Fairey Barracuda

RAF Torpedo/dive bomber 1943 onwards

The Fairey barracuda marks the fifth areo-modelling in CAD by me. I have always been drawn to the under-dog designs, with a desire to find characteristics worthy of admiration and perhaps to lift the design's status. So in these pages I plan to explore these aims. This model (below) was purely an exercise in making a low-resolution model of an aircraft in a reasonably short time. The render below was made after 4 hours modelling work. This marks a significant step for me as a modeller since this rather successful experiment. The problem that has plagued the meshes I made before has been balancing the image resolution against the polygon count. This model contains 1,820 faces, which is a figure I can reduce by a hundred or so, before adding some more detail. Many non-aircraft modellers must ask themselves when reading a page like this Why? As you may have gathered from other related pages in this site, I tend towards the forgotten machines of the air war. Initially after reading the Book "Forgotten Bombers Of World War II", may designs that get relatively little press were examined. Though not a poor aircraft, -it was an excellent replacement for the Swordfish; the Fairey Firefly considerably overshadowed it. It should be understood that Carrier borne aircraft are especially demanding of designers. The plane needs to land safely on a pitching carrier deck, sometimes in poor weather, rain, ice and poor visibility to catch the arrester wire. Spitfires were used (because of their superb air combat ability) but many were wrecked on landing. The undercarriage was weak and narrow in track. The Barracuda's landing gear is rather odd in appearance; this will form part of a future development of this particular model, as I'd like to animate the gear unfolding. It may be part of a short* showing a plane landing on a carrier deck - which I think is now manageable. Back to the point of this exercise: (for Max users- otherwise skip this bit) I modelled the wingtips beginning with a sphere, cut in half and pulled into shape using Free-Form-Deformation [FFD]. Once it was all exactly right, I extruded the open end to for the main span up to the aileron inboard hinge. Then extruded again to the wing root. This plane has split flaps that do not fold into the wings at all, [see the Stuka], and can also act as dive brakes. An interesting feature for a naval airforce that seems opposed to the dive-bombing concept. However the flaps in the original format caused a wake of turbulence over the tailplane, which ruined handling, so production models had the tail, raised high on the tail fin with struts down to the fuselage. .

references:

References
British Warplanes of World War II -Daniel J. March
web: the aircrsft does not exist on one piece nay more, but the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovelton has 2 wrecks.

click to open	description
faasig.org/tech/barracuda.htm	watch out for the large download times on this site- they have made errors with picture file formats.
www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Quarters/2230/baracuda.html
canopus.lpi.msk.su/~watson/barracuda.html
sierrascale.hypermart.net/barraindex.htm	Aeroscale page for modellers, includes usefull technical drawings
.military.cz/british/air/war/bomber/barracuda/barracuda_en.htm
.fleetairarmarchive.net/Aircraft/Barracuda.htm	most cpomprehensive site- with details of squadrons in addittion.
there are plenty more sites, just search Google
7sea-traders.co.za/Previews/barracuda.html	This is an example of a site seling plastic kit models of the plane, many sites are not as thorough as this.