the german giants

anyone know of a copy for $50 or less?

Reply to
someone
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If you want the whole book, I can't help you. But if you need data about a specific aircraft, contact me via e-mail and I'll scan and sent it to you. Contact me at braungart (at) verizon (dot) net.

Reply to
The Old Man

that's very kind, but i need a c opy. mine was stolen. o looked for 11 years and bought a new remainder for $44. oh, well, i enjoyed it for a year. i was well on the way to memorizing it. i do that with books that i really like. i probably have half the heinlein and laumer in my head. damn. but that was a very geberous offer and i appreciate it.

Reply to
someone

(Cut to the two agents of the exiled Kaiser absconding with the book, Biggles and Algie in hot pursuit.) ;-)

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

Which makes me wonder sometimes.... That Poll Giant Triplane, the First World War "Amerika Bomber"; was it a reality-based project, or some engineer's wet dream to keep himself well away from the Western Front? There ~is~ that photo of the supposed wheel being held up by the two British officers. Another was the Krupp-Germania flying Boat. These two aircraft really belonged in a Saturday morning serial at the movies. Maybe with Sky Captain going up against them.

Reply to
The Old Man

or "Don Winslow of the Navy"

Reply to
willshak

From the Bowers and McDowell book, "Triplanes":

Mannesmann (Poll) Triplane

This giant triplane seems to have been a dying gasp of the German Air Force. It was meant to carry leaflets across the Atlantic Ocean to drop on New York City. While the designer's name seems to be a bit of a mystery, it is believed that it was the work of Villehad Forssman who had worked previously for Siemens-Schuckert. The unfinished aircraft was discovered in a hanger after the Armistance by the Allied Control Commissions inspection team.

A section of the plane and a wheel 8 feet in diameter where sent back to England for study. The span of the center wing was 165 ft (50.3 m); the top and bottom wing were of equal span but quite a bit smaller. It was to have tandem mounted engines - eight on the center wing and a pair on the lower wing. The fuselage was long and slender, mounted between the center wing directly above the engines on the lower wing. The fuselage was 150 ft (45.7 m) long.

An eighty-hour flight endurance was planned (editorial comment: Wow!), and provisi Cheers,

Reply to
Bill Shatzer

And the whole thing was to drop leaflets on NYC? Didn't they know about email? :-)

Reply to
willshak

In his book "GIANTS Of The Sky" Bill Gunston seems to think it was a real project, and that it was well-advanced in construction at the end of the war. The surviving wheel is stored in The Imperial War Museum... it has a diameter of 93.5 ". The aircraft's main gear consisted of two-dual wheel units. The real mystery planes from the war were the Adlershof Giants... plans for immense aircraft were found among data from the Zeppelin Company that was taken to Wright Field after the war. The biggest of these would make the Poll aircraft look puny... twenty

500 hp engines drive ten propellers (six ahead of the wing and four pushers) on a twin-fuselaged aircraft boasting a _479'_ wingspan, with each of the two fuselages being 290' 8" long. Gunston thinks the design may have actually have been doable, although the landing gear units were 161 across from outer end to outer end, making a airfield capable of handling it pretty hard to come by. ;-)

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

These are still the cool-looking "Air Adventures" period aircraft it would be fun to model:

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someone hasn't done some resin kits of them.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

It was actually funded by the Brüning und Sohn in concert with the Deutschebank, with more funds initially coming from the German Navy according to Gunston's book. If you want to see it in action, watch "Young Indiana Jones And The Attack Of The Hawkmen" sometime. They give it odd looking bat-like wings, but it's really something to see when it comes in for a landing. This one is pretty impressive in its own right:

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's the Linke-Hofmann R.II. It looks like a large two-seat recon bomber, but it helps to know that the prop is 23 feet from tip-to-tip and being driven by four 260 hp engines mounted inside the fuselage. Span was 138'.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

That always sounded odd to me also. If they wanted to screw things up, they should have loaded it up with top quality counterfeit money and start dropping that on New York City in a attempt to collapse the dollar via massive inflation.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

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