Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Tom Alfaro's art via Concept Ships Blog.
Note: Some of you guys need to get a serious grip. Its concept art. What does that mean? Its freaking Sci-Fi. Maybe its not "totally in line with standard engineering practices today! SO FREAKING WHAT! Can't you just enjoy the art instead of trying to tear down the idea and the artist? Personally you guys amaze me.
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Reminds me of the Switchblade toy I had as a kid
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/wwe1UOgN9pc
transforms from turbo prop fixed wing to rotary wing. Weapons loar though looks to be less then a Apache or Cobra.
ReplyDeleteNose reminds me of a Comanche. the under side rotor converts into the tail so it must be jet powered.
Tom Alfaro's website has even more details: http://www.pan-spatial.com/project-cas-1.html
ReplyDeleteA full portfolio very slick to.
Deletea cross between Avatar and Ghost in the shell: stand alone complex..
ReplyDeletestill looked vurnerable from RPG / MANPAD attack by lowly infantry though
anything flying below 2 thousand feet not doing mach 2 is vulnerable to ground fire.
DeleteName one manned aircraft that can sustain Mach 2 below 2thousand foot. Keep in mind, that speed is over 2 thousand feet per second and the skin temperature is over 750 degrees at that altitude..
DeleteThe aircraft drawings show a small VTOL disc area. That means very high velocity air in close proximity to the earth. What a brown out that would be.
ReplyDeleteTo add to excitement, how does the pilot exit the aircraft in an emergency while the blades are in VTOL mode? It slices,it dices..
Finaly some pointed out the obvious ,if you disregard all other details small rotor disc a area means very high velocity air that makes life dificult while flying low(brownout and FOD magnified gready over helos) not to mention the ineficiency of the rotor operatiing in the fuselage 'shade' there are good reasons why VTOL craft are designed in the way they are.
DeleteThis is pretty neat.
ReplyDeleteI want to see a series of renders of the hypothetical STUG M&S talks about (hey, buddy, if you are reading this, can you draw your STUG pretty please?)
Cool looking idea.
ReplyDeleteInteresting design but to my eye there is not enough internal volume dedicated to fuel and no need for such complex V/G, especially in up and away translations where an aassym or outright failure would be a real bear (imagine the wings come down, complete with pylons, into the rotor disk arc, while the rotor is moving away from them and the gear has to extend and retract on opposed aft then front, front then aft cycles, depending on whether you are 'coming or going').
ReplyDeleteAdd to this the enormous weed whacker hazard, to ground crew doing combat turns or deck handling, especially on a rocking boat, and the lack of directional controls (rudders and tail rotors) and the whole thing becomes a tad whirligig unwieldy.
Reverse the axial direction of the blade fold (top to spine) with zero pitch or stopped rotor zeroing of negative thrust /after/ fixed wing transition and it becomes slightly more believable.
Still doesn't really explain to me why a VTOL aircraft is necessary when ESTOL works just as good in combination with dual tramway ship designs to keep the rotary wing and fixed wing spot/runout lanes separate.
Bury your rotors in a blended wing:body shape and/or continue the SDLF configuration in a fashion that only has to lower approach speeds to say 60-80 knots with primed reversers that activate on touchdown. And watch the game change. Only the insistence on merging 700 knot, 9G, performance with a STOVL capability has truly wrecked the JSF as a helo-escort and fast-CAS platform.
Whereas rotary wing VTOL is largely a drag vs. torque (materials) engineering problem in getting anywhere useful on the pathetically small quantities of fuel carried (<5,000lbs typically), jetlift STOVL has more to do with plumbing/volumetrics as quart in a pint pot type problem solving.
This is easily resolvable if you just trade top end speed and vertical lift for 5,000lbs of burner tube and lobster tail fairing (resulting in a shorter engine overall with easier CG as packaging constraints in the fuselage). Combine this with things like flexible wing skins which can bloat with fuel and gradually regain high speed aerodynamics through a series of supercritical aerofoil shapes as the integral fuel cells bleed down gives you 300 knots to 250nm with an hour or two on-station which is so vastly better than the AH-1 or 64 as to be non comparable..
Of course, you can also look into what the Russians and Japanese have been investigating as a function of Bosonian atomic behaviors in mechanically vortex compressed fluid mediums (i.e. Schauberger/Repulsine stuff: 50,000 to 100,000srpms).
Theoretically, it becomes possible to induce vorticular flows through a helical wound serpentine (conch or unicorn horn) shaped, fixed, compressor channel which comes to such a fine point that the atoms themselves collapse or 'implode' and the space:time suspension that causes the atom behaves like a stabilizing force localization point in the space time continuum is interrupted.
Where this causes space time to become 'sheeted over', gravimetric changes can be induced and 'once charged' the compressor plenum becomes self-sustaining as one of the characteristics of a Repulsine is that that it sucks harder than it blows.
The interesting thing being that the shaped vorticular paths match those of GEs and Pratt's recent fan blade designs and Boeing has gone so far as to start a minor agrav program.
There can be no doubt that the future of VTOL lies in resolving the plumbing issues and the aeromechanical ones of present day systems to come up with something more elegant. But that does not mean that transition systems could not in fact (SDLF as a shaped Repulsine converter) function as a hybrid system by lowering the stall speed of ESTOL systems to something which has 'vertical like' controlled approaches and a thrust induced reversal system that allows ultra-slow precision approaches to be stopped within a few feet, like a braked car.
I check the specs about the fuel. Two tanks, "chest" one for 159 gal. and "dorsal" for 83 gal. So we have an 242 gal. of fuel. I'm not sure... I may be mistaken, but this is a little more then AH-64 have right?
DeleteThe other question, how fast this one consume the fuel.
btw: there are also the two rather large "fuel cells" in wings structure. But I don't know what power they generate (or I just did not read to that part now)
DeleteFantastic and completely ingenious conceptual art work really. In reality though, it seems a bit complex and as someone already pointed out, probably not functional for hard landings, FOD and brown outs, et al.
DeleteWith the savings in R&D alone, couldn't USMC e.g., simply buy 75-100 +/- modified Super Tucano aircraft, capable of STOL and arrested landings on LHD/LHA in special requirements?? They would seem to have potential as a sufficient MV-22 'escort' too. Reliable and economical.