Yes, but bear in mind that no aerodynamic expert would state that making the wing thicker would not appreciably add to drag. There were as many publications stating the opposite available then as there are now.

Camm wanted an efficient lifting foil for his interceptor, and he was reassured correctly that it could be thick enough to have sufficient strengh as well as being efficient. It would drag more and lift more than a thin foil, but have more or less the same efficiency. Claims that the NPL said it wouldn’t drag more ignore all the evidence presented at the time by bodies including the NPL.

Not that the extra drag of the wing by itself was that big a factor. If your wing is lifting more you fly at a reduced angle of attack for the same amount of lift. Reduced angle of attack means less drag. Not entirely self cancelling, but it’s another reason why efficiency of a wing as a lifting device was considered more important to an aeroplane’s performance than the absolute drag of the foil.

As it hàppens there were boundary layer thickening and flow seperation problems near the root that would have been lessened by either using a thinner wing, properly flat, vertical sides or a big expanding fillet – but all were to do with fuselage interaction not wing profile or thickness alone.

The NPL couldn’t warn about these because it would have taken tests on a complete Hurricane to find them (interference theory wasn’t generally up to speed in the UK, despite Ernest Ower’s best efforts). When this was done and these issues were found in late 39 by the RAE (real-world aeroplanes not aerofoil sections were more their bag), it was too late.

It may have been not being warned of ‘bad junction’ interference drag being exacerbated by thick wings that Camm was complaining about. Or it might just be that the story is entirely apocryphal.

You miss the point of Pseud’s corner. Pseud is short for ‘pseudo-intellectual’ – someone who uses long words and name-drops authors etc, but whom an educated reader can see right through because what they write carries no intelligent meaning.

To a person with no capacity to discern meaning when it is there it might look like the aim is simply to mock the use of words or references they don’t understand. It isn’t.

To use language to carry meaning it is important to be concise. That is not the same as using short words. After all, sometimes the longer but rarer word is far more precise – and sometimes it actually saves on word count, as there is no other single word for the concept. ‘Exposition’ is a good example of this.

You frequently ask others to think before posting.

Not the literary type then, John? Look up exposition. It is a standard term used when describing a narrative fiction, and it refers to the revealing of facts to the audience and characters as the plot progresses. Often these facts are just colour, sometimes they are trivial at first but become important later (think detective stories) and sometimes they are crucially important as soon as they are understood because they change everything. A lot of the powerful expositional moments in Who are of this type.

You have a habit of dismissing words you don’t encounter over a pint of Old Toejam at the Puckered Plowman as ‘psychobabble’. Which kind of reinforces my last point about resistance to mind-expansion.

One of the more clever characteristics of Who writing is the way that a viewer’s ‘background’ assumptions going into a story are challenged and overturned by various forms of exposition as the story progresses. The viewer is forced to think in terms outside of our normal frames of reference – most frequently by varying the direction or influence of ‘time’s arrow”. Which is a term frequently used by theoretical physicists, by the way, and also not psychobabble. New ideas have the effect of expanding the mind.

These things need to be paced. Hit the viewer or reader with too much shifting ground early on and the narrative looses coherence – and you lose their interest. Again, not psychobabble, just study and a tiny bit of practical experience of screenwriting.

But never having watched one you, of course, know better.

Pogno’s suggestion of H.126 is worth following up – it did have an unusual control system, including something at the tail which may well have had a differential control linkage.

..and in other news Mrs. May has put on a false beard and a Che Guevara beret.

In a statement from Downing Street she said “For each according to their greed and from each according to their ability to prop up a Government. Free Nelson Mandela with every vote! That’s right isn’t it, that’s what the kids are saying? Do you think this will work.. Oh, is this still on?”

The only original wartime airfield fencing I have come across is three strands of wire held up by rough concrete posts, maybe 10 foot spacing. There may be some left at the site in question. Easy to miss them. I agree there will be a ‘book’ specifying the design somewhere in the National Archives.

There is only a loose correlation if any between the effectiveness of air operations covering a land/sea operation and either a) visibility of aircraft immediately overhead the troops and b) ‘kill ratios’. It is very easy to get caught up in this and loose sight of the actual measure of effectiveness, which is to compare how many aircraft the luftwaffe would have hypothetically have been able to get to the beaches with how many did.

A bit like CD, though, I find the difference between percieved effectiveness and what actions did or didn’t actually make a difference fascinating. For me this extends to our ground-attack ops over France 41-43 as well as the bomber offensive.

British ground troops may not have been entirely up to speed on the best tactical use of air power in May 1940. While the RAF were learning fast, it was only the German forces who grasped that the point was never tying your aircraft to the patch of sky low down over the army and waiting for a combat there. Hence their success up to this point.