https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...s3233388-1.jpg
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...002C1198-1.jpg
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Wow, flying bananas! Never seen those choppers before, had to look them up: Piasecki H-21 Workhorse / Shawnee.
Russ
Yep, not a common chopper to see.
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...6c7f7f69-1.jpg
Technically, these are a predecessor, the Piaseki HRP that appear to be HRP-1s, having doped fabric skins over mild steel tubing and wooden ribs. Note the forward-tipped canopy. MORE
Bob
First time seeing one as well, I love it! I wonder how many soldiers it could carry at one time? Looks like quite a few. I love all the open window in the cockpit. Must have been an unreal experience to fly one of those. It reminds me of the gondola hanging from a blimp with rotor blades haha
As a troop carrier, the capacity was two crewmen and eight to ten passengers.
MORE.
Without the skin:
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo..._Jun1953-1.jpg
Bob
Yes, IIRC it was designed to carry one squad.
Great visibility but not much structural redundancy built into that air frame.
And of course far, far too cheap to manufacture! :D
Wouldn't be much fun in the Korean winters either. :ugh:
Something like the Vickers Wellington method would have been much more survivable.
Does make me wonder what we could do with some of the high-tech modern fabrics though.
Geodetic Construction. I think as it, as a simple explanation, as the shortest distance between two fixed points on a curved surface. It is much more complicated than that, of-course, involving two intersecting arcs on a curved surface, resulting in the forces cancelling each other out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Surpmil
---------- Post added at 01:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:44 AM ----------
What, you mean like Kevlar and, preferably, bullet-proof?Quote:
Originally Posted by Surpmil
Back when i was doing government security I had the pleasure of meeting Frank Piasecki on a number occasions. He was aviation genius, he always wore red suspenders. Going into his company was like going back in time to an old design bureau where everything was on drafting boards with pencils. I remember one of his projects was taking four surplus H-34 helicopters and attaching them to a non-rigid balloon for develop a heavy lift "helicopter". I remember it crashing at Lakehurst NAS during one of the test not far from where the Hindenberg crashed and exploded.
If the helmets are anything to go by, the weight of bonded kevlar thick enough to have that sort of property is probably not much less than a metallic armour(?)Quote:
Originally Posted by Flying10uk
No doubt thin, hard armour skins over bonded kevlar etc. has already been tried.
Bonded cloths are certainly much simpler and cheaper to work with than metals though: no need for massive hydraulic presses or CNC mills. Somewhat analogous to the Mosquito in WWII Heavy Press Program - Wikipedia
For all its apparent complexity that geodesic framing was actually quite simple mechanically, and IIRC of a very limited number of different parts.