Greetings!
Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.
Quick Links
2DFD-120C Phantom III
psCargile417
Posts: 620Member
I love Smith Micro's Manga Studio 5. Still more to come.
Post edited by psCargile on
Tagged:
Additional credits
- Icons from Font-Awesome
- Additional icons by Mickael Bonfill
- Banner background from Toptal Subtle Patterns
© Scifi-Meshes.com 2001-2024
Posts
There are a lots of future fighters being done. Just a thought, the near future will likely see the phasing out of fighters in favor of hypersonic drones.
I bought Manga Studio to do character work, but its vector layers make doing line art real easy.
People have been saying that about the latest fighters since the 60s. I'm not holding my breath until the end of manned fighters.
Yeah, but drones have really gotten more and more use the last decade or so. One thing that helps is a worldwide satellite network that allows a pilot in a base on one side of the world to fly a drone strike on the other side of the world. That hasn't been possible until a bit more recently than the '60s.
with the image the side view is cool but the plan view awfully angular
Drones are the future. There are some good TED talks on robotics and military applications on Netflix worth a look.
But anyway, this project is part of an idea I'm kicking around in a post singularity world of the 2050s, in which this fighter would be around 20 years old at that time. So around the 2030s time frame, there are a lot more drones than manned aircraft, and many of them are intelligent and autonomous (and I've doodled them from time to time as well). I envision a different role for manned fighters, more as combat directors, hence the letter D in the designation. I see hunting packs of at least one manned aircraft overseeing a small squadron of drones, like a hunter and a his dogs--except these dogs are quiet, and more like wolves. Networked together, they function as one large radar array. At least two drones act as defenders to protect the manned fighter. You'll note the Phantom III doesn't carry munitions, it's pure directed energy or cyber warfare. Some of the drones are configured for missile use, if the need to use them arises. (Weapons and their counter-measures are a balancing act and I don't feel like getting into a debate about the pros and cons of my choices. If you've thought of them, so have I.)
Of the technology listed, most is planned, under development, or already in use. The two exceptions are the Apple iCor cortical implant, and the adaptive stealth. I figured if I already had pliable material for flight controls, I could find another use for it, in which computer controlled elements in the skin react to microwaves, forming angles and facets . I know I'm taking a risk speculating that all this tech will be available in the next decades, but one thing I learned from science fiction, even hard science fiction, is that authors often play it safe. I've decided not to.
On the issue of hypersonics: Hypersonic flight has only one advantage: speed. Because it's fast, it's hot, and that throws out stealth. Hypersonics is great when you need a quick response to a growing threat, or for doing surveillance and spying over an enemy that can see you, but can't do anything about it. The unfortunate thing about aircraft is that one size doesn't fit all. If the plane is designed to be efficient at supersonic speeds, it does poorly at subsonic speeds--which it needs to fly at to take off and land, hence flaps and other high lift devices. If it's designed for hypersonic speeds, it does poorly at the lower speed regimes. This has do with the physics of airflow and optimal wing shapes, and some gizmo isn't going to fix it. This means hypersonic aircraft, drones or not, are going to need fast take off speeds, which means long runways, and immediate inflight refueling if they are anything like the old SR-71. There will be hypersonic aircraft (an article in Aviation Week was about Darpa talking about a Mach 6 drone SR-72. Like to see that if it happens) but everything is going to need hypersonic flight.
And yes, the QR codes work.
I'm using Rhino to plan the design. It helps keep much of the jet in the 20 degree Mach angle. Here is some intake work. The S-curve doesn't completely block the compressor face from dastardly radar probing, but it is what it is. Remember to always make your inlet face the same or a little more in area as the compressor face, for equal pressure and all that. Rhino helps finding the area of a circle and a similar rectangle a lot easier than plugging numbers into a spread sheet.
Are you eventually going to build this in 3D?
Might make one for X-Plane 10. Been slowing working on a simple single engine jet to evolve into one my other drones. X-Plane's flight characteristics are more realistic than Flight Sim, and their Planemaker is far easier to use--if you know what you're doing.
Here are some post-Singularity intelligent machine designed intelligent drones. They make the Phantom III look like the Phantom I.
Design wise, your nose is too small to house any kind of useful radar, might want to beef that up.
[video=youtube_share;I__VvKPQJow]
My concern with unmanned craft is the signal intercept and jamming. According to the news, Al Queda supposedly was able to intercept drone signals on occasion and evac a site under attack. Also, if you interrupt the datalink, the mission is over. Whether the drone orbits or follows a preplanned GPS route to home base, the enemy wasn't attacked and the op was a failure. I still like the concept of manned fighters for those among other reasons.
I like your design; it makes me think of a cross between the YF-23 and some of Boeing's drone concepts. My only thought is that with those sideways-facing inlets you might have problems pulling in air at high speed angles of attack. You've got the right idea with masking the fans as much as possible, though!
