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While I agree they look cool, they're an engineering nightmare and absolutely require titanium to build and that shit is too expensive for very little benefit.
The point of a variable wing was to increase the effective flight envelope and there's no point now that the same thing can be done with modern avionics and materials.
Sorry.
Counterpoint: they look fucking dope
Again, completely agree.
But like the A10, sometimes tech just passes you by.
And swing wings are like biplanes. Old obsolete tech.
They're not obsolete until someone designs better looking wings. Until then swing wings are the state of the art in coolness tech. The cutting edge.
Ok, buddy, if you say so.
Pros:
The plane will be partially made of titaniumCons:
It HAS to be made out of prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire titanium.
Pros: expensive vehicles are a flex.
Cons: Expensive vehicles means we still don't have Medicare for All.
Pros: "your injuries are not service related"
I hear you
Pros:
- absolutely requires titanium
Except the US doesn't have a cheap, easily available source of titanium.
The stuff we used for the SR-71 and F-14 had to be gotten surreptitiously from the Russians.
That's why the Space Shuttle didn't have the titanium heat shield it was designed with and had to rely on the newly invented, much more delicate, ceramic heat shields. Which, it can be argued, resulted in the all of the deaths of the Challenger crew.
No, the ceramic heat shield killed the Columbia crew.
The Challenger crew was killed when a leaky SRB blowtorched the big orange tank. The SRB leaked partially because of an imperfectly designed seal and partially by being flown outside of its design limitations regarding temperature.
Mea culpa, you're right. I was misremembering.
So with the original titanium heat shield the Columbia crew wouldn't have died such gruesome deaths. All because Congress was cheap.
It is my belief as a pilot and aircraft mechanic that both accidents share a critical design flaw: The crew vehicle for some bizarre reason was carried next to its rockets instead of on top where it belongs. It meant that Challenger had no way to escape, no launch escape tower could take them away from an exploding lower stage, and it put Columbia in a place where debris shed by the lower stage could hit it. Nothing could fall off of an Apollo first stage and hit the capsule because it was a hundred feet ahead.
Not a rocket scientist so I can't say.
But I'm betting a room full of them and NASA engineers thought through all of their options based on the criteria and current tech.
Aerodynamics called: your center of lift being far infront of your center of gravity does not work
When basically all of your "lift" is coming from thrust, sure it does. As if the space shuttle stack was a work of aerodynamic genius.
Like 30% of the shuttles launch thrust came from the main engines.
And it was vectored down through the floor at the center of mass somewhere in the big orange tank, which is why the shuttle always did a sick Tokyo drift off the pad.
Thrust from rocket engines(or jet engines) is not lift. The force they genarate is perpindicular to the focre genarated by lift. All of the lift being genarated in front of the CG would cause the rocket to pich over and crash back into the ground.
But but, it could glide*!
*Kinda, and the parachutes are slower. It also has to piggyback on a 747 to be moved anywhere.
I'm going to bet that we won't see another spacecraft of the same plan as the shuttle. We barely got it to work, the Soviets managed a single unmanned test flight of something similar, and we've got vertically landing reusable rockets now. Large space planes I think are a dead end.
Pros:
Forces the US to upkeep international relations and tradingCons:
Trading with "the enemy" used to be considered treasonous.