In aviation, those who dare to dream are either visionaries or insane. The long road of aviation history is filled with dead-end side roads of designs that simply boggle the mind. Those designs aren't just limited to fanciful thinking by eccentrics, either. Lockheed in the late 1960s devoted a surprising amount of effort to one of my favorite designs that most certainly falls into the "YGBSM" category ("You Gotta Be Sh*tting Me"- the unofficial motto of the USAF Wild Weasels, allegedly what was said by the pilots and WSOs who attended the first briefing on what was then a secret project). At the time Lockheed's Skunk Works had been looking at the feasibility of building an ultra-large transport for the US military and heading into the early 1970s the design evovled into the CL-1201 tailless aircraft that would have been for lack of a better description, a flying aircraft carrier.
so how would that work aerodynamically? Without elevators or horizontal stabilizers - would it even fly? I mean, it might given the mass of the wings themselves, it's just that it's never been done and I was curious if it would even work, or if that was a tell indicating that the whole article is bogus . . .
This is interesting to me because it might have been conceived with the intention that it would never come to anything. I'm suggesting the idea was probably designed as a deliberate exercise in failure. In order to achieve success it's necessary to achieve failure along the way. Inspiration and improvement can be drawn from that failure, so deliberately designing an outlandishly impractical device is not a waste of time but a source of inspiration in an iterative process.
Oh, hell yeah. Totally a design exercise. One of the biggest problems the B-36 had was a lack of landing strips; as I recall, there were only a handful that were hard enough to deal with its weight. B-36 loaded weight: 260,000 lb. C-5B loaded weight: 760,000 lb. This turkey: Twelve. Million. Pounds. Never mind that the USAF gave up on nuclear planes in the early '60s. Never mind that the hottest-shit engine of the time, put out a paltry 50,000 lbs of thrust. Let's put together a design exercise that will tow five 737s and relies on 625,000 lbs of thrust just to keep it from falling out of the sky. somebody paid for it, though. I've got a bunch of paper on the Boeing 2707 and while it was kind of pie in the sky, too, Boeing was deadly serious about it. The cancellation of the 2707 was the proximate cause of ten years of economic depression in the Seattle metro area.
I don't know anything about aviation or engineering, so I'm not sure I can grasp what this is saying other than it's crazy big and intended to use some kind of nuclear powered engine in addition to jets to lift off. Did anyone do any work to see if it would actually fly?
Well, military design exercises are sort of a thing of their own. It sort of goes like this: IF: the following assumptions aren't complete and utter horseshit THEN: we could build you one of these if you give us enough money. So for scale and perspective, go look at that link again and keep your eye out for a "medium intratheater transport." Imagine each one of those says "Southwest Airlines" on the side and you're at about the scale being discussed. So that's the ridiculous part. You accept that as the boundary conditions. Then you go "Okay, but if we give X airframe Y thrust, will it stay in the sky?" "Okay, if we run A nuclear piles in B liquid sodium, will we get enough thrust for that last equation?" "Okay, if those two equations balance out, can we pass the buck on everything else?" Imagine landing it. Imagine flying it in a storm. Imagine the PR fun involved in having half a Chernobyl overhead. Yeah, it was never going to happen. But it's kinda funny to contemplate the conditions necessary for someone to even get vaguely serious about it.
Yeah, I saw that and the note about the thing towing all of those. Plus there was that thing about 22 multirole aircraft or something. Big. Gotcha. Haha, yeah. My buddy was an engineer on a sub and was telling me all about how it's a pain to do maintenance on that thing, in part because of all the safety protocols, so I'd imagine that servicing a working example of one of these things would be a pain.So for scale and perspective, go look at that link again and keep your eye out for a "medium intratheater transport." Imagine each one of those says "Southwest Airlines" on the side and you're at about the scale being discussed.
Imagine landing it. Imagine flying it in a storm. Imagine the PR fun involved in having half a Chernobyl overhead.