Saturday 18 June 2016

Arsenal VG-60

This is the last post about the Arsenal VG-30 saga.

After having learned their lessons about aerodynamic cleanliness, thanks to the various variants and sub-variants , materialized or not, of the Arsenal VG-33, they decided that it would be best to design a new fighter from scratch.

It was expected that it would greatly improve the performance of it's predecessors and, in order to do so, the design embodied an all-metal monoplane with a low-wing position with the back undercarriage retracting into the fuselage and the main one folding into the wings. A bubble type canopy was chosen in order to achieve greater aerodynamical performance and it would've been powered by an Hispano-Suiza 12Y-51 inline engine, capable of delivering 1200hp of power. It's interesting to point out that the engine was a French copy of the German Junkers 213E and that it was slightly longer than the original. In fact, it was expected that the first prototype would've flown powered by an original German engine since this project was retaken in 1945 after the war ended, the original sketches date from 1940.It was expected that, thanks to that engine, it would've reach speeds of 700km/h.
Unusually it was going to have a very powerful armament, for a French fighter designed in 1940, since it was expected to be armed with eight 12,7mm machine guns in the wings, four in each one, plus the usual 20mm cannon firing through the hub propeller.

This airplane was just a preliminary sketch back in June 1940 and was totally abandoned during the occupation but was retaken after the war. However it was clear that the future of the fighter airplanes relied in Jet technology and therefore further development and/or study on this airplane was abandoned.










Sources:
1. http://www.unicraft.biz/on/vg60/vg60.htm
2. http://www.aviarmor.net/aww2/projects/fra/arsenal_vg60.htm (translated)

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