-Is there any non-fighter combat air job the B-52 can’t be adapted to do?-
When I worked at Honeywell in the eighties we had a contract to upgrade the nav sets on B-52-s. We used all the available design documentation but found that over the years people had made so many undocumented alterations that often we couldn’t plug in the equipment and make it work. Cables had been chopped off, repurposed, or eliminated. No records of the changes were available. The planes were a nightmare to work on. It is astonishing the planes are still flying. The cost of maintenance, upkeep and updating must be staggering.
You should watvh the Barret Jackson auctions, a very popular trend lately is taking any vlassic car, it can be a 1940 Cadillac, a 59 Corvette or even an old mail truck and retro modfing it with modern powerplants and electronics.
Who was that novelist, Tom Clancy? Wrote about a modified swept composite winged B52 Megafortress? About 15 years ago i think.