
North American F-82 Twin Mustang - Tomte
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_F-82_Twin_Mustang
======
termain
I created this entry. It's evolved considerably.

I do still recommend the original source I used: _The Concise Guide to
American Aircraft of World War II_ by David Mondey. It's great.

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shangxiao
The wikipedia entry seems to evade the most blaring question that popped into
my mind: why the 2 cockpits? After a bit of reading it dawned that because
this was intended as a very long range fighter, there were 2 pilots to share
the flying duties as flight time might be anywhere up to 12 hours in duration
(intended range of 2,000 miles, cruising speed of 286 mph).

The later night fighter model ditched the 2 separate controls and had a pilot
in the left cockpit with a radar operator sitting in the right cockpit.

Edit: The next question that I had was: Why not a single cockpit with 2 seats?
I'm guessing if factories were already tooled up to produce Mustang fuselages
then it could be produced with a quicker "time to market" so-to-speak?

~~~
damnfine
1\. Dual cockpits were a result of slapping a couple 51 bodies together,
already mostly engineered.

2\. Kept it because it worked for longer missions using dual controls.

3\. Saves money in production, tooling, and engineering to just use existing
designs where possible. Same parts are already set up, just run the process
another time.

4\. Symmetry man.

~~~
VLM
There's an interesting CS analogy in that aircraft fuselage are extremely
tightly coupled making changes difficult. Imagine making an existing plane a
foot longer. Well that means you'll need a slightly larger wire to carry the
current for the landing lights over a longer distance so thats heavier which
requires a larger hole thru the bulkhead which is now too light so you put a
strengthening plate on it which makes the auxiliary oil cooler not fit,
meanwhile its now too heavy for the original landing gear to handle the weight
... eventually 100000 engineer hours later you have a slightly larger plane.
It would have been cheaper to just design a new plane from the ground up...

Wings are not as tightly coupled as fuselage systems. Almost plastic model
like, you can chop off the ends of two planes wings and stick them together.
Its not quite that simple, but at least it doesn't involve redesigning the oil
cooling system.

Some software is extremely tightly coupled like an aircraft fuselage, some
less tightly coupled like an aircraft wing.

~~~
rwmj
Not to disagree with your main point that there's a lot of tight coupling ...
but planes are regularly stretched[1][2] so it seems like it's still a lot
simpler than designing a whole new plane from scratch. Even new designs are
really evolutions of old planes.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A340#Variants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A340#Variants)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#Variants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#Variants)

~~~
dunmalg
Probably a better example from the opposite end of the spectrum would be the
design changes between the F/A-18C/D and the F/A-18E/F. The initial plans were
to stretch the C/D model to add fuel and improve the abysmal range, but this
increased weight which required larger wings which required all sorts of major
design changes. In the end, the E/F ended up with only 40% parts commonality,
and was now a medium weigh fighter like the F-15, rather than the cheap light
fighter like the F-16 it began life as. Engineers I know who worked on the E/F
design have told me it would arguably have been cheaper to design a new plane
from scratch, but the Navy was so afraid of another failed project that they
were only able to sell it to the Navy as an "upgrade" of a plane design they
already had. Dubious in an engineering sense, but absolute genius in
marketing.

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tyingq
The operating manual:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=UggPCtYPyQ8C&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=UggPCtYPyQ8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)

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arethuza
The Hawker Sea Fury, another prop driven fighter, did managed to successfully
take on jet powered MiGs in Korea:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Sea_Fury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Sea_Fury)

~~~
geezerjay
Your comment made me wonder: if nowadays air battles are being decided based
on stealth, long-range sensors and long-range AA missiles, why aren't we
seeing a resurgence of cheap prop planes such as the Hawker Fury?

I mean, the price of a single F22 Raptor is speculated to be around $180M,
while the price of a single Hawker Fury was established to be around $55k.

Although a F22 may dominate all technical criteria, it loses heavily on cost
and the amount of resources that need to be spent to get one up and running.

Moreover, it appears that the cost of building a single F22 is enough to
build, maintain, man and train a hefty number of complete squadrons, which
could also be equipped with the same long-range sensors and weaponry.

