Satire aside. It is a bit surprising no one’s tried to revive the Flying Aircraft Carrier Concept.
Especially given the multitude of pissing matches we’ve gotten into with various countries over the years with various Military and Vanity Projects. As a Flying Carrier would be comparatively more useful than some of the dead end projects that they did end up funding.
I think it was in the 1970s that Boeing studied an air carrier concept in which a 747 was equipped to deploy manned "micro-fighters" in mid-air and also recover them. This was never picked up for development. I think it was in the 2000s when I went back to that concept and replaced the men in the micro-fighters with robotic control, for use in an architecture for "Instant Air Superiority": fly into a theater and deploy a combination of patrol robots, airborne laser, AWACS, and B-1 equipped as a "Missileer" loaded with air-to-air missiles, thereby establishing a layered defense concept such as used by Navy carrier battle groups. I keep thinking it would have come in handy for many situations that have arisen in the past 20 years.
True enough. But when did logic ever stop a general, admiral, or intelligence spook with an idea? Especially during the Cold War.
The list of projects and concepts that they came up, let alone funded and built prototypes reads like a Mad Scientists fever dream. And it only gets longer and more insane the more that gets declassified. And that’s just the stuff under the normal levels of secrecy you don’t need to pull teeth and threaten jobs to get declassified.
Satire aside. It is a bit surprising no one’s tried to revive the Flying Aircraft Carrier Concept.
Especially given the multitude of pissing matches we’ve gotten into with various countries over the years with various Military and Vanity Projects. As a Flying Carrier would be comparatively more useful than some of the dead end projects that they did end up funding.
I think it was in the 1970s that Boeing studied an air carrier concept in which a 747 was equipped to deploy manned "micro-fighters" in mid-air and also recover them. This was never picked up for development. I think it was in the 2000s when I went back to that concept and replaced the men in the micro-fighters with robotic control, for use in an architecture for "Instant Air Superiority": fly into a theater and deploy a combination of patrol robots, airborne laser, AWACS, and B-1 equipped as a "Missileer" loaded with air-to-air missiles, thereby establishing a layered defense concept such as used by Navy carrier battle groups. I keep thinking it would have come in handy for many situations that have arisen in the past 20 years.
Flying Aircraft Carrier Concept''
...big arse target floating about up there...
...the sound and the downdraft would be phenomenal...
True enough. But when did logic ever stop a general, admiral, or intelligence spook with an idea? Especially during the Cold War.
The list of projects and concepts that they came up, let alone funded and built prototypes reads like a Mad Scientists fever dream. And it only gets longer and more insane the more that gets declassified. And that’s just the stuff under the normal levels of secrecy you don’t need to pull teeth and threaten jobs to get declassified.
But when did logic ever stop a general, admiral, or intelligence spook with an idea?''
...cloak of invisibility solves the problem...