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wingsofwrath — HMS Python
Published: 2013-11-16 00:14:25 +0000 UTC; Views: 48944; Favourites: 495; Downloads: 367
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EDIT, 05.02.14: Here you can find the French counterpart design.Finally, I can say I finished with the design of the Shadowless flying ships. It's been a long road, and they went from steampunk flying ships to more realistic WIG - wing in ground effect, or "ekranoplans"- craft capable of skimming a few meters over over the waves rather than true flight. For examples of the earlier incarnations of these designs, you can see here.
The ship itself is based on the "torpedo boat destroyers" of the late 19th century with elements from the first hydrofoils. In real life, British boat designer John Thornycroft, the man who built the first torpedo boat for the British Royal Navy in 1876, also experimented with hydrofoils between 1899 and 1901, so it's not actually that far fetched that his experiments might have resulted into a craft like this, especially when paired with Sir Charles Parsons' 1884 invention of the steam turbine.
Basically, while the ship is at anchor it floats to the waterline, but, as it gathers speed, it rises out of the water, first on the hydrofoils and then completely out of the water, skimming 6 meters (20 ft) above the waves. To help the ship rise out from the water, the planing surface is stepped just forward of the aft wing set, another design feature first introduced in real life by John Thornycroft.
Propulsion is provided by two Parsons steam turbines connected via gear boxes (so there is no need for additional, "reversing" turbines and the propellers can be driven at a different speed to the turbines) to a pair of shafts containing two four bladed wooden aerial propellers each, set at 45 degrees to one another. The two shafts revolve in opposite directions, thus annulling any gyroscopic force that might arise.
Since flying uses a lot of fuel, for extended patrols the ship can cut power and drop back down on the hydrofoils, thus maintaining a cruise speed of "only" 40 knots.
There are two colour schemes presented, one based on the real life late Victorian "black, white and buff" livery and the other a wholly fictional camouflage design, however with colours used in real life by the RN during WW2.
The name, "HMS Python" was also used in real life for one of the members of the "Viper Class" , the first turbine driven destroyers of the Royal Navy. Following the loss of the other two ships in accidents (HMS Viper foundered on rocks in fog during naval manoeuvres near Alderney on 3 August 1901, while HMS Cobra broke her back in a storm in the North Sea on 18 September 1901) HMS Python was renamed "Velox" and served until 1915 when she was sunk by hitting a German submarine deployed mine off the Isle of Wight.
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Comments: 45
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Remove the wings and you'll get a useless flak boat
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if only these were in a game how lovely it would be to use your vehicle concepts
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I had to add this to my favorites since it is one of the better thought out fantasy designs I have seen. Almost too good of a design for 1899 (aerial propellers, until the Wright brothers, were very inefficient).
Lovely work indeed!
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Indeed.
I wondered wherever to give my design the earlier Tatin, Pénaud, Ader or Maxim style of propellers, but I decided that, since this world got it's start on heavier than air flight a lot earlier and from a naval perspective, by this time they've stumbled upon more practical "modern" style of airscrew, so I went with that.
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One thing I didn't think about until much later is the open air gun platforms would be useless at higher speeds. Some canvas and wood frame enclosed turrets are needed to keep the gun crews on their feet.
But this is just quibbling and doesn't take away from the good art and the beautiful design of it. It does look like it could work.
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I'm afraid you're overestimating the problem.
First off, like on the normal destroyers, in operation the railings around the gun platforms would be fitted with canvas "dodgers" (canvas screens fixed to the railing) which I omitted for clarity in my drawing.
Secondly, WW1 planes had open cockpits and gun positions at speeds much greater than those attained by this ship and still suffered no ill effects.
In fact, here is a picture of the Russian bomber Ilya Muromets built by Sikorsky, which reached a speed of 110km/h and yet there are a couple of people standing on an open platform on top of the fuselage outfitted with a simple wire railing.
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We will have to agree to disagree on this one.
Yes, there were open cockpits and machine gun positions in WW1 and they quickly became more and more enclosed. Even the gun positions on the Ilya Muromets were partly enclosed.
That you mentioned the "dodgers" sort of proves my point, it would be asking a lot of a gun crew to pick up 5 to 10 kg cannon shells and try loading them while also trying to maintain their feet in a 80 kph wind.
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Unfortunately, there is nothing to "agree to disagree" about here, because humans have been active on ships in far worse wind conditions. It's not comfortable, but it can and has been done, especially in the age of sail, when men sometimes needed to go aloft to furl sails or strike down yards or topmasts in the middle of a hurricane.
