Front gun turret in night bombers???

They did not carry many pax anyway Graham.I just put the FR Lanc pic up as a laugh (it is a lovely pic though)
I honestly think that the CofG was not a serious issue as rgds the Lancaster,the Lancaster had tremendous lifting capabilities and a few hundred pounds of ballast (if reqd) would make little difference – if I may quote myself from this thread almost 10 years ago….

I doubt the CofG would have been a serious problem,if there was a real necessity to improve the performance of the a/c !!
The removal would have made more space in the nose compartment and a less ‘draggy’ nose could have been fitted.
Large a/c usually have ballast weights fitted anyway,so a few more would make little difference if necessary.
In the mid 70’s we had a Canberra B2 return from a major service…we had trouble getting the elevator trim correct (a/c should have run out of nose down trim at 400-450 kts on test flight,but was 110 kts out).
We eventually found that the major servicing unit had ‘forgotten’ to refit the ballast weights in the nose 😀 (big lead weights),the C of G must have been way out but she still flew ok.

I wasn’t completely serious, but adding the refuelling gear and additional tankage would be relevant. The Lancastrian did have its own Internal rearrangements, it would be interesting to know if there was any restriction on loading the passengers.

Who would have thunk you could shorten/lighten the nose on a Lancaster and still retain control 😉

I guess shifting the fuel tanks in the bomb bay could compensate for at least some of the CG change from removing the turrets

Hmmmm – the Lancastrian did not have any turrets either and it had a long nose Graham 😉

Anyway I have always loved that pic of the Flight Refuelling Lancaster over the south coast 😀

Sorry if this is belabouring the obvious, but there’s no tail or dorsal turret either. No wonder they had to take the entire nose off…

Who would have thunk you could shorten/lighten the nose on a Lancaster and still retain control 😉

Much more difficult to achieve at night, and clearly not common as did not feature in crew reports. The Halifax did retain a nose gun without a turret, so it isn’t an all or nothing argument.

That’s an interesting argument but if you remove nose turrets then you are vulnerable to a head on attack viz B17 and even good old Eric Brown and his ‘Kuriers’

TT

Hasting’s suggestion appears to be grossly optimistic, after all the Lancastrian did just that but wasn’t 50mph faster overall, let alone at cruise speeds. The cg argument wasn’t quite as simple as some make out, after all you can’t shift fuel or alter bombload at random and there wasn’t a lot of flexibility in wing tanks anyway. You could always reduce the bomb load in the aft bay but after you’d dropped the bombs the cg would revert to being too aft, which is not a good idea. Not that reducing the bomb load is a particularly good idea for a bomber anyway. However I do agree that some fairly straightforward solution could have been found, as on the Halifax and (eventually) the Stirling, in the benefit of slightly faster cruise, more room for the bombaimer, and less draughts! To argue that the Lancaster was already faster than other British bombers is irrelevant – it wasn’t faster than German fighters and every little helps make an interception more difficult. The values of removing (as opposed to improving) the dorsal and rear turrets is another matter. Perhaps the prime role of the dorsal gunner was that of fire controller, and the rear guns proved their worth more than once. The Germans didn’t adopt Shrage Musik because they weren’t bothered about a British bomber’s defensive fire, just where it came from.

Without changing the airframe, you can’t fly at higher rpm without spending more fuel: the cruise speeds of a bomber were set to provide maximum range, not for any bean-counting principles. Going faster reduces the range. Given that every gallon of fuel had to be brought into the country through the Battle of the Atlantic there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point in just blowing it away to little purpose. Having the returning crews bend the throttles a bit in the hope of individual survival is only human nature, and if it worked (if) then it was probably a fair trade-off, at the expense of some reserves. However if they were low enough to shoot at searchlights, trains etc then they were low enough to be vulnerable to light flak.

The ideal nose being under development by the RAE may have counted against removing the nose turret from the Lancasters.

The newly published Max Hastings book on the dams raid notes the turrets were a hangover from the prewar thinking and getting rid of the drag and weight caused would have enabled aircraft like the Lancaster to fly faster by some 50mph

Front gunners did achieve kills on overshooting enemy aircraft that had made a firing pass from the rear, indeed there’s a recorded instance of a Wellington front gunner bringing down an Me 163 in daylight. In the case of Wellingtons, one crewman often watched for fighters and fighter flares, from the astrodome, and would talk the gunners through the combat, so even if the front gunner couldn’t hit a target approaching from the rear, he’d know it was coming, and to which side of his aircraft it’d pass. The other use for the front turret gunner was a simple observational one, especially with regard to what he could see down and below, which neither the pilot or navigator could see clearly.

Thanks for your answer … I mean the range beyond which you aren’t really aiming or expecting to hit anything with any degree of force. That would be a lesser distance than the maximum potential range.

Your data support what I was thinking about any attempt to “douse searchlights”. :rolleyes:

The old Lee Enfield 303 fired the same round as the RAF Browning. It was supposed to be able to kill at one mile.
We fired them on the range at 1000 yards and, with a well aimed shot, could hit the target. Hosepiping 2 Brownings stood a good chance I guess.

Hardly surprising they struggled for altitude whe you think about it. Hanging 22000 pounds of bomb almost externally on a machine designed to carry 14000 internally is bound to have a drag penalty as well as an altitude one

Can anyone advise what, if anything, was changed weight-wise when PA474 had her mid-upper turret reinstated in the mid-70s?

I think the whole CofG thing is a bit of a red herring,for an a/c of the Lancs size 300lb/600lb is chicken feed,all large a/c have ballasting for Cof G anyway so a few extra weights in the correct position would bring the CofG back in range.
The Grand Slam carrying Lancs did have their turrets removed for weight /drag reduction and they still struggled a little for altitude,I believe they quite often bombed from below their briefed minimum safe altitude anyway.

Can anyone advise what, if anything, was changed weight-wise when PA474 had her mid-upper turret reinstated in the mid-70s?

French Lancs kept their fwd guns post war as did the Lincolns. Lancs and others operated daylight missions as well particularly in the last year of the war.

I also think the earlier comment about mid upper turrets being removed from ‘special’ and post-war Lancs in conjunction with front turret removal as a CofG correction is wrong.

The mid-upper turret would have been more of a problem to remove from a C-of-G point of view as it was heavier, weighing 699lb with guns and ammunition plus a additional 200lb for the gunner, and it was further aft, 26 feet, from the datum.

Weren’t all Lancasters originally to have been fitted with a mid-under turret also, 189lb plus 200lb for the gunner (eighth crew member) at a distance of 26.5 feet from the datum. These seem to have been removed without any trim problems, even before H2S was fitted in their place.

I agree with smith, I don’t think removing the turret would have caused a huge CofG problem, bombs releasing in the wrong order would cause a greater upset than that, and as Baz says ballast/trim weights usually appear in an aircraft somewhere. Their removal would be fairly easy to counter weight.
I also think the earlier comment about mid upper turrets being removed from ‘special’ and post-war Lancs in conjunction with front turret removal as a CofG correction is wrong. Firstly many post-war Lancs retained front turrets, and secondly the mid uppers were usually removed for extra room for equipment fit changes, or weight saving on other versions.

agree

Ah … except you’d need to remove that sort of weight/moment.

Oops! 😮 Note to self: don’t do quick trim calculations at three o’clock in the morning…..go to bed!

Even so it still shows the small scale of the problem and that it could easily be trimmed-out on a Lancaster.