I'm hoping to to get um to get published or I might have stick it on my website if I can't be bothered with getting it published but it's not quite finished so essentially um there are a lot of similarities because scientists are scientists everywhere and um before the war and and now um scientists are just people everyone thinks they're special and um and so on because they sometimes wear white coats and things so that that's why that's why why do you think doctors wear white coats is because it's the Mystique and so that you go in and believe everything they tell you implicitly um so it's a Mystique thing so engineers and scientists are no different from that Everyone likes the Mystique so they like to publish because they want they won't be famous they want to be known they want people to say oh Dr CERN so he's the guy who published the thing with you know that they all like that you know I I don't think many scientists are just sort of shy retiring little buffins who are happy to sit and make studies and never be known for it I don't I don't think that's really true and I think they want lots of citations um it's these days you can't get funding for anything if you don't have a track record of publishing dozens of papers on it and go thousands of citations you won't even get a job you'll get sacked so I think it wasn't quite that extreme then but basically even in the 1930s British and German Engineers were publishing almost everything they were doing in scientific journals it's all being read and the Germans kept publishing stuff until 1944 in academic journals I kid you not and these are these journals we would Britain would get copies through like the um you know Swedish Embassy or whatever Swiss Embassy they would just go and get the journals and send them to Britain so almost until the end of the war so if they said oh should we should we be publishing this but you know that's because that's that's how the scientists are thinking they're not it might a lot of mine thinking about the war it's like this is my thing you know I've got to get this published people have to know I've done this you know so um in that respect scientists are the same everywhere so um that's why it's so unusual to get one idea popping up somewhere and it's never been done anywhere else because everything's being published all the time so you know it's there's very little that anyone in any developed country knew that wasn't known in another developed country because they all get the journals okay so um I think the the differences are that I think in Germany um they had a very big setup with the research being done in universities so German technical universities and then and now are um they're they're pretty superlative you know they're um there aren't any that are better and in America you've got like maybe two that are better you know MIT um Caltech but you know in Germany they've got like five universities that are as good as those but um they're not quite as famous but they don't they don't work in English yeah so um German technical Universities at the time and now um but more so at the time they they were research a whole research institutes but on their own Merit um more than was in the case in Britain which is mostly our funding question it's not because British scientists well they're smart or whatever they probably have less funding had much less facilities you know a lot of these German technical universities have better facilities than the Royal aircraft establishment that had you know better wind tunnels and everything you know um so Germany did a lot of research at technical universities you know um uh darmstadt Dresden uh there's half a dozen Stuttgart um so the German research is a lot more concentrated in academic uh settings uh these these research um institutes at the universities and they've also built all these unlimited funding facilities like the you know the um Falcon rotor stuff like this which you know otherwise known as the home and going Institute you know so basically German scientists just came along and the Nazi just said how many things do you want and they just said I want all the things and they said okay and they just went and built everything you know um so the research facilities there are just you know unbelievable you know the British I've read the reports you know British went and saw this stuff and they were just like oh my God you know this stuff how did you lose the war I mean it's unbelievable you know it's you know we've been the engine test sale at farnborough the High Altitude one didn't really work for half the time they didn't have a snow remover on it so you feed in low temperature air to simulate the air if you're flying at 30 000 feet or whatever and it did stop working because you'd get the snow ice particles started for me and the ice particles destroy the supercharger because the superchargers spinning at 25 000 RPM and the snow particles go in and destroyed it half the time it didn't work and they went to look at the stuff that the Germans that had a BMW or attitude plant and they're just like oh my God this is unreal you know um so in in Munich um the tram stopped working when they had the wind tunnel on oh for the electricity uh yeah yeah yeah it's like yeah it was Unreal I mean so uh all that stuff is what um kicked off Cranfield University in Britain so feden went to Germany saw all this stuff and he's like oh my God this is unbelievable it took as much as he could back home and that's what started Cranfield University