So what am I doing? For those that know me it is not hard to figure out. WWII aviation has always been a passion of mine. My finished airplane will also reflect that passion - being painted and fitted as closely as possible to a P-51D Mustang fighter aircraft. For a little fun I plan to add a portable smoke tank that will fit inside my forward baggage compartment, not that I like portraying the fact that I have been shot at and hit by enemy bullets, but everybody loves to see the smoke trails, and they will add to the overall effect.
For even more fun I plan to add "working" machine guns in the wings of my aircraft. Now when I say "working", I mean in an artificial sense, by using a series of very brite LED lights cleverly enclosed in a fabricated gun port that will emulate the actual gun ports on a P-51 Mustang. They will be attached to a strobe controller unit, that will then be tied into a sound system, and everything will ultimately be wired into the trigger switch on my Joysticks. Young Eagles will have a blast shooting enemy planes out of the sky (figuratively speaking of course!)
Originally I had thought that I was doing something unique, and as far as Vans RV aircraft are concerned, perhaps I still am. I see a lot of Military schemed RVs that will either have vinyl machine gun port stickers stuck to their aircraft, or they are cleverly and very realistically painted onto the wing. I just wanted something more I guess.
I found out that I was not as unique in my thinking as first thought when I just happened to venture onto the EAA website, and decided to do a search on the EAA forums. They had restructured the forums a couple of years ago, and this required everyone to establish new account IDs to gain access to the new forum sites. I guess I lost interest at that point, and found myself spending most of my time on the VAF website addressing building questions.
Anyway, just out of the blue one day I decided to go check the EAA forums to see if anyone was as crazy as me. Turns out that literally as of that very same week, someone had posted a new thread on the Homebuilders Corner forum about designing and implementing a fully electronic solution to adding fake machine guns to your experimental warbird aircraft. Before I knew it, I was right in the middle of the discussion, and I could not believe that thre were actually others out there with the same ambition, even if it would be applied to some different airplanes.
This is one of those ironic situations where those that are building WW I replica fighter planes actually had a bit of an easier time implementing this type of solution. In reality, WW I fighters had a very difficult time figuring out how to mount a working machine gun so that it would fire through the propellor blades without destroying the prop or killing the pilot. then came the infamous timing gear that solved all those problems. The WW I guys can retrofit an electronic light solution onto their WWI machine guns a lot easier than the rest of us WWII guys, who have to figure out how to mount them in the Wing. In the end the hardest part of the hole process is designing the proper machine ports and making absolutely sure that they are airworthy and safe for flight (read as - " will not fly off or rip off of the wing during high G maneuvers, etc.). Check out the machine gun thread on the EAA forums.
As a result of all this, the folks that run SuperBriteLEDs are now on my new best friends list. I have ordered a variety of test lights, controllers, and mounting bases, and, after getting some new info n the EAA forum thread, I now have several more lights on order. The challenge is how to make light flash with enough intensity so that a crowd waching the runway would actually see the flashes and here the sound of the guns going off. I am currently working with lights in the 3 watt range, but it may take as much as 5-10 watt powered lights to have a really good effect. My problem, as stated above, is how to get a light with that much power to fit in a relatively small space on the leading edge of the wing. In the end actual flight testing will determine of the flash is brite enough. The process of making multiple guns appear to fire with slightly out of sync timings for realism has already been tested (and works quite well I might add!).
The sound will be another challenge. I need to compile noise data from a lycoming engine at various power and prop settings and airspeeds during a low pass configuration with a crowd standing a certain distance away, to figure out what kind of sound would be needed from machine gun to be heard. That little problem lead me to the discovery of a group of WWI experimental airplane folks back in Kansas City know as the The Dawn Patrol that are even more crazy (or just have more fun) than me. There are a couple of folks there that have designed and are using an inert gas system and electronic trigger mechanism that takes care of the noise issue with no problem. Even provides realistic muzzle blast out of the ends of the guns. Truth is that I think that this is also what the Tora Tora Tora flight team of the Commemorative Air Force (CAF) is using when they re-enact the raid on Pearl Harbor. They will be at Airventure again this year and I can hardly wait.
My ultimate dream is to incorporate that same system in addition to the LED lights in my airplane to get the best of both systems. Now I think it's time for a disclaimer for anyone reading this that may have similar ideas.
The inert gas system is inherently dangerous. If things go wrong it could result in a number of outcomes - most all of which will be very unhealthy for pilot and passengers and perhaps innicent bystanders on the ground. I am approaching the application of both of these systems purely from a safety priority persepective. If I feel I can safely implement both systems then I will most likely do so, but I will start with the light systems first. I am not going about this without very seriously thinking through all of the things that could go wrong first. I will design my application as safely as possible to ensure that I can get maximum fun and minimum trouble with it. If you wish to do something similar, then you need to take the time and do the research to ensure that your application is a safe one as well.
The light testing phase has been fun. I will leave you with a couple of photos of possible light and in-wing gun port solutions that I am currently entertaining:
First is a pic of he first set of LED lights I ordered for testing. Most of these are different configurations of a 1 watt red LED light:
One example of a light mounted inside the gun port:
Much more to come on this. Stay tuned!
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