Hi all,
Hopefully-final version of the Modell 1937 Ausf.39 (incidentally, if you check the image, you'll see that I need to start coming up with shorter names!)
Also, hoping to check a couple of things with regards to engines.
So far, my thinking has been that as a small (albeit rich) nation, New Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach doesn't have a hope of competing with the UK, let alone the US, in terms of production capacity. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that neither the US nor the UK are devoting their full energies to squashing New Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach like a bug, but it's still not an ideal situation.
So, in an attempt to accomplish the most with the least, NSWE has, since the start of their recovery in the early 1930s, been trying to just eliminate redundancies from their military. The New Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach military, for instance, simply doesn't support the various different types of ammunition that other militaries do - tank guns, for instance, are only provided in 37, 55, 75 and 88mm calibres, and these are the same calibres used in naval guns (though the naval guns do go up to higher calibres).
For engines, NSWE has almost entirely switched to producing air-cooled radials from their two major suppliers, New Hannover Motor Works and the Zeppelin Motor Works - in a blatantly protectionist move, NSWE law requires that any company registered in NSWE be owned by a NSWE citizen, a move that resulted in the cadet branches of a few German families decamping to the island group, Heinrich Quandt in BMW's case, Helene von Zeppelin and Alexander Graf von Brandenstein-Zeppelin in the case of the Zeppelin works - but both are producing engines to a common design (after much grumbling and discreet protest) - the
Modula series engines.
Available in nine different basic versions - a 5-cylinder sleeve-valve radial in one or two rows of 800mm diameter and power levels ranging from 300kW to approximately 900kW, mainly intended for tank use (hence the small diameter); a 7-cylinder in one, two or three rows of 1100mm diameter and power levels ranging from 420kW to approximately 2000kW, mainly intended for use in multi-engine craft (allowing the engines, not mounted in the fuselage, to have a smaller engine nacelle) and a 9-cylinder in one to four rows of 1400mm diameter and power levels from 500kW to 3,500kW, intended to fit in the bigger fuselage of single-engine craft, the engine is indeed modular, it being possible to take a row of cylinders out of a
Modula-9-1 engine and use it to replace a row in a
Modula-9-4 engine - or indeed a cylinder from a
Modula engine and use it in another, provided the cylinders come from the same performance grade, though this does require some fairly substantial dis-assembly of both engines - the "row" is actually a (strong) mounting that the individual cylinders are secured into, then connection rods run to the crankshaft, etc, etc.
Does that sound feasible?
Regards,
Adam
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