Ron Wanttaja wrote in
:

On Sat, 2 Feb 2008 00:57:21 +0000 (UTC), Bertie the Bunyip
wrote:

Ricky wrote in
news:5f96da3b-7f80-4b6f-aac7-
:

The Sopwiht had some reasonable level of succes. Sopwith went for it
mostly to improve visibviliy, believe it or not.

Ironic... knew a guy locally who had a Fokker DR-1 replica. His
biggest complaint was how BLIND the plane was. Then again, Sopwith
used some fairly narrow-chord wings, and had the pilot sitting back
from them.

Yes, OI understand Sopwith did it for that reason, in fact, I believe,
without one in front of me, the the center wing didn't quite reach to he
fuselage ging some added vis there. The chord/gap ratio on the Sopwith
was considerably larger as well and it had a sharp stagger, so it's
middle wing might have actually done a little bit, but Sopwith couldn't
have thought all that much of it or he would have made more than the
very few he did. Again, i think maybe a few hundred, whereas over 10,000
Camels were built.

In fact, there are no aerodynamic avantages. None at all. The center
plane is almost completely useless. There's a lot of interplane
interference with a biplane, though this can be put to some advantage
with decalage and stagger. Basically, the one plane influences the
other. With a tripe, the top and bottom planes affect the center,
which can't be practically spaced from it's neighbors givng it very
little lift and effectively neutralising it.

One would have thought the Fokker D-6 (essentially a biplane DR-1)
would have quickly superseded it, then. But I suppose Fokker finally
getting the Mercedes engine let him jump to the bigger D-7.

I don't think the D-6 was quite as good as the Albatros, but it was
probably better than the Triplane in most ways. I think the Triplane had
it;s limited success as a sort of accident. Fokker was fond of just
grabbing bits they had developed and grafting them to other bits and
then lengthening this, shortening that until he came up with something
that worked. I have a two inch thick book of everything the Germans
built in WW1 including all the experimentals and the Fokker creations
are just nuts. I have the book out now and the tandem wing triplane is
the V8. I had remembered it as a tandem triplane, but the rear set were
bipe wings. Way too narrow a gap between the planes in the back. And it
still has a stab! There's a few pics on the net, but this guy obviously
has a fetish for tripes and you can see several as well as a Wight
Quadraplane and the Neiuport Triplane.

http://www.wwi-models.org/Images/Werner/RC/index.html

There were actually very few DR1s built. A few hundred IIRC.It would
have been forgotten but that Richtofen died in one.

Ah, but Werner Voss was first, and established the reputation of the
type. He lasted as long as he did, in his last dogfight, because of
the maneuverability of the Tripe. OTOH, he might have lived if he'd
been flying something that COULD have run away from the SE-5s....

Yeah, Werner Voss's was one of the prototypes. His wasn't a DR1, but a
F1, sort of a production prototype. Not a lot of diffrence between that
and the DR-1 production aircraft, though. All the big name German aces
wanted one when it came out first. It was sort of a weapon of choice. A
kind of fad-ish status symbol.
The first prototype of the Triplane, the V3, had no interplane struts at
all, and no balance area on the ailerons. The wings were fully
cantilever and the struts were added to boost pilot confidence more than
anything else. At least one or two of the F1s lost the upper wing in
flight with a fatal crash ensuing.
I always loved the japanese kite face on Voss's airplane.
One last bit of DR1 lore is that Manfred von Richtofen had four of them.
He also preferred the French Gnome engine over the Oberursel whaich was
basically a copy of the Gnome anyway. His airplanes were all equipped
with Gnomes captured form downed airplanes.
There's a raging debate amongst WW1 nerds about the color schemes of his
aircraft. The standard on the DR1 was to cover it in blue fabric and
then paing the upper sides with a worn out brush in a mix of silver and
olive in a diagonal streaky way giving a sort of camoflage. Richtofen,
of course, painted his red, but each of his airplanes had a different
degree of red on it. The one he died in seems to have been the reddest,
but it may have been only the upper surface of the upper wing ( there is
a phot of that airplane with him in it before his death) and another
with all upper surfaces red. There is a poor photo of one tha appears to
be a solid color, but it might be that in the shade, the blue bottom may
just appear to be the same shade as the top. The debate rages on!
Without me, I might add. I'm just glad those guys are out there doing it
for me.


All sides tried
them. The Neiuport tripe showed an interesting approach to getting
around the interplane interference problems by a multiple stagger
approach ( look one up, it;s hard to descibe)

http://wwi-cookup.com/dicta_ira/nieuport/triplane01.jpg

Cool eh? They knoew how to fudge an airplane back then!


Bertie