The original Vampire fighter?
- Thread starter Edfilho
- Start date
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
That's an X-24, a lifting body test plane from the early 1960s. KoN21 is thinking of the X-38, the aborted Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS. The project was cancelled a while back, but the last time I visited JSC they had a bunch laying around on display. There should be a bunch of pictures I took here: http://banditloaf.livejournal.com/80768.html
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Delance
Victory, you say?
Mind reading in russian!
Edfilho
Cry some more!
I find lifting body craft to be a really strange concept. I'm not surprised it really didn't work. like those ekranoplanes in russia.
McGruff
Banned
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
It didn't work... like those ekranplans in Russia. That's a good way of putting it, considering how well ekranoplans actually do work.
Actually, the lifting body concept works just fine, but it is simpler just to incorporate lifting body principles to an ordinary aircraft's fuselage, reducing the size of the wings. Both the Space Shuttle and Shorts Skyvan were designed that way.
Ekranoplans are intended to serve more like a ship than an airplane, like a sort of super-hydrofoil, but large enough to work as a high-speed transport.
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
What on Earth gave you that impression? Ekranoplans work just fine - the Soviets even planned to build thirty or forty of them for the Black Sea fleet, and only their financial problems in the 1980s stopped the programme. They haven't bothered building any more of them since then, and they've apparently even abandonded the ones they had, but all this was due to financial reasons, not because they don't work.they LOOK great, but they don't really work
I haven't ever read anything anywhere that would indicate that there were any technical problems with the operation of these craft, and I've certainly read and heard a lot of good things about their capabilities - a craft that flies at 400km/h carring hundreds of tonnes of cargo under the radar is an amazing thing.
Delance
Victory, you say?
But so far no one foud a way to actually use them on a large escale. The models for attack ekranoplanes are very interesting: some say that since their profile exists on gray area between airplanes and ships, existing weapons and radar systems wouldn't be very good at detecting them. I have no idea if that's true, but they could be a good plataform for SSMs.
Death
gh0d (Administrator)
Again, "don't have the funds to operate" != "doesn't work". Happen to recall that little thing about the USSR's economy (and the country itself) imploding, about a decade and a half ago?
As for detection, in the region that the WIG effect works, it's fairly easy to get below the radar horizon, even at sea. Ultimately, when you get close enough you will be detected, but the detection point is a lot closer to the sensor platform when you're flying low, giving less reaction time for defending against incoming missiles (which is why most SSMs have some flavor of "wave hugging" mode, to get lost in the surface clutter from waves and such).
As for detection, in the region that the WIG effect works, it's fairly easy to get below the radar horizon, even at sea. Ultimately, when you get close enough you will be detected, but the detection point is a lot closer to the sensor platform when you're flying low, giving less reaction time for defending against incoming missiles (which is why most SSMs have some flavor of "wave hugging" mode, to get lost in the surface clutter from waves and such).
The Rapier actually seems to have been based off that Firefox thing:
Yeah, they moved it over to the National Air & Space Museum. https://www.wcnews.com/chrisreid/nasaarrow.jpg
The Firefox reminds me of the Excalibur.
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