AeroFranz said:In the case of ALCMs and ICBMs the man is only removed from the system by one degree. In an unmanned bomber there is at least one more. I think the potential for SNAFUs increases exponentially with degrees of separation.
marauder2048 said:AeroFranz said:In the case of ALCMs and ICBMs the man is only removed from the system by one degree. In an unmanned bomber there is at least one more. I think the potential for SNAFUs increases exponentially with degrees of separation.
Cynically, I've often wondered if the nuclear warheads onboard bombers were "salvage fused" once they penetrated enemy airspace. In other words, if the bomber goes down over enemy territory it goes down with a very big bang.
sferrin said:I wish. I think we're going to see a B-47 sized flying wing. *yawn*
Flyaway said:There is nothing to say it has to be a flying wing design.
dark sidius said:False it can be another shape,
DrRansom said:Ahh, a Mach 2 cruising bomber would be excellent. But, flying wing is vastly more likely than that.
There is some hope for the future, as counter-stealth improves and interceptor get better, the USAF may be forced to look for speed in the next bomber (2060?).
Ah, that's why Northrop is stressing the point that they are leaders in design of LO, blended wing airframes in latest spring advertising...dark sidius said:False it can be another shape, nobody know exactly what the futur bomber will be, just speculation for now. Stealth don(t mean flyng wing look at the F-35 its not a flyng wing.
Accept we are pretty certain they are not trying to build another airframe with fighter's agility and f-35's level of stealth, so pretty certain they going for the optimum stealth shape - flying wing.dark sidius said:False it can be another shape, nobody know exactly what the futur bomber will be, just speculation for now. Stealth don(t mean flyng wing look at the F-35 its not a flyng wing.
Moose said:I'm sorry I'm just not at the point where I find flying wings "boring" yet. Boring is Boeing and Airbus bending over backwards to keep putting out tube-and-wing airliners.
Air Force acquisition chief William LaPlante revealed some of the service's acquisition plan for the Long-Range Strike Bomber Thursday. At a Senate Armed Services Committee's airland subcommittee hearing, LaPlante explained that USAF is doing all it can to contain costs on the bomber, and that cost is a key competitive requirement. While the development phase will be cost-plus, LaPlante said, the LRS will be structured for fixed-price production. "The first one off the line is going to be fixed-price," LaPlante said in response to a question from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). In previous speeches and testimony, LaPlante has echoed Pentagon acquisition, technology, and logistics chief Frank Kendall, saying a fixed-price contract should only be used when a product is very well understood. Clearly, USAF believes it will have thorough knowledge of what the LRS-B "should cost" after the development phase. In an interview with Air Force Magazine last August, LaPlante said the LRS-B would not be chosen based on drawings alone but by evaluating "variants ... of technical articles; ... prototypes, if you want to call it," suggesting that subscale demonstrators, or proof-of-concept craft, have been flying for some time. He also said in the interview that industry would likely have to invest a considerable amount of its own money in development to assure the maturity of the technology for production. USAF has said it plans to award the program in the June timeframe. LaPLante told Rounds that "nothing has changed" on the program since 2010 and that the target $550 million unit cost in 2010 dollars still holds. (See also Staying Stealthy from the August 2014 issue of Air Force Magazine.) (LaPlante prepared testimony)
TomS said:No, the reson for conventiopanl wing and tube airliners is all about manufacturing -- even with composites, it's still easier (cheaper) to build a basically cylindrical pressure compartment and attach wings than it is to build a BWB. It's probably enough cheaper that the decreased acquisition cost more than offsets any potential life-cycle fuel savings.
Rhinocrates said:Aha, so it does! According to "003" below at least.
Still, something like sixty years of development in avionics since and one big off-centre bomb depicted in the original Avro design.
Other images show a centreline bomb bay - e.g.. "lm-boeing-ngb-planform-view" "ngb" - are these to be taken seriously?
When the Pentagon picks the winner of the Long Range Strike Bomber (LRSB) contest in the next few months, it faces an interesting choice. It could give Lockheed Martin — which is doing the design work for the Boeing-Lockheed team — almost all of the country’s advanced stealth design work. Or it could maintain the status quo, in which the entire stealth bomber fleet is made by Northrop Grumman.
If Boeing wins, Lockheed will do the critical design work and will almost certainly not share that intellectual property with Boeing. The Boeing-Lockheed team has the aircraft production credentials and the power to send dozens of lobbyists and carloads of cash to Capitol Hill to ensure the program’s safety in the face of the coming budget crunch.
If Northrop wins, the nation has two design teams able to work on stealthy aircraft and it gets the incumbent.
LowObservable said:I hadn't noticed that bit in the Forbes piece before - the description of LM & Boeing as a Soviet-style design-build team. It does not reflect reality.
The argument for the Boeing-led team rests principally on the fact that Boeing often can produce large numbers of large aircraft on time and at a reasonable cost. But Boeing’s record on commercial aircraft is mixed — 777 vs. 787 — and it’s encountering difficulties with the KC-46, a commercial aircraft that’s being modified for military tanker use.
“When they get it right, when they do large volume aircraft, they do it better than anyone,” Aboulafia told me yesterday evening. “But you also have a company that stumbles pretty badly,” offering as an example the Wedgetail, and, to a lesser degree, the KC-46. Both are weapons based on commercial airframes, supposedly eliminating many of the usual problems that surface when a new military aircraft is designed and built.
If Northrop wins, the nation has two design teams able to work on stealthy aircraft and it gets the incumbent. While space is a different realm in terms of engineering and industrial base, it shares elements of requiring the most advanced engineering talent. The last time Boeing won a huge contract in an area in which it didn’t have much experience, advanced intelligence satellites, the country suffered years of cost overruns, busted schedules and got, by all accounts, a largely failed program, known as the Future Imagery Architecture. Let’s all just hope the selection committee gets this one right.
TomS said:That's not what the article claims. It says that LM is doing the whole design effort and Boeing is just there for fabrication (i.e., LM does the design and tells Boeing "build this"). That would be ignoring a lot of design expertise within Boeing's Phantom Works for no good reason.