Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: P-40 Warhawk, SR-71 Blackbird, Naval Aircraft Factory N3N seaplane, Space Shuttle Enterprise

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: P-40 Warhawk, SR-71 Blackbird, Naval Aircraft Factory N3N seaplane, Space Shuttle Enterprise

A few nice plastic auto handle china images I found:

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: P-40 Warhawk, SR-71 Blackbird, Naval Aircraft Factory N3N seaplane, Space Shuttle Enterprise
plastic auto handle china
Image by Chris Devers
Quoting Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum | Curtiss P-40E Warhawk (Kittyhawk IA):

Whether known as the Warhawk, Tomahawk, or Kittyhawk, the Curtiss P-40 proved to be a successful, versatile fighter during the first half of World War II. The shark-mouthed Tomahawks that Gen. Claire Chennault’s "Flying Tigers" flew in China against the Japanese remain among the most popular airplanes of the war. P-40E pilot Lt. Boyd D. Wagner became the first American ace of World War II when he shot down six Japanese aircraft in the Philippines in mid-December 1941.

Curtiss-Wright built this airplane as Model 87-A3 and delivered it to Canada as a Kittyhawk I in 1941. It served until 1946 in No. 111 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force. U.S. Air Force personnel at Andrews Air Force Base restored it in 1975 to represent an aircraft of the 75th Fighter Squadron, 23rd Fighter Group, 14th Air Force.

Donated by the Exchange Club in Memory of Kellis Forbes.

Manufacturer:
Curtiss Aircraft Company

Date:
1939

Country of Origin:
United States of America

Dimensions:
Overall: 330 x 970cm, 2686kg, 1140cm (10ft 9 15/16in. x 31ft 9 7/8in., 5921.6lb., 37ft 4 13/16in.)

Materials:
All-metal, semi-monocoque

Physical Description:
Single engine, single seat, fighter aircraft.

• • • • •

See more photos of this, and the Wikipedia article.

Details, quoting from Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum | Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird:

No reconnaissance aircraft in history has operated globally in more hostile airspace or with such complete impunity than the SR-71, the world’s fastest jet-propelled aircraft. The Blackbird’s performance and operational achievements placed it at the pinnacle of aviation technology developments during the Cold War.

This Blackbird accrued about 2,800 hours of flight time during 24 years of active service with the U.S. Air Force. On its last flight, March 6, 1990, Lt. Col. Ed Yielding and Lt. Col. Joseph Vida set a speed record by flying from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 20 seconds, averaging 3,418 kilometers (2,124 miles) per hour. At the flight’s conclusion, they landed at Washington-Dulles International Airport and turned the airplane over to the Smithsonian.

Transferred from the United States Air Force.

Manufacturer:
Lockheed Aircraft Corporation

Designer:
Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson

Date:
1964

Country of Origin:
United States of America

Dimensions:
Overall: 18ft 5 15/16in. x 55ft 7in. x 107ft 5in., 169998.5lb. (5.638m x 16.942m x 32.741m, 77110.8kg)
Other: 18ft 5 15/16in. x 107ft 5in. x 55ft 7in. (5.638m x 32.741m x 16.942m)

Materials:
Titanium

Physical Description:
Twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic strategic reconnaissance aircraft; airframe constructed largley of titanium and its alloys; vertical tail fins are constructed of a composite (laminated plastic-type material) to reduce radar cross-section; Pratt and Whitney J58 (JT11D-20B) turbojet engines feature large inlet shock cones.

• • • • •

Quoting Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum | Naval Aircraft Factory N3N:

In 1934 the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia was tasked to manufacture a new primary trainer for the U.S. Navy. Following successful tests, this little biplane trainer was built in both land and seaplane versions. The Navy initially ordered 179 N3N-1 models, and the factory began producing more than 800 N3N-3 models in 1938. U.S. Navy primary flight training schools used N3Ns extensively throughout World War II. A few of the seaplane version were retained for primary training at the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1961 they became the last biplanes retired from U.S. military service.

This N3N-3 was transferred from Cherry Point to Annapolis in 1946, where it served as a seaplane trainer. It was restored and displayed at the Naval Academy Museum before being transferred here.

Transferred from the United States Navy

Manufacturer:
Naval Aircraft Factory

Date:
1941

Country of Origin:
United States of America

Dimensions:
Overall: 10ft 9 15/16in. x 25ft 7 1/16in. x 34ft 1 7/16in., 2090lb. (330 x 780 x 1040cm, 948kg)

Materials:
bolted steel-tube fuselage construction with removable side panels wings, also constructed internally of all metal, covered with fabric like the fuselage and tail.

Physical Description:
Bright yellow bi-plane, hand crank start. Cockpit instrumentation consists of an altimeter, tachometer, airspeed indicator, compass, turn and bank indicator, and a combination fuel and oil temperature and pressure gauge, floats.

• • • • •

See more photos of this, and the Wikipedia article.

Details, quoting from Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum | Space Shuttle Enterprise:

Manufacturer:
Rockwell International Corporation

Country of Origin:
United States of America

Dimensions:
Overall: 57 ft. tall x 122 ft. long x 78 ft. wing span, 150,000 lb.
(1737.36 x 3718.57 x 2377.44cm, 68039.6kg)

Materials:
Aluminum airframe and body with some fiberglass features; payload bay doors are graphite epoxy composite; thermal tiles are simulated (polyurethane foam) except for test samples of actual tiles and thermal blankets.

The first Space Shuttle orbiter, "Enterprise," is a full-scale test vehicle used for flights in the atmosphere and tests on the ground; it is not equipped for spaceflight. Although the airframe and flight control elements are like those of the Shuttles flown in space, this vehicle has no propulsion system and only simulated thermal tiles because these features were not needed for atmospheric and ground tests. "Enterprise" was rolled out at Rockwell International’s assembly facility in Palmdale, California, in 1976. In 1977, it entered service for a nine-month-long approach-and-landing test flight program. Thereafter it was used for vibration tests and fit checks at NASA centers, and it also appeared in the 1983 Paris Air Show and the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans. In 1985, NASA transferred "Enterprise" to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Transferred from National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Nice Auto Moulds Factory China photos

Nice Auto Moulds Factory China photos

Check out these auto moulds factory china images:

Churchill Club Top 10 Tech Trends Debate
auto moulds factory china
Image by jurvetson
I just got back from the Churchill Club’s 13th Annual Top 10 Tech Trends Debate (site).

Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI, presented their trends from the podium, which are meant to be “provocative, plausible, debatable, and that it will be clear within the next 1-3 years whether or not they will actually become trends.”

Then the panelists debated them. Speaking is Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the U.S., and smirking to his left is Paul Saffo, and then Ajay Senkut from Clarium, then me.

Here are SRI’s 2011 Top 10 Tech Trends [and my votes]:

Trend 1. Age Before Beauty. Technology is designed for—and disproportionately used by—the young. But the young are getting fewer. The big market will be older people. The aging generation has grown up with, and is comfortable with, most technology—but not with today’s latest technology products. Technology product designers will discover the Baby Boomer’s technology comfort zone and will leverage it in the design of new devices. One example today is the Jitterbug cell phone with a large keypad for easy dialing and powerful speakers for clear sound. The trend is for Baby Boomers to dictate the technology products of the future.

[I voted YES, it’s an important and underserved market, but for tech products, they are not the early adopters. The key issue is age-inspired entrepreneurship. How can we get the entrepreneurial mind focused on this important market?]

Trend 2. The Doctor Is In. Some of our political leaders say that we have "the best medical care system in the world". Think what it must be like in the rest of the world! There are many problems, but one is the high cost of delivering expert advice. With the development of practical virtual personal assistants, powered by artificial intelligence and pervasive low-cost sensors, “the doctor will be in”—online—for people around the world. Instead of the current Web paradigm: “fill out this form, and we’ll show you information about what might be ailing you”, this will be true diagnosis—supporting, and in some cases replacing—human medical practitioners. We were sending X-rays to India to be read; now India is connecting to doctors here for diagnosis in India. We see the idea in websites that now offer online videoconference interaction with a doctor. The next step is automation. The trend is toward complete automation: a combination of artificial intelligence, the Internet, and very low-cost medical instrumentation to provide high-quality diagnostics and advice—including answering patient questions—online to a worldwide audience.

[NO. Most doctor check-ups and diagnoses will still need to be conducted in-person (blood tests, physical exams, etc). Sensor technology can’t completely replace human medical practitioners in the near future. Once we have the physical interface (people for now), then the networking and AI capabilities can engage, bringing specialist reactions to locally collected data. The real near-term trend in point-of-care is the adoption of iPads/phones connected to cloud services like ePocrates and Athenahealth and soon EMRs.]

