kvmelements.blogg.se - Book the secret race

The book hangs together well, is well structured, laid out and with significant effort on technical images, which genuinely add to understanding. The research from various sources in various languages has clearly been thorough and detailed. Mr Douglas has written a tour de force here. I know many of the readers of this blog have a broader technical interest in military history.I “get” the importance of piston engine development at this period and had previously dipped into the subject a few years ago.This blog is essentially about the technical development of certain weapon technology – and this parallel weapon technology development to the matters I discuss on this site was pretty important.My father was a mech engineer and had a connection with Ricardo, a British engineering research company which played a key role, and also with Vickers who bought Supermarine in 1928.

When I say “refurbishing” I mean “tinkering and occasionally get it to spring in to life”.

Although I’m not a mechanical engineer I have a modicum of knowledge and recently have been refurbishing a 1914 stationary engine – this gives me just enough understanding to get through most of the technical elements of the book.

I have some background in Technical Intelligence matters in a previous life, decades ago, and there was plenty of that going on in the 1930’s and 1940s in this field.

I’m originally a metallurgist and there’s a fair bit of that in there.

This book has sparked significant interest from me for a number of reasons: Is there a more complex piece of machinery in history than a WW2 fighter engine combining dozens of technologies- with demands on it from 0, to 35,000 feet, and when life or death is the outcome? The book is ” The Secret Horsepower Race: Western Front Fighter Engine Development” by Calum Douglas. Douglas tells the story of a desperate contest between the world’s best engineers – the Secret Horsepower Race.The subject of this book review is perhaps a little outside my usual scope, being a history of largely mechanical engineering developments. Using the fruits of extensive research in archives around the world together with the previously unpublished memoirs of fighter engine designers, author Calum E. This is the neverbefore- told story of a high-tech race, hidden behind the closed doors of design offices and intelligence agencies, to create the war’s best fighter engine.

Whoever designed the most powerful piston engines would win air superiority and with it the ability to dictate the course of the war as a whole. Advanced jet engines may have been in development but every militarily significant air battle was fought by piston-engined fighters.

The piston engines that powered Second World War fighters, the men who designed them, and the secret intelligence work carried out by both Britain and Germany would determine the outcome of the first global air war.