oh wow okay yeah um I have to write that down that's that's a that's a really cool piece of trivia there yeah yeah so feden created Cranfield not not just because he brought back the stuff it was his brainchild and um feden Wanted to improve British education and aeronautical research by combining the best aspects of German and American Science so um we had a lot to learn from both the Americans and the the Germans so um the British staff was no less clever but our facilities were really bad um we didn't have these amazing research establishments like you had all over Germany at the tender green universities and so um we had to be very very focused and you know we made some mistakes but broadly if someone didn't say I need this for this operational reason it didn't happen so we could only pick and choose um very very carefully what to research whereas Germany could just do anything and um which also has its negativities I guess and so in so doing they lost the war because 90 of it was of no military value but that they started the Space Race because you had um thousands of brilliant Engineers given infinite funding yeah and so at the end of the war Germany had um what are called leftover research because um they'd been doing all this stuff that was of no use for the war but it was brilliant so we couldn't start the Space Race off because we'd put 100 well almost all of our effort into militarily useful stuff and we had nothing left to look into you know we didn't have people looking into sort of oh you know how do we get stuff into orbit you know um so it wouldn't have helped you win the war so you didn't look at it right no so um broadly the differences our research was um very very focused um there's no difference in intelligence between the engineers and any of these countries French Italian German American they're all very smart people um but they're given very different sorts of resources and um targets and also a lot of the German research I think was really spurred on by not getting conscripted and sent to the front yeah so um basically you want it to look busy from about 19 um went from when the Russia campaign started to go bad you wanted to look busy a lot so um basically if you're that's not just an idol fear thing as well thousands of um German engineers and scientists were sent to the front that actually happened it's not just that they were worried it might happen that actually happened yeah um and they tried to get them back later in the war they would oh God we need these people I mean when of course you know most of them were dead but some of them were brought back so some uh German um servicemen were brought back from the Russian front because um even the Nazis realized at a certain point oh God like the the Dame web ends uh engine test cells in Stuttgart one day the test cells stopped working and someone was saying why is no one running test cell three it's like well you can scripted you can script to do trade he's in Russia um so um that happened I'm not you know and then this race was try they tried to get him back right yeah they tried to get hundreds of them back to to work on engine testing yeah I've got the letters so that that so you can imagine you've got all these academics and clever people with almost unlimited funding and very good reasons to be busy so it's not surprising they come up with all sorts of stuff which was of no use for the war but was of immense scientific value after the war so that I hope that answers you well that that's a fantastic answer there and uh Jack also who asked the question already in chat said that he's he's very thankful for for you to to have given that great answer um Casey now uh and this is an interesting one because it harks back a little bit to what we said in the beginning of the Q a uh how much more efficient could a World War II plane be if not designed for mass production we don't Mass produce F1 cars after all or F1 car engines after all yeah I've I don't think I can dig it out for you live um because I'm I'm actually um I'm actually at the family home I'm not at my flat so my my 18 month old son is ill and I'm not there because um I don't want to disturb him he's supposed to be sleeping so I wish I had the best of course yeah oh he'll be fine they get well very very quickly but um I don't have a lot of stuff around me I'll see if I can uh I'll see if I can send it to Chris this week and maybe he can put out a tweet so um Chris can you maybe see if you can make a name so I can get this information over so I do have a graph from a German academic Journal from about 1941 and it's a graph of it's not absolutely what you wanted to know it's a graph of engine power and it's the difference in power charted across the years between the Prototype engines and the mass-produced ones so it's it shows you the difference yeah um I wish I could do better for you right now I will send it to Chris yes and he will send it to you so off the top of my head it's not a huge difference it's something like five percent if you averaged it something like that so I do have a little bit of data I'll send it to Chris and he'll send it to you yeah so if I will post that then uh on on Twitter uh for those people who don't follow on Twitter that is Mill AV history at Mill AV history I'll just post the chat and actually do you want to give your Twitter handle as well if you want to follow you yeah so um I'm gonna we'll do a little bit of social media propaganda yeah I'm just I'm just looking at my own Twitter handle