Did anyone else reading this frequent Young and Bloor in the early Nineties? Remember the giant poster of Pamela Anderson as Barbed Wire? There's something about comic book movies about girl characters where a dyke director (I assume) gets hold of the property and makes a movie with an aesthetic that says, "Hey, straight guys, we're just not going to apologise for not being for you," and then the straight guys don't go to see it and everybody looks at the box office and is, like, "What happened?' I mean, I don't want to be the culture warrior here. I liked Birds of Prey well enough. But "we're going to shoot Ella Jay Bosco like she's chunky (she's not!) because you should be ashamed of your male gaze" is quite a message to swallow to enjoy me some movie. While I am determined to validate the artistic choice, I am wondering how you get to spend eight figures on a movie when your head is that far up your ass. It's not like you got the MoD (MoS) to pay for it!
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| By MigMigXII - Animated from CAD drawing, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24337752 |
Speaking of which, this cool animation adorns the Wikipedia article about the Napier Deltic, an 18-cylinder opposed-piston diesel engine consisting of six layers of cylinders arranged in a stack of equilateral triangles. Beginning as Napier's visionary submission to an Admiralty requirement for a diesel engine suitable for Coastal Forces, as of January of 1954 it has been at sea in a proving boat for almost two years, and is about to go into service on 18 "Dark" class 50t patrol boat, as noted in The Engineer for 5 January 1954, which covers the current state of the Royal Navy (which absolutely needs 60 cruisers and its battleships, but which can afford to cut the size of its new aircraft carriers from the excessive 37,000t displacement of Eagle and Ark Royal.) The article also notes that the Deltic has "been covered fully in these pages." But in the first half of whatever month the article ran in, damn it! Apart from the "Darks," Deltics went into a number of subsequent large coastal classes and several classes of British railways locomotives, Especially the Class 55, which made an indelible impression on the trainspotting public running 100mph services and hitting 125mph descending Stoke Bank with its distinctive noise. (Did I mention that this high speed, high power diesel was noisy? And smoky? I know. Next thing I'll be saying that it rattled!) Boring and conventional engines rule the diesel engine world today since given the costs involved in high speed rail infrastructure they might as well be electrified. The Deltic isn't precisely forgotten, but it is a curiosity of a bygone age, and not the only one in this post.
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| By user:Arcturus - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=977912 |
My grandfather was a man of the mid-century, given to the technological solutions of tomorrow that didn't always work out today, and one of his little follies was one of, if not the, first postwar Mercedes-Benz diesels, still iconic to me as the kind of car a well-established country doctor should drive, but something of a nightmare for maintenance and (unkindest cut of all) mileage. Its OM621 was a modified gas engine with heavier components and fuel injection, with very high engine rpm for a diesel of its era at 2200rpm, per Wikipedia. I don't suppose I have to give the reader a refresher on the Diesel (or, if you're a stick-in-the-mud old British engineer, "heavy oil") engine, but if I do, it is an internal combustion engine which uses heavy oil rather than gasoline, and consequentially can, and indeed must, use compression rather than sparking to trigger ignition. The piston, on its return stroke, compresses the charge of vaporised heavy oil and air until adiabatic compression raises its temperature to the ignition point (as controlled by the "glow plug"). More extreme conditions ought to guarantee higher thermal efficiency at the cost of higher stresses to components, which must therefore be heavier, increasing rotational inertia and limiting engine speed compared with gasoline engines, which in the mid-70s Japanese motorcycles I used to ride, could hit 10,000rpm, a speed which would have sounded like science fiction in 1955, turboprops excepted. (Recall The Economist's description of state-of-the-art practice in 1954: 5--7lb per brake hp for gas at 3000hp, 0.6lb gas.hp hr), 12--14 lb/bhp at 2000rpm for Diesel, 0.4lb/hp hr.) The expulsion-charging cycle of a compression engine is highly efficient at constant engine speed, but tended to go out of synch when the engine was changing speed, leading to the smokiness of the road diesel and the mileage problems I mentioned.
In contrast to the similar-to-a-gas-engine design of the OM621 and pretty much all modern automobile engines, the Deltic was an opposed-piston design, the concept being well illustrated in the graphic. As of 1954, opposed-pistons are going into plenty of Doxford-built ship engines, the Commer TS3 truck engine, and Fairbanks diesel-electric locomotives in the United States. In asking whether Diesel is at all in the near future of the motorist or even the light commercial vehicle operator as of January of 1954, The Economist had in mind the Ford "Cost-Cutter" gas engine, the 1700cc, 4-cylinder engine introduced with the Ford Consul which seemed to demonstrate just how far Diesel makers had to go to actually achieve the superior economy they promised, a direct comparison being possible since Ford was offering that engine as an alternative to the Perkins 4/99 diesel on its "Thames" line of commercial vans. Reading the coverage in The Economist I'm a bit surprised that Grampa Hugh was suckered into buying a Mercedes, especially living in a mountainous country, but he was always more of a Guardian man. Sober minds at The Economist looked forward to two-strokes, exhaust scavenging with blowers, turbocharging, and water cooling, not hydrogen injection and opposed-pistons. but I wonder how much of that kind of visionary thinking might have been in the background.
Development of the L60 opposed-piston engine for the Chieftain MBT began at Leyland directly after FV4201, the first proposed Centurion replacement, was scuttled due to its using a Rolls-Royce "C" series V8 diesel engine, which could not meet NATO's multi-fuel directive. The L60 was an up-powering of the TS60 and inspired by the Deltic, but is notorious for having no bottom (perhaps meaning "if you drive into a bog in a Chieftain, your driver needs to know when to shift"), not a good thing when your massed armour manoeuvre is taken in the flanks by an Iraqi ambush. Leyland's big push of the Sixties and Seventies, the romantic "Roadtrain" and "Landtrain" lines for long hauling in remote, dusty continents, might have benefitted from this kind of vision, particlarly successful multifuel capacity, but, oh well. As with most things post dieselpunk, we've given up on the mechanically ambitious in favour of squeezing more efficiency out of information science via chip-controlled injectors. I've no idea whether that's a good thing or not, although it appears that the various byzantine engine configurations we persuaded the Red Army to adopt are working fine in Ukraine. So maybe it's a good thing when you can persuade the Ministry to throw some money away on dieselpunk!
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