Is there a story behind this design, or just something you had rolling around in your noggin and had to get out? :-)
*
It's in a story if I ever get back to it.* Other than that, I have a strong interest in where aircraft design is going and what technologies are going to be incorporated into them. As I've mentioned, most of the technologies I have attributed I've either read articles about, or found during research. I'm putting them all together with no real idea which ones will work and which ones will not. I'm on the fence about the engines (compessor and turbines mounted to a drum instead of a shaft, leaving the core empty--seems well suited for turbofan than turbojets), and think that might not play out, haven't heard much about it since I discovered it many years ago. I see a deficit in the science fiction community for well thought out hard science fiction; and advancements everyone ignores is hull and skin technological. Part of that is exposure. Composites aren't a household word. If the laminate structure of composites allows designers to include honeycomb core, and leading edge anti-ice elements (as with the Global Hawk), then other flat devices can be embeded as well, forming one single component. Maintenance nightmare? Of course. But the plight of maintenainers has never stopped the Air Force.
*
Flexible electronics already exist. When flexible aircraft structures arrive it's going to change aircraft design. That's what I'm doing; pondering the posibility of flexible composites and how that changes the design. By that I mean composites that flex and change form on command. Graphite composites are pretty flexible as is.
*
*
Well aware. The solution to that is full autonomy. If you and I don't like the dependency current drones rely on for mission success, you know the brass doesn't like it either. Drones are going to be made smarter and more independent, and they will malfunction, and they will kill people they aren't supposed to kill, but they are coming regardless, if not by the US, then by someone else.
*
I hate the wireless dependency of GPS, that's why I'm using spatial contextual awareness; knowing where you start from, knowing your speed and direction, and analyzing terrain features and landmarks.
*
Yes, the YF-23 is an inspiration. It screams "FUTURE!" in a way the F-22 doesn't.
*
*
It may. I was more concerned with Mach angle and shockwave generation than high AOA maneuvers. It's a design compromise. It could be moved back and reconfigured. My duct could be shorter, but it would be less serpentine and interfere with main gear placement.
*
Truth. I was a C-130 crew chief for 14 years. Eventually you can learn to take pride in carrying on in spite of it all. There can be a lot of job satisfaction in finding a broken bird and making it fly, but don't expect any recognition. The only time anyone pays attention to maintainers is when things have gone wrong.
Before I get too far I wanted to check where the mean aerodynamic chord would most likely be to determine were the center of lift will be, and hence where the center of gravity could be--all important for an X-Plane model.
I'm not entirely certain how to find the MAC for a planform like this and a time consuming internet search hasn't lead me to the answer I want. I tried three different methods and they all put me in the same ball park.
Since my engine is based on the scale of the F119-PW-100, about half of it is the augmentor, so I can either move the engines back, or move the nozzles forward, which I think is the better idea.
Here's a influential slideshow on Lockheed's FATE Program.
Of course, General Dynamics wasn't making new doors anymore (not in 1990 anyway)...
And let's not even mention the several million $$ worth of weapons system computers we burned up because the same occifer didn't believe us when we told him that the C-Shopper's computers were kicking out too much voltage to the weapons comps (24VDC tested vs. 5VDC required). We R-squared half a dozen CPUs and RPUs before someone finally believed us.
I know the feeling. We had an inlet controller that kept frying out. We would pour water out of the bad ones; the crew chiefs would have to crack open the ground air conditioner door to vent water prior to flight--not a normal procedure. After fighting with Enviro shop, we finally convinced our flight chief that ECS was killing our air inlet controllers, and he made them tear that jet apart until they found the problem. They discovered the avionics cooling sensor was mistakenly replaced with a cabin air sensor as the sensors looked the same, causing the ECS duct over our part to condense and drip about a cup of water into it. Instant INLET light after takeoff.
OT, I like where you're going with this design. It's got pros and cons, but far better to make a master of one (or two) trade(s) than a jack-of-all-trades, but master-of-none. Very interested to see where this goes.
So, do you prefer to have an augmentor over an afterburner?
Don't have any updates because I've been beating myself up over the planform's aerodynamic center of lift, totally forgetting the positive effects the chines would have (see the SR-71 flight manual, section 6 for more info), so I'll keep the wings as is, but I do want to change the inlets. I have the weekend off (work two, off one) so I'll have some time to work on that.
Here is the new Rhino template.
Included in the attachments are scanned and ripped Aviation Week and Space Technology articles that discuss the radar and energy weapons tech I'm using.
Concerning afterburners and augmentors: They are the same. My aerospace dictionary states as such, and my technically detailed jet aircraft books that cover propulsion use the two terms interchangeable between the body of text, captions and call-outs. The "rings of fire" are also called shock diamonds, or Mach discs, and are created by pressure differences between the low pressure supersonic exhaust and the high pressure ambient air, no matter what the exhaust is or what method creates it. Read about it at Aerospaceweb.com
.
I have heard the variable area nozzles called augmentors as well by crew chiefs and engine troops. When the nozzles close and converge the exhaust, they do augment it to higher velocities without the use of afterburner. So technically they too are augmentors.