because I never yeah I I always forget mine as well it's at Callum douglas1 so that's Callum with one l c a l u m d o u g l i s one uh hook can you put that in the uh in the chat please once you so um I just realized that I can give one more slight answer to that so when we were trying to prepare planes to shoot down V1 flying bombs um we had to just do everything possible to get the last couple of miles per hour out of the planes because the v1s are about 400 miles an hour at 2 000 feet and although it's Spitfire 9 can do 400 miles an hour it cannot do it at sea level because the air is really dense so you need a crazy amount of power to do 400 miles per hour at sea level even if a plane can do it at 20 000 feet so we were doing everything so we get Mustangs and um 10 Spitfires and they were polished they would get the guys to like strip all the paint off polish the wings smooth out the wrinkles in the panels put filler in all the panel gaps um take or you know take the radio Mast off take all the bomb rack fittings off everything you could you could possibly do um to get the last few miles per hour out of it so um from memory I think and a Mustang it was about 18 miles per hour difference by doing a complete cleanup of the whole airframe okay that's good that's a good performance increase yeah so um but the man I was I mean you couldn't Mass produce that right but yeah so anyway I hope that's a slight additional answer to your your question plastic um moving on to uh I'm not quite sure if I can use this name online but use your name starts not so uh not uh I may have missed this in the book uh but given how Rolls-Royce did actively decide against a fluid supercharger complete due to time constraint how did Belle or Alison managed to get it working so quickly and because not you have given me the uh the hint to the book yeah of course once again just quick reminder everyone talking about the secret horsepower race which color Douglas has written and if you want to have this book or any old book that is published by the publisher Mortons for a discounted price use the discount code that is provided on screen Mark 10 and ordered directly from their website and generally speaking just a little hint here to all the viewers if you order directly from the Publishers instead of through Amazon the offer actually gets a higher cut and their work should be rewarded um because uh how long have you this is the second question how long have you worked on this uh this book I took six years there we go so reward Callum for his work because he has really written the uh Treasure Trove here on this topic uh with horsepower is absolutely um do you want me to repeat the question perhaps um chill go for it um so the question was why not uh how did Rolls-Royce actively decide against a fluid supercharger coupling due to time constraints uh because of this how did Bell and Allison managed to get it working so quickly um I think we we could have eventually got it working but um you've got to remember that we had less resources so going back to what I was saying about how we did r d you know by the time you had a Spitfire nine with two stage two-speed supercharger um the results from that are ahead of anything the Germans come up with until the UMO 213e the db603l which I don't think ever saw any uh active combat or mass production at the end of 19 well it's right at the end of the war so um if you're at Rolls-Royce and you go and speak to you know the aeronautical research committee or yeah Ministry and say I want another 20 engineers and 50 000 pounds to do a fluid Drive coupling for the supercharger and they say well what's the performance gain um at that point they would probably say well it'll take us six months and we'll have to stop you know we'll lose production of 2 000 Merlin 61 engines while we're retooling it they would you know probably have been laughed out of the room you know kicked down the stairs so um we didn't have the resources to do it and I don't think there was a performance Advantage there for us by the time we'd got to that point um the uh the Americans were very interested in it I'm not sure they did it that quickly because the the Americans studied the db601 right at the start of the war um because when we we captured stuff we would send it to America so um there's a slight delay because you've got a ship stuff or fly it over and um uh and they had problems because people used to steal stuff off the engines in transit something that they would get in so they would send a guy to like watch the engine and there's a there's a report um the guy says oh you know we've lost um I think a BMW 801 turned up without the part of the supercharger controls and it says in the report oh it's vanished in transit as usual despite having private so and so to watch so um this reminds me of the first zero that potentially could have been tested by the Allies which crash landed and they put a card on it and then a bunch of Australians just ripped it apart for souvenirs it happens this is this this is what happens yeah um so nevertheless I think I think it's mid-1941 so there's um there's a society of Automotive Engineers conference in America and they present a study of um engine and the supercharger coupling so it's quite a big study honestly the Americans knew exactly what had been going on with that since 19 mid 1941. so um I don't have the archive papers to show what happens after that but uh they they had enough Resources by the time America entered the war that I think if