Not really Jow Forums, but you guys seem tech savvy enough regarding planes

This thing is the record holder, isn't it? If it ever flies.

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Money I guess? And the fact that it would be pretty useless.

what if you made a circle with those?

As long as you had the power to sustain it, probably.

You see how much that model airplane is sagging in the image you posted?

Now imagine that but with hundreds of tons of steel, aluminum, fuel, wiring and electronics. It would snap in half or be too heavy to get off the ground.

what if you put a nuclear reactor in a huge glider or something? Could it go perpetually like a sub?

Dont you ever, ever mention the word glider here again. For the love of god user, he might show up anytime now...

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Look up Project Pluto. It's basically what you're asking for.

That’s why you build an elaborate air fleet of factory planes and build it mid-air!

Not really true, once airborne it would level out as every part is producing lift instead of there being a heavy portion in the middle burdening the airframe like a normal fuselage aircraft.

Once airborne is the key phrase there.

It takes a loaded C-5 almost an entire length of runway at full power to get off the ground. Full power is about 200k lbs of thrust. Theoretically your meme bird could, realistically it won't.

Maybe fully loaded it takes that length, but empty ive personally seem them take off of runways that are less that 5,000 feet long.

Also, the meme bird wouldnt be carrying much, if anything, and if it was, you would be a retard to center all the mass in the middle.

Huge flying wing would get airborne quicker than a C-5, because it has a shitload of lift per drag. Huge flying wing also takes a wide fucking runway though

The ol' Hughes Spruce Goose was able to fly, and it had a longer wingspan than the 225.

It's just really, really expensive and impractical to go any bigger than that.

>fly

It just stayed in ground effect for its entire flight. That doesn't even count

All runways are the same length now all of sudden? Live and learn...

But ignoring that, remember that each segment here should fly well enough on its own, s the thrust to weight for one segment should be what it needs to be. And as they all bring their own power the power or thrust to weight ratio doesn't really change no matter how many aircraft we stick together. For such a stunningly bad idea you're proving marvellously inept at spotting anything wrong with it.

Yeah, but that was using the shit ass engines of the 40's, nowadays we could easily make that fat fucker fly.

define biggest: heaviest is a materials issue, as theoretically you could concieve of a plane that is 100% lifting surface and there would be some theoretical limitation where the weight of the materials would outstrip the the lift from the wing. With some materials that theoretical maximum would be measured in lbs, in others, megatons

Widest or longest are very different questions, both of which can get complicated by weird planforms, the gullwings of the F4U Coursair meant that if you measured their wings they had a longer wingspan than other planes then in use, but the angled nature meant that the absolute width of the unit was approximately the same.

Theoretically of course if you built something like a Helios, where each section of the plane had a bit of flying equipment plus enough lifting surface to lift that section, and just tied them all together like suggested, then you could extend it around the entire earth until the ends of it joined up in one giant circular wing 40 thousand kilometres wide.

Such a plane would immediately explode from compression if it tried to lift off and reached a height where the compression exceeded the plane's physical tolerance, which you'd eventually reach because the plane wouldn't be able to change it's angle of attack up or down as it tried to fly directly north or south into space, and so from the ground it would appear as though it was always slowly angling upwards because of earth curbing away from it beneath it.

So obviously there's some reasonable maximum width of such a glider, maybe as large as 40,074.999km, so there's a metre gap between the wing tips.

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Though as per the example of the gullwings on the F4U Coursair, you would take the giant super-annular wing, and make the wing sections zig zag so the plane looked like WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

This way you could make a plane whose wingspan would be approximately 80,150km.

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so basically "as big as you want it"

>ukraine
No such thing.

Is that the fucking slenderman by the B-36's cockpit?

Ukraine is a province of Russia

>mfw they air-launched an ICBM from a C-5 just to show that they could

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>two turning, two burning, two smoking, two choking, and two more unaccounted for

Because putting an engine on a plane backwards could neeeeeveeer cause problems!

