SR-72

>>33827646
>News about a concept with no funding

I actually have a friend who is involved in some of the funding business for this kind of thing. All I will say is

>plasma is involved

>>33827667
yeah and my father who works at nintendo said than new Mario sunshine is the tits

protip people with full non disclosure agreement not going to tell dick

>funding business for this kind of thing

propulsion system study is funded by nasa, so no

bait better next time

>>33827646
what do they plant to do about the heat signature? that thing's going to heat up like a giant blowtorch.

>>33827667
plasma stealth amirite?

>>33827730
*plan

>>33827730
There's nothing they really can do; the laws of thermodynamics can only be nudged so far.

>>33827730

>Plasma stealth

For radar, it's a possibility. When you go that fast, the plasma of the surrounding air can refract incoming radio waves.

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>>33827646

>Has an S-duct
This will be the stealthiest plane of all time.

>>33827667

I believe you, and I'm in a bit of a place to do so, as well.

Did he mention MHD augmentation of the turbines at all?

>>33828038
I chuckled when I realized the turbine engine is basically identical to all the ADVENT renderings that have been floating around.

>>33827646

What actually is the purpose for the SR-72? What would it do better than the Recon Satellites and Information Warfare that we use nowadays?

>>33827646
Is this the old "Aurora" spyplane that was supposedly being developed back in the late 80s and early 90s?

>>33828207
Satellites can get shot down now.

>>33828236
and they're predictable. i still don't see what use the SR-72 would be though, wouldn't most recon scenarios be better served by a conventional drone?

besides, how are you going to man a plane going mach 6? and if you aren't, how are you going to retain communications (or even track where you are) when you're constantly enveloped in a coat of pure fire that reflects most radio waves?

>>33828340

SR-72 is proposed to be unmanned.

>>33827667
It makes since that plasma would be involved. Punching through the atmosphere at mach 6? That alone will surround this thing with plasma. It would be like an Apollo space capsule reentering.

>>33828363
Will it have an AI that can ask air traffic control for a groundspeed check?

>>33828363
>>33828340

Although that would raise the question of how they would control the drone, since the plasma would interfere with any signals that tried to reach it.

>>33828363
then how are you going to solve the plasma-communications problem?

maybe the thing might only go up to mach 6 when it's really gotta haul ass, and otherwise it will stay at mach 3. or maybe it's just going to fly so high and fast that plasma will never be a problem in the first place.

or hell, it might have some advanced AI on board that will be able to keep track of where the plane is, even when conventional communications isn't possible. maybe a few cameras mounted around to observe the scenery.

>>33828236

We can already do that with plain missiles.

>>33828387
Pre-programmed inertial guidance.

Here is my question: how will the cameras work through the plasma layer? How would a plane enveloped in plasma actually collect intel?

>>33828422
That's his point.

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>>33827646
Stuff like this, though probably not as advanced has probably been flying since the mid 80s

>>33827730
If it's going that fast, by the time you detect it will be too late to try to shoot it down

>>33828216
Yep, seems like an evolution of that at least

>>33828216
No, Lockheed's actually announced a plane they're calling the SR-72 which they're claiming can go up to Mach 6 and is the spiritual successor to the original Blackbird.

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/news/features/2015/sr-72.html
http://newatlas.com/lockeheed-martin-sr-72-blackbird/29634/

Reminder that the SR-71 did Mach 3.2+ with 1950s technology. You can buy watches now that have orders of magnitude higher processing power than the computers on the Blackbird. Materials and engine tech have advanced tremendously as well.

It's obvious that even if they were never truly operational, there have been at least airbreathing test planes built that went faster and higher than the blackbird. All those billions, if not trillions spent since then and you're telling me they never tried to build something faster?

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its not a real plane, and if it does get made and tested its only going to be a tech test bed or demonstrator like pic related. What you will see in about 15 years is a combination of the 2 meant to replacement military sats because of the fact they can get shot down. Hybrid satellite spy plane that can maneuver and avoid countermeasures. Its too expensive to make in usable numbers now which is why you are going to see projects like these that aren't talked about until they announce it a decade or so.