Trend 3. Made for Me. Manufacturing is undergoing a revolution. It is becoming technically and economically possible to create products that are unique to the specific needs of individuals. For example, a cell phone that has only the hardware you need to support the features you want—making it lighter, thinner, more efficient, much cheaper, and easier to use. This level of customization is being made possible by converging technical advances: new 3D printing technology is well documented, and networked micro-robotics is following. 3D printing now includes applications in jewelry, industrial design, and dentistry. While all of us may not be good product designers, we have different needs, and we know what we want. The trend is toward practical, one-off production of physical goods in widely distributed micro-factories: the ultimate customization of products. The trend is toward practical, one-off production of physical goods in widely distributed micro-factories: the ultimate customization of products.

[NO. Personalization is happening just fine at the software level. The UI skins and app code is changeable at zero incremental cost. Code permeates outward into the various vessels we build for it. The iPhone. Soon, the car (e.g. Tesla Sedan). Even the electrical circuits (when using an FPGA). This will extend naturally to biological code, with DNA synthesis costs plummeting (but that will likely stay centralized in BioFabs for the next 3 years. When it comes to building custom physical things, the cost and design challenges relegate it to prototyping, tinkering and hacks. Too many people have a difficult time in 3D content creation. The problem is the 2D interfaces of mouse and screen. Perhaps a multitouch interface to digital clay could help, where the polygons snap to fit after the form is molded by hand.]

Trend 4. Pay Me Now. Information about our personal behavior and characteristics is exploited regularly for commercial purposes, often returning little or no value to us, and sometimes without our knowledge. This knowledge is becoming a key asset and a major competitive advantage for the companies that gather it. Think of your supermarket club card. These knowledge-gatherers will need to get smarter and more aggressive in convincing us to share our information with them and not with their competitors. If TV advertisers could know who the viewers are, the value of the commercials would go up enormously. The trend is technology and business models based on attracting consumers to share large amounts of information exclusively with service providers.

[YES, but it’s nothing new. Amazon makes more on merchandising than product sales margin. And, certain companies are getting better and better at acquiring customer information and personalizing offerings specifically to these customers. RichRelevance provides this for ecommerce (driving 25% of all e-commerce on Black Friday). Across all those vendors, the average lift from personalizing the shopping experience: 15% increase in overall sales and 8% increase in long-term profitability. But, simply being explicit and transparent to the consumer about the source of the data can increase the effectiveness of targeted programs by up to 100% (e.g., saying “Because you bought this product and other consumers who bought it also bought this other product" yielded a 100% increase in product recommendation effectiveness in numerous A/B tests). Social graph is incredibly valuable as a marketing tool.]

Trend 5. Rosie, At Last. We’ve been waiting a long time for robots to live in and run our homes, like Rosie in the Jetsons’ household. It’s happening a little now: robots are finally starting to leave the manufacturing floor and enter people’s homes, offices, and highways. Robots can climb walls, fly, and run. We all know the Roomba for cleaning floors—and now there’s the Verro for your pool. Real-time vision and other sensors, and affordable precise manipulation, are enabling robots to assist in our care, drive our cars, and protect our homes and property. We need to broaden our view of robots and the forms they will take—think of a self-loading robot-compliant dishwasher or a self-protecting house. The trend is robots becoming embedded in our environments, and taking advantage of the cloud, to understand and fulfill our needs.

[NO. Not in 3 years. Wanting it badly does not make it so. But I just love that Google RoboCar. Robots are not leaving the factory floor – that’s where the opportunity for newer robots and even humanoid robots will begin. There is plenty of factory work still to be automated. Rodney Brooks of MIT thinks they can be cheaper than the cheapest outsourced labor. So the robots are coming, to the factory and the roads to start, and then the home.]

Trend 6. Social, Really. The rise of social networks is well documented, but they’re not really social networks. They’re a mix of friends, strangers, organizations, hucksters—it’s more like walking through a rowdy crowd in Times Square at night with a group of friends. There is a growing need for social networks that reflect the fundamental nature of human relationships: known identities, mutual trust, controlled levels of intimacy, and boundaries of shared information. The trend is the rise of true social networks, designed to maintain real, respectful relationships online.

[YES. The ambient intimacy of Facebook is leading to some startling statistics on fB evidence reuse by divorce lawyers (80%) and employment rejections (70%). There are differing approaches to solve this problem: Altly’s alternative networks with partioning and control, Jildy’s better filtering and auto-segmentation, and Path’s 50 friend limit.]

Trend 7. In-Your-Face Augmented Reality. With ever-cheaper computation and advances in computer vision technology, augmented reality is becoming practical, even in mobile devices. We will move beyond expensive telepresence environments and virtual reality games to fully immersive environments—in the office, on the factory floor, in medical care facilities, and in new entertainment venues. I once did an experiment where a person came into a room and sat down at a desk against a large, 3D, high-definition TV display. The projected image showed a room with a similar desk up against the screen. The person would put on 3D glasses, and then a projected person would enter and sit down at the other table. After talking for 5 to 10 minutes, the projected person would stand up and put their hand out. Most of the time, the first person would also stand up and put their hand into the screen—they had quickly adapted and forgotten that the other person was not in the room. Augmented reality will become indistinguishable from reality. The trend is an enchanted world— The trend is hyper-resolution augmented reality and hyper-accurate artificial people and objects that fundamentally enhance people’s experience of the world.

[NO, lenticular screens are too expensive and 3D glasses are a pain in the cortex. Augmented reality with iPhones is great, and pragmatic, but not a top 10 trend IMHO]

Trend 8. Engineering by Biologists.
Biologists and engineers are different kinds of people—unless they are working on synthetic biology. We know about genetically engineered foods and creatures, such as gold fish in multiple other colors. Next we’ll have biologically engineered circuits and devices. Evolution has created adaptive processing and system resiliency that is much more advanced than anything we’ve been able to design. We are learning how to tap into that natural expertise, designing devices using the mechanisms of biology. We have already seen simple biological circuits in the laboratory. The trend is practical, engineered artifacts, devices, and computers based on biology rather than just on silicon.

[YES, and NO because it was so badly mangled as a trend. For the next few years, these approaches will be used for fuels and chemicals and materials processing because they lend themselves to a 3D fluid medium. Then 2D self-assembling monolayers. And eventually chips , starting with memory and sensor arrays long before heterogeneous logic. And processes of biology will be an inspiration throughout (evolution, self-assembly, etc.). Having made predictions along these themes for about a decade now, the wording of this one frustrated me]

Trend 9. ‘Tis a Gift to be Simple. Cyber attacks are ever more frequent and effective. Most attacks exploit holes that are inevitable given the complexity of the software products we use every day. Cyber researchers really understand this. To avoid these vulnerabilities, some cyber researchers are beginning to use only simple infrastructure and applications that are throwbacks to the computing world of two decades ago. As simplicity is shown to be an effective approach for avoiding attack, it will become the guiding principle of software design. The trend is cyber defense through widespread adoption of simple, low-feature software for consumers and businesses.

[No. I understand the advantages of being open, and of heterogencity of code (to avoid monoculture collapse), but we have long ago left the domain of simple. Yes, Internet transport protocols won via simplicity. The presentation layer, not so much. If you want dumb pipes, you need smart edges, and smart edges can be hacked. Graham Spencer gave a great talk at SFI: the trend towards transport simplicity (e.g. dumb pipes) and "intelligence in the edges" led to mixing code and data, which in turn led to all kinds of XSS-like attacks. Drive-by downloading (enabled by XSS) is the most popular vehicle for delivering malware these days.]

Trend 10. Reverse Innovation. Mobile communication is proliferating at an astonishing rate in developing countries as price-points drop and wireless infrastructure improves. As developing countries leapfrog the need for physical infrastructure and brokers, using mobile apps to conduct micro-scale business and to improve quality of life, they are innovating new applications. The developing world is quickly becoming the largest market we’ve ever seen—for mobile computing and much more. The trend is for developing countries to turn around the flow of innovation: Silicon Valley will begin to learn more from them about innovative applications than they need to learn from us about the underlying technology.

[YES, globalization is a megatrend still in the making. The mobile markets are clearly China, India and Korea, with app layer innovation increasingly originating there. Not completely of course, but we have a lot to learn from the early-adopter economies.]

Cool Auto Moulds Factory China images

Cool Auto Moulds Factory China images

Some cool auto moulds factory china images:

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: Lockheed P-38J-10-LO Lightning
auto moulds factory china
Image by Chris Devers
See more photos of this, and the Wikipedia article.

Details, quoting from Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum | Lockheed P-38J-10-LO Lightning

In the P-38 Lockheed engineer Clarence "Kelly" Johnson and his team of designers created one of the most successful twin-engine fighters ever flown by any nation. From 1942 to 1945, U. S. Army Air Forces pilots flew P-38s over Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific, and from the frozen Aleutian Islands to the sun-baked deserts of North Africa. Lightning pilots in the Pacific theater downed more Japanese aircraft than pilots flying any other Allied warplane.

