You mean like two wing rads and a chin rad? Or a spraybar like many Reno aircraft?
Bit of a late reply, but yes, something like that. Although I doubt that the Buchon could accomodate that.
The wing of the Me109/Buchon is quite small compared to a Spit for example, and the radiators installed there are quite thin/shallow (see photo posted on page 2 of this thread of the parked Buchon). You can tell from the same photo that there is an additional radiator installed in the nose for the Merlin installation. That means that going from the DB engine to the Merlin they needed to add radiator area already and decided not to modify the wings for this (probably to avoid having to do some major aerodynamic redesign work there). Perhaps they kept all the radiators in the wings and the chin houses the oil cooler, I don’t know but the fact is there that they needed more cooling capacity.
So now you’d want to move to another engine which has 10 liters more capacity and you want to run that at racing power settings as well? Expect to have to add something P40-like to the nose, or a complete redesign of the wing rads! Spray bars are an option but remember that you need to accomodate both the bigger engine and the racing settings, I’m guessing that just running a P-51’s Merlin at racing settings with stock radiators already neccesitates a spray bar system with quite a bit of capacity. Added problem: where are you going to stick your water tank? You need both room and CG margin for this.
Conclusions: A Buchon/Me109 airframe just isn’t capable of handling anything bigger than a Merlin in my opinion. Especially since I haven’t even discussed airframe strength and stability issues yet!
Anyway, it’s always fun to discuss stuff like this. But don’t let my ramblings distract from an interesting thread like this :rolleyes:
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