[HN Gopher] Miss Shilling's orifice helped win the war (2020)
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Miss Shilling's orifice helped win the war (2020)
Author : choult
Score : 20 points
Date : 2021-05-19 21:12 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.damninteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.damninteresting.com)
| Dah00n wrote:
| That was a much more interesting read than I expected. Well worth
| the time.
| Jun8 wrote:
| "At 15, she decided engineering was the career for her. The
| problem was that it was 1924. "The average woman does not possess
| the same engineering instinct as the average man," was one
| opinion recorded in the Daily News at around that time. It
| belonged to the manager of the Education Research Department at
| British Westinghouse. "For a woman in the 1920s a career in lion-
| taming would have been more realistic," observes Shilling's
| biographer, Matthew Freudenberg."
|
| Aptly put. Good thing about reading up on history is to gain an
| appreciation on the _enormous_ changes in perception in the last
| 100 years or so, in this case about women in STEM fields. Even
| when her contribution was acknowledged and applied, it was dubbed
| a horribles exist nickname.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "At that moment (I must have been down to about a hundred yards),
| I hit his slipstream and my engine cut --stone dead."
|
| He didn't need to describe his lower legs suddenly becoming
| strangely warm.
|
| What isn't mentioned is that before the band aid was discovered
| thanks to Ms Shilling and her ... (it was often called 'er c**) a
| Spitfire would have to invert before diving to turn a neg. into a
| posi. So, when your enemy pushes forwards on the stick whilst
| frantically wriggling left and right, you would have to spin 180
| on your longitudinal axis to follow. I'm sure many of the enemy
| would then fake to get you to spin and whilst you are fiddling
| around, slow down and get in behind you.
|
| I can imagine: ME109 finds Spitfire on his tail. He has two great
| options - better rate of climb and a pressurized fuel system
| which doesn't cut out in neg. g. The Spitfire has a better
| turning circle, so don't go there. I suspect that they would go
| for the fake dive - the Spit will have to invert to follow. Now,
| I don't know how long the early Spits can manage a dive before
| having to decide to invert or pull out, so that is a factor here.
| When the 109 sees the Spit inverting in the rear view, pull back
| fairly hard, slow down a bit, probably with a left to right
| jiggle with the rudder to "skid" rather than messing with revs
| and propellor pitch (takes to long to play with the controls). If
| done right the Spit will pass underneath your 109 and most
| importantly, be blind because he's inverted. Now you are behind
| him and you have a cannon plus a handful of pea shooters to
| deploy.
|
| If the Spit is canny, he should see the fake dip and probably try
| to turn horizontally and turn the scrap into a turning game. The
| Spit should win that because it has a better turning circle, in
| general.
|
| Have an off day at the office in one of these things and you end
| up dead. I can barely conceive of what it must have been like to
| operate like that, operation after operation, day after day, week
| on week, months turn to years. There is no let up.
| smcl wrote:
| It actually is mentioned in the article:
|
| "When an enemy fighter dived from behind, fired and carried on
| diving past, one could not immediately dive in pursuit without
| the engine temporarily cutting and causing one to be left far
| behind. This could be avoided by rolling upside down, pulling
| back on the stick into a dive (positive g) then rolling level
| in the dive. [...] Similarly, on sighting a target below, one
| suffered momentarily if one pushed the nose down to attack, a
| grave disadvantage."
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(page generated 2021-05-19 23:00 UTC)