Valiant instead of Vulcan... Better or worse?

I was looking over the specifications of the different V-Bombers operated by the UK and I came across a mention of the Vickers Valiant B.2.

By Wikipedia and the other sources I found it was optimized for a low level strike. Stronger and larger airframe, heavier landing gear and faster on the deck than the production version. Of course it was cancelled because in 1955 it hadn't yet sunk in that high altitude bombing wasn't going to last well as an idea and the pathfinder mission it had been specifically built for was considered outdated.

Intrigued by this I checked the range of a standard Valiant B.1, it's listed as 4500 miles unrefueled. The Vulcan's range was only 2600.
The extra fuselage length in the Valiant B.2 probably didn't hold more fuel, but it has a pretty good range already, and with those Avon engines it could have been re-engined down the line for better fuel economy with relative ease (even with newer versions of the Avon itself).

*** I checked, a good replacement engine down the line might have been a non afterburning version of the Turbo-Union RB199 used in the Tornado. Similar size, better thrust (in later versions), can't say if the fuel consumption is better 'cause I can't find a figure to match with the Avon! Also to be considered are the Spey and the EJ200 (the Brits would probably stick with a Brit engine for political reasons if nothing else).

What if something changed the minds in the RAF about low vs high altitude missions in the mid 50's, considering the size of the UK bomber force in the Cold War and the size of their opponent a change in tactics to improve the chances of the bomber is not anywhere near ASB (I think). The evidence was starting to mount that high altitude wasn't going to work much longer.
They could also see the Valiant B.2 as being on the same page as the USAF/SAC B-52... a bit more ASB I admit.

Where am I going with this you ask? The BLACK BUCK raids!
Imagine if the bombers used in BLACK BUCK were coming in on the deck and had much better range (the mission was ~4000 miles each way), maybe even drop tanks (the B.1 had provisions for underwing tanks), maybe those wing hardpoints instead of fuel carried standoff missiles?

If the Vickers Valiant B.2 (upgraded to B.4 by the 80's?) had gone forward as the main bomber of the V-force and existed in improved forms to this day what impact would that have had in the British involvement in NATO, the Falklands War and even today in Iraq and Afghanistan? Could the Vickers Valiant B.2 become the UKs counterpart to the B-52?

UPDATE:
Found some pictures of the B.2 at this link:
http://www.aviastar.org/gallery/valiant.html
 
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The big problem with the Valiant is the Vulcan, they were built side by side, one taking resources from the other.Without the Vulcan the Valiant would have probably been developed closer to it's potential, the B2 as you say could have been a very handy bomber. IIRC the shortened wings which were too hard to make for the bomber were actually used in the tankers to reduce wing flex and make the HDUs more stable for receiveing aircraft.

As for engines, RB199s are way too tiny with only about 10,000lb dry, the last Valiants used 21,000lb Conways. Perhaps a low bypass version of the 3 shaft RB211 would be better going forward, but not may combat aircraft get that sort of upengining.
 
I was looking over the specifications of the different V-Bombers operated by the UK and I came across a mention of the Vickers Valiant B.2.

By Wikipedia and the other sources I found it was optimized for a low level strike. Stronger and larger airframe, heavier landing gear and faster on the deck than the production version. Of course it was cancelled because in 1955 it hadn't yet sunk in that high altitude bombing wasn't going to last well as an idea and the pathfinder mission it had been specifically built for was considered outdated.

Intrigued by this I checked the range of a standard Valiant B.1, it's listed as 4500 miles unrefueled. The Vulcan's range was only 2600.
The extra fuselage length in the Valiant B.2 probably didn't hold more fuel, but it has a pretty good range already, and with those Avon engines it could have been re-engined down the line for better fuel economy with relative ease (even with newer versions of the Avon itself).

*** I checked, a good replacement engine down the line might have been a non afterburning version of the Turbo-Union RB199 used in the Tornado. Similar size, better thrust (in later versions), can't say if the fuel consumption is better 'cause I can't find a figure to match with the Avon! Also to be considered are the Spey and the EJ200 (the Brits would probably stick with a Brit engine for political reasons if nothing else).

