Since Amazon lists the publisher as Osprey Publishing, I'm guessing that Osprey Publishing has yet to finalize the cover for the book and the inside content, and that this book could be part of the X-Planes series.
How is the book set for diagrams? Something I've never seen is a good, clear, accurate and official general arrangement of the aircraft.
It's curious to read biographies of all the book' authors, presented on Amazon page.
I look forward to it!
I can imagine
With their business model being dependent on selling the books they spend the money to publish that is understandable.
I've seen a McDonnell proposal to add a turbojet in each nacelle to augment, not replace, the original powerplant.
Yes, the book has McDonnell's nacelle concept drawings for two different mixed-propulsion options. In fact McDonnell was shopping that concept around before the Continental (not Lycoming) powered XP-67 prototype had even been finished. It was clear by then that that engine wasn't going into production, so MAC was proposing to replace it with a different piston engine in the front of the nacelles and a jet in the back. The Army's response - well, it was interesting to say the least. You can read all about it next month...
The engine issues have been vastly exaggerated over the years, particularly allegations that they were prone to catch fire. Those rumors were floating around all during the flight testing phase, and Engineering Division's Chief of Staff finally felt obliged to step in and set the record straight. I think that his information, as much as anything else in the whole book, is going to surprise a lot of people.
Book Depository tells me my copy has shipped. We'll see how long it takes to arrive here.
"Ask and it shall be given unto you" - my copy arrived today. A quick look-through tells me I have some excellent reading ahead.
Sorry to be so long in answering, but things have been busy. The book has a color 3-view of XP-67 in a late configuration by Adam Tooby, based on all of the drawings and photos that we were able to provide him. That included section cuts through the nacelles, for example, from MAC blueprint 2-50000 "Powerplant Installation" that we got from the son of one of the propulsion leads on the program. and as far as I know they've never been published before. And so on. The artist used all of the material we sent him to create a 3D model, and since most of the information was previously unavailable, I think this 3-view is the most definitive one that's been made so far. There are a couple of irritating little things, the omission of the pitot probe from the left wingtip and the transposition of a tiny little scoop for generator cooling air on the left nacelle that should be on the inboard side rather than the outboard side there, despite numerous trans-Atlantic iterations on these drawings with Tooby through our Osprey editor as intermediary. Other than that, though, it should be spot-on for the moment in time that it represents, late summer 1944, near the end of its short life.
We were very surprised at how small they turned out, too. Some of the blueprints were 5 feet long, or more, and we knew those were going to suffer by reduction to fit a book this size. But some of the photos that we had stacked vertically in our draft, to make them wider on the printed page, were changed to side-by-side layout for the book by Osprey. We had to balance 3 conflicting limits: Total number of pages, number of illustrations, and number of words. This was the best we could do within those hard bounds. Even at the current size, though, there's plenty to inform modelers and historians - we hope!
There are those of us would would *love* to see high-rez versions of those blueprints.
Not usually, but some authors go into expanded formats with further editions. May we could enjoy such approach in the future.
Steve, it's an amazing, little book. I love it!
Sir ! Id like to connect with you in reference to the Moonbat ! I was wondering where any/some of the artwork in the book of the different versions of the P-67 could be found ? My Dad worked for McDonnell AC from 1947 till 1987 and so I can claim being a true MAC-Brat ! I hope you see this and might reply to my email ?
I sent you a reply - wish I could be more help, but the publisher holds the copyright on those illustrations and the artist, although he has a license from the publisher to sell copies, hasn't responded to our own attempts to get prints. Best bet is probably to contact him through his website, adamtooby.com
That's embarrassing! The color battle scenes are correct, the markings seem to have been inadvertently applied to the wrong variants by the artist on the side view profiles, and we just didn't catch the mistake during the extensive back-and-forth review process with the publisher. We were never in contact with the artist himself since his contract was directly with the publisher, so all of our comments and his questions went through that 3rd-party filter and we obviously goofed. Thanks for pointing it out!
hushkit.net