>>33827730
They will be faster than radar waves. So I guess by the time the radar dectecs it, they would already have passed through.

>>33830243
>They will be faster than radar waves
I hope this is a joke.

>>33830252
>his country can't into FTL

where do you live, Poland?

>>33828384

Kek. Loved that story.

>>33828507

>How would a plane enveloped in plasma actually collect intel?

What he said.

>>33830354
>>How would a plane enveloped in plasma actually collect intel?
>What he said.

>implying this plane would be for intel

we have satellites now, we don't really need anything else for intel between those and drones.

Anything hypersonic would likely and almost certainly be reserved for "payload delivery" for when we want to bomb something yesterday into the middle of next week.

>>33830506
How the fuck would a plane enveloped in plasma drop ordinance? If it opened bomb-bay doors, it'd get wrecked. Putting bombs on pylons is obviously not an option. Direct energy weapons through the plasma envelop? I don't think so.

Unless the PLANE is the ordinance. Is the SR-72 actually an intercontinental hypersonic cruise missile?

>>33828602

>If it's going that fast, by the time you detect it will be too late to try to shoot it down

Antiaircraft lasers are a thing now. Unless your plane flies faster than the speed of light, its fucked.

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>>33830566
>How the fuck would a plane enveloped in plasma drop ordinance?
Best thing I can think of as an aerospace engineer with only a basic understanding of hypersonics is to have some kind of streamlined conformal ordinance pod to jettison off the upper part of the aircraft. Because the airflow would be expanding rather than compressing over the top of the aircraft, heating wouldn't be as much of a concern (though definitely still there). That means it'd probably be easier to jettison a payload without disrupting heat shielding.

That being said, there's still a shit ton of things complicating that
>massive change in weight of the aircraft and center of gravity
>change in aerodynamics during release could destabilize aircraft/payload
>expense of designing single-use hypersonic payload packages
>shock interactions between releasing payload and aircraft could damage the aircraft or payload

that last one's a real fun point. One of the X-15s had to be retired because a ramjet mockup mounted on the lower vertical stabilizer for high speed tests caused shock interactions that melted through the skin of the vertical tail.

>>33831213
I can't imagine any of this would be economical (even for the DoD) just for dropping conventional PGMs. So this would be a nuclear bomber, right? Not much good for anything else.

>>33827763
Wrong. If you ionise the atmosphere ahead of a plane, it negates 90% of atmospheric drag. The same principle is applied to modern torpedos, which create a bubble of air in front of them to move at supersonic speeds underwater.

>>33828695
>there have been at least airbreathing test planes built that went faster and higher than the blackbird.

The blackbird holds the record for highest fixed wing flight, so I think you are mistaken.

>>33831318
I feel like you must have missed the context of that comment.

>>what do they plant to do about the heat signature? that thing's going to heat up like a giant blowtorch.
>There's nothing they really can do; the laws of thermodynamics can only be nudged so far.

He's right. This fucker is going to be hot as hell and there's nothing that can be done about that. Your "ionized air" will radiate thermal energy like a motherfucker too. Furthermore it isn't drag that causes most of the heat buildup, it's compression.

>>33828695
Anyone who appeals to transistor miniaturization to claim paradigm shifting changes in other engineering fields doesn't know what they're talking about.

Transistors are SEVERAL orders of magnitude smaller. The improvements in other fields have been nowhere near as dramatic. Not even close. From a mechanical perspective, the planes we're building today aren't that much different from the planes we were building decades ago.

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>>33831271
It'd be stupidly expensive for a tremendously niche role that's mostly covered by multiple other platforms. Honestly I can't think of a role that a manned hypersonic strike platform would actually be useful for. ICBMs and conventional bombers fill either end of the spectrum pretty nicely, and even a small hypersonic vehicle is so difficult to engineer that if we ever do see a hypersonic weapons platform, it'd probably be in the form of a "maneuverable" (relatively) hypersonic missile or reentry vehicle. Problem is, the forces involved mean that even with maneuvers at hypersonic speeds, you're still getting a fairly predictable flight path.