Maj. Richard I. Bong, America’s leading fighter ace, flew this P-38J-10-LO on April 16, 1945, at Wright Field, Ohio, to evaluate an experimental method of interconnecting the movement of the throttle and propeller control levers. However, his right engine exploded in flight before he could conduct the experiment.

Transferred from the United States Air Force.

Manufacturer:
Lockheed Aircraft Company

Date:
1943

Country of Origin:
United States of America

Dimensions:
Overall: 390 x 1170cm, 6345kg, 1580cm (12ft 9 9/16in. x 38ft 4 5/8in., 13988.2lb., 51ft 10 1/16in.)

Materials:
All-metal

Physical Description:
Twin-tail boom and twin-engine fighter; tricycle landing gear.

Long Description:
From 1942 to 1945, the thunder of P-38 Lightnings was heard around the world. U. S. Army pilots flew the P-38 over Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific; from the frozen Aleutian Islands to the sun-baked deserts of North Africa. Measured by success in combat, Lockheed engineer Clarence "Kelly" Johnson and a team of designers created the most successful twin-engine fighter ever flown by any nation. In the Pacific Theater, Lightning pilots downed more Japanese aircraft than pilots flying any other Army Air Forces warplane.

Johnson and his team conceived this twin-engine, single-pilot fighter airplane in 1936 and the Army Air Corps authorized the firm to build it in June 1937. Lockheed finished constructing the prototype XP-38 and delivered it to the Air Corps on New Year’s Day, 1939. Air Corps test pilot and P-38 project officer, Lt. Benjamin S. Kelsey, first flew the aircraft on January 27. Losing this prototype in a crash at Mitchel Field, New York, with Kelsey at the controls, did not deter the Air Corps from ordering 13 YP-38s for service testing on April 27. Kelsey survived the crash and remained an important part of the Lightning program. Before the airplane could be declared ready for combat, Lockheed had to block the effects of high-speed aerodynamic compressibility and tail buffeting, and solve other problems discovered during the service tests.

The most vexing difficulty was the loss of control in a dive caused by aerodynamic compressibility. During late spring 1941, Air Corps Major Signa A. Gilke encountered serious trouble while diving his Lightning at high-speed from an altitude of 9,120 m (30,000 ft). When he reached an indicated airspeed of about 515 kph (320 mph), the airplane’s tail began to shake violently and the nose dropped until the dive was almost vertical. Signa recovered and landed safely and the tail buffet problem was soon resolved after Lockheed installed new fillets to improve airflow where the cockpit gondola joined the wing center section. Seventeen months passed before engineers began to determine what caused the Lightning’s nose to drop. They tested a scale model P-38 in the Ames Laboratory wind tunnel operated by the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) and found that shock waves formed when airflow over the wing leading edges reached transonic speeds. The nose drop and loss of control was never fully remedied but Lockheed installed dive recovery flaps under each wing in 1944. These devices slowed the P-38 enough to allow the pilot to maintain control when diving at high-speed.

Just as the development of the North American P-51 Mustang, Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, and the Vought F4U Corsair (see NASM collection for these aircraft) pushed the limits of aircraft performance into unexplored territory, so too did P-38 development. The type of aircraft envisioned by the Lockheed design team and Air Corps strategists in 1937 did not appear until June 1944. This protracted shakedown period mirrors the tribulations suffered by Vought in sorting out the many technical problems that kept F4U Corsairs off U. S. Navy carrier decks until the end of 1944.

Lockheed’s efforts to trouble-shoot various problems with the design also delayed high-rate, mass production. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the company had delivered only 69 Lightnings to the Army. Production steadily increased and at its peak in 1944, 22 sub-contractors built various Lightning components and shipped them to Burbank, California, for final assembly. Consolidated-Vultee (Convair) subcontracted to build the wing center section and the firm later became prime manufacturer for 2,000 P-38Ls but that company’s Nashville plant completed only 113 examples of this Lightning model before war’s end. Lockheed and Convair finished 10,038 P-38 aircraft including 500 photo-reconnaissance models. They built more L models, 3,923, than any other version.

To ease control and improve stability, particularly at low speeds, Lockheed equipped all Lightnings, except a batch ordered by Britain, with propellers that counter-rotated. The propeller to the pilot’s left turned counter-clockwise and the propeller to his right turned clockwise, so that one propeller countered the torque and airflow effects generated by the other. The airplane also performed well at high speeds and the definitive P-38L model could make better than 676 kph (420 mph) between 7,600 and 9,120 m (25,000 and 30,000 ft). The design was versatile enough to carry various combinations of bombs, air-to-ground rockets, and external fuel tanks. The multi-engine configuration reduced the Lightning loss-rate to anti-aircraft gunfire during ground attack missions. Single-engine airplanes equipped with power plants cooled by pressurized liquid, such as the North American P-51 Mustang (see NASM collection), were particularly vulnerable. Even a small nick in one coolant line could cause the engine to seize in a matter of minutes.

The first P-38s to reach the Pacific combat theater arrived on April 4, 1942, when a version of the Lightning that carried reconnaissance cameras (designated the F-4), joined the 8th Photographic Squadron based in Australia. This unit launched the first P-38 combat missions over New Guinea and New Britain during April. By May 29, the first 25 P-38s had arrived in Anchorage, Alaska. On August 9, pilots of the 343rd Fighter Group, Eleventh Air Force, flying the P-38E, shot down a pair of Japanese flying boats.

Back in the United States, Army Air Forces leaders tried to control a rumor that Lightnings killed their own pilots. On August 10, 1942, Col. Arthur I. Ennis, Chief of U. S. Army Air Forces Public Relations in Washington, told a fellow officer "… Here’s what the 4th Fighter [training] Command is up against… common rumor out there that the whole West Coast was filled with headless bodies of men who jumped out of P-38s and had their heads cut off by the propellers." Novice Lightning pilots unfamiliar with the correct bailout procedures actually had more to fear from the twin-boom tail, if an emergency dictated taking to the parachute but properly executed, Lightning bailouts were as safe as parachuting from any other high-performance fighter of the day. Misinformation and wild speculation about many new aircraft was rampant during the early War period.

Along with U. S. Navy Grumman F4F Wildcats (see NASM collection) and Curtiss P-40 Warhawks (see NASM collection), Lightnings were the first American fighter airplanes capable of consistently defeating Japanese fighter aircraft. On November 18, men of the 339th Fighter Squadron became the first Lightning pilots to attack Japanese fighters. Flying from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, they claimed three during a mission to escort Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers (see NASM collection).

On April 18, 1943, fourteen P-38 pilots from the 70th and the 339th Fighter Squadrons, 347th Fighter Group, accomplished one of the most important Lightning missions of the war. American ULTRA cryptanalysts had decoded Japanese messages that revealed the timetable for a visit to the front by the commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. This charismatic leader had crafted the plan to attack Pearl Harbor and Allied strategists believed his loss would severely cripple Japanese morale. The P-38 pilots flew 700 km (435 miles) at heights from 3-15 m (10-50 feet) above the ocean to avoid detection. Over the coast of Bougainville, they intercepted a formation of two Mitsubishi G4M BETTY bombers (see NASM collection) carrying the Admiral and his staff, and six Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters (see NASM collection) providing escort. The Lightning pilots downed both bombers but lost Lt. Ray Hine to a Zero.

In Europe, the first Americans to down a Luftwaffe aircraft were Lt. Elza E. Shahan flying a 27th Fighter Squadron P-38E, and Lt. J. K. Shaffer flying a Curtiss P-40 (see NASM collection) in the 33rd Fighter Squadron. The two flyers shared the destruction of a Focke-Wulf Fw 200C-3 Condor maritime strike aircraft over Iceland on August 14, 1942. Later that month, the 1st fighter group accepted Lightnings and began combat operations from bases in England but this unit soon moved to fight in North Africa. More than a year passed before the P-38 reappeared over Western Europe. While the Lightning was absent, U. S. Army Air Forces strategists had relearned a painful lesson: unescorted bombers cannot operate successfully in the face of determined opposition from enemy fighters. When P-38s returned to England, the primary mission had become long-range bomber escort at ranges of about 805 kms (500 miles) and at altitudes above 6,080 m (20,000 ft).

On October 15, 1943, P-38H pilots in the 55th Fighter Group flew their first combat mission over Europe at a time when the need for long-range escorts was acute. Just the day before, German fighter pilots had destroyed 60 of 291 Eighth Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses (see NASM collection) during a mission to bomb five ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, Germany. No air force could sustain a loss-rate of nearly 20 percent for more than a few missions but these targets lay well beyond the range of available escort fighters (Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, see NASM collection). American war planners hoped the long-range capabilities of the P-38 Lightning could halt this deadly trend, but the very high and very cold environment peculiar to the European air war caused severe power plant and cockpit heating difficulties for the Lightning pilots. The long-range escort problem was not completely solved until the North American P-51 Mustang (see NASM collection) began to arrive in large numbers early in 1944.

