With powerful enough jet engines, you can make ANYTHING fly. :)

Show me a FLYING PIG!

Show me the attach points on the pig for an engine...

"This thing doesn't even have an L-Bracket! How the hell are we supposed to make it win the Air-Force fighter concept challenge?"

Feed it enough beans, apply open flame, and it'll produce its own thrust!

With powerful enough jet engines, you can make ANYTHING fly.

"There isn't enough [engine] power in all Christendom to make that airplane [the F-111B for the US Navy] what we want!" - Vice Admiral Thomas F. Connolly, then Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air Warfare, in response to a question as to whether a more powerful engine would cure the aircraft's woes.

You know, I shoulda remembered that quote. :)

It was hard enough to make the landing gear sturdy enough to land that thing on the deck...

I like the design concept, with that much surface area for lift you could probably load that thing out with some impressive armament.

I loved that NGC special :D
It made me want to come up with a robotic character that was based off it.

The one thing I did enjoy was listening to guys who almost never get to talk about their handy work due to security finally get public recognition.

Reminds me of a maple seed...

I seem to remember the biggest problems with flying wings in general was the "busy" cockpit. With most aircraft, if you let go of the controls, the airplane will fly itself for the most part. For instance, flying a Cessna 172 and you start "rollercoastering" the best thing to do is center the controls and the stable nature of the plane's design will correct the problem. On the flying wing you don't have that luxury, you are constantly having to fly the airplane. That's why the B2 bomber is computer controlled, the pilots would be overwhelmed just keeping it in the air if it were manual.

On the other hand, with vectored thrust on that bad boy no conventional fighter, like a Mig 15 or F-86 for instance, could out turn you and in dogfighting that is the determining factor in most encounters. Typically though, the age of the air to air missile ended that scenario in the minds of most strategists before the start of the Vietnam War and why F4 Phantoms were being swatted out of the sky by inferior Migs because they had no guns and just a few missiles.

True, until relatively recently the fact was that after the first turn, all dogfights were subsonic.

And, of course, how do you down a Phantom equipped with six Sidewinders? Send up seven MiGs. Or one SA-2 and watch the pilot run out of fuel as he outran it.

As for 172s... my instructor once said that if you ever became completely disoriented and you had a few thousand feet of altitude, reduce throttle a little and take your hands off the controls for about 15 seconds. The 172 would right itself and settle into a slow up-and-down gyration with a near-standard-rate turn to the right. I tried it once from a climbing 45-degree-banked left at 8500 feet, and by 6500 it was stabilized.

It may be a spam can, but it's a damned safe spam can.

My grandfather was deployed near Gotha in 1945 with a wing defending the jet factory. He was one of those throwing away his uniform after the fall of Berlin.

I thought Luftwaffe members were actually fairly safe from post-war vigilantism? As compared to, say, guys like the Waffen-SS.

He was a mechanic, not a fighter pilot. But I think he wasn't much in for being a P.O.W. at all.

I read they were rounding up anyone in uniform at the time including policemen and firemen so yeah, I can see that.

I love concepts, always fun to play with.

This is a awesome design.

If I had to guess at the intended loadout, My guess would be 4 20mm Colt Mk. 12 or Pontiac M39 cannon and 2.75 inch aerial rockets or early AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles for the interceptors, and whatever you can hang under the wings for 'mud-moving'.

Very nice! You did a good job on this concept. As professor Jace told the test pilot of one of his flying wing designs: "Of course, it's perfectly safe!"

Really neat!

The had a dehavilland at the air races this year. Fairly old one, belonged to a british admiral. They had a lot of problems with it. I need to put up the pictures I got of it.

Looks more like it traces its ancestry back to the Blohm und Voss BV P.212.03 design (http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp212.html). But Germany had a lot of tailless designs sitting on drawing boards at the end of the war, and the fundamental design constraints are going to give you designs with a lot of commonality of appearance. The state of jet engine design in the immediate postwar period would make it a pig with that load of external stores, but that's just due to the low-thrust engines of the period; the design looks sound, and with a suitable engine would probably be a solid workhorse of a plane.

Looks like a BV P.212 (single-engined) or P.215 (twin-engined) variation crossed with a bit of Junkers EF 128 and modernized. Still, it's an attractive enough aircraft and looks like it'd be an interesting addition to an air force. it looks like it'd be fun to model and not too difficult a subject.

Yeah, I wanted to capture the simple first generation of jet design. No compound curves, just simple basic shapes. Glad you like it.