Hurricane with contra prop

In an aged book about the Hurricane I have a photo that shows what is captioned as a mock up of Hurricane with a barbette on starboard side of the cockpit with 2 Lewis guns contained within said structure. Presumably the pilot was supposed to stop the war change the ammunition drum and then start fighting again. Caption does not say if a second barbette was fitted on the port side.

AND underneath that photo, another photo illustrating a partially complete Hurricane on floats. The Narvik Affair time of 1940, maybe ??

Censored! Clearly far more secret than the prop…

Where’s the undercarriage?

That was my thought. It has that “smooth” look that the retouched photos of the time tend to have.

If I was to hazard a guess, I would say it’s a doctored photo for the purpose of illustration. There are countless examples of photographs that have been adjusted in technical publications to either illustrate a point or make things clearer. Some actual cut-and-paste, deft airbrushing and then re-photographing the result and you’d be surprised what they come up with.

So I’d say it was a reference picture of a Hurricane that was doctored to illustrate the subject.

It looks a bit “off”. There’s no air intake under the cowlings, for instance.