Could the Concorde be weaponised?

>>32743597
Pack it full of enough explosives. Find a pilot that just doesn't give a fuck anymore and point him in the general direction of your enemies and wait.

It's already killed more people than most military airframes.

>>32743617
>>32743619
I meant in an actual useful way

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>>32743597
it could, and it would likely be akin to the B1B

>>32743644
Sell it to a country you hate and wait until it kills their experienced pilots?

It could be used for strategic airlift.

Use it as a staff jet so that the brass can get there super fast and feel special.

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>>32743597
What is the XB-70

>>32743597
Most definitely could. Is it needed? Probably not.

It's a passenger jet. They are explicitly designed as a flying bus. It can't be a combat vehicle any more than a bus can fill the role of a Stryker or an MRAP.

I hate this board dude

>>32743692
SEX

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>>32743731
Your kurdfu is weak

It was a very malleable lightweight air-frame and not a lot of carry capacity. The best way to "weaponize" it would be to deliver special forces to a trouble area fast. Sixty SAS and gear to a trouble spot might really be the best military use of it.

>>32743692
Looks like a plane.

>>32743731
747 CMCA. A Boeing 747 that would literally shit out AGM-86 ALCMs, nuclear or conventional.

For obvious reasons, it was canned.

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>>32743731
What are technicals.

>>32743597
Anything can be a weapon if you believe hard enough

>>32743731
MRAPs are battle buses though

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>>32743731

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>>32743731
>It's a passenger jet. They are explicitly designed as a flying bus. It can't be a combat vehicle any more than a bus can fill the role of a Stryker or an MRAP.

>I hate this board dude

I agree, I hate this board. For people like you.

Because in fact, the RAF put forward a series of proposals for the construction of a Blue Steel armed concorde in the mid-1960's, and the project continued on the backburner all the way into the 1980's and the final retirement of the "V" bombers.

a B.2 proposal was put forward which would switch from external hardpoints to internal carriage for the Blue Steel missile, and would extend range too. The prototype concorde airframes included one fitted with an undisclosed number of hardpoints, for use in further testing, though it apparently never got that far.

So, that rather goes to show how much you know, doesn't it?

Reality is often stranger than fiction, and certainly stranger than your "know-it-all" notions...

>>32743667
>Sell it to a country you hate and wait until it kills their experienced pilots?

you do realise that the 20 concorde airframes built between them made a little under 50,000 flights during a service lifespan of 27 years?

and that only at the very end of that service did it have its single crash, which was caused by foreign object debris on the runway, shed by another aircraft?

And that single crash killed 113 people, of the 2.5 million passengers it flew during its lifetime.

Would you like to compare that safety record with say, the DC-9?

>>32743945
Bravo!

>>32743945
Glorious post.

>>32743597
Sure. Just have it take off from an enemy airstrip.

>Put two GAU-8's under it.
>Make them look like dicks when they deploy.
>Literally pissing hot death on your enemies at supersonic speeds.
>Call it the dragon.

>>32743945
And Tu-160 originally proposed by Tupolev was a militarised Tu-144 before Myasischev's project was transferred to Tupolev design bureau to become Tu-150 as we know it. So what? There's a reason these projects never see service. Military hates the very idea of using civilian tech.

>>32746811
>Military hates the very idea of using civilian tech.
lol, no.

>>32746910
Yep. That's why we see all these 747s stuffed with cruise missiles around.

>>32743597
Not really. It was an extremely complex aircraft with a small payload.

I wish we had this kind of shit around today. Flying from Houston to Paris in fucking forever is inexcusable when things like this existed decades ago.

Cheaper to stuff people into slow buses in the sky, I guess. I'd easily pay a grand more each way if there was a much faster option.

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>>32743731
>implying

>>32746940
The AC-47 is based on a civilian airliner. It's really not that much of a stretch for militaries to convert civil equipment.

>>32743731
>what is L-188 electra for $200

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>>32744081
If only the accident was what killed the concorde's future.

>>32748019
Problem is the sonic booms shatter windows even from 60,000 feet.

>>32748174

Why not wait to accelerate when you're over the ocean, then?

>>32748210
I mean when it flys over built up areas.

>>32748243

Okay, so why not decelerate when you get over those? Is it that hard to cruise over land, hit the ocean, and then blast across to the other coast and decelerate when you get there? It would still cut out pointless hours of trundling over the goddamn sea.

>>32748243
Isn't the problem there rather exaggerated?

I mean if you had every passing plane doing it, you'd go mad, but the world seems able to cope with the current military flights, and southern England coped with Concorde. (I thought Concorde kept hush-hush until over the atlantic, but apparently it occasionally shook the roof tiles of houses in Devon.)