What if something changed the minds in the RAF about low vs high altitude missions in the mid 50's, considering the size of the UK bomber force in the Cold War and the size of their opponent a change in tactics to improve the chances of the bomber is not anywhere near ASB (I think). The evidence was starting to mount that high altitude wasn't going to work much longer.
They could also see the Valiant B.2 as being on the same page as the USAF/SAC B-52... a bit more ASB I admit.


If the Vickers Valiant B.2 (upgraded to B.4 by the 80's?) had gone forward as the main bomber of the V-force and existed in improved forms to this day what impact would that have had in the British involvement in NATO, the Falklands War and even today in Iraq and Afghanistan? Could the Vickers Valiant B.2 become the UKs counterpart to the B-52?

UPDATE:
Found some pictures of the B.2 at this link:
http://www.aviastar.org/gallery/valiant.html

I was under the impression that the Valiant had to be taken out of service because of metal fatigue in 1965. They were also not that good in the Suez crisis although that may have been because they were new in service.

The Valiant design looks good but I think the Vulcan was better. The RAF obviously thought so because they kept it in service until the early 1980's.
 

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As for engines, RB199s are way too tiny with only about 10,000lb dry, the last Valiants used 21,000lb Conways. Perhaps a low bypass version of the 3 shaft RB211 would be better going forward, but not may combat aircraft get that sort of upengining.

I think you might be mixing the Vickers Valiant and the Handley Page Victor. The Valiant only had Avons and went out of service in 65 with fatigue problems in the wing main spar.
 
The Valiant B.2 was indeed different from the ill-fated B.1 with strengthened wings, elongated fuselage and soviet-looking speed pods for undercarriage storage. Future engine possibilities include Conway and Olympus engines with or without re-heat (British afterburning). The B.2 suffered from bad timing in that it was designed to fulfill the obsolete role of low-level pathfinder, not the future role of low-level bomber. It could conceivably have been the foremost V-bomber, as it's performance figures indicate, but for a simple twist of fate.

Still, I've watched Vulcans fly, and they were cooler looking, and what's more important than that?
 
I think you might be mixing the Vickers Valiant and the Handley Page Victor. The Valiant only had Avons and went out of service in 65 with fatigue problems in the wing main spar.

Yes, friggin V bombers, why couldn't they give them different names so 45 years after they left service I wouldn't get confused.
 
The Vulcan had a fortunately low radar signature and good ECM?

I asked about the Vulcan radar signature at work, and the RAAFies who were radar operators in the 70s said that they had no problem picking up Vulcans at the maximum range of the Darwin search radar. They also mentioned that Vulcans had good ECM, and wouldn't have needed that if they were stealthy.

It seems that the stealth claims are just projected backwards by people who look at todays stealth designs and see some passing similarities with older aircraft.
 
If the Vickers Valiant B.2 (upgraded to B.4 by the 80's?) had gone forward as the main bomber of the V-force and existed in improved forms to this day what impact would that have had in the British involvement in NATO, the Falklands War and even today in Iraq and Afghanistan? Could the Vickers Valiant B.2 become the UKs counterpart to the B-52?

No matter which strategic bomber the British keep, they are not going to spend money upgrading it in the late 70s/80s.
In 'Vulcan 607' it's explained how little funds were available for upgrading the Vulcans in the '70s and zilch in the '80s.
For the Black Buck raid the ECM-pods from Tornado's had to be improvised, because the Vulcan still had a 60s system.

There's no reason whatsoever to expect the British to keep a strategic bomber in service untill now especially not with the Cold war gone.
 
I was looking over the specifications of the different V-Bombers operated by the UK and I came across a mention of the Vickers Valiant B.2....

....

Intrigued by this I checked the range of a standard Valiant B.1, it's listed as 4500 miles unrefueled. The Vulcan's range was only 2600.
The extra fuselage length in the Valiant B.2 probably didn't hold more fuel, but it has a pretty good range already, and with those Avon engines it could have been re-engined down the line for better fuel economy with relative ease (even with newer versions of the Avon itself).

...Could the Vickers Valiant B.2 become the UKs counterpart to the B-52?

No, I think it is clear why the RAF kept only the Vulcan in service as a bomber past the mid-60s.

Aside from the metal fatigue issues, the Valiant was after all, as the first to enter service, the least sophisticated design of the three--in fact Vickers was specially encouraged to go ahead and develop it precisely because, as a lower-risk design (since no one foresaw the metal-fatigue problems) it could enter service sooner. It was in fact an interim stopgap.