they wanted to have a team of people just doing that they would have just done it um and look at all the the hyper engines that Americans did you know they had enough resources to to waste hundreds of Engineers making all these crazy engines which were absolutely no use to anyone like uh the the tornado and the um the Chrysler hyper engine I think there's about four in total and they're all complete waste of time but they had enough resources to do this kind of stuff so I think it's no problem for the Americans once they decide they're interested in something they'll just go and do it and they'll just go and do it yeah okay then the next question here comes from Luke and remember Chad you can still con continue sending in questions we have a bunch here will be let's say another 15 to 20 minutes online um but these questions are not getting lost in the E for afterwards either um we may perhaps Callum if you're up for it uh repeat uh repeat this again in the future as well um so look uh asks how did Engineers deal with the problems of added heat as engines become more powerful and I think this works back a little bit to that discussion we had earlier about radiator size and high pressure in radiators so there's probably three answers to this so um one is the obvious one which is you put bigger radiators on stuff so if you go and look at despite the fact that we had pretty good cooling system if you go and look at a mark one Spitfire um prefer been a museum but you can Google it then Google a mark 22 or Mark 21 Spitfire with Griffin engine and you look I mean the difference in the radiator size unbelievable I mean it's twin radiators and they're um the openings are huge um which is really because the the Spitfire was really pretty much Beyond this development point there and they couldn't fit the radiators further up into the wing you can't extend the duct forward because the wheel well opening is there so you've just got this huge radiator so the the duct Inlet is just this one massive hole so that is that is one answer to it is you just put huge radiators on stuff but that's um that's a it's a really bad solution to do that um so aerodynamic drag goes up with the square of the speed but the power required to overcome aerodynamic drag goes up with the cube of the speed so you really do not want to put drag on a plane because to make the performance difference up um the engine power um needs to be cubed to in relation to make up the difference so it's a really big it's not just a v-squared it's that powers cubed so it's um it's a really serious problem so if you want to go twice as fast you need six times the power so um it's it's um sorry eight yeah yeah yeah my mouth was failing me there yeah yeah so it's um that puts it in relation doesn't it and I'm in perspective yeah um so it's it's yeah it's pretty pretty serious um so the second way you can do it is improve the heat transfer so um Germans did all sorts of crazy tests with different fluids I'm trying to make they've they've made all these synthetic things and stuff like this and they found what everyone had known before which is that water is the best heat transfer um fluid you can you can use um the only thing the only time you might deviate from that is if you were running a nuclear reactor and then you might want to use sodium or something like that um but that's a whole different ball game so we do not do that in in engines um so water is the best thing you can use but it boils um so we need to have very very high pressures to stop it boiling so the ideal solution is you need to that if you look at um water pressure and the water temperature throughout the war then Britain they're just going up and up and up and up so at the end of the war it's about four atmospheres of pressure and the cooling system and 135 degrees cool then temperature so in Germany both those numbers are a lot less and um then you get a much more efficient heat transfer so you can get a lot of the engine heat out without putting a bigger Radiator on it so the third way you can do is chemical chemical Cooling so if you use methanol water or nitrous oxide there's a lot of cooling that happens inside the supercharger in the engine which cools everything down so if you increase the engine power with water methanol um you can for example I've got some American Test reports I think you can basically double the engine power and only put about 10 percent more heat into the engine oh wow okay that's um that's a staggering increase done yeah yeah so um yeah you can go really crazy with water injection so um if you if you want to go really mad with it so the water flow rate exceeds the fuel flow rate so seriously so if you if this isn't a test setting I'm not saying that was used in operation in World War II I'm saying that from the point of view of if you want to go really crazy with it um to get maximum power you can there's more water going in than fuel so that's absolutely mad okay that that um that happens um um so the methanol cools cools down as well although the methanol is mostly uses antifreeze that's that's the main reason it's there is because you can't put pure water in the fuel the the water injection tank because you fry up to about 10 000 feet in the aircraft and it was all frozen solid so it's mostly in there as an anti-freeze um so the chemical cooling so those are those are the three solutions bigger radiators which is pretty hard to do because it's very hard to package so that's a big problem for measure Smith don't even have radiators under the wings it's just a nose radiator it was never designed with radiators under the wings but it's very hard to package big bigger radiators so um big radiators or increase the pressure on the temperature of the coolant or chemical cooling so those are your oppose your eyes are the options excuse me uh Barton then asks uh if we compare the main belligerence um well he's actually going with the UK at us Germany and Italy here um so let's stick with those uh who had the best mass production of piston Aero engines this gas is the US to the use of advanced measuring devices now um I guess it depends on how we qualify the best but I guess output terms of Manpower hours perhaps it's really tough I'll give you three best so I'll try and pick out the best bits that we all individually did um I think best is very difficult to to isolate um the Americans just did an unbelievable job Mass producing so many of their engines um and the Americans this is a really annoying one I'm going to come back to the the stuff about mass-produced Packards and and Merlin engines so there's this um story that drives me crazy that Merlin's were hand built and Packard must produce them which is it's completely nonsense by the way um but it was probably true like up to about 1935 and then um so uh how to avoid going down this Rabbit Hole okay we're gonna go we're gonna go down the rabbit hole we're gonna go down the rabbit hole I'm sorry we're gonna we're gonna do the rabbit hole so um no one has ever written anything about this since I think about 1950 something there's one textbook on it and there's like one paper which is a U.S it's like a US Department of Defense thesis paper which is very very good um I'll send Crystal link because it's really important so no one knows anything about this because I think to know about it spoils our idea of what um Britain was supposed to be in the war so our national idea of what Britain is supposed to be in the war is um the underdog nation of poor downtrodden Brits who were defending themselves alone against the Nazis until the Americans came in and we had no resources and you know we almost lost and all this kind of thing and we had these Genius boffins Like bonds Wallace and RJ Mitchell and so on who saved us from catastrophe and um and so on um some of that is true but I think the history has been perverted because that's the story that we are supposed to have and you know the whole country is covered in Spitfires and you know there's this I do like Spitfires okay but this drives me mad um what Chris what is this thing there's going to be like a spit for a um a huge stainless steel Spitfire sculpture made costing sort of millions of pounds yes I've heard about this but I don't know the details yeah I think it's being sponsored by airfix or something like that okay and um so yeah it's all linked into that so we've got to have Spitfires that you know if we didn't have those we had nothing else and we would all have all this kind of thing you get the idea and I have a somewhat different view on it after having read archive files for six years and more because I keep reading them just because I've published the book I don't stop reading them I I know a lot more and when I started writing the book um so no one has written anything about the committee of Imperial defense and oh you should do because it's it's the committee of Imperial defense is the kind of British defense deep state so it was basically first brought in during the Boer War because the Boer War was not going very well and you know the British establishment even they realized this isn't going very well we need to to do something here so they created the committee of Imperial defense and it's basically a think tank of all the top pertinent people who meet up probably and probably in a little dark smoky smoky room in secret I actually work out what you should be doing and they were given not necessarily a budget to go and do things but they were given I think a lot of leeway in the advice that was given and what Parliament would decide to do so I think the committee would give advice to Parliament probably informally and the official parliamentary committees would then say oh I've come up with a great idea why don't we do this it's actually because this this committee had it was formed by people who know what they're doing had to come up with it and told them what to do so um the committee of Imperial defense basically um wargamed World War II in I think 1928 um I say wargamed in as much as you can war game something in 1928 it's not CGI but they did that and basically by 1930 they'd laid down plans for how Britain should defeat um an enemy in the next European War by 1935 they had a complete plan in place for transforming the entire British Auto industry to Aviation defense manufacturer so we had um Shadow Factory scheme we started producing Bristol engines I think oh I shouldn't go from memory here I think the first one was made in something 1936 so years before the war started we had everything prepped to switch over to mass producing military materials at the drop of a hat new factories built everything and all of this was um basically planned at the top level by the committee of Imperial defense who is this kind of shadowy group of politicians and Aviation experts and defense people um and um so the American essay the American Department of Defense I think sponsored a PhD or a master's thesis so there's a very good American contemporary I mean just from a few years