Strange jet thread

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Rockwell XFV-12A, attempted American competitor to the Harrier, killed by engine problems.

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Evil aliens helped them design them?

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Vaught F7U. Fielded as early carrier jet... and was a fucking under-powered deathtrap.

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Everyone loves XF-85 Goblin-kun!

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>deathtrap
>2 seconds later
I know it wasn't as bad anywhere not 100ft over the German countryside.

Behold, the Convair NB-36H "Crusader", AKA the X-6. A B-36 Peacemaker modified to carry a fully-functional nuclear reactor. Served as a testbed for the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program, demonstrating that a plane could fly with a reactor onboard. Had the project advanced further, the reactor would have been used to superheat air piped to the jet nozzles, alleviating the need for conventional fuel and giving the aircraft 50+ days of flight endurance/loiter time.

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"Oh fuck, we just irradiated the ground crews again."

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Alt history?

youtube.com/watch?v=3l3yEGblTj8

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oh fuck my F7U
thanks 0.45 thrust/weight ratio

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That's what this was for. They called it the "Beetle", haven't read a whole lot about it, but it was a heavily-shielded mobile repair platform specifically to work with nuclear aircraft.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

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The cold war was nuts/amazing

If we're doing cool planes that never made it, meet the Blackbird's direct predecessor - pretty much the same, except this Mach 3+ bastard wasn't armed with a camera, it actually had missiles, making it the largest, fastest interceptor ever built

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That's not "fuck, we irradiated the ground crew", that's "fuck it, irradiate everything"

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I might be wrong here, but I believe the NB-36H would have been cleaner than the Pluto/SLAM, it used a conventional jet engine heated by a nuclear reactor instead of a reactor directly in the airstream functioning as a ramjet.

Here's another related concept that never made it off the drawing board, the Lockheed CL1201, a nuclear-powered flying aircraft carrier. Crew of 800, four main engines as well as one hundred and eighty-fucking-two VTOL lift jets to get off the ground in the first place.

The sick thing is: A proper heat exchanger is just too heavy. But the physics of a reactor can easily work with 2 cycles of coolant, one contaminated, the other not.

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Why are bombers so sexy?

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Yes, Pluto is a scorched earth weapon that affects the whole world. An open cycle reactor is basically a dirty bomb without the boom, or rather one that doesn't end.

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The X36 was meant to use heat exchanger engines iirc, Pluto was just such a no-fucks given design it didn't bother.

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I'm not on /k/, am I? Or whatever board is appropriate?

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Still amuses me that that wasn't even the thing's weapon, it was an incidental bonus

Nah, you're in /d/-lite. We fap to planes.

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I came here to post this.

There's also that awkward part right before the Korean war where the US started trying to replace their entire armed forces with B-36s and nukes.

If you like the SLAM/X-6 stuff, I highly suggest you read A Colder War, by Charles Stross. Soviets weaponize Necronomicon-related entities (shoggoths and Cthulhu), the US builds a fleet of X-6s armed with Pluto SLAMs to counter them. And believe it or not, the world doesn't end until the mid-'80s.

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...crimson skies +~15 years inspiration?

Goddamn vulcan, it howls at you
youtube.com/watch?v=H_ARSE8jEHQ

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>mach 3

Isn't that actually faster than the missile it would fire?

>armed with Pluto SLAMs to counter them. And believe it or not, the world doesn't end until the mid-'80s.
How in the hell?

mmm, Valkyrie

Well I know I'm on /d/lite, I've seen stuff on here, man.

Just... This thread is rather odd.

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I'm knee deep in The Laundry. A Colder War was the one before that has the same flavors but isn't the same universe, right?

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Not the missile IT was designed to use (Mach 4, down from 6 when they switched to a solid rocket over a liquid one that didn't work), but quite possibly faster than soviet ones.

Also the (Air-to-air remember) missile could be equipped with a conventional warhead or a 0.25 kiloton version of the W42 nuclear warhead, because of course it could

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Without spoilering too much, nobody quite knows what kicked it off. Iran makes a deal with Israel (!) to acquire a nuclear weapon with which to attack Iraq, where Saddam Hussein is attempting to open a gate to Yog-Sothoth. Meanwhile the Iran-Contra hearings are in progress, and Reagan cracks a bad joke on an open mic (which actually happened) about bombing Russia.

Yeah, A Colder War ends with Earth being fucked, whereas the Earth-fucking is on the horizon in the Laundry series.

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>Goddamn vulcan, it howls at you
That's probably where they got the idea for the Tie fighter sounds.

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It's really the same principle as character art threads.

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Quite a few applications of nuclear weapons are really mostly just big booms. We've just built up a mystique around them so it seems any little thing is overkill.

>DYEL

god bless you bullshit F-19, i flew you for hours on my 286

Strategic bomber flying boat.

The fuck is that?

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Bokurano, manga about kids in a giant robot but the author made a bunch of designs of near-future and alternate universe tech for it.

I'm sorry but this thing still looks like it should be loaded with bank after bank of A2A missiles.

>strange jet thread
Can't get any stranger than this.

That's one way to thrust vector, I guess.

>that pose
I'd always wondered what the hell the controls were like