Air and Space Photos from Alternate Worlds.
- Thread starter Wingman1
- Start date
Well, one factor is the nature of the procurement process, particularly back in the 1940s and 1950s when there were a lot more aerospace contractors than there are now. Many of these companies were trying to nab government contracts, so they worked up various ideas they had and presented them, but were not able to garner enough interest to go forwards. Other times, some part of the relevant agency has an idea or concept, and works up the idea to sell it to other parts of the agency (eg., the space people in the Air Force trying to sell space-based weapons to the rest of the Air Force). In both cases, there's an incentive to develop concepts so that you can explain your idea more easily and hopefully gain some support.
And usually there is some intention of building whatever it is, it's just that there's no interest from the Army (Air Force, NASA...), or budgets are lower than expected, or there's some kind of technological breakthrough that makes the entire concept obsolete (this doomed a lot of the cooler piston-powered planes from World War II, or hypersonic "air"craft in the 1950s), or changing economic circumstances (eg., tipjets tend to consume a lot of fuel, so when oil prices started rising in the 1960s and 1970s, tipjet aircraft became much more expensive for their capabilities than a more conventional helicopter), or other unexpected changes or circumstances which mean that there's no ability to further develop or pursue the concept.
NothingNow
Banned
That, or it's just a tech demonstrator or testbed used to develop and evaluate new technologies which might later be used in developing the above (or it's a paper project leading to said testbed,) but surprisingly few resources are generally expended on development compared to the entirety of an economy anyway, since the cost of a couple dozen engineers, a few model makers, supplies and wind tunnel time for a project is small for most modern Aerospace firms.
kool F-104!
There's more where that came from... Check out the website of the Aviation Museum in Košice. Or my two photoalbums from early September 2010, when I payed the place a visit. They have a nice assortment of classic European, American and Soviet/Russian aircraft from every era. Including former German F-4F Phantoms, former Polish TS-111 Iskras, former Romanian IAR Vulturs, former Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-15s, former French and Swiss Mirages, former American Hueys, a former Austrian SAAB Draken, etc., etc.
Aussie planes, ey ? Could you try and make a hypothetical souped-up version of the CAC Wirraway or Kangaroo in RAAF camo ?
Last edited:
Now it's even more unsafe than it already was.
You should show it in it's natural state.
Speaks more than a million words.
It should be quite well-known by now that I loathe the F-104 as much as CalBear hates McArthur.