ago you know 10 years ago or something and it's basically um saying that the American Department of Defense should try to adopt a lot of the lessons from how you run a defense structure with something like the committee of improved defense so they thought it was a very very effective system for how you organize a country um so um essentially the that that notion of the sort of um bumbling British approach to things is um it's it's not uh it's not correct um I've gone so far down the rabbit hole that I do is probably not assisted by this glass of wine which I've just finished um so Chris can you repeat the original question yes so uh who had the best mass production of piston Arrow engines because yeah so um the British had to organize this mass production in the mid-30s and I've got it in documents so we did tests with the Bristol Arrow the Hercules made in I think three different plants so somebody Bristol and some by the two of the other car factories which have been turned into Aero engine factories and um they found all the parts were interchangeable from one to the next they had to be it says this in the report or everything has to be interchangeable otherwise you can't run a war because there's no way you're gonna have one box of spare parts from the Aero engine plant in Bristol and one box of spare parts for the same engine that was made by you know a subcontractor down the road you'd never ever be able to um succeed in a war so you can't do it so really by 1940 all of our production stuff were standardized um and everything was interchangeable and it had to be um there's a there's a there's a there's a parts manual like Q archives which is a list of all the part numbers of the Packard Merlin and the Merlin and it's an interchange right so it's got the pack or part number and the Rolls-Royce part number and it says if I've got that one what's the Rolls-Royce put on them and the reason you have that is that if you've got an engine in the field and you don't have a Packard spares box but you've got some Merlin spares you have to know what the cross reference is to use the Merlin spare part it doesn't apply to every bit of the engine because the Packard had their own supercharger Drive Right which is different and they've got American ancillaries but all the rest of the bits of the engine more or less you can use Merlin spare parts so the tolerances all had to be the same you can't have these mad different I just it's it Beggars belief that people have ever believed that you could have thrown a war on that footing so um credit is given to the right country but for the wrong reasons so we've given the Americans well I'll say we many people give the Americans credit for Mass producing the Packard um when the Marlin was all hand built which is rubbish so that's complete junk so what really happened so the Americans we we do have the Americans to thank for it but not for that reason so the reason Britain could Mass produce Aero engines which we were doing at Rolls Royce Glasgow with completely unskilled workers before Packard ever made an engine was because of American automatic machine tools so Americans made the best manufacturing tools so yeah they were even used by the Germans the Germans had real problems in the war because that they had loaded their machines were American okay and they couldn't get them anymore and the only the only people who were making runs which were maybe as good were that I think the Swiss um and I think they couldn't get nearly enough of them um because you know I don't think the Swiss and Manufacturing machines in the scale that the Americans are doing um so essentially British mass production of Aero engines was facilitated by using American Machine Tools which were all had to be shipped across the Atlantic so yes we have the Americans to thank for it but not for the reasons that we think they deserve the thanks for it so um that's not to say the Americans didn't do anything differently because the the British thing had to be developed um using what we had which is oh we're gonna we're gonna use these car factories to manufacture Aero engines we're going to use all these subcontractors who've never seen an engine before we're going to build a few factories here um and like the Ford factory the famous Ford factory that everyone talks about from this you know the stupid remark in Stanley hooker's book and he's talking about um the um the guy from Ford saying oh we can't make these because the tolerances are all you know blah blah blah um so the Ford factory it's just got it's a forward stamp on the factory they administrated it the air Ministry built that factory okay so it was just under the supervision or yeah yeah build that factory but Fords were brought into administrator so they didn't they didn't pay for it they'll build it it's not food factory so they're Ministry Factory but the air Ministry doesn't have you know hundreds of production people to administer the workings of a factory so Ford agreed to take over the running a bit That's the basis on which it was done okay um so it's um I hope that begins to clarify things a little bit about what was really happening here so um if we can leave the question just there just so we can go through a couple of more um we also had another Super thanks coming in thank you very much uh cannon fodder uh now this is a fun speculative question um how much better would all these engines that were produced uh during World War II um just have been if they had been designed with access to a