~~~
mikeash
I don't think a Fury, even a hypothetical one that's been modified with modern
sensors and weapons, would ever prevail against an F-22.

Let's say you put identical missiles on both. Once in range, both fire. The
F-22 can then turn around and get back out of range before it's hit. The Fury
is essentially motionless, and will be shot down. Repeat ad infinitum.

~~~
ceejayoz
Sure, but you can afford to field 2,700 Furies against that F-22, which will
quickly run out of ammo and return to base, while the remaining 2,690 Furies
are running around machine gunning your ground troops. (Sure, this is a bit
contrived... but even 100-to-1 probably still makes sense. Iran's already
taking this sort of low-cost approach with small speedboats intended to go up
against US aircraft carriers.)

~~~
dunmalg
> _you can afford to field 2,700 Furies against that F-22_

You can't just divide the cost of a Fury into the cost of an F-22 and assume
that's even _remotely_ reasonable as a fieldable proportion. The limiting
factor isn't the cost of building the planes, it's the logistics of coming up
with with enough fuel, pilots, maintenance, and ground facilities to keep them
flying. There's nobody who couldn't afford something better that could afford
to field _maybe_ 3:1 vs the F-22.

The salesman for Burt Rutan's little gun-armed midget ARES fighter/attack
plane liked to tell people to "imagine how the Falklands War would have been
different" if the British Harriers had been faced with waves of _hundreds_ of
ARES planes.... completely failing to address the fact that Argentina couldn't
possibly train enough qualified pilots to sit in those hundreds of cockpits.

~~~
ceejayoz
Hence my statement that it's a bit of a contrived example.

Fuel's relatively cheap for a prop plane, one pilot would manage more than one
drone aircraft at once, maintenance is dramatically easier and cheaper on a
prop plane, etc.

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superkuh
If you're looking for more weird aircraft try
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WeirdWings/top/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WeirdWings/top/)

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eterps
[http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/aircraft/North-
American-P82/IMA...](http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/aircraft/North-
American-P82/IMAGES/P-82-Cutaway.jpg)

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eterps
Same concept for a messerschmitt:
[http://www.airwar.ru/image/i/fww2/bf109z-i.jpg](http://www.airwar.ru/image/i/fww2/bf109z-i.jpg)

~~~
digi_owl
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Bf_109_variants#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Bf_109_variants#Bf_109Z_.22Zwilling.22)

------
pkamb
Storm IV Twin-Pod Cloud Car

[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Storm_IV_Twin-
Pod_cloud_car](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Storm_IV_Twin-Pod_cloud_car)

~~~
digi_owl
Quite a bit of Star Wars took cues from WW2.

~~~
rwmj
All of the "red leader" stuff is directly lifted from another film - the
Battle of Britain (1969)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064072/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064072/).
Watch the dogfight sequence and see if it doesn't remind you of Star Wars:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk5gMaCq8GE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk5gMaCq8GE)

~~~
simplicio
Some of the dialogue for the Death Star attack scenes were taken directly from
"The Dam Busters", a WWII movie depicting the Allied attack on a heavy water
producing German controlled damn that required specialized weapons to be
delivered in a highly specific attack run.

~~~
rjsw
The dams didn't have anything to do with the production of heavy water, they
just provided power for factories in the Ruhr area.

~~~
simplicio
Ah your right, apologies. I was getting Operation Chastise (an attack by
specialized bombers on the Ruhr valley hydroelectric dams and the subject of
the movie) confused with Operation Freshman (an attack by commandos on a
German controlled dam in Norway that produced heavy water).

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noir_lord
The F-82 was a fascinating plane but not that unusual given the P-38 was
similar and serial producing right through WWII.

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bedhead
"You know those guitars that are like, double guitars?"

[APPROVED]

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martin_a
How is this related to HN?

~~~
Tomte
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

