You can probably fit more planes in like this. And it looks cool.

[major_clanger]

Cosford_20071103_092.jpg
Originally uploaded by Simon Bradshaw

Pictures from the trip that swisstone and I took to the RAF Museum Cosford on Saturday. Includes fighters dangling from the ceiling, assorted weird experimental planes and gross embarrassment of Lenin.

Comments

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

I do like the Lightning. :)

I see certain similarities between the BS 188 and the SR-71. I assume that this was the British equivalent?

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

I know that we never had anything to match the SR-71; what I wondered was this something which (in a rather better funded world) would have been further developed to produce a mach-umpty reconnaissance plane? If it was a high-speed Concorde precursor then a I could imagine (again in my fantasy better funded world) such a development.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Possibly... the BS 188 had a lot of technical issues, in that it was rather underpowered and could only get anywhere near its notional top speed in full afterburner, which led to prodigous fuel consumption. (Early prototypes of the A-12 - the precursor to the SR-71 - had the same problem, mind you, as the airframe was ready before the engine). It was also very heavy, being made of steel - although the M=1.6 that it achieved ended up being far below the kind of speed at which aluminium alloys suffice.

A practical version would have had more powerful engines - almost certainly the Olympus - and either an advanced aluminium airframe and a speed limit of circa M=2.3 or titanium as per the SR-71 for M=3+.

Actually, had the TSR-2 not been cancelled, a dedicated recce variant would have been quite a reasonable prospect, along the lines of the GR.1A and GR.4A recce Tornados. I'm not sure what the practical top speed of the TSR-2 was, although I know it was structurally limited rather than constrained by thrust; I saw a comment that in theory a clean airframe would reach thrust=drag somewhere past Mach 3, except that important bits would have started melting first. Hmmm, I wonder if BAC might have considered a titanium-airframe version?