Tool quality.

Drop nose, forward canard, low delta wing - yeah, right. They don't look anything like each other.

Why do you think the turret armour is all so big and boxy ? - Plywood

Mind you, polyurethane turned out to be pretty impermeable, if you put it on thick enough.

and providing you sand between coats in a TIMESAVER(R).

You mean Tater Salad?

On Sun, 06 Mar 2005 21:39:46 -0800, the inscrutable charlie b spake:

It's a jet which can fly low and slow, then spit fire like a dragon. I saw one on the ground first (vs. in the air) and it looked elegant in a funky sort of way. A couple minutes later, I saw a nice littel package called the Vulcan mini-gun on a steel cart. (I secretly wanted to see that little thing in the back of my pickup but knew I'd never get if off the Miramar Naval Air Station alive. ;)

Anyway, I've been hooked on the A-10 ever since, warts and all. The History Channel did an hour show on them and they're impressive. My dad came home from VietNam with a bullet hole in the aircraft and a dent in the bottom the seat of his C-123 where small-arms (AK?) fire almost denutted him. (He was over there flying at 1000 feet to drop crates of chickens, pigs, and cows to the South Vietnamese for food. Ever heard the moo of a cow on a parachute?) Anyway, the armored bottom of the A-10 gives the pilot a lot more peace of mind, I'm sure.

========================================================== I drank WHAT? +

Can you guys change the subject line to airplanes so I don't keep clicking on these posts. Thanks max

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 11:58:30 GMT, the inscrutable "Mortimer Schnerd, RN" spake:

I still prefer the Supermarine Spitfire Mk. 1A to the P-51 or XB-70.

The XB70 didn't have a "delta wing" (beyond the level of something vaguely triangular) - that was the whole point of it. The XB70's lift came from a shock wave trapped under the lifting surface and retained there by those huge downward-folding wingtips. This isn't the way that any other aircraft (except a couple beginning with X) have flown and certainly not the Tu144.

When the XB70 flew at low speed, with the wing working as a more traditional wing, it was (to be honest) something of a dog. This was one of the reasons the project was cancelled - it made a great aircraft for an attacking dash at high speed, but loiter performance was poor. And if you're going to build your deterrence around that strategy, use missiles.

As to the canards, then canards have been a popular bodge since the days of Santos Dumont. The Soviets used them because they didn't have Aerospatiale's understanding of the aerodynamics of really high performance deltas. It didn't need them at cruise - that's easy for a delta, but retaining adequate control for a safe all-weather low-speed landing envelope with a heavy delta aircraft is quite another matter.

Not that much. And the closer you look the less they look alike. For that matter the Tu 144 was a whole lot more of an original design than it was a knock-off of the Concord. (Although the Soviets did have a very active espionage effort to learn as much as they could from the Concorde.)

--RC

And you just needed a few brads to hold it in place while the glue dried.

--RC

When the Concorde design team started feeding them clearly dodgy info they had no choice but to go their own way (Tupolev later said this)

The aerodynamics are seriously compromised on the 144 compared to Concorde - that the Yanks would consider using one for supersonic research 25 tears after the Brits and Frogs had perfected it and placed it into commercial service makes me chuckle.

Never saw a night takeoff, but being on perimeter road at the landing lights when one goes overhead is rather impressive. We could hear each other talk by the time we left the perimeter road and hit the base area. Joe

Sat, Mar 5, 2005, 2:52pm (EST+5) snipped-for-privacy@pobox.com (LRod) says: amazingly, the DoD selected the uglier of the two.

I think it would be more accurate to say the selection was done by politicians, not military, and looks had nothing to do with it. Altho to claim a politician actually has "taste" would be stretching it.

But, with politicians involved, their first consideration probably was what possible benefit they'd get out of selecting it, rather than function, effectiveness, etc., or even cost. You just cannot trust politicians to put any priority first, over themselves.

JOAT Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

- David Fasold