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I've always been fascinated by the F-104. It looks fast even on the ground. Cockpit: http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-22.html http://www.nm
by quercusa 4y ago
I've always been fascinated by the F-104. It looks fast even on the ground.
Cockpit: http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-22.html http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-22.html
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI went to that museum (U.S.A.F. museum in Dayton, OH). If you like warplanes, I highly recommend it. It's an incredible value for your money, and you get to be up close and personal with tons of amazing planes (SR-71, YF-23, B-52, etc.) You definitely want to give yourself two days.
- WalterBright 4y agoMe too. It just looks awesome. A cockpit bolted on to a ginormous engine. It's a totally bad-ass airplane.
- TylerE 4y agoStill not quite as cool as a Lightning, though.
- WalterBright 4y agoI suppose you could compare the Starfighter to the Gee-Bee as they are the same concept, but the Gee-Bee always looked like something out of a pulp magazine rather than a mean mo-fo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Gee_Bee_Model_R_Super_Sportster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Gee_Bee_Model_R_Supe... The P-38 is cool, too :-)
- TylerE 4y agoI was referring to the English Electric variety
- WalterBright 4y agoOk :-)
- speed_spread 4y agoI'm also terrified by that wing aspect ratio. Fast it must have been, but it seems that they sacrificed a lot of common (flying) sense to get there.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI know so little about this but aren’t fighters much more ballistic in order to be nimble? My loose amateur sense is that a fighter pilot is always flirting with their plane no-longer behaving like a plane and more like a guided missile if they flew it just the slightest wrong (or right?) way.
- lmm 4y agoYou're thinking of something different. Modern (computer-controlled) fighters are aerodynamically unstable because that makes them more manouverable, but that's about being able to turn or spin rather than flying balistically. For traditionally-shaped planes (delta wings work differently) there's a fairly straightforward tradeoff between big wings to increase lift at low speeds and small wings to reduce drag at high speed. Flaps help but there's a limit to how much you can change the shape of a wing in flight. So if you build a plane to go very fast, you tend to end up with a plane that has a high minimum speed as well, which makes take off and especially landing difficult.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThank you. To simplify, are you basically saying that with more unstable wing configurations, at slower speeds the plane simply wants to fall out of the sky rather than glide? Is that sensible to imagine for this topic?
- lmm 4y agoIt's not "unstable", it's low-lift, those are two orthogonal concerns.
- WalterBright 4y ago
- implements 4y agoI have a fascination for the similar looking T38 Talon: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T-38_Talon_over_Edwards_AFB.jpg#/media/File:T-38_Talon_over_Edwards_AFB.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T-38_Talon_over_Edwa... - still used for US fast jet training, apparently.
- buildbot 4y agoLove how there’s a gauge for airspeed in raw mach numbers, up to mach 4!