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[OP] 127 views 0 replies Posted by Unknown 9 years ago Mar 29, 2:49 am forums.robertsspaceindustries.com
Back when I was in college, a retired fighter-pilot prof and I put together a concept for a stealth heavy-bomber trans-atmospheric vehicle--which drew an "interesting" reaction from his active-duty one-star brother-in-law.
So I've had part of an engineering data package floating on a quarantined USB drive for about a decade, and the thought occurred to me that what we deliberately redesigned to make economically impractical in the present day might possibly have a place in a world like Star Citizen.
The concept: All-environment stealth strike-craft, capable of basing by land or sea, target-approach options ranging from deck-hugging stealth (ekranoplan style) to blistering speed (pop-up into orbit then drop into the target area like a giant ICBM) or even just plain tear a hole and blast its way through with the aid of a dozen embarked drone fighters and expending part of its payload.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Project Infiltrator"--I'm going to give you the statistics for its 2005 final design-freeze concept and then ask anyone who feels like chiming in to translate that to 2940's/SC equivalent stats for power, hardpoints etc. The vehicle is 415' long, with a wingspan varying by tip position like the old XB-70 Valkyrie but 400' with the wingtips drooped 22.5 degrees in subsonic cruise position, less when lowered to -67.5 for supersonic cruise or raised to +67.5 for atmospheric reentry or taxi. Alternatively, the wingtips could be omitted entirely for a 320' (Spruce Goose-size) span, either clean or with a module on each tip for either additional fuel tanks or weapons bays/hardpoints. (Though with this thing theoretically capable of using entire Saturn V rockets as strap-on boosters, a wingtip missile sized to fit this thing would probably be a planet-buster.) Roughly, a little smaller than a Banu Merchantman but flattened to about the height of a Retaliator, if memory serves.
Power package would be a high-bypass-fan/ramjet/linear-aerospike rocket hybrid, with each of sixteen engines generating 125,000# of static thrust--I outlined the concept to a couple GE tech-reps when I was at a Boeing open house, and was assured "if the application entered development, we could start to design and build your monster super-engines as soon as the check cleared." That's 2 million pounds of static thrust for a ship targeted to gross at an "Optimal Max Takeoff Weight" of half that, though for a conventional rolling takeoff and a slower flight profile it could probably go even heavier. (A thousand tons and 400' long is roughly comparable to a WWII destroyer.) Let's call it power-to-weight of 2:1 best/1:1 mid/0.5:1 least for a decent performance envelope, assuming that in the 2940s an engine fifteen feet in diameter will deliver far more power than its counterpart of almost a millennium prior. The pinched section in the waist was conceived as being set aside for a Tokamak fusion reactor to power electrical systems including adaptive-camouflage if/when such systems mature.
One of the concept payload options was to mount a retractable 16"/50 (barrel length ~67') naval rifle in each wing; other design studies included 8" naval rifles, 155mm howitzers recalibrated for direct-fire or M256 smoothbore 120mm cannons as carried on the M1A1/A2 tank. Close-in weapons would include multiple GAU-8/Goalkeeper 30mm Gatlings (GAU-8 is an A-10's fixed gun, Goalkeeper is adapted as an AA turret for ships), and my prof estimated that the central carapace could have housed enough air-to-air and air-to-ground weapon to deliver all of Operation Enduring Freedom's air campaign on one flight.
Front view:
Top, supersonic (note, this is the next-to-final, 8-engine version):
Top, subsonic, to-scale with Saturn V and person (speck on #8 afterburner/aerospike):
Broadside:
With the aircraft it was designed to replace:
All I have is a SketchUp model of the exterior shell--when my prof's BIL freaked we destroyed about half the engineering data package and agreed that any future development and modeling would be skin, cockpit and main weapons bay (the central carapace) only--I believe that redeveloping it in a sci-fi context will also serve our instructions to "bury the project" nicely. Anyone out there think this would be worth developing as an SC ship (and if so, what would its numbers look like for weapons/hardpoints), and would anyone be game for filling out the SketchUp "skin" in 3dsMax/Gmax/whatever 3d-model suite to take it from a doomed-by-its-own-frightful-potential "paper airplane" to a viable Star Citizen spacecraft?