>>33831318
>If you ionise the atmosphere ahead of a plane, it negates 90% of atmospheric drag.
No, that's retarded. You get ridiculously high drag coefficients for hypersonic flight - the Space Shuttle had an L/D of 1, and the HVT 2 was a little over 2.5.

>>33831356
>The blackbird holds the record for highest fixed wing flight
Pic related holds the fixed-wing record at 354,199 ft. The record holder for air-breathing flight is 123,520 ft by a Ye-266M/MiG-25. SR-71's ceiling was 85,000 ft.

>>33831423
Fun fact - most of what we know about aerospace was figured out in the '50s at the latest. There's actually a looming crisis in the Aerospace industry because there's a bunch of important codes for things written back in the '50s when methods for solving certain problems were first developed. They were mostly written in FORTRAN, and the people who wrote those codes are starting to die of. Thanks to the Aerospace industry as a whole not liking to update codes, there's still a whole lot of important code floating around in archaic languages.

There are a couple areas where they're still working though. Hypersonic research still has some ways to go from what I hear, and at my university there's one professor who's been working on scramjets for over 50 years now.

>>33831426
show me the commie ceiling, everything I see says 80,000ish

>>33831464
they'll just simulate and get the info back in a year

>>33831426
Are they anticipating ICBM's being neutralized? Decoys and maneuverable reentry vehicles would seemingly make that nearly impossible, unless they were considering ascent stage neutralization. But how would they neutralize an ascent stage over the continental US? Direct energy weapons from orbit? Doesn't seem practical, the Soviets have put nuclear reactors into orbit before to power radars, but a TOPAZ reactor is only 5kW... The future of ICBM's seems safe to me.

I agree, I don't see a practical application.

>>33831487
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/mig-25.htm

6th paragraph. Ye-266M was a specially modified pre-production MiG-25 made just to break records.

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>>33831520
There *might* be a niche for hypersonic vehicles for nearly suborbital flights either to deploy some kind of weapon against a platform or deliver a small payload into orbit, but that concept seems like it has too niche a role for the time being. IIRC MiG-105/Spiral was supposed to be a concept like that, but it ended up not panning out as hoped.

>>33831525
>Ye-266M
>He reached 37,650 metres (123,520 ft) at Podmoskovnoye, USSR in zoom climb (the absolute altitude record is different from the record for sustained altitude in horizontal flight).

Okay, neat trick. But what could it do in level flight?

>>33831554
Seems like it would be significantly cheaper and more practical to use a proper rocket for that.

Unless they are going to put a nuclear payload on this thing how is this better for recon than all the Global Hawks we have stationed all over the world? Can this thing get from Texas/ Nevada or wherever it's going to be and fly to the ME faster than a Global Hawk stationed in Jordan?

>>33831601
Maybe the purpose is just to make everybody shit their pants. A huge plane flying through the air at Mach 6, leaving a glowing trail of plasma in it's wake like a fucking meteor. Invisible to radar, only shows up thermally once it's above the horizon. Psychological/propaganda weapon?

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>>33831583
Depends, really. Air-launch-to-orbit has its benefits, the biggest being that you extend the range of orbits you can launch directly into. The lowest orbital inclination available for a direct launch is your latitude, which is why you normally see launch stations as close to the equator as possible. If you have an airborne launch platform, it gives you the flexibility to fly closer to the equator than ground stations might allow, letting you get a wider range of orbital inclinations for direct launch. That's actually a pretty big deal, because orbital inclination changes are a lot more fuel-intensive than one would think.

There's also the efficiency standpoint - if you can replace the first stage of a launch vehicle with what amounts to an air-breathing reusable stage, you've got the potential to reduce costs. I haven't seen any numbers for proposed hypersonic solutions, but a hypersonic vehicle flying ~Mach 5-6 at 30-50km would give you significantly more energy at launch compared to the current subsonic air launch platforms. Without any real data to work with, though it's hard to say if the math would work out in its favor.

