'Aerial Carriers'...

[cthulhu77]

And, in the background of this issue is another neat design, but again, where are we gonna find turbofans THAT big?

Easy, you'd need a ship for it anyway, and I believe large ships tend to be 1:350 or 1:700 scale, or something in that range. At 1:350 scale, a smallish turbofan from a 1:72 kit would be about 20 feet in diameter. Of course, that assumes the existence of suitable kits at a sensible cost...

I've been saving these up for the last year or so, thinking of doing a large contained turbofan in 1/144:

[dy031101]

After watching a couple episodes of Ring Raiders out of curiosity, I began to wonder...... how large does an aerial carrier have to be (in terms of runway length) to allow for launch and recovery of every fighter jet that has been in existence (navalized or otherwise), assuming the carrier is based upon a large fixed-wing aircraft (like Justice in Ring Raiders or Banshee III in Yukikaze)?

Any suggestion?

[Mossie]

Blimey!!!  Anyone's guess!!!  But since I'm anyone, lets have a stab:

Had a quick look on the Goggle Maps sattelite view of Davis Monthan & take the F-16 as an average sized fighter.  You'd get about 320 F-16's in a 1000ft square.  That works out at about 1700 in a mile square.

Complete guess, but lets say 1 million jet fighters have been produced up to now.  That's about 600 Square miles.

The aircraft storage will only be part of it, you need engines, workshops, fuel, crew births, command facilities, weapons.  So that's 3000 square miles (twice the size of Long Island).

Split the 3000 square miles into as many decks as you like & vary the dimensions depending on the shape you want.  In my head, I'm thinking of a blended wing body, so something triangular.  200 decks just out of my head. 

So that's 15 square miles per deck.  If you're looking at a triangle, you double the dimensions to get the same area, so that's 30 x 30 miles.  Give it a little more wing span than length, that's 25 miles long by 35 miles wide!  Each deck is ten foot high? 2000 ft high, roughly a third of a mile.

So:
Length: 25 miles
Wing Span: 35 Miles
Height: ¹/₃ mile

A lot of fudge factor there, but hey, at least it produces a figure!

[pyro-manic]

I think he meant how long does the runway be in order for any aircraft to be able to take off and land, ie which aircraft has the longest takeoff run. I'm guessing in terms of fighters, it'd be something from the late 50s/early 60s - Thud perhaps? Big machine, high wing loading.

[Mossie]

Bugger, took me ages that!

[dy031101]

pyro-manic is right about my earliest intention, but Mossie did demonstrate how little I know and where I ought to begin to flesh out the whole thing after working out the runway length......  

(Say, like the game Air Force Delta Storm, featuring well-known aircraft, relatively obscure ones, even figments of game designers' imaginations?)

Thank you both very much.

One thing on my mind is this: I remember reading various articles on how some nations perfer stationing twin-engined fighters at plateau airfields (being launched from an aerial carrier at altitude sounds a bit similar, leading me to wonder how this is going to affect takeoff performance of the carrier's plane)...... but the carrier, being a large fixed-wing aircraft, would have forward velocity.......

[ysi_maniac]

Why not the size of a current carrier (ship) ?

[dy031101]

Why not the size of a current carrier (ship) ?

Well, like I said, I don't know enough to work out the runway length to allow its use even by a land-based fighter with the longest takeoff and landing runs......

That is unless the forward velocity of the aerial carrier can make it possible.

[ysi_maniac]

Taking into account that an aerial carrier is an aircraft too, relative velocity between carrier and fighter can be reduced to almost 0. So IMHO runway can really short.
I maybe wrong,

[Gary]

I wouldn't want to be deck crew on that thing. If relative speed were zero all you really would need would be a pad to land on that dropped down below the 'flight deck' and a hole on the bottom to poop fighters out.

I recall that the old Lexington class carriers had sideways catapults below decks and could fling four fighters at the same time. Two from the bow and two from the below deck cats. But they pulled the lower cats for a few reasons, one being the problem of an aircraft emerging into a sideways airstream.

So I guess my question is, if your going to use a relative speed of zero set up, landing becomes easy, but the launch could be very tricky.

[ysi_maniac]

IMO it could be easier than in sea carriers as long as the flying carrier's velocity is subsonic. Think in flying a kite.

[dy031101]

I thoughts on the direction of flight decks have been limited to along the length of the aerial carrier- no sideways-launching.

But yeah, you brought up the question of how the support crew is supposed to work on the flight deck.  Where is the re-arming and refuelling done in sea-based carriers?  If it's done on the flight deck, would that be for safety reason?  Where can we move the procedure to?  Maybe a deck right below the flight decks...... and maybe with blow-off panel to vent any accident or battle damage explosion along safer directions?

[Weaver]

One design which ocurred to me was a flight deck, with a hanger below it, supported between two airship envelopes. It's got clean (ish) airflow over the deck and the hanger just an elevator ride away, without making a single envelope top-heavy. Aircraft land without wires at 50-90kts wind-over-deck, and then taxi to a forward elevator with a lockdown mechanism that automatically engages with their wheels. All servicing and arming takes place in the hanger, then the aircraft is taken up on a rear elevator, giving it the whole deck as a take-off run. The pilot runs his engine up, releases the lockdown mechanism, and he's good to go.

[Madoc]

Guys,

Why do you need a "flight deck" to begin with?  On an aerial carrier you're already IN flight.

If your aerial carrier is in the air and flying then it's gonna already be at speed sufficient to both launch and recover aircraft.  Thus they'll need no "runway" nor "landing strip" to operate from the carrier with.

Instead they'd simply either advance their throttles to accelerate off the carrier or first match speed and then retard the throttles to land.

The simplest solution from a weight savings perspective would be to have some sort of aerial trapeze docking mechanism used to launch and recover the smaller planes.  This, much like the USN came up with for the Akron and Macon as well as the USAF came up with in its FICON.  The launch and retrieval mechanism for the FICON in particular would be applicable here as it was designed from the outset for jet fighters to utilize and it involved a minimal amount of dedicated equipment aboard the fighter plane.  In fact, I believe it just required a hook mechanism mounted forward of the cockpit and that the plane's horizontal stabs be reconfigured with anhederal.

So, with your aerial carrier moving along at sufficient speed for it to remain airborne then the launching and recovering of smaller craft would be a breeze.  No need for the weight of a flight deck nor the weight and complexity of having aircraft elevators to move the smaller planes onto and from that deck.  Simply hang out the trapeze to both lower the craft into the airstream and pluck it out of it.

Also, having the launching and retrieval of the smaller craft always take place on the ventral part of the carrier minimizes any damage that could happen to the carrier through problems with those smaller craft.  A failed landing approach onto a flight deck means the smaller craft hits the upper surface of the carrier.  A failed hook up approach to a trapeze means the smaller craft falls away beneath the carrier with no other harm done.

Madoc

[Weaver]

Madoc: it depends on the relative speeds of the carrier and the planes though. An airship carrier's unlikely to make three-figure speeds, which is fine for prop-fighters upto the end of WWII, but heavy fast jets don't fly that slow (particularly at altitude) without serious compromises being made to their design. So if we've got an airship doing 90 knots, and a jet fighter with a stall speed of 130 knots, then the latter still needs to scrub off 40 knots after "touchdown". That's much more benign than the real carrier condition, but it still needs to be accomodated.