Also, let me point out that 110 Km/h is the absolute maximum the ship can reach for a very limited time (it would both overheat and run out of fuel really fast) and that I say in the description that the normal operating speed is 40 knots, or 75km/h. (yeah, I know, it's a ridiculous speed for a steam engined vehicle, but for the sake of argument let's just assume it can go this fast)
And speaking of similar speeds, I have sailed on Soviet made hydrofoils of the Raketa and Kometa classes which can reach 65km/h. Being on the exposed upper deck while the ship is going full tilt is somewhat breezy, but at no point did I find it even slightly uncomfortable, let alone difficult to bear. I'm pretty sure I could have been loading and firing a QF 6 pounder (whose round, by the way, weighs in only 4.4kg) without batting an eyelash.
Oh, and you could also read this scientific paper on the effects of high windspeeds on the human body, which tells us that, for a 40 knot wind we would need to lean in about 2.9 degrees and for a 60 knot one about 5.7 in order to keep our balance. That's not a lot of leaning into the wind, is it?
Finally, don't just believe me, see for yourself - this is what a 55 knot wind looks like for someone standing on the deck of a ship. Please observe that the people in the video seem to be going about their business normally. Sure, they have rigged lifelines, but that's standard practice.
And here's some people playing freaking golf in an 100km/h windstorm, because I guess golf is serious business?
I don't know about you, but I think that if you can play golf in it, you can definitely fight in it.
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Why do you consider 40kt for ridiculous for a steam engine vehicle if we are talking steam turbines here? The pre-WW2 French destroyer class Fantasque could do 45kt plus and the Soviet nuclear K-162 submarine could do 44.7kt submerged!
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Except for that bit, where, you know, the Fantasque was, quite literally, twice the size and fifteen times the displacement of little Python here, including proportionally larger boilers.
Also, K-162/222, which , by the way, is also much larger, uses a nuclear reactor to generate steam.
It's not only turbines, the steam pressure is also very important.
Besides, you can't compare steam technology from 1900 to that of the 30s and 60s...
Steam turbines are simply too inefficient for hydrofoils, let alone ekranoplans. In real life there was a single a steam hydrofoil ever built, Enrico Forlanini's "Idroplano N. 2", which had extremely disappointing performance - it reached only 50km/h whereas the same boat refitted with a petrol engine reached 75 km/h...
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Case not made. Enrico Forlanini' steam engine was only 25 h.p. were as the petrol engine was 60 h.p. But I would agree that steam turbines are too inefficient for small hydrofoils. Yet if that is all that is available, steam power aircraft and ekranoplans could be built.
May I point out that Parsons' Turbinia (1899) displaced only 44.5 tons yet had 2,100 h.p. at 200 psi. Your Python is much larger by comparison.
By the way, Maxim's steam powered airplane was 3.5 tons and had two 350 h.p. engines which means it had a better power to weight ratio than the Wrights' Flyer.
So it is a matter of power to weight and how efficiently you use it.
As to our earlier discussion of wind problems, I will say youtube isn't the most reliable source of information and refer you to the Beaufort scale on Wikipedia.
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I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing - my point was that, sure, you could make a steam powered hydrofoil, but it would never reach a speed of 100km/h because a steam engine will never be efficient enough - after all, a steam engine needs a boiler and two types of consumables (or, if you add a condenser, then you add the weight of the condenser), so even if you were able to somehow produce a steam engine with the same power ratio as an internal combustion engine you would still not be able to attain the same kind of performance because you would have a lot more to carry in order to make it work.
Why exactly are you comparing Maxim's aeroplane with that of the Wright brothers? Yeah, it had more power-per-kg with which to play, but, as you yourself say, it matters "efficiently you use it" - Maxim's machine had inefficient propellers (after all, that's exactly what we started from, no?) and produced a lot of drag, on top of having poor wing design and the above mentioned problem with needing two types of consumables. I'd be amazed if their effective power use wasn't about the same really.
Speaking of which, I just looked at the original design for the flying destroyer and I realised I made a stupid mistake - Originally, I crunched some numbers to make this thing "vaguely plausible" and decided on a figure of 10,400 British horsepower for the turbine output. When I did the actual drawing, months later, I accidentally dropped a zero and rendered it as "1,400hp" instead. Oops. And then I compounded my error by basing the specifications of the French boats on this drawing rather than looking up the figures for the actual destroyers. Double oops.
