And it's STILL the best bomber in the world today.
Plans to retire them early are sheer folly. Even IF we get the 164 B-21s.
Always need a conventional bomber, if even not for standoff nukes like the B-52; which is always an option. The B-52 can’t get there like the B-1 can.
Mach .92 at 75ft above the deck, or through mountain passes with the computer driving, and 125,000 lbs of ordnance with external hardpoints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_B-1_Lancer
Whilst we can assume the B-21 model has flown in a CFD ( Computational Fluid Dynamics ) environment, the question begs what if any have been flown in the real word aka scale man carrying and we all know where that could have been done. My point being w/ NG owning Scaled Composites and their personnel at NG and SC being top shelf, I have no problem with the possibility of the B-21 passing the critical review and the real prototype once flown, meeting it's design numbers and possibly even exceeding it. Build 200 or more of them, let us not do what we did with the B-2 and F-22, and oh yes moth ball the tooling after your done, and don't pull a Dick Cheney destroy all of it.
Not sure why we need to develop new nuclear bombers for maybe another decade or two. Three generations are still in the air, the B-52, B-1, and B-2. Even if we finally ground the B-52, there’s still a lot of punch available.
Wow. A new fleet of B2 variants? They should be ready to go operational at right about the time that manned heavy bombers are finally completely obsolete.
I’ve read that the Bones were an unheralded workhorse during the campaign to take down the Taliban in Afghanistan post-9/11. Lots of payload, long loiter time, could scoot across the country quickly for a just-in-time delivery.
I thought the numerical designations were, at least in the past, sequential.
How did they get from B-2 to B-21?
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