Welcome back Skybolt your contribution to this forum have been missed.
 
Skybolt said:
Hi all, let me revive this old topic:
link to WIND TUNNEL INVESTIGATION OF A 1/9-SCALE BOEING COMPANY AMSA AIRPLANE- INLET MODEL AT TRANSONIC AND SUPERSONIC MACH NUMBERS.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/385284.pdf

Aircraft very similar to the traced out sketch published by Scott along time ago. From the wind tunnels model, they tried out three-engined configurations too.

And
Wind Tunnel Investigation of a 1/8-Scale AMSA Aircraft-Inlet Model at Transonic and Supersonic Mach Numbers from GD published here and on which a rather complete report exist on DTIC.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/385450.pdf
Very similar to the above mentioned well known AMPSS configuration.

General Dynamics AMSA from report
 

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All the General Dynamics AMSA materials from http://www.codeonemagazine.com/article.html?item_id=114 posted here for comment and posterity. Note the VG Subsonic design. The Configuration 2906 seems to be the version windtunnel tested above.
 

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Many thanks my dear Paul.
 

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That looks like a fighter canopy, not something you'd see on a bomber. ???
 
sferrin said:
That looks like a fighter canopy, not something you'd see on a bomber. ???

Well, B-47 and XB-52 had fighter-looking canopies too... and B-57, IIRC...
 
Well, you may say as well the the F-111B was a fighter (sort of) with a bomber canopy... :)
 
I'm trying to find info on the B-1 space launch vehicle proposal. It was a B-1 carrying a rocket with satellite underneath. I know I've seen it somewhere, possibly on this board, but I can no longer find it. Any help would be appreciated.
 
GTX said:
Mark Nankivil said:
Slow day at work coming up with that..... Mark

That or someone wanted to impress their kid...or tapped into their inner child. :)

I had to stare at it for some time before I'd accept what my eyes were telling me...
 
Avimimus said:
GTX said:
Mark Nankivil said:
Slow day at work coming up with that..... Mark

That or someone wanted to impress their kid...or tapped into their inner child. :)

I had to stare at it for some time before I'd accept what my eyes were telling me...

I wondered if someone needed to demonstrate that they knew how to get a patent through the USPTO.

"Just come up with something weird, something that no one else would have thought of..."
 
...Or they decided drawings of a B-52 would be boring and old-fashioned. The patent has nothing specifically to do with the B-1B, and so they could have used drawings of any real or notional aircraft with a bomb bay.

I think it was clever marketing — if it were a B-52 in the figures, would the non-specialist press have picked it up and run with it? It's getting conversation started on social media with folks that don't generally follow things like patents on swinging a gun or laser out of an airplane, so I'd have to say Boeing's marketing folks succeeded.
 
Sure but do you really want to send the message, "we think our best ideas come from Wile E. Coyote cartoons"?
 
sferrin said:
Sure but do you really want to send the message, "we think our best ideas come from Wile E. Coyote cartoons"?

I'm honestly confused about why people think that this notion is so irrational. If you develop a palletized gun system that can deploy at substantial airspeed, slew around and accurately hit targets at some distance, then that same gun system can be mounted on other systems. Flip it upside down and put in on the back of a truck and nail ground and air targets. Put it on the deck of a cargo ship and surprise the hell out of those Somali pirates or Iranian gunboats or Chinese destroyers. Put one in a shipping container and plop it on top of your embassy or other fixed position.

Put the gun in a B-1 and get it on site quickly. Put it in a B-52 and loiter over the target. Put it in a B-2 and get there quietly. Hang a modified version out the back of a C-130 or C-17 and make an insta-gunship.
 
Orionblamblam said:
If you develop a palletized gun system that can deploy at substantial airspeed, slew around and accurately hit targets at some distance

And there's the problem. If you've ever seen footage of Apaches firing their canon it's not all that accurate. If they're in a hover they can hit a single guy...eventually. Put that on a plane at 20,000 feet (to stay out of reach of small arms fire) and forget it.
 
sferrin said:
Orionblamblam said:
If you develop a palletized gun system that can deploy at substantial airspeed, slew around and accurately hit targets at some distance

And there's the problem. If you've ever seen footage of Apaches firing their canon it's not all that accurate. If they're in a hover they can hit a single guy...eventually. Put that on a plane at 20,000 feet (to stay out of reach of small arms fire) and forget it.