computer-aided design programs I mean it's speculative so I don't think we're going to nail you down for an answer here but um that's that's really that's really difficult because I have to know if you're trying to imagine that we're gonna have um some sortable terms of History thing where we have World War II now um You you make the engines now with all of the other stuff we've got or if you're just talking about going back with a time machine with some computers I'm gonna go for option two Bing what you're asking so if I got a whole load of computers and take them back to 1930 and give them to Rolls-Royce what what would have happened um they would have been designed a lot quicker and they would have made less mistakes um I use it with the other constraints they had I don't think the performance would have been that different it would have been a bit better but I think um I don't think people appreciate how clever these people were you know um we have computers now but honestly if you don't know how to if you don't know the fundamentals um you're just going to design junk anyway and um you wouldn't believe in companies the amount of computation time that's wasted people doing simulations of designs which are obviously stupid the waste um they've run these optimization routines they've got AI tools and stuff so you can you can say I've got a problem I need to do a thing from here to here it can be this big here and that big here I've got a bit through the middle and it like morphs the shape um iterations into into the ideal thing but you still have to put some constraints in there right so you still you could have picked us you can pick a stupid scenario to get it to perfect so you can get an absolutely perfect stupid thing out of your simulation if you think and think oh I've got a perfect stupid thing this is the best thing in the world whereas if you get someone with a pencil who actually knows what he's doing he said that's a completely stupid way of doing this in the first place and um these guys you know the really good ones they were Geniuses they were absolute Geniuses and um guys like um Allman in Germany who worked for AVL list um sorry it became AVL later on um he was like hand calculating the gas flows in and out of the engine and the cylinders with different valve sizes and Port shapes and yeah so it would have been a bit of an improvement but I think um I think most people don't appreciate how clever these people were and so I think the Improvement would be less than you might imagine um unless you remove them from from World War II and bring them to today's world where you've got all the advances of the machine tools and you know all and all the rest of it and so on um so I said I'll just I'll just I'll end this question with an interesting One mission which is a point I always make to people um they say oh your romanticizing the past and and so on and we're all very clever now and I say really are we well I'll tell you uh for sure if I went back to 1935 to the Rolls-Royce design office I would be the t-boy I would be the two boy if I was lucky maybe I'd get to be a trainee draftsman if you get if you get any one of these really good guys even from 1920 and you take them to today they would be flying in a couple of weeks because the mathematics these guys had without because they didn't have any computers they all had to be done with mathematics and um all the important branches of mathematics were all known then you know yeah um well if you would have been dead at the trainee back then uh I think I would have been a trainee and um they would have picked up computer they would have learned to code in about which because coding is just it's just maths in stupid people language maths turned into words so that you can kind of understand it a bit um so they would have learned to code and they would have just taken to it like a duct of water whereas we take today's engineer back then you're useless okay wouldn't be able to machine probably couldn't do a drawing with a pencil properly like so I I like to look at it in those terms when people talk to me about getting rosie-eyed about the past that's not how I look at it okay um for the last couple of sets of questions shall we just do a quick fires so we can get through as many as possible in the next 10 minutes um Kai asks uh how important and this is a cool one I think important word is super Marine S5 and the SX4 British fighter development so those are the racers of course built by super rain for for the chat um it's it's all really important um S5 and S6 I think um it's obviously very very important for super Marine um I think a lot of it's also important for it's important I think you've got to remember you know the succession of the Spitfire is a lot more than just RJ Mitchell so when Beverly shemstone the Canadian aerodynamicist who actually did most of the aerodynamic design in Spitfire came to work in Britain he went round several different companies trying to get a job he didn't come from Canada to go and work for Mitchell so he came to Britain to to try and because there wasn't much going on in Canada right So eventually he went to supermarine because he was turned down from I think his first interview which wasn't even super Marine he went to Super Marine got a job in Mitchell super Marine hadn't had the the the the the the cachet and having won those Schneider trophy races do you even think shenstone would have gone there for a job Maybe he might not even know who super Marine work because