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You'd have to think though that a frame built long before CAD and long before you could stress test member components digitally would be much heavier for the sa
by redthrowaway 11y ago
You'd have to think though that a frame built long before CAD and long before you could stress test member components digitally would be much heavier for the same strength (or weaker for the same weight) than a modern airframe which could be min-maxed to high hell before a single sheet of aluminum was stamped.
- jimmcslim 11y agoIs there an opportunity to revisit this design with Dreamliner-style composite materials perhaps?
- notahacker 11y agoNot a commercial one; it's a size of aircraft which already has an anomalously large number of competing new generation rivals.
- chx 11y agoNot only would it need to contend with the massively successful Boeing 737 series and the Airbus A320 family but also the upcoming Bombardier CSeries which is an unusually efficient plane .
- meatysnapper 11y agoThe Mig-25 was mostly build from steel. Steel! Good engineering can be done without the aid of a computer.
- jandrese 11y agoIt was also built with the philosophy that it doesn't really matter what you build the aircraft from as long as the engine is big enough. Of course this hurt its fuel efficiency, but in some ways this was a good thing. The mission it was designed for (intercepting supersonic bombers) doesn't require the plane to loiter and the short range meant it would be difficult to defect with.
- mikeash 11y agoDifficult but not impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko (Not meant to contradict you, just an interesting story.)
- speeder 11y agoIs a steel plane harder to shoot down than an aluminum plane? Or it makes no difference because the fuselage has to be thin?
- sandworm101 11y agoAbsolutely no difference. Only a handful of near-modern planes (a-10) have any real armor protecting the plane itself. Pilots often sit in metal tubs, but the overall plane is unprotected from anything physical beyond bird strikes. Any protection is incidental to the structural requirements. There might be something to say for a metal with a higher melting/yield temp that could survive longer in a fire but I don't think that enters into the design equation.
- meatysnapper 11y agoThey would have built it from titanium but at titanium welding hadn't been figured out too well then. The Alfa sub hulls were done with plutonium rods if I remember right!
- jessaustin 11y agoPlutonium? Apparently weight is not an issue.
- mjevans 11y agoAs I /really/ don't want to search those terms in order to confirm it... I'm just going to point out that it seems like meatysnapper is saying: Alfa sub hulls were done (, welded using,) plutonium (welding) rods; according to their memory. Not, as another reply speculates, made out of plutonium rods (which sounds silly from all sorts of perspectives).
- sandworm101 11y ago80ish % steel. The 25 did use some aluminum and titanium where needed. The good engineering was in determining where steel was good enough and where it wasn't.
- WalterBright 11y agoWell, the whole art of designing an aircraft is shaving away the metal (weight) where it isn't absolutely needed!
- WalterBright 11y agoThe DC-3 was famously overbuilt because Douglas had no experience with large aircraft and played it safe. The result was the DC-3 was a very robust aircraft, and this contributed to its many decades of service (and still doing so today).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]