You probably wouldn't send a B-1 or B-52 to nail a single guy. If you wanted to mess up a truck column, or theatrically turn a building or an industrial area or a missile launch site or a mass of infantry or a gunboat or a cargo ship or a train or low flying helicopters or cargo planes into confetti, this would be a dandy way to do it. Orbit at 20,000 feet and drop five thousand rounds of 40MM on a target, the *right* *kind* of target, and you'll leave an impression. With a 40MM cannon, the possibility certainly exists to use guided rounds. Imagine having a 40MM cannon capable of nailing one guy from five miles up... thousands of times. The mission limitation might be fatigue in the on-board WSO, so the plane might have to have remote gunners.

Still, consider: a B-1 with a high-precision gun is available, and you've just found out that the leader of ISIS is going to be standing on such-and-such a balcony hundreds of miles into enemy territory in a few hours. Soon enough that a B-1 could get there, but not an Apache, not a SEAL sniper team. It might be worth it to send that B-1. The guy is standing there chatting with his buds when BLAMMO his chest is turned into a cavity. Everyone starts looking around but can't see diddly because the gun is *miles* up and *miles* away. The B-1 gunner (now that he has definite confirmation that the target is indeed toast) gets to decide whether to call it a day and leave the rest of the people wondering, or start plinking. Individuals would be too busy simulating Brownian motion to be individually targeted (unless the rounds are laser guided), but their vehicles and structures certainly could be. If you want to be especially entertaining, use rounds that detonate a meter or two prior to impact, thus making a real mess of soft targets.
 
So how is the above a better approach than using precision-guided cluster munitions? I think the USAF got it right when they put this in the "interesting but unnecessary file".
 
Perhaps the ability to reduce or remove the collateral damage from cluster munitions. Cluster munitions tend to kill just about everything in the vicinity of the target which is good for media coverage but not so good for the civilian population at ground zero or governments tainted by the act.
 
Such scenarios are more or less fantasy anyway, since actionable intelligence with that high precision in terms of both space and time is exceptionally rare. And the US has shown little concern about putting a PGM through roof of the suspect building on the occasions when such targets do present themselves. A B-1 with a bays full of SDBs or 500-pound JDAMs would be more than adequate for such missions.

This capability might be of some interest (though far from essential) in cases where bombers are used to provide close air support to troops on the ground. There are instances of B-1Bs (in Afghanistan mainly) making low-level, high-speed passes for suppression just from the sheer noise of their passage. Being able to deploy a gun to provide suppression with some actual lethality and standoff might be appealing. But it's a lot of bomb bay to tie up for such a capability.

The idea that a gun is somehow more of a precision weapon just isn't borne out by the reality on the ground. A gun fired at range from a high-speed aircraft is going to cover a wide area even when nominally shooting at a point target. That's just the nature of the beast -- dispersion is unvoidable. Even the guns on attack helicopters are far from precision implements, as Scott pointed out. Hence the interest in small guided weapons like APKWS to provide actual low-collateral-damage lethality.
 
Orionblamblam said:
You probably wouldn't send a B-1 or B-52 to nail a single guy. If you wanted to mess up a truck column, or theatrically turn a building or an industrial area or a missile launch site or a mass of infantry or a gunboat or a cargo ship or a train or low flying helicopters or cargo planes into confetti, this would be a dandy way to do it. Orbit at 20,000 feet and drop five thousand rounds of 40MM on a target, the *right* *kind* of target, and you'll leave an impression. With a 40MM cannon, the possibility certainly exists to use guided rounds. Imagine having a 40MM cannon capable of nailing one guy from five miles up... thousands of times. The mission limitation might be fatigue in the on-board WSO, so the plane might have to have remote gunners.