Poor cockpit heating in the H and J model Lightnings made flying and fighting at altitudes that frequently approached 12,320 m (40,000 ft) nearly impossible. This was a fundamental design flaw that Kelly Johnson and his team never anticipated when they designed the airplane six years earlier. In his seminal work on the Allison V-1710 engine, Daniel Whitney analyzed in detail other factors that made the P-38 a disappointing airplane in combat over Western Europe.

• Many new and inexperienced pilots arrived in England during December 1943, along with the new J model P-38 Lightning.

• J model rated at 1,600 horsepower vs. 1,425 for earlier H model Lightnings. This power setting required better maintenance between flights. It appears this work was not done in many cases.

• During stateside training, Lightning pilots were taught to fly at high rpm settings and low engine manifold pressure during cruise flight. This was very hard on the engines, and not in keeping with technical directives issued by Allison and Lockheed.

• The quality of fuel in England may have been poor, TEL (tetraethyl lead) fuel additive appeared to condense inside engine induction manifolds, causing detonation (destructive explosion of fuel mixture rather than controlled burning).

• Improved turbo supercharger intercoolers appeared on the J model P-38. These devices greatly reduced manifold temperatures but this encouraged TEL condensation in manifolds during cruise flight and increased spark plug fouling.

Using water injection to minimize detonation might have reduced these engine problems. Both the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and the North American P-51 Mustang (see NASM collection) were fitted with water injection systems but not the P-38. Lightning pilots continued to fly, despite these handicaps.

During November 1942, two all-Lightning fighter groups, the 1st and the 14th, began operating in North Africa. In the Mediterranean Theater, P-38 pilots flew more sorties than Allied pilots flying any other type of fighter. They claimed 608 enemy a/c destroyed in the air, 123 probably destroyed and 343 damaged, against the loss of 131 Lightnings.

In the war against Japan, the P-38 truly excelled. Combat rarely occurred above 6,080 m (20,000 ft) and the engine and cockpit comfort problems common in Europe never plagued pilots in the Pacific Theater. The Lightning’s excellent range was used to full advantage above the vast expanses of water. In early 1945, Lightning pilots of the 12th Fighter Squadron, 18th Fighter Group, flew a mission that lasted 10 ½ hours and covered more than 3,220 km (2,000 miles). In August, P-38 pilots established the world’s long-distance record for a World War II combat fighter when they flew from the Philippines to the Netherlands East Indies, a distance of 3,703 km (2,300 miles). During early 1944, Lightning pilots in the 475th Fighter Group began the ‘race of aces.’ By March, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Lynch had scored 21 victories before he fell to antiaircraft gunfire while strafing enemy ships. Major Thomas B. McGuire downed 38 Japanese aircraft before he was killed when his P-38 crashed at low altitude in early January 1945. Major Richard I. Bong became America’s highest scoring fighter ace (40 victories) but died in the crash of a Lockheed P-80 (see NASM collection) on August 6, 1945.

Museum records show that Lockheed assigned the construction number 422-2273 to the National Air and Space Museum’s P-38. The Army Air Forces accepted this Lightning as a P-38J-l0-LO on November 6, 1943, and the service identified the airplane with the serial number 42-67762. Recent investigations conducted by a team of specialists at the Paul E. Garber Facility, and Herb Brownstein, a volunteer in the Aeronautics Division at the National Air and Space Museum, have revealed many hitherto unknown aspects to the history of this aircraft.

Brownstein examined NASM files and documents at the National Archives. He discovered that a few days after the Army Air Forces (AAF) accepted this airplane, the Engineering Division at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, granted Lockheed permission to convert this P-38 into a two-seat trainer. The firm added a seat behind the pilot to accommodate an instructor who would train civilian pilots in instrument flying techniques. Once trained, these test pilots evaluated new Lightnings fresh off the assembly line.

In a teletype sent by the Engineering Division on March 2, 1944, Brownstein also discovered that this P-38 was released to Colonel Benjamin S. Kelsey from March 3 to April 10, 1944, to conduct special tests. This action was confirmed the following day in a cable from the War Department. This same pilot, then a Lieutenant, flew the XP-38 across the United States in 1939 and survived the crash that destroyed this Lightning at Mitchel Field, New York. In early 1944, Kelsey was assigned to the Eighth Air Force in England and he apparently traveled to the Lockheed factory at Burbank to pick up the P-38. Further information about these tests and Kelsey’s involvement remain an intriguing question.

One of Brownstein’s most important discoveries was a small file rich with information about the NASM Lightning. This file contained a cryptic reference to a "Major Bong" who flew the NASM P-38 on April 16, 1945, at Wright Field. Bong had planned to fly for an hour to evaluate an experimental method of interconnecting the movement of the throttle and propeller control levers. His flight ended after twenty-minutes when "the right engine blew up before I had a chance [to conduct the test]." The curator at the Richard I. Bong Heritage Center confirmed that America’s highest scoring ace made this flight in the NASM P-38 Lightning.

Working in Building 10 at the Paul E. Garber Facility, Rob Mawhinney, Dave Wilson, Wil Lee, Bob Weihrauch, Jim Purton, and Heather Hutton spent several months during the spring and summer of 2001 carefully disassembling, inspecting, and cleaning the NASM Lightning. They found every hardware modification consistent with a model J-25 airplane, not the model J-10 painted in the data block beneath the artifact’s left nose. This fact dovetails perfectly with knowledge uncovered by Brownstein. On April 10, the Engineering Division again cabled Lockheed asking the company to prepare 42-67762 for transfer to Wright Field "in standard configuration." The standard P-38 configuration at that time was the P-38J-25. The work took several weeks and the fighter does not appear on Wright Field records until May 15, 1944. On June 9, the Flight Test Section at Wright Field released the fighter for flight trials aimed at collecting pilot comments on how the airplane handled.

Wright Field’s Aeromedical Laboratory was the next organization involved with this P-38. That unit installed a kit on July 26 that probably measured the force required to move the control wheel left and right to actuate the power-boosted ailerons installed in all Lightnings beginning with version J-25. From August 12-16, the Power Plant Laboratory carried out tests to measure the hydraulic pump temperatures on this Lightning. Then beginning September 16 and lasting about ten days, the Bombing Branch, Armament Laboratory, tested type R-3 fragmentation bomb racks. The work appears to have ended early in December. On June 20, 1945, the AAF Aircraft Distribution Office asked that the Air Technical Service Command transfer the Lightning from Wright Field to Altus Air Force Base, Oklahoma, a temporary holding area for Air Force museum aircraft. The P-38 arrived at the Oklahoma City Air Depot on June 27, 1945, and mechanics prepared the fighter for flyable storage.

Airplane Flight Reports for this Lightning also describe the following activities and movements:

6-21-45 Wright Field, Ohio, 5.15 hours of flying.
6-22-45Wright Field, Ohio, .35 minutes of flying by Lt. Col. Wendel [?] J. Kelley and P. Shannon.
6-25-45Altus, Oklahoma, .55 hours flown, pilot P. Shannon.
6-27-45Altus, Oklahoma, #2 engine changed, 1.05 hours flown by Air Corps F/O Ralph F. Coady.
10-5-45 OCATSC-GCAAF (Garden City Army Air Field, Garden City, Kansas), guns removed and ballast added.
10-8-45Adams Field, Little Rock, Arkansas.
10-9-45Nashville, Tennessee,
5-28-46Freeman Field, Indiana, maintenance check by Air Corps Capt. H. M. Chadhowere [sp]?
7-24-46Freeman Field, Indiana, 1 hour local flight by 1st Lt. Charles C. Heckel.
7-31-46 Freeman Field, Indiana, 4120th AAF Base Unit, ferry flight to Orchard Place [Illinois] by 1st Lt. Charles C. Heckel.

On August 5, 1946, the AAF moved the aircraft to another storage site at the former Consolidated B-24 bomber assembly plant at Park Ridge, Illinois. A short time later, the AAF transferred custody of the Lightning and more than sixty other World War II-era airplanes to the Smithsonian National Air Museum. During the early 1950s, the Air Force moved these airplanes from Park Ridge to the Smithsonian storage site at Suitland, Maryland.

• • •

Quoting from Wikipedia | Lockheed P-38 Lightning:

The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was a World War II American fighter aircraft built by Lockheed. Developed to a United States Army Air Corps requirement, the P-38 had distinctive twin booms and a single, central nacelle containing the cockpit and armament. Named "fork-tailed devil" by the Luftwaffe and "two planes, one pilot" by the Japanese, the P-38 was used in a number of roles, including dive bombing, level bombing, ground-attack, photo reconnaissance missions, and extensively as a long-range escort fighter when equipped with drop tanks under its wings.