>Theoretically your meme bird could
It's a good thing OP specified theory and not practicality then.

you could extend it around the entire earth until the ends of it joined
This guy gets it

If you watch the video of that thing flying you'll understand why it's generally a bad idea. Some of the throttle-related issues that are probably a product of torque would be alleviated with turbine engines but basic stability issues would persist for small gain.

>Oscillates while performing any kind of maneuver.
>Needs auto-level to really be controllable
>Poor yaw control (since it's controlled by differential throttle rather than a rudder)
>Ugly as fuck takeoff and landings
>Crabs

In particular the poor yaw control seems unavoidable. Any kind of stall would be absolutely catastrophic as you'd never be able to recover. On top of that, it really begs the question of what it would even be good for, I'm not sure how you'd distribute any kind of load across a flexible airframe like that. Would probably have use for extreme long-range flights- possibly could be used for recon drones with different mission modules?

It's also not as simple as just bolting a bunch of identical airframes together. You could make a modular aircraft, but it would probably have left and right handed modules that are added on to a central control module. The design is explained here youtube.com/watch?v=GWGqs3zqttA but it's important to note that none of these modules would be able to fly individually. In this case, the handedness of the joint geometry and flex is important to maintain stability, since it corrects different angles of attack, and the only control surfaces are "elevators" (elevons, technically).

Fundamentally though, even if we discount the physical size and were able to engineer a full size aircraft (which is not an insignificant challenge), the poor yaw control at low speed means that it would struggle to use traditional runways even if they were wide enough to accommodate it. Any kind of crosswind is going to make landing very dangerous.

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>you could extend it around the entire earth until the ends of it joined
>This guy gets it

You couldn't because it would have points that the entire aircraft would need to rotate around. These portions would not be generating lift and thus crash.

What if the circle went around the whole planet

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>not making the polar components helicopters

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I didn't think of that

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christ does that runway ever end?

Sadly not with our tech.

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in space?

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We're talking truly gargantuan OP, your real limitation is runway size, if you're looking for conventional takeoff. As you may know, the bigger a plane is generally the more runway it needs, because the bigger a plane is the longer it takes a sensibly sized engine to get it up to a fast enough speed to leave the ground. I say sensibly sized because I'm sure much, much larger aircraft engines could theoretically be built but they'd eventually get inefficient to the point of uselessness. There's also the issue of structural strength, a rigid winged plane with the conventional layout of fuel in the wing with engines hanging off it is limited by the material strength of it's wing spars, too long = too heavy = wing either flexes and permanently bends the spar or just snaps right off. I don't think even with planes the size of the Antonov we've reached the maximum limit of conventional steel spars, I'm sure that if you replace the sections of spar under the heaviest load with titanium or the entire spar with titanium that you could go significantly wider, and if you build the wings using supercomputer optimization and 3D additive metal printing to shave that extra couple % you could get to some seriously ridiculous wingspans, but the plane would be so big that no modern runway would be long enough for it to take off from.

Spruce goose

Visions of assembling a plane at the Bonneville Salt flats Something like the nuclear powered steam driven airplane from Steambird. Put in the air, hope it never lands anywhere you want to keep. The guy who wrote it, his first job was on the R & D team at Pratt and Whitney, working on the design of the engines for a nuclear reactor-powered aircraft. He thought a ten mile long runway could work. Funny story, I remember laughing out loud.

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Well certainly steam never would have worked, although as the Pluto missile demonstrated a hot enough molten salt reactor can operate as an airbreathing engine, although generally as a rule the shielding even on the superior MSR with it's dramatically reduced size and weight is still too heavy to allow for a practical aircraft which can do anything other than fly it's own weight. I imagine that could be addressed now, especially with metamaterials like Allite which is both significantly stronger and significantly lighter than conventional aircraft aluminium and a carbon composite body. Such an aircraft though would be monumentally more expensive than a conventional plane, and of course always carry that very slight risk of a crash resulting in a nuclear incident.

It flew, once. Barely. It lifted off from the water. The problem is that it was almost too heavy for itself. It wouldn't be able to bear cargo. It ruined Leo DiCaprio's career.