I was stunned at the huge discrepancy in range your sources point out. However, Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulcan

gives a much higher range for the Vulcan designs--3400 NM for the original B.1 version, 4000 for the later B.2. And stresses in a footnote that range and fuel capacities as given in the table were for the primary installed tankage--and could be increased by installing extra tanks in bomb bays (where, while they would cost their weight in payload, they at least would not increase drag).

Whereas, the Wikipedia entry for the Valiant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Valiant

gives a range (for the B.1 version, not discussing the B.2 which of course was never built OTL) of 4500 NM--but that's "with underwing tanks." Which would of course not only weigh the plane down, costing payload or increasing drag by demanding cruise at higher lift coefficients, but also add to the parasite drag of the airplane.

It makes some sense that the delta-winged Vulcan would be at some disadvantage in range, given that the optimum lift/drag ratio of a conventional wing tends to be better, due to the higher ratio of span to wing area. For subsonic aircraft well below compressibility, one divides the span squared by the wing area, and multiplies this by a coefficient determined by the detailed geometry of a wing (with an elliptical planform being the best, giving IIRC a coefficient of pi). For the non-elliptical wings we are comparing here that coefficient would be a lower number (and lower for the delta than for the crescent wing of the Valiant, though maybe not--the crescent form is similar to the delta in the way it deviates from the ideal ellipse). To get overall drag at a given lift coefficient, one takes the square of the lift coefficient (which is the fraction of the wing area that effectively is providing lift at a given angle of attack), squares it, divides by the above-derived number, and adds the resulting number to the parasite drag of the whole aircraft, which is the ratio of the actual drag area at zero lift divided by the wing area. This gives drag; divide the lift coefficient by this to get L/D. And multiply the drag ratio by the wing area and the aerodynamic pressure at a given airspeed to get the actual drag in units of force.

Given these relationships of lift to total drag, one can show that the best lift to drag ratio will occur when the induced drag (which is the part of the drag that varies with the lift coefficient as I outlined above) equals the fixed parasite drag of the airplane. Thus, the higher the ratio of wingspan to wing area, the higher the lift coefficient is at optimum cruise. But also note, take-off and landing and high-G maneuvers require higher lift coefficients, and these are limited by the stall angle--a long span, narrow-chord wing will have less margin for higher lift above the cruise. Plus of course long, narrow wings
are mechanically less robust than a delta, and if I am not much mistaken I understand that deltas (and other low-span planforms, such as circular wings) have higher stall angles/lift-coefficients as well.

In the competition for range, the main thing is to have as good an L/D as possible. A delta design can recoup some of its disadvantage by "burying" more of the airplane's structure in the wing volume--the Vulcan like many (but not all) delta designs eliminated the horizontal stabilizer/elevator empennage for instance. Also, since the chord of a delta of a given span is going to be much greater than that of a conventional wing of the same span, the thickness relative to the chord can be much reduced even if the wing is absolutely thicker, and this gives a somewhat lower drag ratio. But actually, lowering the parasite drag component of the airplane (as a fraction of the wing area) _also_ lowers the optimum lift coefficient for minimum drag (ie most economical cruise). So a delta tends to have a lower L/D.

Comparing the span-squared/area ratios of the two planes, dividing the two ratios and taking its square root, I arrived at .75, which matches almost precisely the ratio of the maximum take-off weights (loaded with fuel for the maximum ranges we are comparing here, which involves an overload for the Valiant!) divided by each plane's respective wing area--the Vulcan having a MTOW of 98.3 metric tonnes divided by 368.3 square meters, while the Valiant (overloaded with under-wing fuel tanks) massed 79.4 MT with an area of 219.4 m^2. So I think I am on the right track in this back-of-the-envelope analysis.

Since the V-bombers were all designed to the same specification, and it was quite amazing to see it claimed that the Vulcan was so vastly inferior to the Valiant in range, I find the Wiki statistics much more believable.

