SkippyBing

According to a cutaway drawing I have, the wedge shaped attachment to the leading edge of the undercarriage strut is a footstep to assist in getting on to the wing. Having said that, I'd still like some mountaineering kit to get into the thing! Great build, I really should get round to finishing the one I started about 5 years ago...

You can't say the Navy didn't get value for money with the Firefly...

Not strictly true, the software etc. for the strike role was there from the start, they just didn't use it.

I believe the plan was that the fighter aircraft at least would be struck down in the hangar, they weren't expected to undertake a suicide mission. That's why initially the Illustrious class had a smaller air group than comparable US carriers as there was no intention to maintain a deck park. Not necessarily the best doctrine ever, but certainly more forward thinking than assuming ships would never be sunk from the air.

That was when the plan was to convert one of them to a 'proper' carrier with cats and traps, i.e. the other one wasn't being turned into a 'helicopter assault ship' it just wasn't getting catapults. Now we're back to the F-35B variant they should both be able to operate as carriers, unless someone wants to spend extra money making one of the ships somehow incapable of operating that.

True, probably a bad example on my part, however my point was that the RN had considered operating carriers close to enemy shores and taken measures to counter the threat. It would be interesting to see how an un-armoured carrier would have faired if it took the same hits that Illustrious took, e.g. would the armour piercing bombs have got through to the engine spaces?

Not according to here http://www.fleetairarmarchive.net/ships/ILLUSTRIOUS.html which states one 1100lb bomb even managed to penetrate the deck armour.

Not true in the case of the RN, who assumed they would at some point being operating near land, then assumed naval fighters wouldn't be able to hold back the high performance land based fighters, then decided making the flight deck armoured would be a suitable defence. Considering the beating Illustrious took post the Taranto raid it's reasonable to assume this strategy worked, certainly she survived a scenario which it's questionable the Enterprise would have.

Are you sure they weren't just using it to transport some ship's fenders! Oddly the Italian Navy have an AEW version of the Merlin already with a larger radome under the forward fuselage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EH101-112ASuW.jpg not sure how good it is mind.

In bringing up the weather difference my original point was that the RN's doctrine was biased towards the North Atlantic whereas the USN was biased towards the Pacific. Obviously they were, and are, both global operators but your concept of operations is going to be different if you have a main base in Scapa Flow as opposed to Pearl Harbour. If you're used to operating in the North Atlantic you're going to think differently about the problem of finding the carrier at the end of the sortie, especially before radio beacons. Or radios in the case of the Skua which really was quite stupid...

There were actually two different tanks, an internal one that went in the bomb bay, and an external one that caused the pregnant belly bulge. The latter was un-baffled and consequently unsuitable for naval use unless you wanted unused fuel sprayed across the deck after every arrested landing. All the airframes that were modified/built as Martel capable had the capability to have the bomb door tank fitted, however the RN examples had blanking plates fitted over the fixing points. There were separate mod numbers for the blanking plate fit and the fuel tank fit.

I don't think you could get Martel or an LGB in the bomb bay, for the former the attachment points would leave it overlapping the fuselage, for the latter I don't think they entered service before the bomb bay tanks were permanent fits. That's not to say you couldn't with a bit of fettling but I haven't seem any evidence of either being used.

I've got the S1 pilot's notes on PDF, I'll see if I can extract the cockpit photos tomorrow. It is more or less the same as the S2 bar a few radios being moved around.

It depends, the Fulmar design was drawn up before the advent of the sort of radio nav aids that made finding the ship 'easy' and with the intention of operating at range from the fleet to hack any shadowing aircraft. In these conditions you need an Observer if you're going to get back to mother in night or bad weather. Although other navies didn't come to this conclusion their area of operations was generally different i.e. the Pacific where bad weather was less of a concern, as evidenced by the open bows on US and Japanese ships of the time. The Fulmar wasn't intended on countering land based fighters so the performance sacrifice to get the range and crew compliment was less of a concern. As a counterpoint how would the Spitfire have done performing the Fulmar's role on a stormy winter's night in the North Atlantic? It certainly wouldn't have the range and if it did, if the pilot managed to find the carrier again he'd probably write it off on recovery, where the Seafire was useful was defending against land based fighters when the ship was sufficiently close to shore that the navigation issue became moot. Was the Fulmar a great fighter, no, but then it wasn't a failure either.

That would be the Fulmar that was the FAA's highest scoring type and the Firefly that could out turn the Zero and shot down Hyabusa?