https://discover.hubpages.com/education/how-a-crude-steel-deflector-gave-birth-to-the-fighter-plane
How a Crude Steel Deflector Gave Birth to the Fighter Plane
https://discover.hubpages.com/education/how-a-crude-steel-deflector-gave-birth-to-the-fighter-plane
im gonna need a tldr with that click bait title
The first fighter planes had trouble with forward facing MGs. You either offset them and had to get out of the wienerpit to reload or risked shooting off your own propellar. Then we started adding steel bits to the props to protect them (OP's pic, right side). Still not perfect but you could actually shoot something in front of you.
So basically just an early ad-hoc fix that was made obsolete by synchronization gears and constant speed props?
Yes. Though I recall reading somewhere that early synchronization gears didn't always work perfectly and could sometimes let the gun fire out of sync if they got a bit loose.
I wonder if they kept fitting those plates on props just in case that happened.
The French continued with the plates.
The Germans used sychronisation gears while the US and England used pneumatic or electric sychronization.
French engineers copy nobody, and nobody copies french engineers.
Or you could just move the prop
Just don't crash or catch fire. Or try to jump out when the aircraft does catch fire.
All that applies to WW1 planes in general. They were all prone to catching fire since you sat right on top of the gas tanks, and you couldn't bail because no parachutes.
If you couldn't land the plane safely you would die a fiery death.
In the Airco DH.2's case it was worse since the engine had an annoying tendency to pop it's mountings a smash right into the pilot. Moving the engine back also messed with the weight balance and made the DH.1 tricky to fly, especially with a rotary engine that nearly outmassed the rest of the aircraft.
Unironically those OG fighter pilots were absolute madmen. Just imagine being inside that, no instruments, no GPS, no fuel too, just a few minutes of erratic flying while manually operating a machine gun with one hand and keeping the airplane from stalling with the other one while everyone around tried to kill you.
They didn't even have radio. You just to guess what the rest of your squadron was doing based on a pre-established plan and signals.
Never mind that a ton of these early aircraft used rotary engines which acted like gigantic flywheel gyroscopes and actively made the planes more difficult to fly.
For example the gyroscopic effect made planes like the Sopwith camel turn significantly tighter to the left than to the right. So much so that some pilots just never turned right, they'd just circle to the left until the plane was pointing in the desired direction.
Also many of these engines didn't have throttles, engine speed was altered by manually adjusting the ignition timing and fuel mixture.
Don't forget the total loss oilers fling castor oil into the pilots breathing air.
Nothing like breathing pure laxative to make you want to limit your time in combat.
Perhaps this might interest you.
https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/310013/Flying-Circus--Core-Rulebook
Just have the passenger wave the Webley at them, they'll sod off
Just mount the gun above the prop and have a connector trigger.
Don't mind the photo, just the most succesful fighter of WW1
That works great right up until you need to reload. Then you have to let go of the controls and stand up on the seat in the middle of an aerial battle. Not surprising that they put so much engineering into getting around that problem.
Well the good thing is the nieuport was so mobile, fast and had such a great rate of climb that when they needed to reload, they just turned inside the fokkers, broke contact climbed above the fight, reloaded and then dived down to pick off germans at leisure.
The nieuport was such a massive threat the Germans started a crash program to find something that could fight it on even terms and started rebuilding crashed nieuports and repainting them in german colors to fight.
The fokker triplane could match it in manoeuvrability but not in climb or speed. It wasn't until late 1917 the Germans fielded something better and by then newer models of the nieuport were in service as well.
That's only a decade old technology, them planes in WW1… just crazy.