Whoever did that drawing for PM wasn’t an aeronautical engineer. Good luck on firing a load of missiles from behind the center of gravity.
If you can successfully get a vertical launch without damaging that huge tail, you’ve just changed that 747’s pitch trim to “crazy nose heavy”.
Not great.
Whoever did that drawing for PM wasn’t an aeronautical engineer. Good luck on firing a load of missiles from behind the center of gravity.
If you can successfully get a vertical launch without damaging that huge tail, you’ve just changed that 747’s pitch trim to “crazy nose heavy”.
Or maybe these non-’aeronautical engineers’ already anticipated the trim problem.
Note on the drawing, there are two tanks shown, one over the wing and one in the tail, connected by a tube.
Seems like that might be a way of moving ballast back and forth to compensate. Looks good to me.
Also they had no trouble releasing the shuttle from the top of the 747 without hitting the tail. I would imagine the missile would be leaving much faster.
But anyway, I still think it would be better to drop the missile out the bottom and then light it off. But I also assume they thought of it, and decided against it for some reason.