R.J. Mitchell's B 12/36 bomber

Every project that never made production is touted as being wonderful, and only the machinations of politicians/ministry/Beelzebub stopped it being a world-beater.

Quite. 🙂
Large aircraft of the 30s (and if we’re giving Mitchell credit for the design it would have been mid-30s given his death in mid-1937) were inevitably underpowered, you have a great airframe but without reliable and powerful engines, it’s not going anywhere.

And let’s remember even though the designer may be great, every design may not be.
Case in point: the Tudor.

Picture of a fuselage before it was destroyed by German bombing on 26th September 1940.

http://johnkshelton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/r-j-mitchells-bomber-and-his-death.html?m=1

We also have to bear in mind that Mitchell’s aircraft was completely redesigned from the ground up between the initial submission and the sign-off for production. During that time the estimated performance seems to have dropped significantly (from published sources) but was still impressive. During detail design a great many additional changes were incorporated that no doubt would have degraded performance further. However, having said that, all the estimates do appear optimistic in light of the actual performance of somewhat similar aircraft.
Mitchell actually followed the spec. pretty closely; troop-carrying capability, catapult spools, wingspan and so on. Perhaps starting with a clean sheet of paper rather than Gouge’s decision to use an adapted version of his tried and tested wing was a better solution when it came to bomb and fuel storage (sorry Stirling fans, I don’t pretend to be knowledgeable on that aircraft)

Claims made for its performance appear fairly unconvincing by the time the practical gun turrets etc. had been fitted, and (as said above) the trends in bomb size would count against it. It was also very late – no prototype had flown (nor been particularly near) by mid-1940 so squadron entry wouldn’t have been before 1942 at the very soonest, and what would have been cancelled to make way for it? There’d have been a large hole in the production programme for something whilst retooling etc was going on. I don’t believe that it would ever have made service, if only because of the timescale.

Every project that never made production is touted as being wonderful, and only the machinations of politicians/ministry/Beelzebub stopped it being a world-beater. At least in this case we can blame the Luftwaffe.

What is interesting to me is that RJM totally ignored all the specification items that the Stirling’s fans claim responsible for that particular misfortune. 100ft span wing – no problem. Maximum payload exceeded (yeah, right). Carrying ground crew when staging abroad – really? I suspect that RJM, through long experience, was more familiar with the way the Air Ministry was open to negotiation over requirements.

Hmm stumbled upon this thread. Tried the search engine here before posting, but it’s not perfect obviously:D

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?122758-Supermarine-Type-B12-36-317

Cees

And everything concentrated behind the single mainspar, load, fuel, undercart. What Merlins? X?
Cees

I think it depends on how good the original design would have been, maybe like the Spitfire it could have been modified to carry it’s payload differently; notwithstanding the fact that ordnance was changing and becoming bigger and heavier itself.