Yay for more USAF office wall pronz.

I like 'em. Reminds me of the Ascender, one of my fave 'X'es.

Not one of my faves. It was my subject for my graduate Stability and Control course and, after crunching the data from the NACA wind tunnel testing, I wasn't surprised that two out of three crashed as the design was highly unstable. It's an attractive design, but definitely not one I'd favor (then again, I find the J7W1 Shinden far more stable and aesthetically appealing).

*Nods*

I like it!

I often think that jets came too quickly, and robbed us of an entire era of turbo-prop aircraft.

It wasn't just jets coming early -- look at air racing pre- and post-war. Before WWII, there were all kinds of different racing aircraft designs, as aeronautical engineers worked on their own solution to the characteristics important in a racer. By the end of six years of teams of engineers working on 'faster, farther, higher', racers had been reduced to tweaking one of a very few late-war fighter designs. The era of the quirky-looking one-off aircraft design was gone forever.

All rusting away in the same neglected aviation "boneyard" with dirigibles...

Lovely rendition of an interesting design.

I own the original of this! I love that pic!

I still wanna see you finish that F4U in Army Air Corps markings in action over Europe.

Not lame!

I always wished they had put this plane into production.With a powerful turbo prop engine,it could have rivaled the early jets of that era I think.

Uhm, guys, the P-73 and P-74 are my own designs, not associated with any real historic types. However, in their "history", they were actually piston-powered machines, the P-74 was driven by two radial engines through extension shafts.

Hmm, from a mechanical simplicity standpoint, I'd be thinking one large radial engine, either a R4360 or something that bore the same relationship to the R3350 that the R4360 bore to the R2800. driving contraprops. Or if you want to go with compact radial engines, two Wrigth Tornadoes driving the propellers through a gearbox like that used much later on the Learfan. The overall arrangement allows the combined engines to work better with V or inverted V engines (Macchi MC-72 being a prime case in point).

While a single large engine would have been preferable, at the time a pair of P&W R1830 were the units of choice. One in each wing root. The Tornado never became available. Oddly, though the earlier P-73 had a turbo'ed Allison V1710, there was no consideration to use the 3420 in the larger P-74 in a similar installation. The thinking of the time was to use an off-the-shelf engine already in established production.

Which is interesting because my understanding is that if the R3350 had experienced many more problems or a slower rate of resolving them, the USAAF was strongly considering going with the B-39 and W3420 instead. Considering that Allison was the only engine manufacturer to get a doubled-engine that was production ready and met all the requirements, it would've done well (and I'm going by the historical record here, the RR Vulture, the DB610 and DB606, and the engine the Japanese used in the R2Y1 - a twinned version of their derivative of the DB605 - all were quite unsuccessful).

So, a pair of R1830s on the wing root with a suitable cooling set up? That could be a bit challenging to design but sounds eminently doable and allowing room for later growth.

The B-29 with the 3420 was tested and did work, so it could have been a viable alternate, but the program was committed to the 3350 over all, and as the 3350 did sort of work out eventually, so it went. As it was, the only type really committed to the 3420 was the ill-fated P-75, a shame as the engine really did work. The coupled BD600 series engines did actually work as powerplants, but the installation in the He177 was as much as fault as any weakness in the engine itself.

Well, the coupled DB600 series didn't work too well in the other installations (Me261 comes to mind) but I agree that the He177 was not an optimal installation (as t he He277 quite proved). OF course, I don't know if the Japanese equivalent that flew in the R2Y1 was any better or if it suffered from installation problems also (then again, their derivative of the DB601 suffered from problems if I remember correctly). They obviously managed to d-bug the R3350 adequately, but I've read sources that indiacate they had contingency plans in place should the problems not be resolved.

Gorgeous design that looks to be a mix of Jack Northrop's work with flying wings and the "Davis Manta" design that never went beyond mockup and wind tunnel testing. Perhaps it could be considered a N-1M scaled up to fighter size.