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Originally Posted by MikeW
Not much to add to the above:
Collishaw reported that the twin gun N533 suffered a performance hit (of course it did - imagine how much more weight the thing had to carry!) but thought that the benifit of two guns outweighed the loss of climb.
Everyone else thought it was a dog and N533 was rapidly demoted to the Commanding Officer's hack. Whilst Collishaw was flying it he experienced nothing but trouble until his final flight when as Graeme says he made two claims.
When these twin gun machines were introduced, the triplane was starting to loose its performance advantage - anything that reduced that even further was bad news.
Markings as reported above with the exception that it had a black fin, not rudder. The white C on the stabilizer is only known for N533, there are no known photographs of N5490 and N5492 so they remain conjecture based upon the known markings of other Naval 10 machines.
Mike
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What he specifically states in his autobiography, is that there was a slight loss of performance above 10,000 ft. He does say some others greeted it with mixed feelings. He says, he felt the slight loss of altitude performance was worth the extra firepower. He also says he continued to fly the machine as long as he was at Naval 10, and wished they had been equipped with 2 gun ships long before. This info is on page 126 of "Air Command", which is open in front of me.
Dang, you guys made me look it up. I was hoping for a simple answer early but, I got the answer I needed anyway. Thanks for clearing the paint job question up. I'm building the tripe as N533.
The tripe actually a modified Wattage Camel slow flier. I lengthened th fuse, got a spare wing, cut 2" off the trailing edges, added birch ply struts, etc. and it's really starting to look Tripey as it sits on the building board awaiting final wing mounting and electronics.
Thanks to everyone; you're great, as always,
F=MA