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Post by Cybermortis on May 22, 2014 10:41:07 GMT
Drop tanks used in WW2 were made from compressed paper, not metal. Metal was too valuable to be considered disposable in this way - the kind of metal sheeting needed for a drop tank would have been better used for making/repairing the skin of aircraft.
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Post by c64 on May 22, 2014 11:08:46 GMT
Drop tanks used in WW2 were made from compressed paper, not metal. Metal was too valuable to be considered disposable in this way - the kind of metal sheeting needed for a drop tank would have been better used for making/repairing the skin of aircraft. Fuel dissolves paper. When I had worked for a construction machines company, a lot of customers came with machines which refused to run and it turned out that the entire fuel system was clogged by liquid cardboard stuff. We can't tell if someone used a stripe of a cardboard box as a dipstick or if this is a form of sabotage. It sure works a lot better than sugar in the gas tank - at least for diesel. Machines with gas engines were very rare so there is no surprise that we didn't had any case of paper sorbet there. It would be nice to know if they used resin, tinfoil lining, plastic, wax or a combination like for modern milk and juice cartons.
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Post by Antigone68104 on May 22, 2014 11:14:33 GMT
Most of the references to paper drop tanks that I've seen have identified them as specifically British. US planes in the European theater would sometimes use paper tanks, but also used metal ones. Though, do we have this story yet? Mr Mohrle was (according to his obit) part of the USAAF's 510th Fighter Squadron, based in Great Britain.
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Post by OziRiS on May 22, 2014 13:05:03 GMT
I can't help but think that a paper (cardboard?) drop tank that was made to be sturdy enough to hold X gallons of fuel and be attatched to the wing of an airplane going up to 30,000 feet and doing high G maneuvers might actually provide too much insulation to make the contents freeze properly. I mean, to protect the structural integrity of such a tank, I imagine it would require fairly large amounts of paper/cardboard in pretty thick layers...?
I don't know... Just got to thinking...
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Post by the light works on May 22, 2014 14:56:22 GMT
I can't help but think that a paper (cardboard?) drop tank that was made to be sturdy enough to hold X gallons of fuel and be attatched to the wing of an airplane going up to 30,000 feet and doing high G maneuvers might actually provide too much insulation to make the contents freeze properly. I mean, to protect the structural integrity of such a tank, I imagine it would require fairly large amounts of paper/cardboard in pretty thick layers...? I don't know... Just got to thinking... while not being an extrememly good insulator, cellulose (the active ingredient in wood, paper, and cardboard) is also not an extremely good conductor of heat.
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Post by OziRiS on May 22, 2014 16:24:34 GMT
I can't help but think that a paper (cardboard?) drop tank that was made to be sturdy enough to hold X gallons of fuel and be attatched to the wing of an airplane going up to 30,000 feet and doing high G maneuvers might actually provide too much insulation to make the contents freeze properly. I mean, to protect the structural integrity of such a tank, I imagine it would require fairly large amounts of paper/cardboard in pretty thick layers...? I don't know... Just got to thinking... while not being an extrememly good insulator, cellulose (the active ingredient in wood, paper, and cardboard) is also not an extremely good conductor of heat. If cellulose isn't a good insulator, why are people insulating their houses with paper wool and why are cardboard and newspapers some of the top choises for homeless people to put under their coats in cold weather?
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Post by the light works on May 22, 2014 17:01:26 GMT
while not being an extrememly good insulator, cellulose (the active ingredient in wood, paper, and cardboard) is also not an extremely good conductor of heat. If cellulose isn't a good insulator, why are people insulating their houses with paper wool and why are cardboard and newspapers some of the top choises for homeless people to put under their coats in cold weather? air gaps. all modern insulation technology is based on using trapped air for your primary thermal insulation. a better expression of it is that you can use a piece of pressboard to handle a hot object, if you are relatively quick about it, but the heat will migrate through the pressboard. after you let go of the hot object, the pressboard will hold the heat for a while. in comparison, a piece of metal will start to transmit heat almost immediately; while modern thermal insulators will take much longer to transmit the heat. as I said, neither an extremely good insulator nor an extremely good conductor.
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Post by Cybermortis on May 22, 2014 17:59:03 GMT
I can't help but think that a paper (cardboard?) drop tank that was made to be sturdy enough to hold X gallons of fuel and be attatched to the wing of an airplane going up to 30,000 feet and doing high G maneuvers might actually provide too much insulation to make the contents freeze properly. I mean, to protect the structural integrity of such a tank, I imagine it would require fairly large amounts of paper/cardboard in pretty thick layers...? I don't know... Just got to thinking... Drop tanks were not intended to be used in combat, in fact the first thing that was done on sighting hostile (or potentially hostile) aircraft was to release the tanks. The Luftwaffe used to take advantage of this by attacking bomber formations in waves. The first attack would cause the escorting fighters to drop their tanks, and subsequent attacks burnt through the escorts on-board fuel supplies until they had to turn for home. The Allies countered this by having the escorts only responsible for a small portion of the overall trip, replacing them in stages by fresh fighters. Or at least they did this when they had fighters that had enough fuel supplies to match the bombers range. I wouldn't be surprised at the existence of metal tanks at this period. But these would most likely have been 'drop tanks' in name only, in so far that they used the same connection and carried fuel to extend an aircraft's range. Such tanks would not have been intended to actually be dropped, or carried into combat, but to be reused - most likely when ferrying aircraft over long distances. Paper tanks were cheap, easy to produce and could not be picked up by the enemy and reused or provide valuable materials. (The metal used for a tank could be hammered out and used to patch up holes in fighters)
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Post by silverdragon on May 25, 2014 10:55:26 GMT
Drop Tanks as fuel tanks were long range tanks for extra fuel use where stopping to refuel would be impossible.