The P-38 was used most successfully in the Pacific Theater of Operations and the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations as the mount of America’s top aces, Richard Bong (40 victories) and Thomas McGuire (38 victories). In the South West Pacific theater, the P-38 was the primary long-range fighter of United States Army Air Forces until the appearance of large numbers of P-51D Mustangs toward the end of the war. The P-38 was unusually quiet for a fighter, the exhaust muffled by the turbo-superchargers. It was extremely forgiving, and could be mishandled in many ways, but the rate of roll was too slow for it to excel as a dogfighter. The P-38 was the only American fighter aircraft in production throughout American involvement in the war, from Pearl Harbor to Victory over Japan Day.

Variants: Lightning in maturity: P-38J

The P-38J was introduced in August 1943. The turbo-supercharger intercooler system on previous variants had been housed in the leading edges of the wings and had proven vulnerable to combat damage and could burst if the wrong series of controls were mistakenly activated. In the P-38J model, the streamlined engine nacelles of previous Lightnings were changed to fit the intercooler radiator between the oil coolers, forming a "chin" that visually distinguished the J model from its predecessors. While the P-38J used the same V-1710-89/91 engines as the H model, the new core-type intercooler more efficiently lowered intake manifold temperatures and permitted a substantial increase in rated power. The leading edge of the outer wing was fitted with 55 gal (208 l) fuel tanks, filling the space formerly occupied by intercooler tunnels, but these were omitted on early P-38J blocks due to limited availability.

The final 210 J models, designated P-38J-25-LO, alleviated the compressibility problem through the addition of a set of electrically-actuated dive recovery flaps just outboard of the engines on the bottom centerline of the wings. With these improvements, a USAAF pilot reported a dive speed of almost 600 mph (970 km/h), although the indicated air speed was later corrected for compressibility error, and the actual dive speed was lower. Lockheed manufactured over 200 retrofit modification kits to be installed on P-38J-10-LO and J-20-LO already in Europe, but the USAAF C-54 carrying them was shot down by an RAF pilot who mistook the Douglas transport for a German Focke-Wulf Condor. Unfortunately the loss of the kits came during Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier‘s four-month morale-boosting tour of P-38 bases. Flying a new Lightning named "Snafuperman" modified to full P-38J-25-LO specs at Lockheed’s modification center near Belfast, LeVier captured the pilots’ full attention by routinely performing maneuvers during March 1944 that common Eighth Air Force wisdom held to be suicidal. It proved too little too late because the decision had already been made to re-equip with Mustangs.

The P-38J-25-LO production block also introduced hydraulically-boosted ailerons, one of the first times such a system was fitted to a fighter. This significantly improved the Lightning’s rate of roll and reduced control forces for the pilot. This production block and the following P-38L model are considered the definitive Lightnings, and Lockheed ramped up production, working with subcontractors across the country to produce hundreds of Lightnings each month.

Noted P-38 pilots

Richard Bong and Thomas McGuire

The American ace of aces and his closest competitor both flew Lightnings as they tallied 40 and 38 victories respectively. Majors Richard I. "Dick" Bong and Thomas J. "Tommy" McGuire of the USAAF competed for the top position. Both men were awarded the Medal of Honor.

McGuire was killed in air combat in January 1945 over the Philippines, after racking up 38 confirmed kills, making him the second-ranking American ace. Bong was rotated back to the United States as America’s ace of aces, after making 40 kills, becoming a test pilot. He was killed on 6 August 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, when his P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter flamed out on takeoff.

Charles Lindbergh

The famed aviator Charles Lindbergh toured the South Pacific as a civilian contractor for United Aircraft Corporation, comparing and evaluating performance of single- and twin-engined fighters for Vought. He worked to improve range and load limits of the F4U Corsair, flying both routine and combat strafing missions in Corsairs alongside Marine pilots. In Hollandia, he attached himself to the 475th FG flying P-38s so that he could investigate the twin-engine fighter. Though new to the machine, he was instrumental in extending the range of the P-38 through improved throttle settings, or engine-leaning techniques, notably by reducing engine speed to 1,600 rpm, setting the carburetors for auto-lean and flying at 185 mph (298 km/h) indicated airspeed which reduced fuel consumption to 70 gal/h, about 2.6 mpg. This combination of settings had been considered dangerous; it was thought it would upset the fuel mixture and cause an explosion. Everywhere Lindbergh went in the South Pacific, he was accorded the normal preferential treatment of a visiting colonel, though he had resigned his Air Corps Reserve colonel’s commission three years before. While with the 475th, he held training classes and took part in a number of Army Air Corps combat missions. On 28 July 1944, Lindbergh shot down a Mitsubishi Ki-51 "Sonia" flown expertly by the veteran commander of 73rd Independent Flying Chutai, Imperial Japanese Army Captain Saburo Shimada. In an extended, twisting dogfight in which many of the participants ran out of ammunition, Shimada turned his aircraft directly toward Lindbergh who was just approaching the combat area. Lindbergh fired in a defensive reaction brought on by Shimada’s apparent head-on ramming attack. Hit by cannon and machine gun fire, the "Sonia’s" propeller visibly slowed, but Shimada held his course. Lindbergh pulled up at the last moment to avoid collision as the damaged "Sonia" went into a steep dive, hit the ocean and sank. Lindbergh’s wingman, ace Joseph E. "Fishkiller" Miller, Jr., had also scored hits on the "Sonia" after it had begun its fatal dive, but Miller was certain the kill credit was Lindbergh’s. The unofficial kill was not entered in the 475th’s war record. On 12 August 1944 Lindbergh left Hollandia to return to the United States.

Charles MacDonald

The seventh-ranking American ace, Charles H. MacDonald, flew a Lightning against the Japanese, scoring 27 kills in his famous aircraft, the Putt Putt Maru.

Robin Olds

Main article: Robin Olds

Robin Olds was the last P-38 ace in the Eighth Air Force and the last in the ETO. Flying a P-38J, he downed five German fighters on two separate missions over France and Germany. He subsequently transitioned to P-51s to make seven more kills. After World War II, he flew F-4 Phantom IIs in Vietnam, ending his career as brigadier general with 16 kills.

Clay Tice

A P-38 piloted by Clay Tice was the first American aircraft to land in Japan after VJ-Day, when he and his wingman set down on Nitagahara because his wingman was low on fuel.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Noted aviation pioneer and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vanished in a F-5B-1-LO, 42-68223, c/n 2734, of Groupe de Chasse II/33, out of Borgo-Porreta, Bastia, Corsica, a reconnaissance variant of the P-38, while on a flight over the Mediterranean, from Corsica to mainland France, on 31 July 1944. His health, both physical and mental (he was said to be intermittently subject to depression), had been deteriorating and there had been talk of taking him off flight status. There have been suggestions (although no proof to date) that this was a suicide rather than an aircraft failure or combat loss. In 2000, a French scuba diver found the wreckage of a Lightning in the Mediterranean off the coast of Marseille, and it was confirmed in April 2004 as Saint-Exupéry’s F-5B. No evidence of air combat was found. In March 2008, a former Luftwaffe pilot, Horst Rippert from Jagdgruppe 200, claimed to have shot down Saint-Exupéry.

Adrian Warburton

The RAF’s legendary photo-recon "ace", Wing Commander Adrian Warburton DSO DFC, was the pilot of a Lockheed P-38 borrowed from the USAAF that took off on 12 April 1944 to photograph targets in Germany. W/C Warburton failed to arrive at the rendezvous point and was never seen again. In 2003, his remains were recovered in Germany from his wrecked USAAF P-38 Lightning.

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Stalinorgel. Stalin’s Organ. Сталинский орган.
china automobile molds factory
Image by Peer.Gynt
Katyusha multiple rocket launchers (Russian: Катюша) are a variety of rocket artillery first built and fielded by the Soviet Union in Planet War II. Compared to other artillery, these numerous rocket launchers deliver a devastating quantity of explosives to an location target speedily, but with decrease accuracy and requiring a longer time to reload. They are fragile compared to artillery guns, but low-cost and easy to produce. Katyushas of World War II, the initial self-propelled artillery mass-made by the Soviet Union,[1] have been usually mounted on trucks. This mobility gave Katyushas (and other self-propelled artillery) one more benefit: getting capable to provide a big blow all at once, and then move prior to being positioned and attacked with counter-battery fire.

Katyusha weapons of Globe War II included the BM-13 launcher, light BM-8, and heavy BM-31. These days, the nickname is also applied to newer truck-mounted Soviet numerous rocket launchers—notably the typical BM-21—and derivatives.

The nickname

Initially, the secrecy kept their military designation from becoming recognized by the soldiers who operated them. They had been known as by code names such as Kostikov Guns (soon after the head of the RNII), and lastly classed as Guards Mortars.[two] The name BM-13 was only permitted into secret documents in 1942, and remained classified until right after the war.[three]

Due to the fact they have been marked with the letter K, for Voronezh Komintern Factory,[3] Red Army troops adopted a nickname from Mikhail Isakovsky’s well-known wartime song, Katyusha, about a girl longing for her absent beloved, who is away performing military service.[4] Katyusha is the Russian equivalent of Katie, an endearing diminutive form of the name Katherine: Yekaterina →Katya →Katyusha.

