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USAF Launch Supersonic Bomb Firing Technology
coondoggie writes "Boeing and the US Air Force today said they have tested new technology that for the first time will let military aircraft launch bombs from aircraft moving at supersonic speeds. Researchers from Boeing Phantom Works and the Air Force Research Laboratory used a rocket sled in combination with what researchers called "active flow control" to successfully release a smart bomb known as MK-82 Joint Direct Attack Munition Standard Test Vehicle (JDAM) at a speed of about Mach 2 from a weapons bay with a size approximating that of the U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber, Boeing said. Active flow control is a tandem array of microjets upstream of the weapons bay that, when fired reduces the unsteady pressures inside the bay and modifies the flow outside to ensure the JDAM munition travels out of the bay correctly."
We miss often enough at sub-sonic speeds. Great.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I seriously doubt that. F22 airframe is mostly titanium and it's got to take 9G turns which are much more stressful then Mach3 level flight. The PW119 engines are very powerful but only about 25% more than what is on the F16 and the plane is much bigger. The benefit of these engines in their high efficency which allows supercruise w/o afterburners which saves 40% on fuel consumption. Go look at http://www.f22fighter.com/
The B-58 could drop at supersonic speeds, and the A-5 Vigilante may also have had this capability. During the 50's the USAF had a serious hard-on for all things supersonic. Given the generally limited supersonic capabilities of aircraft from that era the ultimate utility of the concept must have been called into question. The supersonic cruise ability of the new generation of aircraft has simply re-awakened a dormant idea. Much like the fashion industry, the institutional memory is so limited that many folks inside have no clue what has been done before.
No, he didn't. He conscripted thousands of your friends and neighbors to do it for him.
It's more than likely the fact that the airframe is heavily composite, and at Mach 3 the expoxies would simply come apart from being baked in flight.
The B-58 had no internal bomb bay to launch bombs out of, which is the whole point of TFA. It's one thing to detach a weapon on a pylon that is already in a supersonic airstream, it's another to try to force one out of a stagnant weapons bay into a supersonic airstream.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
The (very substantial) energy has to go somewhere. At some point the yield from the kinetic energy alone exceeds the yield from any explosive. And to get a high terminal velocity, you need to make the projectile as dense as possible - and high explosive is not nearly as dense as tungsten, tantalum, DU, etc. So putting in explosives is actually a loss.
That meteorite that killed the dinosaurs didn't explode in the sense you mean, either, yet it managed to vaporize a fair bit of the ancestral area around the Yucatan peninsula.
The collateral damage advantages should be clear as well. The same energy, and smaller dispersal, provides very high energy density in the target area and far less flying debris.
The only thing missing from the 50's/60's experiments was the accurate guidance, and the fact (still true) that nuclear weapons needed no guidance to speak of, and are extremely cost-effective.
Brett
Ah, good ol' trusty mortars
the F-104 was rated top speed was Mach 2.2, but it could easily achieve Mach 2.4,
Mostly straight down, unfortunately.