kim wrote:
I'll see if I can dig up any info on it. Did you ever see the Short P.17D VTOL carrier for the P.17A attack bomber? It was intended to arise out of a forest clearing with the P.17A riding on its back, get going forward to lift-off speed, and launch the P.17A. That's a fairly odd idea, but who knows, maybe they could have made it work, although fuel consumption per minute on the P.17D would have been staggering. The P.17D was insane; 44 RB.108 engines aimed straight down, 16 RB.108s in swiveling mountings, and 10 RB.108 or RB.145 engines pushing it forward - grand total: 70 engines! Imagine for a second what that would sound like with all of its engines running. The whole forest would be shaking with dead birds and squirrels falling from the the trees, bleeding from their ears. Starting the engines would have been quite the operation; one assumes they were started in some sort of sequence rather than all at once, as otherwise the electrical power need to crank them all up at once would have been formidable indeed. Of course one could just fire 70 starter cartridges, and use the resulting huge smokescreen to hide the aircraft's ascent, assuming that all the engines don't just re-ingest the smoke and quit. But the really crazy part comes at the end of the P.17A's mission...again the P.17D would rise into the air, and the P-17A would alight on its back in mid-air! How exactly the P.17D was going to react to a 75,000 pound aircraft suddenly ending up atop it is a good question...I assume they flew as a biplane letting the P.17A's wings generate lift while slowing down and increasing lift thrust till once again they were hovering over the forest clearing.
Which Mirage? The VTOL Balzac and it follow-on Mirage III-V used lift engines in the body. We did a design with lift fans in the wings, the GE-Ryan XV-5A "Vertifan".
Pat