>>33831639
I mean I guess? But unless it can achieve some tactical advantage we don't currently have adversary nations might just think, "for what purpose?".

I dunno. It seems like a money pit to me when we don't even have a shuttle program anymore. I'd like to think smarter minds than mine are making sure our R&D tax money is prioritized correctly but history leaves me with little faith.

>>33831654
>If you have an airborne launch platform, it gives you the flexibility to fly closer to the equator than ground stations might allow, letting you get a wider range of orbital inclinations for direct launch.
Good point, but what are the military applications? Spy satellites go into very high inclination orbits, and would the inclination really matter for a ballistic payload like a nuke delivering reentry vehicle?

I could see it being useful for Russia since they're so far north. It would give them access to inclinations used by low inclination American vehicles. Why would America need it though? China can launch from Wenchang, which is only 19°N.... Maybe that's why.

>>33831742
setting a conventional rocket up for launch takes months and can be detected by any idiot with a camera and a bit of sense, while what that anon is talking about (which does work) can be done whenever you want with little preparation time.

>>33831819
Modern solid fuel boosters don't require much setup. Not when there's any degree of urgency anyway.

>>33831835
>americans do not launch anything other than nuclear missiles

>>33831840
What
> Needs to be launched on short notice
> Could be lifted by the SR-72
> Couldn't be lifted by an ICBM-derived booster like a Minotaur V
?

There aren't currently any (known) solid fuel launch systems reliable enough. Get ULA to build one instead of Orbital, then it would probably work. And I can't imagine it would come out being more expensive than an SR-72.

>>33831426
Manned hypersonic strike doesn't make much sense, but a hypersonic cruise missile or unmanned hypersonic bomber would make some sense:
>Bin Laden 2.0 appears outside a cave; nearest strike fighter is 2 hours away.
>Hypercruise missile can be launched from a continent away and get there in the next 20 minutes without triggering Russia and China into thinking this is a rogue nuclear ICBM
>It can even just take 5 minutes to arrive if it's launched from a destroyer ~1000km away.

Hypersonics also have their use for anti-ship missiles; stealthy subsonic AShMs are better than ~Mach 2, etc missiles, but a Mach 10 weapon is likely to be even more effective, particularly as sensor tech improves (missiles will always be behind the cutting edge of stealth; you don't want to literally deposit your top secret materials, etc into the enemy's hands). A Mach 10 missile is travels roughly 3.4km / 1.8nmi per second; by the time point-defense weapons can fire, it's already on an unstoppable ballistic course.

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>>33828695

>>33831906
>Needs to be launched on short notice
i'm not talking about the need for a quick launch, i'm talking about the need for a stealthy one. the payload that spacex launched just yesterday was the subject of speculation for months beforehand. even just the launch site and NOTAMs will give away too much in most cases.

>Could be lifted by the SR-72
anything light. there are already launch platforms that do this.

>Couldn't be lifted by an ICBM-derived booster like a Minotaur V
anything that the US government doesn't want people spying on for years before it's launched. any land based launch platform requires a ton of infrastructure.

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>>33828236
SR-72 can get shot down now.

>>33831920
20 minutes at Mach 6 would take you what, 2,000 km? That's really stretching "from a continent away".

>>33831936
I see no reason why you couldn't make a mobile launcher for an ICBM-esque solid fuel booster.

>>33831963
I'm talking about a serious single-use hypersonic weapon moving at Mach 10 in the upper stratosphere - distance-wise I was looking at the UK to middle of Iraq. If it's reusable like the SR-72 it'll obviously be slower for less wear.

>>33831041

Lasers are shit aa weapons. They are defeated by clouds for starters.

>>33831955
>altitude 10,000 feet
Please read your own shitty infographics. What the fuck kind of number is that? 40N6 can go a hell of a lot higher than that. That might be it's apogee when flying to it's furthest range. But it can also go a lot further than 120km...

