The SAAF Forum

The next time I am in SA I will buy you a drink if you can find or calculate to a reasonable degree of accuracy, the surface area of a Spitfire. Things like canopy, wheels, landing gear struts do not have to be included. Another way to approach the problem is to think: If I were to redo the camo for a spitfire, how much paint do I need?

Can't help you with the surface area, but can with the paint job.

Park said spitty in a large enough hanger, place two 5 liter tins of paint of the selected colour underneath the fuselage just behind the leading edge of the wing and another two tins on either side of the vertical stabiliser. Insert one stick of TNT/dynamite, per tin, into said opened tins of paint (remember to stir vigourosly before this).

Light the fuse, RUN, and wait for the bang.

Mr Bean, what a great Brit.

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Gil en spring!!!!!

Simple enough, but... which variant's surface area are you looking for?

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www.monzlyons.co.uk

Would it amuse you further to find that MythBusters tested this? xD

Nope, seen it. They did it wrong. Mr bean did it the correct, stiff-upperlip way.

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Gil en spring!!!!!

Well if you can't find the surface area of a spitfire, can you at least determine the circumference of a moose?

That's easy. The circumference of a moose is equal to the square root of the weight of a six pack of budweiser divided by its speed of consumption.

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Gil en spring!!!!!

Fair

Do you think I could get away with using Wing Area multiplied by 3?

Are you in principle opposed to PI?

Something tells me that Pi will not suffice to calculate the surface area of a spitfire... Or the circumference of a moose for that matter.


And I'm dead serious about the spitfire, so, any takers? Something more accurate than wing area times three would be greatly appreciated =]

Get yourself a 3 view drawing of a Spit. Use Photoshop to fill in the the entire aircraft with a solid colour. Note how many pixels of that colour are used. Add up the side times 2, the planform top and bottom view. Work out the wingspan and length in pixels. This will give you all you need to know calculate fairly accurately the area.



Crude demonstration of what I was saying - use the biggest scale drawings you can to get more accuracy. Leave out the bits you will not be needing painting, etc.



So using two sides and two plans we get approximately 205 square metres. Very crudely - but bung in a few percent for curvature etc and I'd say if you worked on 210 - 215 sq metres you could not be far out.

Using a much larger scale drawing where the length is close to 2000 pixels I get an area of 204.6 square metres for the entire aircraft. So 210 square metres should cover it.

Ooh, Hi there. Missed your post for some reason

I'm looking ideally for a Mk II or Mk V, though since I'm not expecting an exact number, I doubt the difference between the marks will prove an issue.


Good sir Eugene, we appear to have a rather large discrepancy between the figures we've arrived at, and something tells me we've used somewhat different figures.

I used the wing area multiplied by three and came to about 66 sqm. That's a pretty big discrepancy, and while I admit I'm using a very rough estimate, I don't think I can be that far off.

According to wiki, the spitfire's wingspan comes to about 12m, not 17, and the length to only 9, not 14. Not sure how much that'll throw your calculations by, but I'd suspect a fair amount.

I might be out by 100%, since I'm not sure if wing area is a single wing or both, so my value is either 66 sqm or 122 sqm.

You are correct. Comes from doing this stuff at 3 am. I converted inches to millimetres by hitting the millimetres to inches button. No sweat - the method is substantially correct, just bad converting! Ok - by doing the length and width correctly I arrive at a figure of 89.5 square metres -
working on just the plans and sides as flat. Bung in something for curves and scale error and I'd say between 90 and 95 square metres surface area. Drop me a pm if you'd like the original I worked from so you can check for yourself.

Hmm; but shouldn't we be taking away for curvature, since the curved surfaces are actually counted twice?

And does anyone have the appropriate plans for a Spitfire, such plans that would show the various ribs and shapes?

Not really. Yes, you are looking at some of the curvature in the planview. But not all of it.



I'm sure there are some available on the web - I have several, but no tin plan and side views that I can think of.