German troops coined the sobriquet Stalin’s organ (German: Stalinorgel), soon after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for its visual resemblance to a church musical organ and alluding to the sound of the weapon’s rockets. They are known by the identical name in Sweden. [four]

The heavy BM-31 launcher was also referred to as Andryusha (Андрюша, “Andrew”, endearing diminutive).[five]
Katyushas of Planet War II

Katyusha rocket launchers have been mounted on several platforms throughout Planet War II, which includes on trucks, artillery tractors, tanks, and armoured trains, as properly as on naval and riverine vessels as assault support weapons.

The style was relatively simple, consisting of racks of parallel rails on which rockets were mounted, with a folding frame to raise the rails to launch position. Every truck had amongst 14 and 48 launchers. The 132-mm diameter M-13 rocket of the BM-13 program was 180 centimetres (70.9 in) long, 13.2 centimetres (five.two in) in diameter and weighed 42 kilograms (92 lb). Initially, the caliber was 130 mm, but the caliber was changed (initial the designation, and then the actual size), to avoid confusing them with normal artillery shells[3]. It was propelled by a solid nitrocellulose-primarily based propellant of tubular shape, arranged in a steel-case rocket engine with a single central nozzle at the bottom finish. The rocket was stabilised by cruciform fins of pressed sheet steel. The warhead, either fragmentation, high-explosive or shaped-charge, weighed around 22 kg (48 lb). The range of the rockets was about five.four kilometres (3.4 mi). Later, 82-mm diameter M-8 and 310-mm diameter M-31 rockets were also developed.

The weapon is much less accurate than standard artillery guns, but is really successful in saturation bombardment, and was particularly feared by German soldiers. A battery of 4 BM-13 launchers could fire a salvo in 7–10 seconds that delivered four.35 tons of high explosives over a 4-hectare (ten acres) effect zone.[two] With an efficient crew, the launchers could redeploy to a new place immediately following firing, denying the enemy the opportunity for counterbattery fire. Katyusha batteries were often massed in quite huge numbers to generate a shock impact on enemy forces. The weapon’s disadvantage was the lengthy time it took to reload a launcher, in contrast to conventional guns which could sustain a continuous low price of fire.

The sound of the rocket launching also was distinctive in that the continuous &quotwoosh&quot sound that came from the firing of the rockets could be employed for psychological warfare. The rocket’s devastating destruction also helped to decrease the morale of the German army.

Development
Katyushas of Planet War II

Katyusha rocket launchers were mounted on numerous platforms in the course of World War II, including on trucks, artillery tractors, tanks, and armoured trains, as nicely as on naval and riverine vessels as assault support weapons.

The design and style was relatively easy, consisting of racks of parallel rails on which rockets were mounted, with a folding frame to raise the rails to launch position. Each truck had in between 14 and 48 launchers. The 132-mm diameter M-13 rocket of the BM-13 method was 180 centimetres (70.9 in) extended, 13.2 centimetres (five.2 in) in diameter and weighed 42 kilograms (92 lb). Initially, the caliber was 130 mm, but the caliber was changed (initial the designation, and then the actual size), to keep away from confusing them with typical artillery shells[three]. It was propelled by a solid nitrocellulose-based propellant of tubular shape, arranged in a steel-case rocket engine with a single central nozzle at the bottom end. The rocket was stabilised by cruciform fins of pressed sheet steel. The warhead, either fragmentation, higher-explosive or shaped-charge, weighed about 22 kg (48 lb). The range of the rockets was about five.four kilometres (three.4 mi). Later, 82-mm diameter M-8 and 310-mm diameter M-31 rockets were also developed.

The weapon is significantly less correct than conventional artillery guns, but is incredibly successful in saturation bombardment, and was especially feared by German soldiers. A battery of 4 BM-13 launchers could fire a salvo in 7–10 seconds that delivered four.35 tons of high explosives over a four-hectare (10 acres) impact zone.[two] With an efficient crew, the launchers could redeploy to a new location quickly after firing, denying the enemy the chance for counterbattery fire. Katyusha batteries have been usually massed in extremely large numbers to produce a shock impact on enemy forces. The weapon’s disadvantage was the long time it took to reload a launcher, in contrast to standard guns which could sustain a continuous low rate of fire.

The sound of the rocket launching also was unique in that the constant &quotwoosh&quot sound that came from the firing of the rockets could be utilised for psychological warfare. The rocket’s devastating destruction also helped to reduced the morale of the German army.

Combat history
BM-13 battery fire, throughout the Battle of Berlin, April 1945, with metal blast covers pulled over the windshields

The a number of rocket launchers had been top secret in the starting of World War II. A specific unit of the NKVD secret police was raised to operate them.[2] On July 7, 1941, an experimental artillery battery of seven launchers was 1st used in battle at Orsha in Belarus, below the command of Captain Ivan Flyorov, destroying a station with several provide trains, and causing enormous German Army casualties. Following the achievement, the Red Army organized new Guards Mortar batteries for the help of infantry divisions. A battery’s complement was standardized at 4 launchers. They remained below NKVD handle till German Nebelwerfer rocket launchers became widespread later in the war.[six]
A battery of BM-31 multiple rocket launchers in operation

On August eight, 1941, Stalin ordered the formation of eight Special Guards Mortar regiments under the direct manage of the General Headquarters Reserve (Stavka-VGK). Each and every regiment comprised 3 battalions of three batteries, totalling 36 BM-13 or BM-8 launchers. Independent Guards Mortar battalions were also formed, comprising 36 launchers in 3 batteries of twelve. By the end of 1941, there had been eight regiments, 35 independent battalions, and two independent batteries in service, holding a total of 554 launchers.[11]

In June 1942 Heavy Guards Mortar battalions were formed about the new M-30 static rocket launch frames, consisting of 96 launchers in three batteries. In July, a battalion of BM-13s was added to the establishment of a tank corps.[12] In 1944, the BM-31 was used in Motorized Heavy Guards Mortar battalions of 48 launchers. In 1943, Guards Mortar brigades, and later divisions, have been formed equipped with static launchers.[11]

By the end of 1942, 57 regiments have been in service—together with the smaller independent battalions, this was the equivalent of 216 batteries: 21% BM-8 light launchers, 56% BM-13, and 23% M-30 heavy launchers. By the end of the war, the equivalent of 518 batteries had been in service.[11]
[edit] Katyushas since World War II
Russian forces use BM-27 rocket launchers during the Second Chechen War

The accomplishment and economy of multiple rocket launchers (MRL) have led them to continue to be created. In the course of the Cold War, the Soviet Union fielded a number of models of Katyushas, notably the BM-21 launchers fitting the stereotypical Katyusha mould, and the larger BM-27. Advances in artillery munitions have been applied to some Katyusha-type a number of launch rocket systems, like bomblet submunitions, remotely-deployed land mines, and chemical warheads.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited most of its military arsenal such as the Katyusha rockets. In recent history, they have been used by Russian forces in the course of the 1st and Second Chechen Wars and by Armenian and Azerbaijani forces during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Georgian government forces are reported to have utilised BM-21 or related rocket artillery in fighting in the 2008 South Ossetia war.[13]

Katyushas were exported to Afghanistan, Angola, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, East Germany, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Poland, Syria, and Vietnam. They were also constructed in Czechoslovakia[14], People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and Iran.[citation necessary]

Katyushas also saw action in the Korean War, utilised by the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army against the South and United Nations forces. Soviet BM-13s had been identified to have been imported to China prior to the Sino-Soviet split and had been operational in the People’s Liberation Army.

Israel captured BM-24 MRLs for the duration of the Six-Day War (1967), used them in two battalions in the course of the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the 1982 Lebanon War, and later created the MAR-240 launcher for the identical rockets, primarily based on a Sherman tank chassis. For the duration of the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired between 3,970 and 4,228 rockets, from light truck-mounts and single-rail man-portable launchers. About 95% of these have been 122 mm (four.eight in) Syrian-manufactured Katyusha artillery rockets, which carried warheads up to 30 kg (66 lb) and had a range of up to 30 km (19 mi).[15][16].[15][17][18] Hamas has launched 122-mm “Grad-type Katyusha” rockets from the Gaza Strip against a number of cities in Israel,[19] even though they are not reported to have truck-mounted launchers.