They thought it through and decided that the tanks would be better of instantly detachable should the aircraft come under attack, but initially there were just a transport thing to get aircraft where they needed to be, from where they are made. "Long range" missions came later.
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Post by Cybermortis on May 25, 2014 11:06:31 GMT
I'd guess that being able to detach the tanks was also a safety issue, in case an aircraft ran into trouble and had to land before the fuel in the external tanks was used up. Emergency landings are dangerous enough without trying to do it with two large fuel containers strapped to the underside of the wings...especially if you had to land with the gear up.
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Post by Antigone68104 on Feb 21, 2015 23:11:48 GMT
Summary PostThe myth: during WWII, soldiers in front-line postings would combine different items from their ration packs to produce ice cream mix, and then freeze the ice cream by sending it up in one of their fighter planes. The first post in the thread said it was Australian soldiers making ice cream in their planes, but most stories identify the soldiers as American. Neither the RAF nor the RAAF knew about this myth, but the USAF has -- their accounts link it to US Marines flying the F4U Corsair. There's some variation in the stories. One story, from a soldier (since deceased) posted to an airfield in Great Britain, has the ice cream mix placed inside a paper drop tank. The tank was attached to a plane, which was sent up to 30,000 feet and the pilot told to practice evasive maneuvers to mix the contents. Another story has the ice cream mix placed in a sealed container in the aft gunner's compartment, where cold temperatures and the plane's vibrations could mix and freeze the ice cream. (A variant of this has the container placed in a cargo hold.) Finally, there's the claim that mechanically-inclined soldiers came up with stirring rigs "powered" by air movement as the plane flew at high altitude. Warplanes of the era weren't climate-controlled, there's plenty of documentation for it getting cold during a mission. Would it have been cold enough to freeze ice cream? Theoretically, yes. This Wiki page lists an average temperature drop of 3.5 degrees F for every 1000 feet above ground level (6.4 degrees C for every kilometer). A Corsair going up to 36,000 feet above its base would have an average temperature drop of 126 degrees F. Humidity would and does affect this temperature drop, if the air was at 100% relative humidity the drop would only be 3 degrees F, but that's still a drop of 108 degrees. The city of Honiara, on the island of Guadalcanal, is close to the WWII airbase Henderson Field (currently Honiara International Airport), and has an average high temperature of 87 degrees F. The lowest calculated temperature drop would put that ice cream mix at -21 F. (I don't know if plane ice cream was made at Guadalcanal or not -- but it's one area of the Pacific war zone that we can expect even those who slept through history class to know about. And with any luck, the guys can get some clips from war films to splice into the episode. The math is about the same for Midway Island, if that would be more familiar.) The stirring rig has the most potential for an interesting build, but may not actually be needed. There's some WWII home-front ice cream recipes in Grandma's Wartime Kitchen: World War II and the Way We Cooked, by Joanne Lamb Hayes (available on Amazon last I checked), and those recipes were simply stuck in a home freezer compartment to freeze. OTOH, the ice cream machines on US Navy ships, based on commercial ice cream machines, used stirrers. Many of the stories use (hopefully new) drop tanks as improvised ice cream makers. These could either be aluminum or laminated paper. Odds are the guys would have to build their own, I don't know if modern drop tanks are close enough in construction style to be used. If the pictures of P-51s with metal drop tanks are accurate, I suspect they could come darn close to making their own with the water-forming rig Jamie used to make the Ancient Greek torpedoes and his version of the aquabike. There's a description on how the paper drop tanks were made in the first link above, and that also sounds buildable by the guys -- it's basically paper mache. Of course, this assumes the guys can get the FAA to approve a home-built drop tank. It might be worth checking with companies/collectors who restore old planes; I hate to suggest chopping up a genuine WWII drop tank, but unless someone's got full technical specs for a drop tank (which could then be either built at M5 or custom-made by a specialist) it may be necessary. The USAF has a historical archive that may be able to help here. I've done some experimenting with ice cream recipes at home. The most basic recipe, two 12-ounce cans of evaporated milk and eight 0.7 ounce envelopes of hot chocolate mix (both of which would have been easily available to the soldiers), made a very nice ice cream in my electric ice cream machine. Preliminary mixing only took a hand mixer, which would also have been available anywhere they were setting up field kitchens. I know there are groups that keep WWII planes flying, but have no idea whether they'd be willing to bring their planes in to make ice cream. Wikipedia has a list of airworthy Corsairs in the US, and three places that have at least one flyable Corsair are in California, so that's a start. If they have to go with a modern plane, they'd want one with similar performance to a Corsair. Exact specs depend on which version, but the lowest speed I'm seeing is 417 MPH/671 KPH, and lowest service ceiling is 36,900 feet/11,247 meters. --- Can anyone think of anything important that should be added to this?
