Handley Page Hampden and Hereford

[zenrat]

H-P don't have the engineering and production capacity for the deepened fuselage Hampden so it's handed off to Gloster. After a great deal of redesign it belatedly enters service as the Gloster Gladstone.

 
 

[Weaver]

H-P don't have the engineering and production capacity for the deepened fuselage Hampden so it's handed off to Gloster. After a great deal of redesign it belatedly enters service as the Gloster Gladstone.

Gloster will have it as a jet-engine testbed if you're not careful!

Whittle engine in the bomb bay, navigator's position deleted to make room for a nose intake, ventral gunner replaced by the jetpipe, flight engineer in place of the dorsal turret.

[Rheged]

H-P don't have the engineering and production capacity for the deepened fuselage Hampden so it's handed off to Gloster. After a great deal of redesign it belatedly enters service as the Gloster Gladstone.

Gloster will have it as a jet-engine testbed if you're not careful!

Whittle engine in the bomb bay, navigator's position deleted to make room for a nose intake, ventral gunner replaced by the jetpipe, flight engineer in place of the dorsal turret.

What a splendid idea!

[jcf]

H-P don't have the engineering and production capacity for the deepened fuselage Hampden so it's handed off to Gloster. After a great deal of redesign it belatedly enters service as the Gloster Gladstone.

Gloster will have it as a jet-engine testbed if you're not careful!

Whittle engine in the bomb bay, navigator's position deleted to make room for a nose intake, ventral gunner replaced by the jetpipe, flight engineer in place of the dorsal turret.

You'll need to bulge the bomb bay
as the Whittle engine's diameter is greater than the Heyford fuselage width.

[Weaver]

H-P don't have the engineering and production capacity for the deepened fuselage Hampden so it's handed off to Gloster. After a great deal of redesign it belatedly enters service as the Gloster Gladstone.

Gloster will have it as a jet-engine testbed if you're not careful!

Whittle engine in the bomb bay, navigator's position deleted to make room for a nose intake, ventral gunner replaced by the jetpipe, flight engineer in place of the dorsal turret.

You'll need to bulge the bomb bay
as the Whittle engine's diameter is greater than the Heyford fuselage width.

Well either:

a) Make it an early Metrovick axial engine

or

b) go ahead and bulge it, just to annoy Hampden purists even more...

[scooter]

H-P don't have the engineering and production capacity for the deepened fuselage Hampden so it's handed off to Gloster. After a great deal of redesign it belatedly enters service as the Gloster Gladstone.

Gloster will have it as a jet-engine testbed if you're not careful!

Whittle engine in the bomb bay, navigator's position deleted to make room for a nose intake, ventral gunner replaced by the jetpipe, flight engineer in place of the dorsal turret.

You'll need to bulge the bomb bay
as the Whittle engine's diameter is greater than the Heyford fuselage width.

Well either:

a) Make it an early Halford axial engine

or

b) go ahenad and bulge it, just to annoy Hampden purists even more...

And if you give it cheek intakes, you can keep the Art Nouveau French cafe in the nose.

[Caveman]

H-P don't have the engineering and production capacity for the deepened fuselage Hampden so it's handed off to Gloster. After a great deal of redesign it belatedly enters service as the Gloster Gladstone.

Gloster will have it as a jet-engine testbed if you're not careful!

Whittle engine in the bomb bay, navigator's position deleted to make room for a nose intake, ventral gunner replaced by the jetpipe, flight engineer in place of the dorsal turret.

If they used it to do inflight testing of ramjets like the Germans did it would look like the suitcase had a handle...

[Rick Lowe]

I had a related idea for a Hamden "flak basher" along the lines of the A-26 Invader.

It's job would be to go in much lower than the bombers, identify AAA sites by their muzzle flashes or searchlight sites by their beams, strafe them and/or drop small bombs all over them. Nose full of guns, lots of tubes for adapted 3" mortar bombs in the bomb bay, navigator in the former dorsal turret position with just a flex-mount K-gun, ventral turret deleted.

The sticking point for any project like this is making the solid nose. If you just paint the standard nose glazing it looks wrong. Maybe you can sand off the frame lines, but then maybe it no longer mates up with the fuselage afterwards. The only solution then is to coat it in a thin layer of filler and buckle up for some serious PSR sessions. I suppose the other way would be to claim that they did the conversion "quick'n'dirty" by just replacing the perspex with bent alloy on the existing frames, but I can't think of a real-world example of that being done.

Given that the Hampden was introduced in 1937/38, there's  the potential for  an interesting backstory about mass "field conversions"  into anti-invasion beach strafing aircraft  to make life difficult for troops landing in the first wave of Operation Sealion.  That would certainly cover the "quick and dirty"  aspect.

Like the Tu-4 conversion I saw here, have a mass of rifles or muskets mounted to shoot downwards from the bomb-bay...
Then watch the erks scatter if it comes back and has to be reloaded... "Sorry Sarge, it's tea-break time."