The only sensible use of two Merlins for a bomber was to fit them to a Mosquito 😎

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It anyone was that interested in it, they would have taken the concept (not nesessarily the specific design) and developed it in the same way the US eventually developed jetsliners (after Comet) and rear-engined jetliners (after the Trident and Caravelle). If the concept were really practical, I would think we’d have seen large gyroplanes by now…from someone.

That doesn’t necessarily follow. It is always very hard to introduce a new concept into the market; it is commercially less risky to carry on developing a known kind of product than to strike out in some radical direction. And big companies try to minimise their commercial risks.

One example; all kinds of alternatives to the poppet-valve piston car engine have been proposed, many with clear advantages demonstrated in test-beds. Some of them have even made it into production (sleeve valves and rotary pistons). But most manufacturers aren’t interested – they prefer to continue to develop the ancient poppet valve because they understand it and are geared up to make it.

In terms of the infrastructure required, a jet airliner is just a development of a turboprop which is in turn a development of a piston-engined plane. They all need the same kind of airports. A VTOL airliner is a different matter; to be worthwhile, it has to make use of its characteristics to use city-centre landing grounds, so an entire infrastructure of such grounds, served by ground transport, has to be built. That’s a huge step, and too much of an investment risk (even if the noise problem was solved).

A similar problem affects the return of airships; various studies have shown that they could still make a worthwhile contribution in a number of roles, but there is no infrastructure in place to support them.

The story of the V-22 is a good example of the problems of selecting a highly capable – but technically new and complex – solution to a requirement. Unless the government is picking up the development tab, the industry doesn’t want to know. As it happens, I think that the gyroplane could have provided much of the performance of the V-22 at a fraction of the development time and cost.

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120 rpg definitely.

TW

Ah the Draken – one of my favourite jet fighters. I’ve always thought it was a pity that the British didn’t go into co-production with SAAB to make the Draken as the RAF’s Hunter replacement; after all, it used a British engine and British guns. I think it would have easily beaten the Mirage in the export market. However, it would have been politically virtually impossible at the time (sigh).

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PS. Was it not a major headache with the excellent F-8: Gun jamming?

Yes. The reason was the very long ammunition belt runs from the high-mounted magazines to the low-mounted guns; pulling high Gs could break or jam the ammo belts.

Incidentally, the F-8U’s 20mm cannon were quite different from the F-100’s, and fired different ammunition.

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The end of the Cold War and German Reunification happened. Spending on military equipment was drastically cut and the G11 was one of the casualties.

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There are various types of caseless ammo, but the HK G11 buried the bullet in a solid, square-section block of propellant with the primer stuck on the back (the primer burned up on ignition). The propellant was carefully prepared by Dynamit Nobel to have a very high ignition point to minimise the cook-off risk. The cartridges were kept protected inside a plastic 50-round magazine which was placed on top of the gun.

Advantages of the caseless ammo included much less weight, a smaller round which could be packed tightly, and no case extraction problems (one of the biggest causes of unreliability).

HK were bought by BAe in the early 1990s – and did the very thorough reworking of the SA80 – but were bought back into German hands in 2002 IIRC.

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