Talk:Nieuport 17

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I don't know what the rate of climb actually is, but it must be more than 18 ft per minute, or this would have been a lousy fighter. So I'm going to replace 18 ft per minute with a question mark until someone has something more authoratative to offer.

 Done Replaced Rate of Climb with 'time to climb'. Source is "The Complete Book of Fighters", 1994 by Green and Swanborough. - Guapovia 07:45, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I think that Serbian Airforce on the Macedonian Front also used Nieuports.

Flights of fancy and Gun synchronisation

1. I don't think that there is a very much of a logical link between the wing flutter in a Nieuport "V" strutter and that inherent in many early monoplane wings. If there is a link at all - we'd need much more space to develop it properly, which we don't have here. In any case, to step from here to the monoplane ban of 1912 drifts even further into irrelevancy.
2. The Nieuport 16 was basically a re-engined variant of the 11 - produced in small numbers. The "11" remains the type from which the "17" was developed.
3. Woodman (our best source for the history of specific French synchronisation gears) treats the "unknown" gear fitted to the Nieuport 28 (and also, I suspect, to the Hanriot HD1 and perhaps some of the later Nieuports V-strutters as well) as unique to the "28". My suspicions, and other fine editors' (brilliant) original research notwithstanding - I think we must go with Woodman here. Linking Woodman's "gnome" gear with Davilla's unnamed one is speculation, albeit intelligent speculation. Anyway Davilla, which is a beautifully produced work, is (alas) full of inconsistencies.
4. Nieuports in British service were never (hardly ever?) fitted with (synchronised) Vickers guns - since the only British gear available at the time was (naughty word expunged to protect the guilty), especially for synchronising a gun to a rotary engine. Talking about supplementing (or replacing) either gun on British Nieuports is a logical impossibility - the Lewis was simply "retained". --Soundofmusicals (talk) 12:46, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

The loss of the wings on the monoplanes (mostly British-built machines whose designers had even less understanding of what they were doing than the French) was also due to flutter, although like the lower wing problems on the Albatros scouts was not understood until many years afterwards. It was exacerbated by the combination of wing warping and very low angles for the bracing wires, and not helped by wing root mounts that allowed free movement of the wing up and down. The Nieuport's had the ends of their spars inset into sockets that meant the wires were not the only thing keeping the wings attached. Wing warping, particularly on monoplanes also added its own hazards, as a corrective maneuver at low speeds could more easily stall a wing than even with an aileron equipped aircraft.

The 16 had the fuselage beefed up for the greater weight and hp, had a headrest added and had a horseshoe cowling with a larger opening to ensure cooling.

British Nieuports arrived sans weapons - so the Brits were responsible for providing the guns and any associated mechanisms, and since they had a workable system in place (ie mounted above the wing), they were at a low priority for the inadequate numbers of systems they were building. - NiD.29 (talk) 07:14, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

Pretty spot on as far as it goes (and on the whole I like your edits to the article) but flutter was only one of the inherent problems with wire braced monoplane wings. They were just too weak and "floppy". If you can get hold of a copy of this book https://www.amazon.com/Building-Aeroplanes-Those-Magnificent-Men/dp/0854290575 it is a real eye-opener - Air Commodore Wheeler is a wonderfully dispassionate witness. Mo0re to it than the length of the bracing wires, too. Biplane wings were braced against each other - there was a real problem about what a "braced" monoplane wing could be braced to. At best lateral control was pretty marginal, the highly flexible wing tended to involuntarily "warp" itself - turning any form of "deliberate" warping (or, even more problematic, any attempt at aileron control) into a "reversal" situation. The monoplanes that caused the notorious "ban" were actually Nieuports by the way - they did well in the famous competition and several got ordered for the RFC. Back to the N.16/17 - British "scout" pilots, well into 1917, preferred a Foster mounted Lewis to a synchronised Vickers where they had the choice - for various reasons, but mainly because the Vickers-Challenger gear was so problematic. (Who says this isn'y a forum!!) --Soundofmusicals (talk) 13:52, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