This however, doesn't really affect the conversation as a whole, since it's one of the rare cases where I'm trying to prove that a design wouldn't work in real life rather than the other way around... I guess I should be flattered that it looks plausible enough that it would elicit this conversation in the first place XD
Well, no, youtube is not the most reliable source of information, which is also why I gave you a link to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject and added an anecdote from personal experience. The youtube was simply there to illustrate the point visually.
Besides, I fail to see what the Beaufort scale has to do with the whole discussion because it's an empirical way to measure wind speeds in the absence of an anemometer and we were already discussing precise wind speeds.
So far nothing I've seen points tot he fact my original point that wind speeds of 60 to 100km/h are not enough to stop people from walking and fighting on top of the deck of the ship. Far from it. I could link you to dozens of people car and transurfing at extreme speeds (including some guys trainsurfing the 300km/h InterCity Express), but what would be the point? You clearly don't believe me despite the preponderance of evidence in my favour, so I won't.
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Actually, at this point I think we are arguing for the fun of arguing.
But I am interested in the method you used for the power requirements of the Python.
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So brilliant! I think we can talk about the design of airship later!
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Are these hydroplanes, or are they designed to come out of the water under their own lift?
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There's one small problem: no sensible captain would allow manned guns so close to spinning propellers, one wrong step and the unfortunate guy is turned into mincemeat.
So either the propellers are to be set on long outriggers at least 3-4 yards outside the hull on each side, or the rear gun platform has to be moved.
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I'm not sure what you're seeing, but the way I drew them the propellers ARE on outriggers and you certainly can't reach them from the aft gun platform, even if you were to purposefully stretch yourself towards them, because they're the better part of two meters away.
The only place from which you could conceivably reach the propellers from the deck would be the very tip of the maintenance walkway in between the propeller sets, by reaching your arm through the railing (since the propeller axis is about level with the middle wire of the railing), but that area isn't manned during the normal operation of the ship and the railing there also has canvas "dodgers" (canvas screens fixed to the railing, also present on the gun platforms, which I omitted for clarity in my drawing) to make sure that doesn't happen.
Sure, even that wouldn't stop a purposeful idiot from managing it if they really tried, but you can't idiot-proof everything in this world and this is a warship after all...
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The depth and detail of your world-building never ceases to amaze me ~w @ Would these machines really be able to "fly" like ekranoplans if they existed?
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Actually, if their engines were powerful enough, I think they would. Probably not very well since I haven't done any aerodynamic study on their shapes, but...
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Well, of course: more power is always the answer!
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As the pilots of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, dubbed "the triumph of thrust over aerodynamics" can testify...
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These ships look great!
I can see these ships to be exceptionally fast and deadly to large battleships which probably couldn't respond fast enough.
but I don't really see any Anti-air armament to counter supporting fighter escorts.
What would torpedo boats do to counter french fighters if they were chased?
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I have no idea what happened with my answer, DA formatting goofed up and, since, for some idiotic reason this site still doesn't allow one to modify one's answers am reposting the text and hiding the other one:
This was indeed their intended role, of fast torpedo flying ships / torpedo flying ship destroyers, thus able to either attack battleships with torpedoes or hunt enemy torpedo flying ships before they manage to launch the friendly battleships, while their speed also makes them superb scouts.
Unfortunately, in practice, attacking battleships is a risky proposition even in the absence of enemy TFSD ("torpedo flying ship destroyers", which I will be calling them from now on to differentiate them from regular "torpedo boat destroyers" or TBDs), because the flying ships are also very flimsy (in fact, HMS python is mainly made of plywood over a steel frame, and, as time goes by, more and more TFS/TFSD start using aluminium as well) and thus can be taken down with massed fire from the battleships' anti-TBD tertiary batteries comprising the same type of guns that HMS Python herself mounts. Another especially deadly proposition for the TFSD are automatic guns such as the British QF 1 pounder "pom-pom" Maxim and the French 37mm M1880 Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon.
The unreliability of torpedoes from the era and the fact, in the "Shadowless" world, they are actually much, much slower than the ships which launches them (a typical British 14-inch MArk X torpedo of the era had a speed between 24-27 knots and a range of about 1,000 yards, whle the HMS Python can reach 60 knots) makes it even worse.
And in our world as well, despite some spectacular achievements (the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian battleship SMS Szent István at the hands of Italian torpedo boats during WW1 springs to mind) such successes were few and far between - during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, the combatants fired roughly 300 torpedoes at each other with only one 1 battleship, 2 armored cruisers and 2 destroyers being sunk by them. The above mentioned battleship, the Russian "Knyaz Suvorov" was on the recieving end of 21 (!) torpedoes launched from 17 TB and TBDs, and, of those, only 3 struck home.