>>33831977
you could, but that doesn't give you the necessary stealth. when you're preparing a launcher, working with the appropriate agencies (the NRO randomly launching a spy satellite anywhere in the continental US will NOT fly, no pun intended), waiting for a launch opportunity and so on, your enemy can detect that you're launching a payload. when a SR-72 takes off from arizona randomly then releases a payload, the only warning your enemy gets is the payload itself showing up on their radars.

this has an immense value.

>>33828384
>speed is 4700 knots
>chuckles in T1000

>>33831982
add boost stage

with today's sensor mobility, a missile can achieve very high hit rates, orders greater than icbm's of the past. here, how do you attack silo? a missile silo is a clear target. why does it matter??

because you didn't send one nuke at a silo if you wanted a kill. plans were to send several, to ensure the greatest chances of a direct hit. with a kinetic weapon, accuracy is king. a carrier killer as well. demonstrating a working hgv is a priority because it matters a lot. it changes the facts. to contrast with another game changer, missile interceptors. if you send even 1 other missile to mitigate the mission failure if shot down in flight, the enemy stockpile available is halved. how do you, at once, decrease the enemy's first strike options, push carriers far deeper away from your shore, and potentially have a target/kill ratio of 80%+. it's a meme weapon

>>33832003
have you tried forcing more power into it

>>33832038
>but that doesn't give you the necessary stealth
>*hides from NATO detection*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h4f0GZbDyo

>>33832073
>add boost stage
That's the intention with most hypersonic weapons - they'll use a solid rocket booster to reach Mach 5 to Mach 10, then use a scramjet to cruise at high speed along a relatively flat trajectory.

>>33832107
the problem you run into is that, at range, the moisture in the atmosphere is equivalent to dozens or hundreds of feet of water. much greater than a cloud. the waves are diffused in the molecular water. atmospheric lensing is more then a compensation problem. it's why an airborne laser went as far as it did, you're eliminating those lower atmospheric effects, effectively increasing kill range. the problem is not power, it's mass. the tech weighs too much to power in the air, and so your plane is limited by weight and scale.

groundborne lasers are practical against indirect fire, close in/ground attack aircraft, drones for sure. maybe some day even in place of cannon, when you can just a punch a hole in concrete. lasers can even become part of rotating gatling style weapons. they are solid-state, and you are just replacing bullets in a line. not going to be shooting down some shit 3000km away soon though. for the near-term, they are likelier to show up in 3's on some fob

>>33832132
right. here's what i think- once that box is open we can't close it. whoever gets used to using that shit first is going to get addicted, like we did with popping mopeds in afgh with predator hellfires. it's really just an evolution to the cruise missile. but the tech can scale down, the performance can increase. why waste weight on warheads when you can add fuel and smack someone in the dick from a little further away

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>>33832183
MORE POWER

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>>33828695
>Materials and engine tech have advanced tremendously as well.
Not really.

>>33830566
>How the fuck would a plane enveloped in plasma drop ordinance? If it opened bomb-bay doors, it'd get wrecked.
Plasma can be very low density, especially if you're flying in the upper stratosphere already. I don't see how this in particular would be a problem. There are countless missiles and rockets and so forth that have performed successful separation at hypersonic speeds before.

>>33831356
>The blackbird holds the record for highest fixed wing flight
Only because the FAI has some rather arbitrary criteria for what constitutes an airplane, including airbreathing propulsion and a human pilot.
And even then, the MiG-25 actually holds the absolute record when zoom climbs are counted (which are by the FAI.... in a separate category that is).

>>33831487
It was a zoom climb. A transient arc into the upper atmosphere. Service ceiling is the highest altitude which an aircraft can sustain, not the absolute highest it can reach.

>>33831397
>This fucker is going to be hot as hell and there's nothing that can be done about that.
There are things you can do, but most of them involved going fast for only a brief dash and slowing down before you burn to death.

