A spin-off of the car thread, flight was brought up. Instead of thousand years ago we’re going a hundred years back, to the opening of World War I.
As you can see from this photo recovered from the bowels of a government archive I managed to transport an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter aircraft back to a Royal Flying Corps airbase in 1914. It’s fully fuelled and armed.
What happens next? Will they figure it out in time to shoot down the Red Baron and his mates?
I can’t imagine how they would fly it in any useful timeframe. The maintenance alone is incredibly complex – something like 30 hours of hangar time per flight hour.
I doubt it. I don’t think they would have any idea at all what all the lights and dials mean. Would they even have a suitable runway? I admit I know very little about aircraft…can you even start that plane up without an external power source?
Would it even be able to really take off and land from a 1914-era grass runway? Seems to me it would be too short and too soft to really work, like Ravenman suggests.
Beyond that, I don’t think they’d know what to look for in terms of an on-switch/ignition key unless it’s clearly labeled as such, and is the sole thing needed to get the thing up and flying (which I seriously doubt).
You know what it is and what it does. Yet, could you start it up and fly it in combat?
Beautiful photograph!
And, sure, they’d figure some things out quickly. They’d get the nature of turbine jet engines, even as they pretty much would have to ruin them to pry them open. They’d also realize that their own standards of engineering are not capable of producing such finely-machined parts.
Other things, they wouldn’t be able to guess at, at all. All the electronics trace back to circuit boards, and the circuit boards all depend, in the end, on tiny black “centipede” thingies, and when you crack those open all you see is microengraving. They would be left with the haunting sense that something deeply profound is going on…but wouldn’t have enough clues to deduce what.
Also the carbon fiber wing surfaces. They probably would never even notice. They wouldn’t have any idea how to detect it.
Fully fueled and armed? I predict a number of local explosions as they accidentally launch missiles into their hangers.
My guess would be that men in black suits with black sunglasses would quickly descend to confiscate the jet and some of the best and brightest engineers and scientists of the era would be called in to take the thing apart and figure out what all the parts are.
Overall, you’d mostly end up accelerating the progress of technology, rather than giving the people of 1914 a usable fighter jet.
If the thing is armed with missiles, will they even target the tiny wood and cloth piston-engine planes the other side is flying?
If they did somehow manage to get it airborne, the pilot is probably doomed. I think the F-22 has a sidestick controller, like the F-16. Those things are twitchy as hell. Given the non-existence of G-suits, and the total lack of experience with high-G flight…yeah…not going to end well.
Ah, they’d figure it out as easily as the proto-humans figured out that big black monolith in 2001. :rolleyes:
Get it airborne? Heck, they’d never get as far as starting the engine.
Give then one of these Republic P-47 Thunderbolt - Wikipedia
They can recognize the technology and utilize it to improve their own planes.
I read a trilogy involving U.S. Navy warships that were caught up in a secret weapon. IIRC, the idea was that you could teleport a small bit of antimatter or something directly into a terrorist’s skull and blow him up. Something went terribly wrong, and the fleet – or at least the surviving ships – was scattered across the planet and back to 1941 or 1942. (I don’t remember if it was in time to avert the Pearl Harbor attack, but I think it was later.) No satellites, no GPS; but shipboard intranet had plenty of data on the server, both official and unofficial. Using these files, the Allies built Douglas A-4 Skyhawks and then advanced to Vought F-8 Crusaders and A-7E Corsair IIs. Maybe F-4s, and maybe more advanced aircraft; but I don’t remember.
So basically the technology that was manageable for the Allies in 1942 was 10 to 15 years in the future. The P-47 might be manageable for the RFC, but I think a Hawker Hurricane would be more attainable.
Harry Turtledove used a similar idea in one of his books. The idea of the book was that a group of aliens with 1990’s equivalent technology invaded Earth during World War II.
In one scene, a British engineer was examining a captured alien jet fighter. And while he could understand many of the things he was seeing, the electronics were completely beyond his experience. Nobody before 1947 had ever seen a transistor much less a microchip. A good engineer could understand that the things he was looking at must be the equivalent of vacuum tubes but he’d have no idea what they were, how they worked, or how they were made.
Exactly what I was thinking of (the book series is World War, if anyone wants to check it out). They would have no idea even how to refuel and maintain it, less on how to fly it, and no idea at all how it worked. I doubt they would even try, but instead they would take it apart and see if they could puzzle out how it worked.
You’d be better off giving them something from WWII to play with. I think that they could puzzle out most of it, though the metallurgy would be beyond them to reproduce. They probably could figure out how to fly it, though, and could re-create a lot of what they see.
I think your best bet would be along the lines of post #34 from this thread (but sort of inverted): Leave the F-22 parked out in the open; then when the Red Baron flies by and sees it and says “What the fuck is THAT?!?” and swoops down for a closer look, you shoot him down with regular First World War-era weapons.
I picked the Jug because it has a radial engine (common to the WWI planes) and it had a reputation of being very hard to shoot down (You don’t want to lose your only copy on it’s first mission)
In WWI they used rotary engines, where the crankcase and cylinders rotated around the crankshaft. There were also in-line engines, such as the Liberty V-12 and the Curtis OX-5 V-8.
The P-47 is actually a better choice for this thread than a Hurricane, since it’s more advanced. If the RFC could figure out how to work it, the Hurricane would be relatively easy. The biggest problem I see is that the T-bolt’s stall speed was pretty close to the maximum speeds of many WWI airplanes. They’d really need to invest in some very long concrete runways to allow test pilots to get a feel for it without having to fly a circuit.
I have been on and seen airfields of grass or dirt that WWII warplanes used quite easily. Right after a rain might be hard for a fully loaded P-47.
Saw a DC-6 fly off a grass strip, a P-38 many times, B-25 & A-26.
FW 190’s were found all over Germany hidden in the trees beside a clearing that they could fly out of.
Grass / dirt runways are not a problem from what I have learned, heard & seen.
YMMV
OTOH, would an F-22 pilot be able to fly a WW1 aircraft? I mean they were basically a stick and some pedals and were very nose heavy. Do they even train on piston aircraft?
