British military 'inventions''?

you just made me think of the Merlin in the P 51!.[ actually, I read where the Brits '''improved'' on an American engine ].....so, to all, the Brits got a head start in 1939,? ...seems like the Brits are/were doing something different...much thanks...we'll have to do an American invention thread

 

The Allied vs. Axis use of science and technology....the real stuff, not the tin foil hat stuff!...was discussed once on AHF.

The British came up with big sollutions like radar to REALLY big problems....then crafted them into a system, like the Dowding System, where the technical innovation gave of its best.

Colossus was, after all, just one cog (sic!) in the whole Bletchley Park "machine"'''

The Germans however....would come up with a huge jump in technology....like television guided missles, jet fighters, ballistic rockets....but somehow usually used them in such a way that they were limited by their problems, not used to "give of their best". They'd come up with "war winning" weapons - as they thought - them managed to use them NOT to win!

The American excellence was in applied science on the smaller scale.They productionised and made huge HUGE great numbers of smaller but enormously influential and vital tech like the VT proximity fuse, and the bazooka. In tanks they settled on the Sherman while trying many different ways to develop a "heavy" tank, for example...

In other words - the U.S. made a virtue of productionising a level of tech perhaps slightly below the "warwinning" grandstanders of the Germans...which meant that when the enemy was exhausted, or had run out of whatever came from the factory straight to the front line this week.....there was always another Sherman there, or another bazooka, or another gunner with a VT fused round ready to stop that V1 or kamikaze....

 

very nicely put phylo....you people, seem to be able to concisely answer/inform excellently---[ right or wrong?! ] I could look stuff up like this, but it might take a long time, and be lengthy.......very interesting phylo...I'm out of salutes so here !!S!!......so, it looks like the different research/production ''cultures'' of the countries play/played into the weapons developed....German<>precise..US<>high production output [what can we produce a lot of reliably ]

 

Your thinking of the Curtiss D-12 liquid-cooled V-12 aero engine. Linking the Curtiss to the Merlin is tenuous at best. However, the link between the Curtiss D-12 and the Rolls Royce Kestrel is more commonly accepted. Of course, there were many engines derived from the D-12.

 

I thought the Merlin was in the 51?....no?...well, I read that one of the keys to it's range was the low RPM

 

My fault, I thought I had deleted the bit about the Mustang and Merlin...I was responding to the Brits "improving" on an American engine.

Sorry.

 

The "issue" of the Packard Merlin vs the RR Merlins is....

The Americans took a mid-life version of the RR Merlin and converted it for mass production along American lines....there's the "productionising" thing at work again ...then went on to develop three more versions of it...then hit the limits of the Packard Merlin.

Back in the UK, Rolls Royce went on to develop another 7 or 9 versions of the Merlin. THEN there was the Griffon...!

Two different manufacturing ethos'. In Britain there was still a huge empahsis on the fruits of trained hand labour that had been honed by years of training from apprenticeship up...each Merlin was more than 90% handbuilt and hand-manufactured...

Whereas, ever since Henry Ford did his thing, U.S. industry had concentrated on the "production line" for every component and task possible in something.

It did indeed mean "better" as in more even standard of production, quality-wise and time-wise...but on the British side of the equation it meant every Merlin was a handbuilt and blueprinted piece of precision...virtually toolroom/"competition shop"...handcrafting.

Maybe more finicky and pernicketty when it came to servicing etc. - but it got performance - whereas the American system got just a shade less performance in favour of....longevity? More air time before the tune went off?

It would be interesting to compare service intervals and tasks for the two engines

 

seems like Rolls' experience and ''culture'' put out good products....no wonder they are expensive

 

What about the Ford Merlins produced in Manchester...They were also "Americanized" for ease of mass production.

I wonder how they compare to the Rolls and Packards.

 

eeehmm, much as the individual inventions discussed here are very interesting, i can't help but noticing there is a biased tendency here of nationalistic jubilation of primarily the brits , and "secondly"(supposedly) americans...and a total contempt of the rest of the world.

what does wikipedia "list of british inventions"/military mean if you do NOT pit it against * "list of german/dutch/french/russian/soviet/italian/Japanese/swedish/etc inventions-/military ??? ( * do remember that wikipedia is a vastly american supported institute... so it too is biased).

And how do you value one invention (and put in production) like Radar with the invention of jet propulsion(AND putting into production) ?



In the end what mattered for boasting about national inventive capabilities is a) facing 'problems' (and being in a war soonest is facing problems soonest) b.) budget spending on inventing and development (which makes a single big economy nation more effective than 10 times smaller 1/10 economy nations)...perhaps you can think of more arguments.
What you want is to factor out the above influences and be left with a degree of "intelligence and capability" and come up with "the british were the smartest of them all" according to the british forum members here (which is always arguable).

But in the example of the pakistani's getting to make the A-bomb in contradiction to their economy and state of society and level of universities I find proof that factors a) and b.) and the determination to get "something"(a problem solved) are more important than having a number of smart people in your society.
Having/getting/making Smart people in your society is "easy".

 

Other British inventions are:-

Discarding sabot anti tank ammunition, which is the way tank ammunition developed post WW2.

The Bailey bridge. .

The Liberty ship,

There are three reasons why the British seem to have been particularly inventive, and willing to try stuff out.

1. The country has a lot of clever engineers and some very good research establishments harnessed to a national emergency.

2. An urgent wartime need to solve problems, via technology. Britain had limited manpower and a widespread desire to avoid unnecessary loss of British lives, after the trauma of 1914-18. The Tank was a model solution.. .

3. An institutional culture of improvisation. Britain's Army Navy and Air force tended to favour local common sense solutions. There was no "Doctrine" until the 1990s and ist forces faced a wide range of tasks across the world often ona logistic shoestring.