Explain

Yeah why the fuck did they choose to do that, seems like a last minute decision too

>Ukraine built the largest plane An-225
Soviet Union did. All the "ukraine" ever did about it was letting the second unfinished airframe to rot in a hangar and selling the blueprints to China.

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>limitation is runway
So what your saying is the super gigantic aircraft we build needs to be a VTOL

VTOL or SVTOL would come with a host of more dangerous teething issues, the primary one being instability. Even the more modern VTOLs are more dangerous to operate than a conventional runway launching aircraft. Runway length can be mitigated by using a catapult system or discarding boosters, but if your giant VTOL inhales a gust of hot exhaust and tips over then you'll be scraping burning pieces of it off the takeoff site.

I have no idea. I've heard the reduction in turbulence/drag and better cruise efficiency may have had something to do with it.

MfW, China resells the blueprints to Russia.

Funny that those f-15s are closer in size to the c-130 than the c-5 is to the c-130

F-15s are way larger than I initially thought they were. F-22s are also huge. Su-27 family is even bigger.

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The largest plane by wingspan is Stratolaunch

USA
S
A

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Now you can hit both towers at once

If you consider ground effect the same as flight, you can get a cargo of 150 tons or more in the air.

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I'm disappointed in you Jow Forums, this should have been the first post.

>The CL-1201 design project studied a Nuclear-powered aircraft of huge size, with a wing span of 1,120 feet (340 m). Had it been built, it would have had the largest span of any airplane to date.The wing was of crescent form, similar to the British Handley Page Victor V-bomber, but unlike the British design it was tailless. Power was derived from the heat generated by a nuclear reactor and transferred to four jet engines where it would superheat the air passing through to provide thrust. The craft would be capable of staying airborne for long periods of time. At low altitudes the jets would burn conventional aviation fuel. In order to get airborne in the first place it required 182 additional vertical lift engines. Two variants were studied, a logistics support aircraft and an airborne aircraft carrier. The logistics support variant had a conventional heavy transport role, carrying hundreds of troops and their equipment to the battle zone. The airborne aircraft carrier could carry up to 22 fighter aircraft externally and had an internal dock capable of handling two air-to-ground shuttle transport aircraft.

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>that helmet

based and kesslerpilled

sexy

With enough thrust even a brick generates aerodynamic lift. So as big as an island would be my guess, past that your airplane gets too big for the atmosphere.

This. Theoretically, you could have a Nimitz size plane flying around if you properly reinforced the wings and had sufficient thrust in addition to the aforementioned runway length. All things become relative as long as you can scale up.

The problem is two fold: operational cost and physical ramifications. Even assuming you had the funds, engineering capability, and resources to build such a plane, it would cause havoc to everything around it. Lowering the flaps on something that large would flatten houses or trees beneath it.

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youtube.com/watch?v=nB9QMQI-ZRM

which is becoming more unlikely at this point. They canned their own launch vehicle developement program, so they're down to carrying three pegasus launch vehicles. And those haven't been remotely cost effective since more than a decade by now. They're hoping that someone else will design an air launch to orbit vehicle for it, but that seems unlikely

Came here to post this.

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There once was a faggot, so autistic he would make Pierre Sprey seem like a functioning human beeing. That guy was Gliderfag. Gliderfag unironically belived that all transport aircraft should be replaced by gliders (yeah, the sort of thing they used in WW2). In every thread about ground combat or air warfare Gliderfag would come, and he just wouldnt shut up about his new idea of titanium gliders beeing a revolution to warfare.

How bad, on a scale of Sparky to CWC?

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He was definetly on Sparkys levels.

>God has left

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>Lowering the flaps on something that large would flatten houses or trees beneath it.
How can we weaponize this

>No guard rails
Now that I think about it, real carriers don't have guard rails either right? What happens if someone falls off? The surface must be pretty slippery with the water plus any kind of oil or fuel spill from the planes.

do you need radiation shielding if the aircraft is unmanned?

by lowering the flaps
those that fall over the edge are a sacrifice to obtain the favor of the gods

Yes, Radiation can damage electronics and optics very easily.

Carriers decks are paved with asphalt