Help needed with translation from French

Schneiderman

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Can a French speaker please translate the text below. This is from a project blueprint and I am having a big problem working out the scale and dimenssions, for example it states that the length of the fuselage is 678, which makes no sense in either metres or feet. The clue is probably in this text. Thanks
 

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"Profondeur de profil à l'encastrement 200
Epaisseur 40"

Can be translated as:
"Profile depth at (wing) root: 200
Thickness 40"
 
Schneiderman said:
it states that the length of the fuselage is 678, which makes no sense in either metres or feet.

678 *inches* = 56.4 feet, or 17.22 of the units that didn't send men to the Moon. Or it might be 678 centimeters. Seems odd they'd use inches in a French design, though. It's always possible that the 678 is in reference to some particular design feature; many wind tunnel models set the length of the fuselage as 1, and all other measurements as simply scaled from that.
 
Schneiderman said:
Can a French speaker please translate the text below. This is from a project blueprint and I am having a big problem working out the scale and dimenssions, for example it states that the length of the fuselage is 678, which makes no sense in either metres or feet. The clue is probably in this text. Thanks
What type of aircraft is it ? 6,78 m is not necessarily a nonsense for the length of a fuselage. For example for the Arnoux Simplex racer (1923) the length is 5,40 m, and the thickness on the root would be around 40 cm.
 
Thanks for the translation, that helps.

Its a large flying boat and I would expect the hull length to be something like 150ft, I'm 99% certain the units on the drawing are metric, so ~46m. Its a British drawing produced on behalf of Wibault or, alternatively, copied in order to comment on their hull design. Most probably the former.

As Orionblamblam says, the units may refer to a model, I had thought the same. It also says Echelle: grandeur on the drawing which I take to mean scale: full size, is that correct? If it were the span that had been set as 1 then the other dimenssions would be plausible, say 1 metre span and 67.8cm length. Unfortunately there is no reference to span on the drawing and no full top view.
 
Yes "échelle grandeur" means full scale.
Units on french blueprints are in millimeters, so that would be 67.8 cm. If the thing was 6.78 m long, it would be noted 6780.

Couldn't find what unit are used for fuselage STA in metric countries…most probably mm.
Note STA 0 position is sometime ahead or behind the nose tip.
Was a STA reference system even used at the time of Wibault?
I thought their reference would be from the nose to tail length, not STAs, like "this is at XXX mm (from nose)", at the time, dunno.

Edit: This A320 plan shows STA in mm, note nose tip is at 254, 37.57m (A320 lenght) = 3757mm + 254 mm= 4011mm (STA 4011) :
A320_FuselageSideView2.jpg


Edit again: I kept using comma to separate decimal :p corrected, changed that to points.
 
of the units that didn't send men to the Moon

Yet those same units send Mars Climate Orbiter to a fiery death... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-force seconds (lbf·s) instead of the SI units of newton-seconds (N·s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed.

;D
 
Great, so we are looking at a drawing produced at full size and therefore of a model. All the dimenssions are thus in mm. Unfortunately there is nothing on the drawing to indicate at what scale the model was produced, I will have to see if I can deduce that from other information.
 
galgot said:
Yes "échelle grandeur" means full scale.
Units on french blueprints are in millimeters, so that would be 67.8 cm. If the thing was 6.78 m long, it would be noted 6780.

Couldn't find what unit are used for fuselage STA in metric countries…most probably mm.
Note STA 0 position is sometime ahead or behind the nose tip.
Was a STA reference system even used at the time of Wibault?
I thought their reference would be from the nose to tail length, not STAs, like "this is at XXX mm (from nose)", at the time, dunno.

Edit: This A320 plan shows STA in mm, note nose tip is at 254, 37.57m (A320 lenght) = 3757mm + 254 mm= 4011mm (STA 4011) :
A320_FuselageSideView2.jpg


Edit again: I kept using comma to separate decimal :p corrected, changed that to points.

Thats not in mm, its in cm. 4011mm = 4.011m which is awfully short for an A320. 4011cm is correct.

However that doesn't really help, except to put us back to 678 = 6.78m.
 

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