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.
You’re a lot of fun! Do you really think that there’s any way of pumping ballast fast enough to compensate for tons of missile leaving within a second or two?
Releasing the Shuttle - a large glider - was never done except in some Bruce Willis movie. As it is that 747 variant used to transport the shuttle had twin tails to provide yaw authority when the Shuttle’s bulk would have blanked out the stock single tail.
No, launching any missile at all would be accomplished by only two methods; gas generator expulsion before main engine ignition (like the Polaris/Poseidon/ Trident/ss-20/25) which conceivably could push the missile way from the airframe without hitting the tail but that system would impart huge recoil forces on the 747 aft fuselage. No way, Jose.
Or, the missile’s motor is ignited to propel it away. Nah. If a multi ton missile is fired, it either accelerates relatively slowly at first - hitting the tail for sure - or it has enormous acceleration with lots of motor energy which keeps going as it exits the vertical launch tube. The exhaust gases and debris would wreck the fuselage and tail.
Hope you’re not planning on flying that thing..
That’s the big problem we have in the defense R&D these days - engineers without any military experience combined with marketing guys with zero engineering training.