Rolls-Royce Nene

RB.41 Nene / J42
Rolls-Royce Nene on display at RAAF Base Pearce, Western Australia - note the wire mesh grille around the air intake to prevent Foreign object damage
Type	Turbojet
Manufacturer	Rolls-Royce Limited
First run	27 October 1944
Major applications	Canadair CT-133 Silver Star Dassault Ouragan de Havilland Vampire Grumman F9F Panther Hawker Sea Hawk
Number built	1,139 (J42)
Developed from	Rolls-Royce Derwent
Developed into	Rolls-Royce Derwent V Rolls-Royce RB.44 Tay Pratt & Whitney J48 Klimov VK-1

The Rolls-Royce RB.41 Nene is a 1940s British centrifugal compressor turbojet engine. The Nene was a complete redesign, rather than a scaled-up Rolls-Royce Derwent,^[1] with a design target of 5,000 lbf (22 kN), making it the most powerful engine of its era. First run in 1944, it was Rolls-Royce's third jet engine to enter production, and first ran less than 6 months from the start of design. It was named after the River Nene in keeping with the company's tradition of naming its jet engines after rivers.

The design saw relatively little use in British aircraft designs, being passed over in favour of the axial-flow Avon that followed it. Its only widespread use in the UK was in the Hawker Sea Hawk and the Supermarine Attacker. In the US it was built under licence as the Pratt & Whitney J42, and it powered the Grumman F9F Panther. Its most widespread use was in the form of the Klimov VK-1, a reverse-engineered, modified and enlarged version which produced around 6,000 lbf (27 kN) of thrust, and powered the Russian built Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15, a highly successful fighter aircraft which was produced in vast numbers.

An uprated version of the Nene was produced as the Rolls-Royce Tay.