The US did not have a burning need in the early years of WW1 or WW2 to invest in weapons development. Its industry was commissioned to build stuff that the British and French wanted. As has been pointed out, American innovation often lay in production innovations. The British may have invented short wavelenght radars, but US Industry made the most reliable gun control radars and one small enough and cheap enough to use to fuse artillery rounds.

The US Army had expanded rapidly from a small peacetime base using a very modular approach, with soldiers and airmen trained to undertake standardised roles. Taking one example, the British Army trained chefs, starting with lesson one "how to peel an onion". US Army cooks were trianed to take packet X and add to packet y. (Note) A hand full of weird kit , such as Funnies would cause ripples through the system. and cause more problems than throwing lots of combat engineers at the same problem. The British relied on Mulberry harbour., When the American one was wrecked they replaced it with an army of DUKW operatign over open beaches.

.

 

Ive never read anything regarding a comparison of all three

Productionising the Merlin was a matter of splitting the cylinder block and cylinder head into two seperate machineable castings; the RR item was a one piece item machined as far as possible within the limits of the piece then hand finished. Separately the two items could be spun on a jig to allow all areas to be reached by a drill/reamer. A substantial number of steel spacers and shims...used to take up play on handfinished assemblies...were eliminated, which freed up tolerances in favour of set, machined-in tolerances in various locations. So fewer parts all told, and fewer moving parts.

Still a high performance engine - but one whos parts could be finished by a machinist, not an aircraft tradesman....and assembled by an assembly line worker, albeit a decently-trained one - but again, not handfinished by a tradesman with years of investment put into this training to craftsman level.

 

The issue of Pakistan's...or anyones'...bomb is quite simple, really. Look at the example of Heisenberg in 1945 when he was interned at Farm Hall in England along with the rest of the German atomic physicists...

For years Heisenberg had banged his head aginst the problem of creting a working Atomic Bomb; for a brief time, in his particular short "window of genius" before the war, he had been for a short time the finest atomic physicist in the world...but got completely the wrong end of the stick regarding a Bomb and went up a blind alley which discouraged him from further progress.

But in August 1945, when he and the rest of the interned Germans...and the rest of the world...heard three days later about the Atomic Bomb at Hiroshima - he closed himself in his room and with JUST the brief paramters supplied in the radio news regarding the size and weight of the Bomb, and the rough explosive yield....and in SIX HOURS he came back down having worked out the design of the U.S. uranium bomb in almost perfect detail! A design he hadn't been able to make any "original" progress of his own on for six years.

Knowing that a thing can be done successfully is half the battle in a third party replicating it. You could build an Atomic Bomb the size of a house in the average university physics lab...its weaponising it, getting it small enough and yet also strong enough to be delivered by whatever delivery systems are at your disposal are the REAL problems!

Having smart people at your disposal during wartime is something that has to be planned for The Germans didnt...they drafted their students, a lot of their research scientists etc. at the start of the war and gave them a rifle - NOT helping Heisenberg's research efforts at all! From very early on - in the case of the British long before the war began - the British and Americans realised the value of research and development and having the right people available to do it.

 

There is however a problem with a manufacturing industry that has grown up based on "craft"...

1/ when it doesn't let go of the "craft" when necessary...

Aftert several MAJOR warnings, the british government was forced to nationalise Short bros. and Harland in the middle of the War because the owners refused to accept unskilled or semi-skilled labour, and also refused to reduced production and finish standards on the Short Sunderland flying boats...leading to HUGE delays in quantity delivery. Shorts thought that for some strange reason they still had the leisure to put the same level of craftmanship and finish into a Sunderland as they did into their "flagship" Empire class flying boats pre-war!!!! Except they weren't building half a dozen at a time, they were being asked to buy hundreds at a batch...and refused to speed up production or economise/slim down the design and production standards to achieve the required and contracted output.

So the company was, unsuprisingly, taken off them!!!

2/ when introducing semi or unskilled labour in wartime doesn't work;

Avro experienced HUGE problems with the first three "production testing" Lancasters. They constantly shed engine nacelle panels in flight, and sections of wing skinning....and time after time the wingtips unskinned themselves! The problem was....the government had set a specific number of hours to be flown by EACH of the three, without problems, before they'd accpet the Lancaster into service...

Having the aircraft out of testing time and time again bit hard into their flying hours accumulated...and as a result the Lancaster project was MONTHS behind schedule. Not development (from the original manchester)....but just because of the testing! Avro tried several different cures...different shapes and types of rivets/screws etc....

But in the end the problem was at least 75% the fact that Avro was using hundreds of unskilled or semi-skilled workers shipped in by the government. Actually changing the design of the fasteners holding the bits ON was only part of the solution - the rest of the solution was better inspection by Avro - and better training and supervision! They were letting unskilled workers loose on the testing lancasters because that's all they had as production in all areas of A.V.Roe's company had spiralled up and up beyond the company's pool of time-served craftsmen.

In the end - the government...being hounded by Churchill because HE was being hounded by FDR!...simply changed the rules of the testing regime! The required number of flying hours could be flown cumulatively by ALL three aircraft, rather than individually by each...in effect reducing the testing requirement by c.66%!!!

In the end the first Lancasters were coming into squadron service as the three test aircraft were still finishing off even their reduced test regime!

 

It was wrecked because the Americans didn't follow the exact installation procedures laid down by the British, assuming they were being over-cautious.

 

Well spotted, but there is a third option Landing craft are in "Flights"

 

Speaking as a British forum member I'm glad we invented fish and chips ( thus giving people something to put on their shoulders....) :flag_uk:

 

Fish??? I had a maths teacher smelled like that...