submarine mostly made flying boats right yeah so um yeah all the stuff about monoplanes and all the rest of it it's all very important but I'd like to emphasize that um without that cachet of rose rose wins if you can't get good people you're not going to be able to make you know uh something like a Spitfire you need you need dozens of very good people to do that it's all very well having one guy like Mitchell to push a vision but you need a lot of very very good people and if you don't have company cache you're not going to get them so I would say um at least as important as the science is that the Kudos and um would they have got shenstone without it I don't know maybe not okay then next question here quick fire yada was there any information sharing about between alliances I.E British and American Intel for engine developments um was there I think we can say yes uh yes it was a little bit once I did at times um they didn't want to send us turbo charges for quite a while they were very secretive about that so it was a little bit one-sided um I'd say it's mostly information from us to them um but we were getting so much material reward Lend Lease Etc that I don't think we were in a position to complain okay and then um the last question here uh Darius um where can we go to learn read and listen more about this subject and I think the answer is obvious that would be your book but do you have any other recommendations for this uh yeah so the the Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust books are all worth having on the various Rolls Royce engines um there's so many books written about the Merlin um honestly um they're almost all worthless seriously they don't buy them get the Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust ones they're quite small pamphlets they're not complete right there's a lot of detail left out but they're very very good and they're actually correct um whereas there's so many books about the Merlin and most of the people who've written them haven't even been to the Royals archive okay they're just don't um the go and going um go and subscribe to the aircraft engine Historical Society so that's an an amateur group in America it's just run by a few old guys who are volunteers in America and they've got a website which um if once you figure out how to navigate it has got a huge amount of stuff so if you join as a member you get additional stuff you can see all the conference reports they have got stuff like um they've got presentations there from Pete law on the sl-71 engines so Pete law is a member of the aircraft engine Historical Society so you can go and read Pete Law's presentation on the SR-71 if you remember this and it loads of World War II stuff so um go and do that get the Rolls-Royce Heritage books and then your book I would say um and I just want to plug this again also thank you very much for the cooperation with Morton's uh with the 10 discount for all of you in the chat um Callum could we actually I think we should say we we will cut it here for today there's just one one point I'll like to make um some of the bdi'd among you will um possibly um look at the 10 discount offer from Mortons and then go someone will say to you oh I bought it from Amazon at 30 discount and that's true you can absolutely go and buy this from Amazon 30 discount tomorrow without using this code and that's fine um you can do that um but to let you know the amount of money I get if you buy it from Amazon is um it's it's a very very small amount of money because the the royalties I get there are net okay it's not gross so yeah when Amazon does a discount they're going back really close to the price they paid for the book and they don't care because they just want to be they want to dominate the market so that that this that 30 discount that's my money so if you go and buy from Amazon at 30 discount I seriously get virtually zero so yes it may seem to you ridiculous why am I getting a 10 discount for something I can get a 30 discount any day of the week and the answer is um because Amazon who's the author and when I say it took six years to write I I mean I I actually spent six years on that yeah I I probably spend 20 000 pounds just on travel for archives and if I add up my time I I think it cost me about a hundred thousand pounds to write that book so uh so um so seriously but that's the reason to use the discount and not just go and save money on Amazon so unless you are um using a food bank um please use the Morton's uh order and don't buy from Amazon thank you yeah uh that's definitely and I I will add to what uh what caliber says is absolutely true um the Amazon always takes away the office cut and leaves basically nothing and uh with the amount of information that is in this book it is an absolute bargain price uh at Morton's with the uh 10 discount as well and the 10 discount also works on all the other books so you can bulk order something and get a nice discount here as well Callum thank you very much for answering all the questions uh thank you for the chat where's absolutely spectacular with the contributions uh roughly 200 people were here all the time which is a really cool out uh turning out uh so thank you very much thank you column and we'll reconvene hope sometime in the future cool thank you very much Chris and we are going

Channel: Military Aviation History

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Id: SIk2TDHOVkE

Length: 143min 10sec (8590 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023