The last F-14s are begging for death in Iran. Don't desecrate their corpses.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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While I agree they look cool, they're an engineering nightmare and absolutely require titanium to build and that shit is too expensive for very little benefit.
The point of a variable wing was to increase the effective flight envelope and there's no point now that the same thing can be done with modern avionics and materials.
Sorry.
Pros:
The plane will be partially made of titanium
Cons:
It HAS to be made out of prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire titanium.
Pros: expensive vehicles are a flex.
Cons: Expensive vehicles means we still don't have Medicare for All.
Pros: "your injuries are not service related"
Counterpoint: they look fucking dope
Again, completely agree.
But like the A10, sometimes tech just passes you by.
And swing wings are like biplanes. Old obsolete tech.
They're not obsolete until someone designs better looking wings. Until then swing wings are the state of the art in coolness tech. The cutting edge.
Ok, buddy, if you say so.
I hear you
Pros:
- absolutely requires titanium
Except the US doesn't have a cheap, easily available source of titanium.
The stuff we used for the SR-71 and F-14 had to be gotten surreptitiously from the Russians.
That's why the Space Shuttle didn't have the titanium heat shield it was designed with and had to rely on the newly invented, much more delicate, ceramic heat shields. Which, it can be argued, resulted in the all of the deaths of the Challenger crew.
No, the ceramic heat shield killed the Columbia crew.
The Challenger crew was killed when a leaky SRB blowtorched the big orange tank. The SRB leaked partially because of an imperfectly designed seal and partially by being flown outside of its design limitations regarding temperature.
Mea culpa, you're right. I was misremembering.
So with the original titanium heat shield the Columbia crew wouldn't have died such gruesome deaths. All because Congress was cheap.
It is my belief as a pilot and aircraft mechanic that both accidents share a critical design flaw: The crew vehicle for some bizarre reason was carried next to its rockets instead of on top where it belongs. It meant that Challenger had no way to escape, no launch escape tower could take them away from an exploding lower stage, and it put Columbia in a place where debris shed by the lower stage could hit it. Nothing could fall off of an Apollo first stage and hit the capsule because it was a hundred feet ahead.
Not a rocket scientist so I can't say.
But I'm betting a room full of them and NASA engineers thought through all of their options based on the criteria and current tech.
Having been to NASA and seen their museum and the launch pads and shit and gotten to talk to people who work there:
You'd think they thought it through, but small details get missed all the time in Nassau history
I mean, sure hindsight is 20/20.
But Columbia would have never happened if Congress hadn't pulled funding for the titanium heat shield they wanted.
The issue is that they wanted to really pump up the reusable launch vehicle part, so it couldn't be this little thing on the top with 4 SRBs.
They died for the marketing.
And more than a little scope creep.
Aerodynamics called: your center of lift being far infront of your center of gravity does not work
When basically all of your "lift" is coming from thrust, sure it does. As if the space shuttle stack was a work of aerodynamic genius.
Like 30% of the shuttles launch thrust came from the main engines.
And it was vectored down through the floor at the center of mass somewhere in the big orange tank, which is why the shuttle always did a sick Tokyo drift off the pad.
Thrust from rocket engines(or jet engines) is not lift. The force they genarate is perpindicular to the focre genarated by lift. All of the lift being genarated in front of the CG would cause the rocket to pich over and crash back into the ground.
Aerodynamic lift has a lot to do with angle of attack. Source: I am a flight instructor.
Wings still genarate lift when in a vertical climb. The force genarated is reative to the wings not gravity
The amount of lift made has a lot to do with the angle of attack, the angle between the relative wind and the mean chord of the wing. While the space shuttle is in gliding flight, it flew with a very nose high attitude in a reasonably steep descent, thus the angle of attack. Under rocket power on ascent, the relative wind would be coming pretty much nose on, so a very low angle of attack, thus very little lift.
If the angle of attack goes negative, the wing will lift in the other direction, which is how planes can fly upside down.
Yes but it would still generate lift - a force witch would not be aligned with the center of mass and while not massive would be enough to pitch over the rocket and destroy it. There is a reason the x37 flies in a payload faring.
But but, it could glide*!
*Kinda, and the parachutes are slower. It also has to piggyback on a 747 to be moved anywhere.
I'm going to bet that we won't see another spacecraft of the same plan as the shuttle. We barely got it to work, the Soviets managed a single unmanned test flight of something similar, and we've got vertically landing reusable rockets now. Large space planes I think are a dead end.
The only way I can see another "space-plane" design is if we actually get skyhooks working. As long as we are using rockets it doesn't make sense. Sure it was cool AF when we were kids, but yeah, the design is just a safety nightmare
It is my understanding that at least one small, unmanned space plane is in use by the US military. Something small enough to fit in the payload fairing of a commercial or military rocket that can be put in space, flown for a little while then landed at an air force base probably serves some function.
But I'm convinced large space planes on the order of the space shuttle are now museum pieces and/or debris.
Pros:
Forces the US to upkeep international relations and trading
Cons:
Trading with "the enemy" used to be considered treasonous.
The only swept wings should involve a broom and a pigeon.
Might complicate reducing radar signature.
Also, it seems like kind of a specialized tool. You want it to have a low stall speed but also high maximum speed. The F-14 was a naval interceptor -- intended to take off from and land on carriers at low speed, buy also dash out quickly enough to intercept incoming strikes against that carrier.
I don't know if there are many situations that have that combination of characteristics.
Also, it seems like kind of a specialized tool. You want it to have a low stall speed but also high maximum speed. The F-14 was a naval interceptor -- intended to take off from and land on carriers at low speed, buy also dash out quickly enough to intercept incoming strikes against that carrier.
Completely agree with you, they're awesome and should be used everywhere.
Okay but hear me out: Drones fly slow.
A modern interceptor needs to intercept everything, so it will need low stall speed and high dash speed.
Unless we want our Air Force running after a plane like when Mr. Burns stole the Wright Flyer on The Simpsons.
Just bring out the prop planes and a shotgun, Ukrainian style
Auto shotgun cannons on an F-14?
Fine, but it has to be able to mag dump like an a10
But see now we can have the glorious f35 to do everything we need. Purpose built says what? /s
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