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Post by ironhold on Feb 22, 2015 0:13:26 GMT
According to Wikipedia, at least some of the surviving Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boats from that era have been converted into firefighting aircraft. So even if the team can't find a historical group willing to volunteer, they may be able to find a fire crew willing to lend a hand.
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Post by Cybermortis on Feb 22, 2015 3:49:57 GMT
Summary PostCan anyone think of anything important that should be added to this? Yes actually; Out of interest I contacted the the historical flying groups for the RAF, RAAF and USAF to see if they could add anything to the story. Ironically both the RAAF and USAF got back to me within 24 hours, while the RAF took two weeks. (Ironic because I'm British) Of the three only the USAF has heard of this, and further investigation seems to indicate that this was specific to the US Marine Corps and the Corsair fighters they flew. The origin appears to come from a book written by a senior US Marine long after the war. Just as importantly although the USAF historical group (I forget its real name) has heard of this they have never been able to confirm if it was/is true. Meaning that they might be rather interested in Mythbusters looking at this myth, and as such willing to help out by providing technical information and putting them in touch with individuals who might have aircraft they'd be willing to loan out for testing. The downside with this is that MB might not be able to make their own tanks, as I'm guessing that they would have to be FAA approved before they would be allowed to be fitted to an aircraft. The upside is that there are Corsair fighters still flying, and I'm also guessing that while rare drop tanks for these aircraft still exist - although these would probably be the metal versions rather than the paper ones. Then again the stirring system/modification would, again, most likely have to pass FAA approval. I was thinking that they might be able to use a wind tunnel, but the risks here would (ironically) probably be higher than putting one of these on an aircraft - Drop tanks are usually carried on the wings*, so anything that came off would most likely miss the aircraft. In a wind tunnel however anything that flies off stands a very good chance of smashing into the machinery. (*On the Corsair drop tanks were carried under the wings, just shy of the pivot point on the gull wings, as well as another tank being carried under the engine between the wings.)
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Post by rmc on Feb 22, 2015 3:59:11 GMT
Could using a simple hydrogen weather balloon be used to test some portion of this one?
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Post by the light works on Feb 22, 2015 5:18:12 GMT
According to Wikipedia, at least some of the surviving Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boats from that era have been converted into firefighting aircraft. So even if the team can't find a historical group willing to volunteer, they may be able to find a fire crew willing to lend a hand. I'm sure as long as the team was willing to share the ice cream (and maybe cover the cost of fuel) there would be no shortage of warbird owners willing to do the flying.
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Post by Antigone68104 on Feb 23, 2015 2:04:19 GMT
Updated the summary.
RMC, the balloon could get the ice cream mix to altitude, but I don't think they could test a stirring rig -- the balloon would be matching the wind's speed, where an airplane would be going fast enough to force air through the stirring propeller.
Ironhold, the specs I found for a Catalina say they're much slower than a Corsair, and can't get as high. They might be able to work around the speed, but given that altitude is what's (supposedly) getting this cold enough to freeze that's going to be a sticking point.
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Post by silverdragon on Feb 23, 2015 8:40:05 GMT
Problems with a Balloon... Landing. As in chasing it down.....
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Post by the light works on Feb 23, 2015 15:54:13 GMT
Problems with a Balloon... Landing. As in chasing it down..... not if it is on a tether.
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Post by silverdragon on Feb 24, 2015 9:05:44 GMT
Problems with a Balloon... Landing. As in chasing it down..... not if it is on a tether. To get "that" cold, how long is that tether going to be?... And then, how far up until the tether will weigh too much to stop it rising?... Even mono-filament has weight, and thats expensive. The best solution I can find is something called para-cord. Extremely strong for its weight and slightly elasticated, but even a bobbin of that (or two) is heavy....
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Post by Antigone68104 on Feb 24, 2015 15:44:57 GMT
According to this Wikipedia page, the average temperature drop in normal atmospheric conditions is 3.5 degrees F/1000 feet or 6.4 degrees C/1 kilometer above ground level. They could probably get a tethered balloon to ice cream freezer temps if they ran the test on Trail Ridge Road, even in summer the starting air temperature up there is pretty darn cold. (I've worn my winter coat up there in June.) But from anything approximating the elevation of a Pacific island airbase, it would be iffy. Incidentally, if my math is right a Corsair that started from near sea level and went up to 36,000 feet would get an average temperature drop of 126 degrees F. It probably wouldn't get quite that chilly, because I'd bet on those Pacific islands having a little more humidity, but should easily get cold enough to drop the ice cream mix below 0.
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