Pretty sure it was the Bristol Coanda's (which had particularly long wings) that brought an end to that - most of the Nieuport monoplanes were just grounded, which means they weren't the ones that crashed (although being French/foreign they may have been used as an excuse). Doesn't seem to be a wiki page for the monoplane ban yet. The Vickers was also much heavier than the Lewis, which impacted performance, especially climb rate, and when that is your biggest advantage, you prefer to keep it, however the Foster mounting was only used on RFC aircraft - the French had their own mountings but none of them had popular names it seems, same as their gun rings. I will check out that book, thanks. - NiD.29 (talk) 16:53, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Found the report in flight's archives(p.2) - a Bristol monoplane and a Deperdussin monoplane were investigated for structural failures, while a Nieuport featured in their investigation but was strictly an engine failure and had nothing to do with the aircraft's structure. Interestingly, both the Bristol and the Deperdussin have rather dubious looking cabane structures in which each wing is really only braced to the other - there is little lateral strength to be found. - NiD.29 (talk) 22:19, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Have you read our well documented articles on gun synchronisation and (bless us) the Foster mounting? It's all there, so far as I can see. Not that I had much to do with either but they are models of how to do a Wiki WWI aviation article. Incidentally, French WWI aircraft ARE underdocumented - even the most comprehensive sources (like Davilla, which I'm sure you own) are rather anglo-centric - but this is not our fault, nor is it something we can do a lot about - that needs a new generation of French aviation historians. Personally, I am concerned about your habit of editing cited statements to have the opposite sense while leaving in the cite. OK if you know better than the published source (it happens) but in that case you need to cut the reference (preferably substituting a more authoritative or up-to-date one) or you are saying someone agrees with your version of events when they don't necessarily. If I were you I'd check through your recent work on this article and fix instances of this. Otherwise I'll get round to it (maybe, sometime). Something both of you seem to be missing is that early aeroplanes nearly all had a tendency to come to pieces in the air - especially when flown by young maniacs who pushed them well past their limits. At least up til 1918 you didn't have to be crazy to fly but it definitely helped. Even if you were French. WWIReferences (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:00, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Deleted the cites, as for the comments I removed on stagger I found this scientific paper studying the effects on gap, stagger and other variables which found that for stagger the "variation of the results being smaller than the measurements' incertitude." - ie any measured variations in drag due to stagger were smaller than the margins of error in their measurements. From whichever paper I first encountered this, they suggested that the reason for stagger is usually pilot visibility or cockpit access rather than drag reduction. As for the lift, I haven't found anything specific to sesquiplanes, however on the post-ww1 Thomas-Morse MB-3 the upper wing was responsible for between 1.6 and 2.5 times as much lift as the lower wing, depending on flight attitude with the chord similar on both wings. The percentages can only be higher on the sesquiplane. The issue isn't that the aircraft suffered frequent structural failures, but that specific aircraft have been singled out, particularly the Nieuports, and thus undue emphasis is placed on this. From my readings, I have found that the Sopwith Camel, Fokker Dr.I, SPAD S.XIII and many others also suffered similar failures to the Nieuports but it is not a central part of those aircraft's pages as it is with the Nieuports, which were actually in service in far larger numbers over a longer period of time than any of those (combined Nieuport production of all types was over 16,000 aircraft of which only a small number were monoplanes or full biplanes), and yet, unlike the Morane-Saulnier AI, and other types, none of the various sub-types was withdrawn from service because of it - which suggests that the problem has been exaggerated by the Anglo-centric POV most of our English language sources have. Unfortunately the French sources don't go into much detail about it, but then if there was no perceived problem, they wouldn't have - it is very hard to proved something doesn't exist. We can probably thank the pulp fiction industry for that - and which is where the profile publication seems to have gotten much of its information - sadly, newer authors have more of a tendency to copy what has gone before than to do any new research. For instance, and I am not sure where it can fit in, a major reason for the RFC's seeming lack of interest in the Nieuports until they got N.16s was that their officers were used to receiving kick-backs from the aircraft manufacturers - however it came to light in a parliamentary investigation (excerpt in flight magazine) that Nieuport wouldn't pay the bribes, so the RFC officers refused to buy from them. Despite being in a fairly accessible source in English, this has never appeared in any book on the subject. (I wonder why?) - NiD.29 (talk) 22:02, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Having just read the Foster Mounting article (still ranked as start class btw), there are plenty of unsourced and potentially dubious claims so I am not sure it is a good example of what to do. There is no indication the French regarded the overwing mounts as "interim" since they used them right to the end of the war, and the double hinge would only apply to one of the types of overwing mounts however there were several types used. Also with only 17 cites on a page that long is a bit sparse, and two of the sources are so extremely dated I wouldn't take anything they said as gospel. - NiD.29 (talk) 22:56, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Two gun armament

The RNAS's 17bis aircraft seem to been armed with one Vickers and 1 Lewis gun according to Bruce.Nigel Ish (talk) 17:26, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

I think (from a number of other sources) that the two gun armament (Lewis AND Vickers - same as the S.E.5) - appeared on a number of "v strut" Nieuport fighters in both British and French service but never really took on because it reduced performance (already very marginal by then). Thanks again for the help in looking up the 27bis anyway, most helpful! --Soundofmusicals (talk) 10:34, 31 July 2018 (UTC)