24 Jan 2023 Garand Picture of the Day - Korea

[Mark in Rochester]

Information

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[RASelkirk]

Wow, flying bananas! Never seen those choppers before, had to look them up: Piasecki H-21 Workhorse / Shawnee.

Russ

[browningautorifle]

Yep, not a common chopper to see.

[Bob Womack]

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

[jond41403]

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

[Bob Womack]

As a troop carrier, the capacity was two crewmen and eight to ten passengers.

MORE.

Without the skin:



Bob

[Bob Seijas]

Yes, IIRC it was designed to carry one squad.

[Surpmil]

Great visibility but not much structural redundancy built into that air frame.

And of course far, far too cheap to manufacture!

Wouldn't be much fun in the Korean winters either.

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.

[Flying10uk]

the Vickers Wellington method

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.

---------- Post added at 01:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:44 AM ----------

Does make me wonder what we could do with some of the high-tech modern fabrics though.

What, you mean like Kevlar and, preferably, bullet-proof?

[Surpmil]

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.

---------- Post added at 01:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:44 AM ----------



What, you mean like Kevlar and, preferably, bullet-proof?

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(?)

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.