Project Habakkuk, the meltable aircraft carrier! Not the world’s most workable idea, but I would have liked to see where commecial shipping went with that for inspiration.
What cancelled 20th/21st Century military system would you have liked to have seen come to fruition?
Can I joke and say the bat bombs from World War II?
Death Ray.
They cancelled those in the 30s when they went out of style.
Not even close to sexy but I always like the YC-14
Oh, good memory. I actually saw one of those parked at Boeing Field when the program was underway. I seem to remember reading that the YC-14 was judged superior to the YC-15, but the Air Force decided not to buy either one. Some years later when they did start buying a new cargo aircraft, the C-17 looked like it shared some design DNA with the YC-15.
There’s definitely some cool tech being mentioned in this thread. If they couldn’t be built, the next best thing would be to know the inside stories on why they weren’t built. How many of them were technologically sound but fell prey to budgets or politics, and how many of them just didn’t work?
This is the one that wins. The rest are all just weapons and therefore not a real quantum leap forward.
Metal rods spread over a division arriving at orbital speeds? That’s cool beyond the ability of man to comprehend.
Nothing spurs weapons development more than a real shooting war. Aside from the super battleships I mentioned, the prop-driven fighter planes that would have come out in late 1945 are way up there, surpassing the P-51D and TA-152 by large margins. Example are the Spitfire Mk 22, the US P51 G with a speed of 495 mph, and the Japanese Reppu that could outfight any carrier-based fighter. But with the advent of the jet, development efforts shifted.
The Republic XF-12 wouldn’t have been a shabby bomber/recon plane either. Republic XF-12 Rainbow - Wikipedia 400 MPH cruise, 40,000 ceiling, 4,000 nm range. The apotheosis of piston multi-engine propeller aviation. Unfortunately, jets did everything so much better.
I would love to have seen the Russian winged tank developed further
It probably would never have been practical but it would have been cool as hell
I was actually at Duxford on Sunday, and it was the first time I’d heard of the TSR. In terms of not looking old, my first glance at it across the crowded hanger, I thought it might have been a B-1 Lancer. (Why it wouldn’t have been in the American hangar I didn’t know )
Interestingly, at the time the Comanche was conceived, the emphasis was on it being a one-seater, explicitly – that was part of what would make it a desirable addition to the two-seater helicopters already in service. Half the personnel at risk, half the human resources expenses, less weight, longer range, and the second operator’s workload farmed out to computers.
But somewhere in the process it was decided to make it a two-seater – a decision which immediately called the entire concept into question.
One of the crises the development program went through in 2000:
Isn’t that roughly the weight of a second operator?
Now that I didn’t know, still for all its simplicity they still haven’t quite managed to kill the A-10A off yet.
I agree with you on that, I’m sure the F-22 is a fantastic plane but look-wise at least its positively mundane compared to the YF-23.
Coincidentally someone showed me this rather striking picture earlier today:
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/450641506443605774/ (Chuck Yeager and YF-23)
And on checking wikipedia apparently he’s still alive! I wonder what he thinks of the current generation of fighters?
Very true, though the TSR-2 is just one part of an object lesson in how a country can through away a world-leading industry, Britain went from fielding not one but three world class nuclear bombers in the 1950’s to, well…
That reminds me of the Cheyenne, it would be interesting to see what it would have turned into with a few more generations of development.
Actually that would be a potentially interesting and fun Cold War story, with all the military hardware that was cancelled being fielded and those that were fielded in our timeline/reality being cancelled.
The TSR reminded me more of a A-5 Vigilante than anything else. Beautiful a/c, but my God, if the F-111 had teething pains with near Mach 1.0 flight on the deck, I’m not sure how an a/c 10-15 years earlier would do any better.
The Cheyenne—and it is a gorgeous helicopter, with outstanding speed—unfortunately would have flown its missions right in the heart of the envelope of a bunch of Soviet AAA and low altitude SAM systems, like SA-8, 2S6, 2K22/SA-19, and a slew of others. N.O.T.E. is where it was at, and preferably deploying weapons while sitting behind a terrain feature while some other system/sight did the designating. The Russians built an awful lot of AAA machinery to kill anything aircraft related that had the misfortune of letting itself get seen by said machinery.
As for the Comanche, it was a dumb decision, although it can be argued the Army has never really valued scout aircraft, like the Kiowa, Bronco, or Mohawk like they should’ve. Maybe nowadays, their work can be replaced by a distributed surveillance net of interlinked drones. Or maybe, the Army figures that things like the Reaper and it’s stealthier cousins will be enough.
I think they’re really going to regret getting rid of the institutional memory of the Cav air scout community with getting rid of the Kiowas, and not getting them sufficient survivable replacements like the Comanche. One seat was kind of silly though. There’s just too much stuff to do, and too many things to watch out for at low level, for one person to handle it all. Maybe AI will solve that problem too.
The Soviets kind of went for a Cheyenne type helicopter with the Mi-24 didn’t they? Did they think it would be more survivable in the NATO air defence environment?
And I didn’t know the Kiowa had been done away with, seems a strange decision definitely.
quite, we did that a lot with our post-war technological advances. For a country that maximised the benefits of the industrial revolution we did very poorly with 20th century innovations.
Apparently not. It was a great machine in the air. The first time it went supersonic it did so on one afterburner and an F3 Lightning couldn’t keep up without lighting both.
Top speed would certainly have been approaching mach 2.5 and the teething troubles lay elsewhere with fuel pumps and landing gear rather than any airborne qualities.
Sadly it did lack the most important qualities of all, frugality and political backing.
Question: how come the turretless design for MBT’s didn’t catch on? During the '80s i recall the UK, West Germany, and the USSR were experimenting. The last cold war Soviet design i recall was a monster turretless design with a 155mm gun (scaled down to 135mm). The frontal armor would have had enough ceramic armor to defeat any kinetic sabot round, while the sides and back were chock-full of reactive armor. The gun could fire full caliber HEAT, sabot, and sub-caliber “cannon ball” rounds capable of cracking hard brittle armor. The article mentioned the (US) army will now consider installing depleted uranium armor on to the M-1 Abrams.
I first remwmber XM8 and OICW. Probably not the best project; seemed innovative at the time. But it filled pop culture for awhile, especially in video games.