Katyushas have been also allegedly utilized by the Rwandan Patriotic Front in the course of its 1990 invasion of Rwanda, by means of the 1994 genocide. They were successful in battle, but translated into much anti-Tutsi sentiment in the neighborhood media.[20]

It was reported that BM-21 launchers had been employed against American forces for the duration of 2003 invasion of Iraq. They have also been utilized in the Afghanistan and Iraq insurgencies. In Iraq, according to Related Press and Agence France-Presse reports, Katyusha rockets had been fired at the Green Zone late March 2008.[21][22]

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Lotus Europa
automotive interior mold factory
Image by pedrosimoes7
Cascais Classic Motorshow, Cascais, Portugal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OVERVIEW

ManufacturerLotus Cars
Production1966–1975
Numbers produced:
Series S1: 296
Series S1A/S1B: 342
Series S2: four,294
Series Twin Cam: four,950

AssemblyHethel, Norfolk, England
Body and chassis
ClassSports automobile (S)
Body style2-door coupe
LayoutLongitudinal, Rear mid-engine, rear-wheel drive
Powertrain
Engine
1470 cc Renault A1K I4
1565 cc Renault 807 I4
1557 cc Lotus/Ford DOHC I4

DIMENSIONS

Wheelbase91 in (two,311 mm)
Length157.25 in (3,994 mm)
Width64.5 in (1,638 mm)
Height42.5 in (1,080 mm)
Curb weight1,350 to 1,570 lb (610 to 710 kg)

The Lotus Europa name is utilized on two distinct mid-engined GT coupé cars constructed by Lotus Cars. The original Europa and its variants comprise the Lotus Kinds 46, 47, 54, 65 and 74, and had been developed between 1966 and 1975. The second vehicle is the Sort 121 Europa S, a Lotus Elise-derived design made from 2006 to 2010.

EUROPA (1966-1975)

The Europa concept is believed to have originated throughout 1963 with drawings done by Ron Hickman, then director of Lotus Engineering, for Lotus’a bid for the Ford GT40 racing auto project. When that contract was lost to Lola Cars, Chapman chose to use Hickman’s highly effective aerodynamic design, which had a drag coefficient of only Cd .29, as the basis for a new mid-engined production model initially intended to succeed the Lotus 7.

By the mid-1960s, the mid-engine car configuration was nicely-established as the optimal design and style for Grand Prix automobiles, nonetheless almost no road cars yet employed this arrangement. Lotus planned the Europa to be a volume-created, two-seater mid-engined sports coupe constructed to reasonable expense, quite an ambitious purpose for the time.

Like all Lotus automobiles of the era, the Europa was created and constructed following Chapman’s oft-stated philosophy of automotive design: &quotSimplify, then add lightness&quot. To this end, a number of ingenius design approaches have been made by Lotus to allow it to economically overcome the many challenges presented by the novel mid-engined arrangement.

Production of the original Lotus Europa ceased in 1975, with a total of 9,230 cars of all models obtaining been built.

Style Attributes

Lotus Europa S2 interior (1968 black-badge model).
The Europa employed a lightweight, folded &amp welded &quotminimalist&quot boxed-steel backbone chassis with a fibreglass moulded body, a mixture that was first utilized by Lotus founder Colin Chapman in the Lotus Elan launched in 1962. Earliest versions of the Europa had the physique totally-bonded to the chassis for maximum structural stiffness, nevertheless this was soon changed to a bolted-on physique to let normal chassis and physique repairs to be created.

As opposed to the Elan, the Europa had no front-mounted engine or gearbox to accommodate, and so the Europa’s principal chassis member ran straight forward to intersect a large box-section cross-beam operating across the car amongst the front suspension points. At the rear, the chassis split into a &quotY&quot shape behind the cabin to accommodate the combined engine, transmission and final-drive components, and to support the rear suspension.

ENGINE AND TRANSAXLE

The sourcing of suitable engine, gearbox and final-drive components was regarded critical to the achievement of delivering a low-price mid-engined automobile. Chapman was keen to diversify beyond the Ford elements heavily used in earlier Lotus vehicles, and settled on using the engine and combined transmission/final-drive transaxle units not too long ago released by Renault for their Renault 16.

The 1470cc Renault engine was a light and contemporary design and style (if somewhat pedestrian in the Renault), while the matching Renault 16 transaxle seemed nearly ideal for the Europa project. In the Renault automobile, the transaxle sat ahead of the engine, driving the front wheels. By relocating the combined engine/transaxle unit to the rear of the auto and rotating it 180 degrees in strategy, Lotus could obtain a ready-made contemporary mid-engine configuration – albeit 1 with four reverse gears! By repositioning the differential crownwheel within the final drive assembly, the path of rotation of the output shafts was reversed, as a result correcting this &quotshortcoming&quot.

The Renault 16’s engine’s design and style was well-suited to Lotus’s needs. It utilized an aluminium block with cast-iron cylinder liners, which saved appreciable weight compared to the cast-iron blocks a lot more widespread at the time. It’s overhead-valve design and style had the camshaft situated higher-up in the block, resulting in a compact valve-train nicely suited for higher-rpm operation. Most importantly, all the engine ancillaries (water pump, belt-drives, alternator) have been driven off a v-belt pulley fixed to the transaxle end of the camshaft instead of getting driven by the engine’s crankshaft. When fitted to the Europa, this pulley location place all the engine’s ancillaries at its rear face giving straightforward access for maintenance, rather than them being positioned tough against the vehicle’s bulkhead as-for most standard engines.

For Lotus use the Renault engine was given a quantity of crucial improvements, like a higher compression ratio (ten.25 alternatively of 8.6), larger inlet valves, revised valve timings, dual valve springs and a twin-barrel carburettor. These alterations lifted the engine’s power by 30% from 63 bhp @ 5000 rpm to 82 bhp @ 6000 rpm.

For US export, a de-tuned 1565cc version was used giving 80 bhp @ 6000 rpm.

Later Europa models have been fitted with the same Ford-based Lotus Twin Cam engine utilized in the Lotus Elan range because 1962. This was a sophisticated, twin-overhead-cam, eight-valve higher-efficiency motor making 105 bhp in original kind (later lifted to 126 bhp in &quotbig-valve&quot kind), and it was reported that Lotus initially delayed its introduction in the Europa till they had been confident in the strength of the Renault transaxle. The twin-cam engine 1st appeared in the Europa in 1971.

When Renault released their most effective 16 TX model in 1973, it included a strengthened 5-speed transmission. Lotus rapidly offered this gearbox as an selection in the Europa, along with their Massive Valve twin-cam engine.

SUSPENSION

The Europa’s four-wheel independent suspension was also typical Chapman pondering. The front utilised lightweight pressed steel upper and reduced wishbones with a clever coil-more than spring-damper arrangement, all connected to the wheels using off-the-shelf front uprights, ball joints and trunnions. The steering gear was solid-mounted rack and pinion employing Truimph Herald elements.

The rear suspension was a heavily modified version of the Chapman strut, initially developed for Chapman’s earlier Formula racing automobile styles and utilised in the Lotus Elan. In the Europa, the vertical &quotstrut&quot element pivots on the wheel hub at its reduce end and doesn’t control wheel camber angle as-in earlier Lotus styles. Wheel place and alignment is controlled as an alternative by interaction between a fixed-length, articulated driveshaft top hyperlink, a easy tubular decrease hyperlink, and a massive box-section radius arm operating diagonally forward to the chassis.

These radius arms played a critical part in providing the precise tracking and handling desired, as the Chapman Strut’s use of the driveshaft to resist lateral forces was compromised by the rubber engine and transaxle mounts necessary to isolate vibrations from the auto body. A careful compromise in between the radius arm mount’s stiffness, isolation and automobile handling was needed, culminating ultimately in a sandwich bush that was flexible against shear but stiff in compression and tension.

The car’s subsequent resulting handling prompted automotive writers to describe the Europa as the nearest factor to a Formula car for the road.

Series 1[edit]

Lotus Europa Series 1 (Variety 46)
The Series 1 or S1 Europa (also identified as Lotus Type 46) was announced for sale to European markets on December 20, 1966. The first vehicles were delivered in France in February 1967. Volkswagen owned the rights to the Europa name in Germany, so vehicles for sale in Germany had been badged Europe rather than Europa.

The S1 was fitted with a modified Renault 16 1470 cc inline-4 engine and a four-speed gearbox. The engine was a unique 82 hp (61 kW) version (as opposed to the 52 hp (39 kW) generated in standard type). Lotus adapted the affordable but lightweight Renault engine and gearbox to the revolutionary Europa longitudinal mid-engined layout, inverting the gearbox’s crown wheel on its pinion gear to avoid obtaining 4 reverse gears. The S1 weighed 610 kg (1512 lb). Autocar magazine achieved a prime speed of 121 mph (195 km/h), and did 0–60 mph in 9.3 seconds. Of particular note, in excess of .9 g (eight m/s²) lateral acceleration was regularly accomplished by Car magazine on road tires of that era.

