NASA appears to be pulling its SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest production plane ever made, out of retirement as the Trump administration teases its new line of hypersonic surveillance jets — but doubt…
Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
I think the closest comparison to what it would be best for is basically air cavalry. Dive in at high speed for a devastating hit-and-run, and then do it again
Im not sure it flies slow enough for a gun to work properly.
When at top speed, yeah, traditional guns wouldn’t work well. You could still shoot, sure, but the bullets would quickly be slowed down by air resistance, while the aircraft keeps flying … there could be a very real danger of overtaking your own bullets and hitting them from behind. The relative speed wouldn’t be very high, so they probably wouldn’t do much damage on impact, but they could do a lot of damage if one of the engines ingests one, so still a bad idea.
But when at top speed, it’s already traveling faster than most bullets. At that point, you don’t need a ‘gun’ anymore. Just drop some inert projectiles while doing your flyby, and those projectiles will hit your target with the force of bullets.
Sure, if it had any payload capacity. But it doesn’t.
Getting a machine up to that speed is hard, real hard. The margins are extremely small. So the moment you start adding additional moving parts to it, opening payload bays, weapons release mechanisms, a few 400 lb missiles… And don’t forget, all those additional components also take up additional volume, higher volume means more air displacement, which means more drag. Higher volume also means the area of the airframe gets larger, that means additional mass.
All of a sudden, that plane can’t hit mach 3 anymore and you don’t actually have an untouchable weapons delivery system anymore.
This is probably why a combat version of the aircraft was abandoned, it doesn’t really make sense.
I think the closest comparison to what it would be best for is basically air cavalry. Dive in at high speed for a devastating hit-and-run, and then do it again
It would probably be a missle platform.
Probably had the Phoenix missle or similar range weapon in mind for air to air.
Im not sure it flies slow enough for a gun to work properly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12
When at top speed, yeah, traditional guns wouldn’t work well. You could still shoot, sure, but the bullets would quickly be slowed down by air resistance, while the aircraft keeps flying … there could be a very real danger of overtaking your own bullets and hitting them from behind. The relative speed wouldn’t be very high, so they probably wouldn’t do much damage on impact, but they could do a lot of damage if one of the engines ingests one, so still a bad idea.
But when at top speed, it’s already traveling faster than most bullets. At that point, you don’t need a ‘gun’ anymore. Just drop some inert projectiles while doing your flyby, and those projectiles will hit your target with the force of bullets.
Would have been funny to put in a tail gun.
Sure, if it had any payload capacity. But it doesn’t.
Getting a machine up to that speed is hard, real hard. The margins are extremely small. So the moment you start adding additional moving parts to it, opening payload bays, weapons release mechanisms, a few 400 lb missiles… And don’t forget, all those additional components also take up additional volume, higher volume means more air displacement, which means more drag. Higher volume also means the area of the airframe gets larger, that means additional mass.
All of a sudden, that plane can’t hit mach 3 anymore and you don’t actually have an untouchable weapons delivery system anymore.
This is probably why a combat version of the aircraft was abandoned, it doesn’t really make sense.
I was mostly going for a [email protected] thing tbh, because of exactly what you were saying