How much are you willing to soup it up? The MOP is 6 times heavier than anything else the F-15I carries (the GBU-28, also a penetrating bomb), and 3200 kilos over its total payload capacity. It’s about the same diameter as the 610-gallon drop tank the F-15 can carry on its centerline pylon so apparently ground clearance wouldn’t be be an issue but I am not sure how I’d feel about having something that weighed significantly more than my airplane bolted to that pylon.
Humor is lost on some… Actually, what I saw in another article was “Fordow”.
Again, how much do you want to start modifying the airframe so that two or three points can hold as much as the total payload? What do you cut, what do you weld to, what does it do to weight and balance and handling, what if you have to land loaded, etc.? They have engineers for that, but it’s not trivial.
Partly, too, I assume there’s a serious aiming and targeting component to such a bomb. It may be primarily ballistics, but I assme any precision munition nowadays includes a means to identify and steer to a specific spot; and the electronics and controls for that? Or is bomb dropping so precise that while travelling 880 ft/sec with arbitrary winds you can release and drop a bomb within a few feet of target without guidance?
What are those mountains made of? I guess that’s an interesting question too.
And if nobody’s going to physically invade - well, the assumption in 1993 was that Saddam would cave or be assassinated shortly if they kept up the isolation and occasional air attacks; that didn’t happen. Meanwhile, North Korea is the poster child for “having bombs keep you safe”.
I’m just spitballing here: how about you make a basket? Build a large, rigid basket, made out of carbon fiber or some other strong and light material, and attach it to multiple hardpoints at the bottom of the aircraft simultaneously. That basket will cradle the bomb, bearing its weight until it’s dropped. Obviously there are myriad problems to solve, including aerodynamics, adjusting mass, and releasing the payload in a safe and effective manner, but in theory, it’s not too crazy, is it?
From a purely FQ point of view, sort of, yes. The GBU-57 uses a combination of GPS and inertial guidance. In the general sense, JDAMs (Joint Directed Attack Munitions, an addon kit to convert unguided bombs into precision-guided ones) that rely on GPS coordinates can just be preprogrammed before takeoff and the bombs released at once without needing to program each one at the time.
This is more useful, obviously, with stationary targets, but it is hard to get more stationary than a mountain. In any case, lofted JDAMs can have a range in the tens of nautical miles depending on the altitude and speed of the aircraft deploying them. I do not know how well the GBU-57 glides and I would be even less enthusiastic about lofting it than just carrying it around. But the targeting should not be an issue.
Similarly, unless it’s changed, the fighter aircraft the Ukrainian Air Force has aren’t capable of talking directly to the antiradiation missiles they were given, so the missiles are simply preprogrammed with some set of target parameters and then fired in the right general area for the missile to do the rest of the hard work.
This sort of thing is not uncommon with, in particular, air forces that are obligated to improvise. The Colombian Air Force flies A-37 Dragonflies as counterinsurgency aircraft; this is a Vietnam-era plane that the USAF continued using mostly as a jet trainer. In Colombian service it has been adapted to drop guided weapons; the coordinates are transferred via Bluetooth using Raytheon’s WiPAK (Wireless Paveway Avionics Kit, I believe).
I mean, as long as I’m not the one flying it, do whatever you want.
The first issue I notice with that is that those cables would put significant sideways forces on the hardpoints, probably greater than the vertical forces. I’m sure that hardpoints are rated to handle some amount of sideways forces, since you don’t want bombs falling off just from maneuvers, but I doubt they can handle that much.
To be clear, Trump claims to have dropped bombs at several sites including Fordow.
CNN Excerpt:
The US has struck three nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, US President Donald Trump said on social media on Saturday evening, as the conflict between Israel and Iran enters its second week.
B-52 would be the other option. Radar cross section of the B-52 is about 100 meters squared. For the B-2 it is about .0001 meters squared. Nothing Iran has would even see them until they opened their bomb doors.
I’d imagine also that the moment of takeoff would represent a terribly forceful yank on the airplane; the moment when that huge bomb goes from sitting idle on the runway in the basket to being dragged and eventually lifted airborne - it might be strong enough to yank out whole components of the airplane’s hardpoints.