So I've had part of an engineering data package floating on a quarantined USB drive for about a decade, and the thought occurred to me that what we deliberately redesigned to make economically impractical in the present day might possibly have a place in a world like Star Citizen.
The concept: All-environment stealth strike-craft, capable of basing by land or sea, target-approach options ranging from deck-hugging stealth (ekranoplan style) to blistering speed (pop-up into orbit then drop into the target area like a giant ICBM) or even just plain tear a hole and blast its way through with the aid of a dozen embarked drone fighters and expending part of its payload.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Project Infiltrator"--I'm going to give you the statistics for its 2005 final design-freeze concept and then ask anyone who feels like chiming in to translate that to 2940's/SC equivalent stats for power, hardpoints etc. The vehicle is 415' long, with a wingspan varying by tip position like the old XB-70 Valkyrie but 400' with the wingtips drooped 22.5 degrees in subsonic cruise position, less when lowered to -67.5 for supersonic cruise or raised to +67.5 for atmospheric reentry or taxi. Alternatively, the wingtips could be omitted entirely for a 320' (Spruce Goose-size) span, either clean or with a module on each tip for either additional fuel tanks or weapons bays/hardpoints. (Though with this thing theoretically capable of using entire Saturn V rockets as strap-on boosters, a wingtip missile sized to fit this thing would probably be a planet-buster.) Roughly, a little smaller than a Banu Merchantman but flattened to about the height of a Retaliator, if memory serves.
Power package would be a high-bypass-fan/ramjet/linear-aerospike rocket hybrid, with each of sixteen engines generating 125,000# of static thrust--I outlined the concept to a couple GE tech-reps when I was at a Boeing open house, and was assured "if the application entered development, we could start to design and build your monster super-engines as soon as the check cleared." That's 2 million pounds of static thrust for a ship targeted to gross at an "Optimal Max Takeoff Weight" of half that, though for a conventional rolling takeoff and a slower flight profile it could probably go even heavier. (A thousand tons and 400' long is roughly comparable to a WWII destroyer.) Let's call it power-to-weight of 2:1 best/1:1 mid/0.5:1 least for a decent performance envelope, assuming that in the 2940s an engine fifteen feet in diameter will deliver far more power than its counterpart of almost a millennium prior. The pinched section in the waist was conceived as being set aside for a Tokamak fusion reactor to power electrical systems including adaptive-camouflage if/when such systems mature.
One of the concept payload options was to mount a retractable 16"/50 (barrel length ~67') naval rifle in each wing; other design studies included 8" naval rifles, 155mm howitzers recalibrated for direct-fire or M256 smoothbore 120mm cannons as carried on the M1A1/A2 tank. Close-in weapons would include multiple GAU-8/Goalkeeper 30mm Gatlings (GAU-8 is an A-10's fixed gun, Goalkeeper is adapted as an AA turret for ships), and my prof estimated that the central carapace could have housed enough air-to-air and air-to-ground weapon to deliver all of Operation Enduring Freedom's air campaign on one flight.
Front view:
Top, supersonic (note, this is the next-to-final, 8-engine version):
Top, subsonic, to-scale with Saturn V and person (speck on #8 afterburner/aerospike):
Broadside:
With the aircraft it was designed to replace:
All I have is a SketchUp model of the exterior shell--when my prof's BIL freaked we destroyed about half the engineering data package and agreed that any future development and modeling would be skin, cockpit and main weapons bay (the central carapace) only--I believe that redeveloping it in a sci-fi context will also serve our instructions to "bury the project" nicely. Anyone out there think this would be worth developing as an SC ship (and if so, what would its numbers look like for weapons/hardpoints), and would anyone be game for filling out the SketchUp "skin" in 3dsMax/Gmax/whatever 3d-model suite to take it from a doomed-by-its-own-frightful-potential "paper airplane" to a viable Star Citizen spacecraft?
