re: #266 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

And it was so bad at doing it was designed for that they had to change its mission to get any use out of it.

A lot of that lies with the fact that they were pushing the boundaries of what piston engines could do. The Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone was extremely complex, and was pushed into production to get the ungainly beasts into the air. After the war, its refined versions became reasonably reliable engines for large commercial airliners, before the advent of the Boeing and Douglas jet liners.