>>32748524
>>32748243
>>32748375
It was limited to supersonic only over oceans. Due to this it was pretty much limted to trans-atlantic flights. Of those that gives the plane only 4-10 routes that would actually turn a profit. Due to that alone it was not economically feasible. Say you wanted to go from LA to New York the flight would be limited to subsonic so you are better off using a 747 that flys at 580mph and can carry 5x the passengers with much less work load.
As for military they always require clearance for flying supersonic at least within the states and they rarely do it other then over deserts and some mountain ranges.
I do know some planes with different profiles like the SR-71 crusing at 80k feet made a much quieter sonic boom. The legality of flying it was within limits with out going into the math and science the boom has to generate less then 1ftlb for it to be able to fly over land. The concord generated almost 2x the legal limit at speed.

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>>32746811
I could give you a hundred examples of why you're wrong, for every branch. But we'd reach image limit.
Just shut up when you don't know anything about the matter at hand, it'll make everyone gain precious time.

>>32748210
>>32748375
>>32748524
The problem is that aircraft optimized for supersonic flight aren't efficient enough to be commercially viable in subsonic flight. Literally their entire selling point is speed - you're paying exorbitant prices to save a couple hours. If you're not flying at supersonic speeds, all you have is an airliner less efficient than a conventional jet carrying far fewer passengers.

And no - sonic booms aren't as trivial as they sound. It only takes about 1.5 psi across a shockwave to break windows, and most supersonic aircraft exceed that by quite a bit. Worse, the heavier you are, the louder the plane. NASA and Boeing looked at reducing sonic booms with the HSCT program. Their design goals for the noise reduction phase were:
>Reduction from Mach 2.4 cruise to 1.5 overland
>72 dBA for overland instead of FAA regulated 65 dBA
>maximum 1psi overpressure
Even then, they found that it wasn't viable to adapt the design to those conditions.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19890018277.pdf (page 93)

Current low-boom research mostly looks at super-specialized smaller concepts. Lockheed has one of the larger proposals, and it's only got the capacity you'd see on a medium-sized regional airliner. The projects with any real funding are almost exclusively business jets.

The reason behind this is because it's so incredibly difficult to design a quiet SST. Low-boom technologies require very specific design conditions that often go against efficient cruise principles. Things like:
>very long lifting surfaces
>weak shocks on underside of the aircraft
>designing for specific weight, speed, lift coefficient, and altitude
>comparatively low supersonic speeds

>>32748070
And the fact that they did this on just a couple specific occasions proves they hate it.

Fly it over the United States and cause weaponized butthurt to every USAF officer and government weenie underneath its path.

>they actually paid farmers to complain about concordes engines hurting their cows

>>32748659
>It was limited to supersonic only over oceans

Because of Amerifat buttfury

>>32743597
Vulcan bomber

>>32746811
oddly enough the bomber variant of concorde was a RAF proposal, they saw a super cruising jet with capacity to carry stand off nuclear weapons with relatively little modification and thought it might be worthwhile

>>32743945
I like you and people like you.

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>>32748108
Fuck Air France.

Didn't the Vulcan use the same engines as the Concorde?

>>32743597
Fly it in a building.
They wont even hear you coming.

>>32751260
But they still do it. And the projects do see service.

>>32750889
>It only takes about 1.5 psi across a shockwave to break windows, and most supersonic aircraft exceed that by quite a bit
Can't one decide upon an acceptable rate of window-breakage, just like we decide most other acceptable trade-offs? In Oklahoma the FAA got 16k complaints and 5k claims for damage over a population of 500,000, which can (very lazily) be worked down to 160 and 5 over areas of 50,000, and 1.6 & 0.05 over rural areas of 5,000. The industry wide monthly complaint rate is/was apparently 1.97, so 1.6 complaints from the SST would fall within acceptable bounds. (Although I accept if you tear over 100 small towns, you're getting back up to OKC levels.)

Ignoring the wider efficiency problems (let's just say oil stayed cheap and while adoption was wider, the inefficiency of providing parts and mx for a small fleet never came up), it doesn't seem beyond comprehension that society could subject those in highly rural areas to supersonic overflight without causing social chaos. (Remembering that 90% of people will take the subsonic airliner anyway.)

I can't find an actual distance, but even assuming say a 100km exclusion zone it shouldn't be impossible to plot a route that only affects the most rural of areas, by extension opening overland flight (at the cost of Federal bureaucracy deciding your route, and possibly negating your speed advantage with regular zig-zagging.)