>>33832265
>Plasma can be very low density, especially if you're flying in the upper stratosphere already. I don't see how this in particular would be a problem. There are countless missiles and rockets and so forth that have performed successful separation at hypersonic speeds before.
It'd wreck the SR-72 like it wrecked the Columbia. Opening up panels to drop a bomb at those speeds would be functionally equivalent to a space shuttle with a whole in the tiles.

>>33832286
>8:58:00 (EI+831): At this point, wing leading-edge temperatures typically decreased to 2,880 °F (1,580 °C).
>8:58:20 (EI+851): Columbia crossed from New Mexico into Texas. Speed: Mach 19.5; altitude: 209,800 feet (63.9 km; 39.73 mi).
>8:59:32 (EI+923): A broken response from the mission commander was recorded: "Roger, uh, bu – [cut off in mid-word] ..." It was the last communication from the crew and the last telemetry signal received in Mission Control.
>8:59:37 (EI+928): Hydraulic pressure, which is required to move the flight control surfaces, was lost at about 8:59:37. At that time, the Master Alarm would have sounded for the loss of hydraulics, and the shuttle would have begun to lose control, starting to roll and yaw uncontrollably, and the crew would have become aware of the serious problem.[24]

>mach 19.5

>>33828384
Thanks for the reminder friendo many keks were had in the aviation community over that one

>>33832306
>altitude: 209,800 feet
The lower you are, the worse it will be.

We are not sending SR-72s into Chinese airspace, just like we aren't sending the B-3 to Albania.

>>33832674
then what is it for? sr71 did fly pretty much everywhere

>>33832689
What is what for? There is no SR-72.

>>33832720
>>>where's not sending SR-72 to China
>>then where?
>it doesn't exist
Your analysis is trash.

>>33828384
Simply ebin

>>33832727
You can't send something that doesn't exist to anywhere.

>>33832806
can you still send it to nowhere?

>>33832815
No. You can't do anything with something that doesn't exist.

>>33832908
So who was it that was suggesting that SR-72s were flying into Chinese airspace?

>>33832018
they forgot a zero when converting to imperial, 30km max alt is actually ~100k ft

>>33832926
Nobody suggested that there was anything flying in Chinese airspace.

>>33830566
Maybe you could just slow the fuck down for a minute. Do you really think this thing will be flying at sanicfast spweds all the time?

>>33833074
Then what's with the argument starting with >>33832674?

>>33828734
HTV-2 was the testbed. Designed to test engines, controls ,coms and aero at hypersonic speeds.
It topped out at mach 20.


This is the baby of all that testing.

>>33830243
Um... Radar travels at the speed of light. Did I somehow fail to notice that we developed FTL?

>>33833232
see >>33830297

>>33832265
>The Sprint missile

God, those late 60s ABM systems give me wood.

They really were just about the closest thing we ever got to Evangelion-style integrated city defences, weren't they?

What kind of non-politician civilian job that gets you all-access to black triangle aircraft?

>>33831041
If your plane can bandle the heat from moving at mach 6 modern laser weapons aren't going to do shit.

>>33833620
Working for northrop/bae/lockheed skunkworks

>>33827858
The original SR-71 was supposed to go fast enough to mess with the return pulse of the radar or something like that. Didn't work.

>>33833722
Not necessarily - if it's an IR laser sure, but different frequencies of directed energy (eg using a maser) would be able to penetrate their ceramic, etc shielding.

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>>33833372
>God, those late 60s ABM systems give me wood.
Words fails fully express sheer awesomeness of these things.
>5 megatons
>X-rays
>golden tamper

>This presented a new method of attacking enemy nuclear reentry vehicles (RVs) while still at long range from their targets. X-rays hitting the warhead's outermost layer will react by heating a thin layer of the material so rapidly that shock waves develop that can cause the heat shield material on the outside of the RV to separate or flake off. The RV would then break up during reentry.
>The major advantage of this attack is that it takes place over long distances, as great as 30 kilometres (19 mi), which covers the majority of the threat tube containing the warhead and the various radar decoys and clutter material that accompanies it. Previously the ABM had to approach within less than 800 feet (240 m) of the warhead to damage it through neutron heating, which presented a serious problem attempting to locate the warhead within a threat tube that was typically at least a kilometer across and about ten long.
>The use of gold maximizes the production of x-rays as gold efficiently radiates thermal x-rays (see Moseley's law).[7] This efficient release of x-rays when heated is the same reason that inertial confinement fusion experiments like the National Ignition Facility use gold-covered targets. In Congressional testimony on potential dismantling of the W71, a DOE official described the warhead as "a gold mine".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtH0EDLcbwA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtH0EDLcbwA