Only 296 examples of the S1 had been manufactured (chassis numbers from 460001 to 460296). These are the rarest on the marketplace. These vehicles had incredibly light and minimalist building, with fixed side windows, fixed seats (adjustable pedals needing the use of tools), no door handles, no internal door covers, and an aluminum dashboard. The steel chassis central beam was sandwiched (incorporated) within the fibreglass bodywork, hence reinforcing stiffness, but producing repair rather complex.

Series 1A and B (about 350 constructed) had removable side windows, wooden dashboard, and internal door panel covers which could accommodate the windows when taken off. Series 1B had a redesigned rear panel, with new, rectangular light clusters.[citation necessary]

Which includes the S1A and S1B (which incorporated some of the later S2 modifications) variations, 644 Europa S1s have been manufactured.

SERIES two

The Europa Series 2, or Lotus Variety 54, was introduced in April 1968 (approximately chassis quantity 0645 onwards). The S2 utilized the very same 1470cc Renault engine and mecahnical components as the earlier Series 1, but added a number of essential refinements including opening electric windows, adjustable seats, a new completely carpeted interior and a polished wooden fascia panel for the dashboard. The most significant alter was the switch from fully-bonded building to the use of bolt fasteners to attach the fibreglass body to the backbone steel frame. Even though decreasing the torsional and flexural stiffneses somewhat, the use of a separable body was welcomed by the automotive insurance business as it greatly reduced the complexity and price of making repairs to the car.

Early examples of the S2 had been externally almost identical to the S1 with the exception of the new windows. From early 1969, secondary front indicator lamp nacelles have been added in between the headlights, and bigger door handles had been utilized in place of the S1’s push-button products. In the course of 1968 a quantity of Europas (and Elans) were made bearing black-and-silver Lotus badges on the nose and steering wheel in place of the customary yellow-and-green ones. The official Lotus Cars website states these &quotblack-badge&quot automobiles have been to commemorate the tragic death earlier in 1968 of Jim Clark, Lotus’s champion Formula 1 driver, however this is debated by other sources.

1968 Lotus Europa S2. The early S2 models had been developed with S1-style front indicators and door handles. Note the S2 two-pane opening windows.
Modern road tests for the Europa S2 recorded a top speed about 120 mph (195 kph), -60 occasions of 9.3 secs, standing 1/4 mile occasions around 16.7 secs, and an all round fuel economy about 30 mpg (9.4 L/one hundred km).

A modest number of Series 2 cars had been modified to be &quotfederalized&quot for export to the United States. These Federal Kind 54s had the low front fenders (guards) of the European model and the larger 1565cc engine of the later Lotus Kind 65. These vehicles have been subsequently recalled by Lotus due to the headlamps becoming beneath the regulated US height (a &quotbug eye&quot headlamp raiser was later to be installed).

In 1969-70, the Kind 65 (also known as S2 Federal) was born especially for export to the U.S., with extra changes to the body, chassis, suspension and the powerplant to much better comply with U.S. D.O.T. requirements. Amongst the modifications, the engine was a slightly modified emission controlled Renault 16TL 1565 cc engine producing 80 hp rather than the 1470 cc engine of the Kind 54. The front suspension was changed to make the front end of the auto taller along with taller front fenders to raise the headlamps. Road &amp Track magazine tested the Federal S2 and recorded -60 mph in 9.6 seconds with a prime speed of 116 mph (187 km/h).

In total Lotus produced three,615 Europa S2s.

TWIN CAM AND Unique

In 1971, the Type 74 Europa Twin Cam was produced accessible to the public, with a 105 bhp 1557cc Lotus-Ford Twin Cam engine (105 bhp US &quotFederal&quot emission normal emissions handle version with Stromberg carburetors, till the finish of production) and a re-designed bodyshell to increase rearward visibility. Initially with the exact same gearbox as the earlier vehicles, once the supply had been exhausted in 1972 a new stronger Renault four-speed gearbox (Kind 352) was introduced. Mike Kimberley, who rose to turn into chief executive of Group Lotus, then a new engineer at Lotus, was appointed Chief Engineer of the Europa TC project. 1,580 cars had been shipped as Europa &quotTwin Cam&quot before Lotus switched to a 126 bhp &quotBig Valve&quot version of the engine.

The huge valve &quotEuropa Particular&quot version was aspirated by Dell’Orto carburettors version of the very same engine in addition it also supplied a new Renault 5-speed (Type 365) gearbox choice. It weighed 740 kg (1631 lb), Motor magazine famously tested a UK Specific to a leading speed of 123 mph (198 km/h), did 0–60 mph in 6.6 seconds, and ran the 1/4 mile in 14.9 sec. This at a time when all road tests were carried out with both a driver and passenger, with only the driver on board the 0–60 mph time would have been well beneath 6 seconds, a phenomenal performance for the period.

1974 LOTUS EUROPA Unique

Introduced in September 1972 the first 100 large valve automobiles have been badged and painted to honour the just won Team Lotus’s 1972 F1 Globe Championship title with John Player Particular as sponsors, all with five-speed gearbox, these had been all black with gold pin stripe matching the livery of the GP cars – plus a numbered JPS dash board badge, becoming the first ever John Player Special commemorative motor autos. The &quotSpecial&quot name and colour scheme was planned to be dropped following the 1st 200 automobiles, reverting to the Twin Cam name, but such was the positive reaction to the new car that the name and pin stripe scheme remained until the end of Europa Production despite the fact that colours other than black have been created accessible.

In the end the numbered plaque distinguished the first, original, 100 JPS cars from other black Europa Specials.

In total 4710 Type 74s have been developed of which 3130 have been badged &quotSpecials&quot.

Sort 47 AND 62

LOTUS Variety 47

Though the original Europa was intended as a clubmans sports racer to replace the Lotus 7, it was realised that the automobile would be uncompetitive with the Renault engines accessible. A choice was for that reason created for Lotus Elements to manufacture a specialist race auto based on the Europa to be raced by Group Lotus and sold to private entrants.

Even though the extremely first Variety 47 was primarily based on a modified Europa, all subsequent automobiles have been produced completely by Lotus Elements rather than the main factory. Launched at the same time as the S1 Europa, the body of the 47 was thinner than the common Europa and with bigger wheel arches. Side vents into the engine bay have been added right after the 1st handful of automobiles experiencing difficulties with engine bay temperature.

The engine, gearbox and rear suspension had been completely different from the normal Europa and have been taken in their entirety from the Lotus 23/Lotus 22 Formula Junior with a Lotus-Ford Twin Cam primarily based 165 hp (123 kW) 1,594 cc Cosworth Mk.XIII dry sump engine, and a Hewland FT 200 five-speed gearbox and suspension with reversed bottom wishbone, top hyperlink and dual radius arms. The front upright was specially cast in common with the F2 version of Lotus 41X to accommodate a larger Girling brake for the later 47A model (which had the Alfa Romeo tail lamp shared with the Europa S2) with reinforced front frame.

The Kind 47 precise production numbers are unknown, the last auto was 47GT-85 but it is unlikely 85 47GT’s had been made, estimates vary from 55 to 68 during the years 1966-70. Although the 47GT is the very best known, a handful of 47F’s were produced, these had the detachable physique equivalent to the S2 Europa, but retaining the massive wheel arches and side vents of the 47GT. Fitted with a tuned Ford cross flow engine but with the Renault gearbox and rear suspension of the Europa. The quantity created is unknown but probably no much more than six.

As a mobile test bed for the new two litre Lotus 907 engine getting developed for the forthcoming Elite and Eclat, the Sort 62 was produced. Only two such cars have been ever created. These have been space frame automobiles with F1 suspension to deal with the 240 hp from the engine. Although deliberately created to resemble the Europa, in practice the only connection to the Europa was a couple of of the Europa’s physique panels. It did win its very first event the 1969 BOAC 500 at Brands Hatch with John Miles and Brian Muir at the wheel. Replica 47’s and 62’s are bespoke-manufactured by Banks Europa Engineering, in a number of variations. A a single-off 47, fitted with a Rover V8 engine (3.five litre enlarged out to four.4 litre), was constructed for GKN in 1968 and registered, GKN 47D, with 300 hp it was capable of 180 mph (290 km/h).

NON-FACTORY CUSTOM SPECIALS

Throughout its life, the Europa attracted the consideration of numerous non-Lotus automotive customising businesses who supplied &quotspecial&quot versions in tiny numbers to the public. Amongst these was the Swiss Lotus importer, who produced two specific versions of the S2 fitted with the Renault 16 TS variety 807 engine, the &quotEuropa Hemi 807&quot and the fuel injected &quotEuropa Black Shadow 807&quot. The Hemi 807 had 105 PS (77 kW) SAE and could attain 200 km/h (124 mph), even though the Black Shadow had 137 PS (101 kW) on tap. The Black Shadow also received a five-speed gearbox.

These automobiles had a wider track, specific wheels and stickers, white indicator lights up front, and featured extractor vents higher on the side panel behind the rear door. The fuel injection program was from Kugelfischer.