unconventional float planes or flying boats

[McColm]

This is Whiffland, so the word impossible doesn't exist.Even if you make a mistake on your build who is going to know.
For me its in the shape or shapes fitting together.

[Diamondback]

Right--a model is one thing, but this thing actually constructed and deployed full-scale is the stuff of some of my worst nightmares... if our figuring is right, the only way to bring one of these down short of a nuke is with another, or to knock out its engines or whack the tankers keeping it refueled.

[McColm]

Really?

[rickshaw]

Several well placed non-nuclear SAMs or a few non-nuclear air-to-air missiles would bring it down quite easily.  Putting massive ship guns on an aircraft also appears rather pointless.  Your aircraft would lose so much liftable weight to reinforced structure so absorb the recoil, it more than likely couldn't get off the ground.  Putting air-launched ballistic missiles on it would be cheaper and easier.

[McColm]

Something that size, someone must have seen it.

[Captain Canada]

Looks awesome !

[McColm]

I know Convair proposed several unusual configurations for Flying Boats, in trying to find them I netted something else windswept and interesting on Secret Projects:
http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,15375.msg151898.html#msg151898

This was a real proposal from Convair to convert Comet airliners into flying boats.  It's unusual in several aspects, it's a landplane conversion to a flying boat and the wings and intakes are so close to the water.

I could move the wings to shoulder level and scrapbuild the hull now that I have a Revell 1/720 aircraft carrier in ny stash.This I can use as a template. I have always wanted to whiff the Airfix Nimrod back into an airline.

[McColm]

On second thoughts by moving  just the wings to shoulder height, the lower fuselage already looks like a hull. If by repostioning the tail elevators, this should resemble the drawing.As I recall the Nimrod acted just like a boat when it ditched in Canada.

[Captain Canada]

Pretty sure Ratty built a Comet flying boat. Or BO-AT.

[The Rat]

Pretty sure Ratty built a Comet flying boat. Or BO-AT.

Did I hear my name? Yes, I did, the Hawker Siddeley Nodens, article here.

[McColm]

Wow!
And that was 1/250 scale.
I've got an Airfix 1/72 BAe Nimrod kit in my stash.Should be an interesting build with a twist, might go for a V- tail.

[Steel Penguin]

Rat  the Nodens,  eeek.  were there Nightgaunt class fighters to go with it?

[The Rat]

Rat  the Nodens,  eeek.  were there Nightgaunt class fighters to go with it?

I never mix myths. 

[Steel Penguin]

 Few,  having come across Nodens as one of the Old Gods in Lovecrafts books I tend to be a bit twitchy when it turns up,
Its the fear of Shoggoths that does it realy

[McColm]

I'll throw in an oddball... a stealth flying-boat a prof and I designed in my college days.

415' OAL, 400' span once airborne and wingtips rotated down into Subsonic Cruise position, SIXTEEN of the largest, most powerful jet engines ever built for a total of two million pounds static thrust running as high-bypass turbofans.

Yes, that Saturn V is to-scale...


Head-on subsonic:


Side:


Intakes are dorsal for the eight main engines, shown as solid because I haven't mastered the art of modeling meshes yet.

Roberto Ludvigovich Bartini designed something very similar for the Russians back in 1957 that could land and take off from water or ice. Known as the Bartini A57.This was to have a bank of five jet engines as shown above the fuselage with swivel jet exhaust pipes . There is an article on YouTube about it.