The first thing you should know about the B-36 is that it was big. When I write about airplanes from World War 2, I often use words like 'colossal' and 'huge', but this is little misleading, since I usually mean "colossal - by the standards of the day." Really, even the largest aircraft of the period would be reckoned as medium-sized by today's standards; not so the B-36. It had a wingspan of 70m (230 ft), which is a bit bigger than the Boeing 747-8's, and was nearly the width of an American football field. It was 50 m (162 ft) long, about 15 stories high if it was tilted on its nose. It had a combat weight of 262,000 lbs (119,000 kg) and a max takeoff weight of 410,000 lbs (186,000 kg), which is all the more remarkable as it used piston engines, not turbines, to achieve flight. (It is in fact the largest piston powered/second largest prop-powered aircraft ever made, only beaten in the latter category by the Antonov An-22 turboprop.) Speak...
The conquest of the air will prove, ultimately, will prove to be man's greatest and most glorious triumph. What railways have done for nations, airways will do for the world. - Claude Grahame-White, The Aeroplane, 1914 Longtime readers of this thread will be unsurprised to learn that I've spent literally some time thinking about the trends that lead to airships falling out of use. Some of these you are no doubt familiar with (viz. the incredible advances in aviation made during World War 2, the enormous civil engineering project of building modern airports around the world thanks to World War 2, hydrogen being dangerously flammable when mixed with air, etc.) I came across a new idea while researching this new infodump, from a British aviation writer in 1929: "Airships breed like elephants, airplanes breed like mice." This is true. Rigid airships need to be very large to justify themselves over other Lighter Than Air (LTA) designs, which meant that getting into ...
Pyotr Velikiy. The collapse of the USSR had a major impact on the Kirov program. By the time the lead ship Kirov was put into commission, it was 1980, and the enormous military spending of the USSR (50% of GDP) was bringing the rest of the economy to a halt. As a result, I'm breaking up the service records into three eras: the Soviet era, the 1990s shambles, and the 2000 + stabilization of Russia. As a preamble, I thought I'd mention something only occasionally touched on when talking about the Soviet Military: the corrosive nature of their military-industrial complex. Jobs producing military goods were higher status in the Soviet Union, as well as relatively well paying. While there were lots of other things driving Soviet military budgets (especially in the early 1980s, when the Cold War reached a peak of hostility) communist party officials could best bring home the bacon for their constituents by getting more military production in their district. I suspect that some...
It’s laborious to search out knowledgeable folks on this subject, but you sound like you realize what you’re talking about! Thanks casino blackjack
ReplyDelete