>>33827702
>I don't know what Lockheed skunk works are
BAE Systems and Northrop-Grumman have an equivalent too, guaranteed.

>>33831554
darpa thinks it's needed due to the current cost of launches.
http://www.darpa.mil/attachments/20160429_Sponable_XS1_Industry_Day_DISTAR_26422.pdf

>>33832306
>>33832286
>15 minutes after reentry interface
>Hole in the leading edge; pretty much the worst possible spot other than the nose cap
>Cooking parts of the airframe with no TPS whatsoever
>At Mach 19.5+
>Thinking this is at all comparable to briefly opening an underside weapons bay, designed to function at speed, while going half as fast no less

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>>33835293
Even at "low" mach numbers, shocks can really fuck you up. Pic related is the lower fin of an X-15 after a test that mounted a ramjet mockup on the lower fin.

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>>33831520
Well. Casaba howitzers are still classified for whatever reason...

>>33832306
>Mach 19.5
>at >200,000 feet
>In an aircraft that was damn near as big as a C-17.

No matter what exists or has existed in the world of black airframes, I'm 100% sure that the Space Shuttle's flight envelope still makes all of them look like biplanes in comparison.

>>33832306
rip in peace mr shuttle and crew. ground control knew they were all dead and didnt tell them ;_;

>>33835859
so what is this, directed concentrated radiation or an actaul nuclear detonation funneled into a cone

>>33831920

So in your fantasy scenario, you know where Bin Laden 2.0 is but your nearest weapon system is 2,000 miles away.

Somehow I'm not buying this as being very realistic.

>>33836235

It's a plasma weapon.

The fission device goes off, emits X-rays that turn the other part of the bomb into plasma. One-time use only, obviously. Not very accurate, either.

It's sort of like building a handgun that has no barrel and self-destructs after one shot...but it fires a 120mm shell.

ITT: 95% of people who have no clue what is available and in use in the black world.

>>33836447
You don't know shit. Laziest comment in the thread.

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>>33836235
>>33836361
It is quite literally a nuclear shaped charge. This was developed from the Orion propulsion system concepts. Basically, the nuke channels most of its initial x rays through an x ray transparent material into a layer of propellant mass. Depending on how powerful the bomb is and how narrow the angle of the cone, you can then use it either to slam against a shock-absorbing rear plate of your spaceship or as a nuclear spear for vaporizing things thousands of miles away. The velocity of the charged particle burst could get as high as 1000km/s if I recall correctly.

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>>33836473
This is the idea that spawned it - project orion aka "nuke yourself repeatedly to go really fast"

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>>33836503
It would have allowed for legit million-ton battleships in space. In the 60s.

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Too bad the nuclear test ban treaty pussies killed it

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>>33836473
>>33836503
>>33836519
>>33836535
Dam shame, really, because as it happens mother nature had provided the perfect launch site for these crafts as well

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>>33836447
i pity you knowalls. guessing is all the fun

>>33831654
It's going to be pretty hard for a hypersonic airbreathing first stage that hasn't been developed yet to defeat F9 on cost.

The only real advantage is location flexibility. In addition to being able to pick your inclination, as you mentioned, it also allows you to use just about any runway, whereas VTVL is restricted to a handful of expensive, fixed facilities that could be easily targeted in a conflict.

>>33836775
Nothing stops you from doing mobile sea launch of rockets

Nor are launch sites necessarily that expensive

Air launch is for tiny LEO payloads or suborbital anti-satellite missiles