[AR] Re: B-58 \ was Ozone etc.
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2016 10:00:10 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 20 Sep 2016, David Weinshenker wrote:
As for the implementation, it was pushing a lot of late-40s/early-50s
technology pretty hard, and so it ended up with big maintenance and
reliability problems...
How hard would it be to do something similar out of our present (over 60
years down the line) technology base (i.e., supposing an airplane of the
same size, general configuration, weight, payload and speed were to be
started as a "clean sheet" project today)... is there any reason in
principle that such performance isn't compatible with reasonable
reliability, or is such high-speed operation intrinsically going to push
structures and systems into high-maintenance territory?
Without having looked at the details hard, I think that even in the 1960s,
if Convair had been funded to do it over again (with a suitably nasty
sergeant-major type standing over them, insisting that they not try for
Mach 4 at 100,000ft, but focus on merely matching B-58 performance with
better operability), the results would have been much more satisfactory.
Just moving to transistor electronics would have made a huge difference;
even subsonic high-tech aircraft of the day were maintenance nightmares
because of vacuum-tube electronics. And a lot of other issues were much
better understood in 1965 than in 1955.
For doing it today, the one thing I would wonder about is whether we have
the right engines for it -- sustained high-supersonic speed has not been a
priority for jet-engine design in recent decades. (Not even in fighter
engines, because real fighters on real missions rarely get anywhere near
Mach 2, a fact that was not then appreciated.) An appropriate new engine
could be developed, for sure, but there might not be anything suitable
available off the shelf. And developing that engine might involve
re-learning a few things along the way, because it's been long enough that
some of the fine points of how to do it right may have gotten lost.
Henry
Other related posts:
