Alternative Electronic Warfare Aircraft

[Gondor]

Heavy Lift Transport : Two, or more, largish bi-planes with the cargo carried in a monster net slung between them.

Sounds like Dastardly and Mutley's Catch That Pigeon!

Gondor

[loupgarou]

Being "pedantic"  the Lancaster, Halifax, Stirling et al, ALL dropped "Window". Yes I know it was renamed "Chaff " by our Trans At cousins.... but that was later

So Microsoft's next operating system will be Chaff 10? 

[loupgarou]

You know, you could get a whole series of comedy models out of the theme of "low-tech high-tech", i.e. biplane-era equivalents of modern technology.

Airborne Early Warning : big biplane with a rotating array of trumpet-shaped sound-locators,

Stealth : biplane with canvas sheets rigged underneath it and in between the wing struts with paintings of empty blue sky on them,

Electrical Counter-Measures : big biplane with belt-driven generators running off the engines (or windmills) and an array of Frankenstein's Lab-style electrical devices installed on the fuselage: towers of insulator rings, pair of copper balls with sparks flying between them, Van de Graaff generators etc...

Wireless Intelligence Gathering : biplane rigged with a mass of wire aerials suspended between "masts" like an old-fashioned warship*

"Automatic aeroplane bomb" carrier: big biplane carrying a little two-place biplane with a very obviously clockwork autopilot installed in the rear cockpit, cartoon bomb in the front cockpit, no undercarriage and a ladder for the bomb-aimer to climb down the outside of the carrier aircraft to "program" it.


* "Wireless? It's all bloody wires!" - My grandma's response to my uncle's attempt to build a home-made radio in the 1940s...

Sometimes reality beats Whiff. 
In WW1 the germans tried covering their R-Flugzeug (giant planes) with transparent celluloid to make them invisible.

[Old Wombat]

HUD: a chalk board tied to the windscreen, where the pilot scribbles mathematical equations to plot a deflection shot.

[rickshaw]

And maybe when I get build the second Heyford based whiff it can be an AEW plane with a rotating array of ear trumpets on the top?

ROTFL! 

LOVE the idea! Like an airborne version of the Denge Acoustic Mirror site. 

Perhaps build it with an oversize rotating roof ventilator?  Like one of these?



It would have the curved, acoustically reflecting surfaces and it's rotating would represent it's scanning.... 

[McColm]

I was trying to avoid airborne early warning aircraft as there is another topic covering alternative AEWs.
As I've found out by the Techno Whiffers sticking a spin top on most cargo/airliners works with a single tail fin but there are others than a twin or triple fins would be better.

[DarrenP]

S2 tracker ELINT ?
Gannet