"Flying torpedoes" have also been developed (such as the real world "Kettering Bug" ) that can reach 80 kilometres per hour (50 mph) and have a range 121 kilometres (75 mi) from its launch point also exist and have been fitted to TFS, but they remain extremely unreliable and too imprecise to hit anything smaller than a town let alone a battleship...
As for fighters, I think you are assuming the combatants have access to fixed wing fighters and bombers capable of attacking a ship, which they don't.
Sure, fixed wing aircraft will make an appearance around the middle of the war, offshoots of the above mentioned flying torpedoes, but, like in our world, they'll be first used for scouting and artillery observation then aerial dogfighting and light bombing, never reaching the level of sophistication needed to bomb ships and especially fast moving ones like TFSD until well after the war. For most of the war aerial bombardment was limited to rigid and semi-rigid airships, including long distance raids against enemy cities.
In our world, the first experiments of bombing battleships from the air were carried in the early 1920s by US General William "Billy" Mitchell, and the lessons weren't learned until the middle of WW2, Mitchell himself being court-martialled for insubordonation after accusing the Army and Navy leaders of "almost treasonable administration of the national defence" for investing in battleships instead of aircraft carriers, because the widely held view was that battleships could survive anything except other battleships, a view which also exists in the "Shadowless" universe and accounts for the slow adoption of air power.
Also, I really think you should research things a bit before claiming you don't see any anti-air armament on HMS Python, because, in our world, the 4.7cm QF 3 pounder and 5.7cm QF 6 pounder were amid the first weapons used in an anti aircraft role during WW1, because they had good range (about 3,000 yards), packed enough punch and had a high firing rate.
In fact you cans see one such gun on a high angle AA mounting in the drawing of the RNAS armoured train, in this case used more against the threat of rigid airships than that of fixed wing aircraft.
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Ill admit my information isn't really that accurate when it comes to details of specific cannons and weapons of the time period.
Im looking from a WW2 perspective, but again it really isn't that detailed as well.
Thank you for the history lesson nevertheless, both in reality and in your reality.
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Let me tell you that your drawing is very fantastic as usual!
mechanic design is just beautiful and your choice is also nice, a true "destroyer" in early age.
I always get inspiration from your drawing! Please keep the work X)
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Thank, you, I'm glad you liked it! I'm pretty pleased with he final concept myself.
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Glad I could provide then!
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This is amazing. I've always loved early industrial shipping. The way the ships change in appearance from the Victorian livery to the camouflage is very nice. Also, looking closer at the camouflage, it looks very interesting. I thought it was 'dazzle' at a glance, but I see now that it's something a bit more unique than that. I also like how you've redesigned the Royal Navy Ensign.
Once again, your focus on the most minute details looks incredible, and I absolutely love how this has turned out.
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Thank you for the kind words!
Actually I did have some difficulties with the design, and the biggest were related to the position of the lifeboats - in the real life TBDs the collapsible lifeboats were stowed alongside the funnels, but on the flying ships that space is taken by the wings, so I had to relocate them to the turtledeck to the place where the anchors would have been on the real ship and move the anchors further forward. I'm not sure I like the davit design I used for them though, so in further designs I might just go for more conventional ones.
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The cool thing about the issues you had with the lifeboats is that that is exactly the sort of design issues and problem-solving that British nautical engineers would have had to deal with in real life had this been a existing design. It just makes the whole thing feel more authentic.
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That's true. I happen to think that approaching the design of fictional mechanical devices from a practical perspective is just common sense, although it might be just professional deformation of being an architect...
In any case, it certainly tends to annoy people whenever we're watching some science fiction movie and I go "why does the alien ship have all of those wings if it's not going to be used in an atmosphere?"
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I love this concept - the ladder hydrofoils, the multiple triple-wings (do I detect a hint of the ill-fated Caproni Ca.60?), the operational concept; it's all really well thought-out.
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Thanks! As usual, you are spot on with the influences. I always thought the Ca.60 a ridiculous looking design (even though it does fly - I've seen footage of flying models) but, in this case, it just felt "right" for the part...
The French flying ships, on the other hand, will follow a completely different and even more ridiculous pattern, as it behoves the designers of the"Jeune Ecole" who, in real life, produced some of the most outrageous ships in existence.
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Well, that's something to look forward to XD
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It'll be a bit until I can get the designs online, though, I'm currently swamped, and it doesn't look like it'll be getting better in December.
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That's okay, I don't want to rush the mad genius XD
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"mad" being the operating word here, obviously
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Thank you, I'm glad you like it!
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