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From: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: B52 Replacement (WAS Re: B2 vs. F117A )
Message-ID: <1991Mar6.034612.20256@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 6 Mar 91 03:46:12 GMT
References: <1991Feb26.011655.5357@cbnews.att.com> <1991Feb28.051210.8528@cbnews.att.com>,<1991Mar4.204134.4041@cbnews.att.com>
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From: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
In article <1991Mar4.204134.4041@cbnews.att.com>, dela@thermal.ee.rochester.edu (Del Armstrong) writes:

>Every time this comes up, I have the same knee-jerk 
>reaction ... what's so dumb about designing a heavy bomber
>variant of the Boeing 747 (or whichever big "mass produced"
>people hauler you happen to like)?
>
>If this is a bad idea, will somebody please put me out of my
>misery, and explain why? :-)

Well, not a bad idea, actually; 747s and DC-10s were considered for cruise 
missile carriers in the late 70s. You could pack a LOT of cruises into a
wide-body airframe and save lots of money on airframe maintanence :-)

Unfortunately, the AF will continue to insist upon overflying the target to 
drop bombs instead of using stand-off weapons (despite the use of "smart 
weapons," lotta ordinance was dropped the old-fashioned way). 

The Navy, on the other hand, showed how to do things "right" in some sense. All
of the cruise missiles were launched off of ships to kill fixed targets, and
they got to test their SLAM stand-off missile. 

Work continues on a stand-off submunitions carrier (currently one has to
overfly to drop cluster weapons, with the exception of a Tomahawk varient), but
I'm sure it will be put off for another 5 years....
 

     Reform may be dying in the Soviet Union, but we have the right to 
                introduce it to the DECUS Board of Directors. 

  -- >                  SYSMGR@CADLAB.ENG.UMD.EDU                        < --