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I've got no insight into what happened with Wickliffe vs Paducah. That said, while St Louis still feels ambitious, I would say that a metroplex more or less encompassing Paducah to Cape Girardeau MO to Union City TN isn't completely unreasonable in size if you think in terms of it's growth...

Would the Walleye work for the low fast approaches that were needed to have any chance? The attack profile the A-4s used isn't particularly amenable to TV guidance, and going in higher is going to hopelessly expose the attackers. My impression is that whatever else you can say about Argentine...

That also opens the possibility of Wickliffe Ky becoming the real center of any "Cairo Metropolitan Area". Certainly if it were a city of any size you'd have meaningful, directly adjacent, settlements in all three states.

They are MUCH further apart... That said, yeah, I'm always fond of the Cairo displacing St Louis. Among other things, it seems to me like the earlier one gets western settlement the more advantages Cairo has.

TBH the concerning thing to me about some of these Ploughshare proposals is how well they would have worked... This plus a sea level Panama canal would get us a pretty large group of people advocating for MOAR nuclear explosives.

You hit the problem on the head pretty well... The jetliner as it existed was too small and too short ranged to be more than a niche product. It could well have been developed into something better, by that runs smack into the reality of being Avro Canada, with all the foolish policy and lack...

As was observed above, they bear some real similarity to the Delta IV core, and I've seen some work that suggests a core only SLS would offer about the capability of a Falcon 9, so no, the idea isn't crazy.

To throw more complications at Shevak's wonderful analysis... How about introducing crossfeed? There's already plumbing in place to get fuel from the ET to the orbiter proper, so why not go a step further and A: get the stack a full ET at booster separation and B: allow fueling the full stack...

The PLUTO angle is one that hasn't occurred to me before, and I agree. Almost to the point where I wonder if the quick post D-Day clearing to the extent needed for a basically uninhabitable utility corridor might become long term. Any pre WWI tunnel would have been single tracked, and between...

Quite true that the tunnel was never going to be practical without electrification, but even the 1880s proposal would have had realistically usable electrification available by the time it opened.

I'd say there's a much more realistic prospect of it happening pre First World War. After the war the economy just isn't there, and the political situation is more... obviously unstable.

I very much like this angle, but yes. To me the key is that they really needed another season, ideally two. At a minimum there should have been some time to settle into some kind of "new normal" with the two Battlestars prior to New Caprica with a longer election cycle more separate from the...

I have to imagine that the orbiter is coming in at a 90 degree angle to the ET, which leaves the solar panels (once deployed) as the main clearance concern. Gotta say that I do hope for a render of this station with two shuttles docked simultaneously though.

Yes, but in practice I suspect what they will get in this scenario is something akin to a Salyut core module stuffed into a Shuttle C. If not (more likely imo) expansion modules for Enterprise designed with the intention to be shifted to that third gen station once it is available.

Yeah, a runway over/undershoot would be FUN for a timeline, but honestly, deadstick landings just aren't that dangerous in the context of spaceflight mission counts.

258 seems like it really should be enough for a profit in that era. Everything really seems to have been predicated on smaller orders in that era, and bearing in mind the level of completeness the V.1000 reached I'd say major surprises that hugely raised costs were probably not all that likely.

Deep seabed. And then it doesn't have to be a true SINGLE respository, just an agreed protocol for permanent sequestration. Which is actually the reason I'm not a fan. For all the implications of "just throw it in the ocean" proper containers in deep trenches confirmed to have muddy bottoms...

I was looking for a digital of those earlier actually, and yes, I imagine if the V.1000 ever DID go underwing it would be podded much like De Havilland was looking at. Re the discussion of tail vs wing mounting, it did occur to me during this thread that if one is looking for something visually...

Anyone have a sense on the gear height of the V.1000? Most of the stuff I have on it isn't great for figuring out clearances, and I have doubts about underwing on that basis. I come back to the VC10 at this point, and wonder if it might not be tempting to Vickers to go move to tail mounted...

I'll put this out there re the SSMEs: given the nature of the wetlab component here, I have to imagine that at some stage there will be an experimental attempt to remove at least one engine in a "can we do this" experimental mode. My own big question at this point though is what of a lifeboat...