[HN Gopher] Miss Shilling's orifice helped win the war (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ 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." ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-19 23:00 UTC)