Still, consider: a B-1 with a high-precision gun is available, and you've just found out that the leader of ISIS is going to be standing on such-and-such a balcony hundreds of miles into enemy territory in a few hours. Soon enough that a B-1 could get there, but not an Apache, not a SEAL sniper team. It might be worth it to send that B-1. The guy is standing there chatting with his buds when BLAMMO his chest is turned into a cavity. Everyone starts looking around but can't see diddly because the gun is *miles* up and *miles* away. The B-1 gunner (now that he has definite confirmation that the target is indeed toast) gets to decide whether to call it a day and leave the rest of the people wondering, or start plinking. Individuals would be too busy simulating Brownian motion to be individually targeted (unless the rounds are laser guided), but their vehicles and structures certainly could be. If you want to be especially entertaining, use rounds that detonate a meter or two prior to impact, thus making a real mess of soft targets.

See, this starts to sound like the Project Insight Helicarriers from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
 
Yes, what I was thinking: A 40mm cannon firing guided rounds might be the exception (effective, relatively cheap, and usable outside of short range air-defenses).
 
Jeb said:
See, this starts to sound like the Project Insight Helicarriers from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Science fiction has often been a decent way to envision future developments. A high altitude aircraft capable of sniping individual combatants at high volume, high rate and some distance would be a *fantastic* capability.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Jeb said:
See, this starts to sound like the Project Insight Helicarriers from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Science fiction has often been a decent way to envision future developments. A high altitude aircraft capable of sniping individual combatants at high volume, high rate and some distance would be a *fantastic* capability.

That was basically the concept in Real Genius but they used a laser in a weapons bay in a B-1. Why not do the same instead of a projectile weapon? Make a self-contained pallet that slides into one of the bays on a B-1B.
 
TomS said:
Such scenarios are more or less fantasy anyway, since actionable intelligence with that high precision in terms of both space and time is exceptionally rare.

Not really. Sure, knowledge about "hey, you know that *one* guy we really want?" might be rare, but "hey, there's a whole camp of jackholes we'd like to kill" is fairly common. The capability being discussed here *might* (and, eventually, *will*) allow an aircraft to take out individuals. If you have a series of remote gunners or a really good AI hooked up to sizable optics and laser guided ammo, you could shoot every male of military age in a camp, or everyone holding an AK-47 or an RPG, or everyone *not* wearing an orange jumpsuit.

The ability to turn an entire camp into a smoking hole is a fine demonstration of power. The ability to turn *specific* people in a camp into individual smoking holes is a whole new level of power projection.

A B-1 with a bays full of SDBs or 500-pound JDAMs would be more than adequate for such missions.

Sure, if your goal is widespread and rather uninspired destruction. and that's fine for many applications. But there's times when you want to do something different, or otherwise we'd simply drop bobs on *all* problems.

dispersion is unvoidable. Even the guns on attack helicopters are far from precision implements, as Scott pointed out. Hence the interest in small guided weapons like APKWS to provide actual low-collateral-damage lethality.

And since there are guided .50 BMG rounds, a 20MM and especially a 40MM with guided rounds is pretty straightforward. Imagine how many tens of thousands of rounds of guided 20MM a B-52 could carry, along with the optics needed to pick out individual targets. With a proper controlling AI software system, that B-52 could overfly enemy territory and apply one 20MM round to each person. A single B-52 could wipe out an entire invasion force landing in, say, Taiwan or Ukraine (by targeting everyone wearing a particular nations uniform... killing them, but leaving a lot of their *stuff* intact, and *not* trashing the friendly territory the B-52 is protecting). It could kill the crews of every single small attack boat within 20 miles. It could turn an infantry assault sweeping west through Poland into just a whole lot of dead guys. And missiles and aircraft sent to bring that B-52 down had better attack from above, because they won't get close.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX8Z2MDYX3g
 
sferrin said:
Orionblamblam said:
Jeb said:
See, this starts to sound like the Project Insight Helicarriers from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Science fiction has often been a decent way to envision future developments. A high altitude aircraft capable of sniping individual combatants at high volume, high rate and some distance would be a *fantastic* capability.

