Quote:
Originally Posted by SvdM
Makes one wonder why they didn't just truncate it with a hard edge for clean detachment, but I guess even this bad stub tail is better than no tail for drag?
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In World War-II,Heinkel cut almost 9.25 feet off the tail of their He-177 and replaced the boat tail section with a machine gun ball-turret.This only increased the drag coefficient of the fuselage from Cd 0.120,to 0.122.
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On Messerschmitt's Me-109 "G",the fuselage of the plane made up only 12% of the planes drag,whereas the wing contributed 81%.
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You could have put a small drag chute on the back of the plane and it would have hardly noticed.I think this is why cargo plane designers can play fast and loose with the fuselage.It's drag kinda gets lost in the signal-to-noise ratio of testing.