That was basically the concept in Real Genius but they used a laser in a weapons bay in a B-1. Why not do the same instead of a projectile weapon? Make a self-contained pallet that slides into one of the bays on a B-1B.

Hell, fill the two forward bays with laser pallets and some sort of fly-out smart weapon in the third. I mean, since we're making stuff up and all.
 
Orionblamblam said:
And since there are guided .50 BMG rounds, a 20MM and especially a 40MM with guided rounds is pretty straightforward. Imagine how many tens of thousands of rounds of guided 20MM a B-52 could carry, along with the optics needed to pick out individual targets. With a proper controlling AI software system, that B-52 could overfly enemy territory and apply one 20MM round to each person. A single B-52 could wipe out an entire invasion force landing in, say, Taiwan or Ukraine (by targeting everyone wearing a particular nations uniform... killing them, but leaving a lot of their *stuff* intact, and *not* trashing the friendly territory the B-52 is protecting). It could kill the crews of every single small attack boat within 20 miles. It could turn an infantry assault sweeping west through Poland into just a whole lot of dead guys. And missiles and aircraft sent to bring that B-52 down had better attack from above, because they won't get close.

There was an article in an old MILTECH back in the late 80s/early 90s where they'd developed a guided 40mm round. It used single-shot side thrusters like the ASM-135 KKV. They said they could scale it down to 20mm or up to 16" rounds. As Exacto demonstrated, the options are greater now.
 
Jeb said:
Hell, fill the two forward bays with laser pallets and some sort of fly-out smart weapon in the third. I mean, since we're making stuff up and all.

What stuff is being made up? Guns? We have them. Laser guided ammo? Have it. AI systems that can distinguish types of targets? Have it (quite possibly your *phone* has it). Airborne optics? Got it.
 
DoD FY2018 Rapid Innovation Fund

U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)
Requirement #: SOCOM-18-BAA-RIF-0001
Title: Guided 30MM Ammunition Capability
Military System or Acquisition Customer: Program Executive Office (PEO) – Fixed Wing
(FW)
Description: Provide an enhanced accuracy, guided 30MM ammunition capability that is
compatible with current AC-130 W/J platforms’ Mk 44 Bushmaster II (GAU-23) automatic
cannon weapon systems. Deliver a 30MM round capable of receiving and responding to
externally provided post launch course corrections to accurately engage designated moving and
stationary ground targets, with guidance systems that are compatible with current Precision
Strike Package (PSP) on the AC-130 W/J aircraft configurations with little or no hardware
modifications. Proposed software modifications should lead to demonstrable capability by minor
additions to PSP software in about six months with full capability fitting in the annual PSP
software release cycle. The guided 30MM round target circular error probability (CEP) must be
predictable and provide considerable improved accuracy over standard unguided 30MM
ammunition. The guided 30MM round must operate within the operating envelope of the
AFSOC AC-130 W/J, altitudes (15,000 – 25,000’ MSL), ranges (1.0 - 10.0nm) and slant ranges
(2.5 – 3.0nm). Use of high fidelity modeling throughout development is encouraged to
determine the optimal munition configurations, characteristics and maximize the value of range,
ground, and flight testing. The initiative will conclude with a guided 30MM ammunition round
design, guidance and control system, and tracking system that has been demonstrated in a nearfinal
and realistic configuration.

Technical POC: Todd Hadley, 813-826-0048, Todd.hadley@socom.mil.
 
some great B-1A references here
 
flateric said:
some great B-1A references here
Those are excellent, and beefy, PDFs. Thank you.
 
PeninsulaSrsVideos said:
B-1 Bailout: Hazards of Flight Test
B-1 Flight Test Engineer Otto Waniczek recounts conditions, causes, and aftermath of the crash of a B-1 Lancer prototype that crashed on 29 August 1984. Only two of the crew members survived the bailout, sadly pilot Benefield did not. Produced by Jarel & Betty Wheaton for Peninsula Seniors www.pvseniors.org
Video:
View: https://youtu.be/TN-mXzAFCqM

Code:
https://youtu.be/TN-mXzAFCqM
 
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