And range, while especially important for a bomber, is by no means the only criterion. A delta like the Vulcan takes advantage of what appears as a limit in the range game by having a much lower wing loading (having as it does a much bigger wing) which pays off in lower take-off and landing speeds, and as important or more for a combat craft, especially one being considered for repurposing from high-altitude strike to low altitude, in greater agility at lower speeds and altitudes. As you can see from the arguments above, the Vulcan, as a delta, would tend to have more range of lift available and also be more mechanically robust, and these would be big advantages in actual combat. especially in messy, rapidly shifting situations during a low-altitude strike run.

In fact, the American Convair B-58 "Hustler" supersonic bomber, which was a four-engined big brother of the mainstay F-102/F-106 supersonic interceptor jets, was also designed for a high-altitude strategic mission and (briefly) repurposed in the 1960s as a low-altitude strike bomber--and it actually adapted surprisingly well to the low-altitude mission, considering it had been made for a completely different environment. Again, the Convair warplanes were all delta wings (more radical than the Vulcan, being designed as they were for supersonic flight).

I suspect this is what the RAF was mainly thinking of when they kept the Vulcan as a bomber. Of course the metal-fatigue problem doomed the Valiant B.1 to decommission. But I also think that if the funding and will had been there for upgrading any of the V-bombers, it would have been for developing the Vulcan or a successor.
 
If Skybolt had been allowed to proceed to completion, then a improved Phase 6 Vulcan would have been built, with revised avionics to handle up to 6 Skybolts, a larger delta wing, with a revised planform & hardpoints to handle said Skybolts, & more powerful Olympus engines...
For the conventional bombing role, 2 external bomb "panniers" were proposed to be fitted conformally underneath the wings...
 
Later phase Vulcans?

Does anyone know if Vulcan or Vulcan-successor designs after the B.2 version ever got far enough in the process to generate some diagrams?

I particularly wonder if further evolutions in the planform were in the offing. The B.2 differed from the B.1 in having a more complex planform, which moved in the direction I was imagining it would have to to improve range.

That is, back when I was accepting Atomos's wildly different range figures (2600 nm for Vulcan B.1--far too low-- versus 4500 for Valiant--which involved external fuel tanks) I was trying to figure how to modify the basic delta to help range.

You can't just widen the delta to increase span, or at least not very far. Doing so would improve L/D but make it increasingly harder to achieve longitudinal (pitch-axis) control--pretty soon you'd have something like the Northrop flying wing bomber which was beyond 1950s technology to control safely.

And going the other way, lengthening the delta to get more chord, is what you need to do for supersonic performance (also, re-designing the whole wing section for decent supersonic aerodynamics, thinning it hence cramping storage volume--something more like the Hustler) but it would only make the basic L/D problem worse.

However, if you went for a more complex form, in pretty much the way the B.2 Vulcan actually did, with a longer chord central section, a medium section of essentially the same sweep, and an outer wing section of a lower sweep (presumably with a much thinner vertical cross-section) you'd get something like the "cranked-arrow" upgrade of the US F-16, the F-16XL*.

The longer, steeply swept central section, which would resemble the "leading edge root extensions" or LERX fashionable in 1970s-90s fighter designs such as the F-16, F-18, or Soviet Mig-29, could bury more of the fuselage projection, and give a longer lever arm for pitch control by raising the lift contribution of the central section which would also be shifted forward of the center of force of the basic delta. By itself it would also reduce the L/D ratio. Hence the outer section, which would raise the overall effective span and further accent the longitudinal control by providing a section with its center of action shifted _back_ from the basic delta. The triple sweep might in practice be smoothed into a more continuously varying, sinuous curve, and reflects the "crescent wing" philosophy fashionable in Britain in the '50s and evident in the wings of both the Valiant and Victor

As I saw and said, the real B.2 actually did evolve a little bit in this very sort of direction. What I wonder is, was that pretty much the limit of "stretch" of the Vulcan design, or would this more advanced increment have been possible and if so, was anyone at Avro or in the RAF actually thinking about it?

----Looking for images of the F-16XL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16XL
I was reminded that the "cranked arrow" form actually has a _lower_ sweep in the central section. The XL actually had a better L/D than the standard F-16 form, and with a much larger wing area a much higher takeoff weight too. However bear in mind that these American examples I have citing were all designed for supersonic as well subsonic performance, and perhaps these forms offer less advantage in a strictly subsonic range. Still, I think these forms suggest how the Vulcan could have been improved to address the poorer lift/drag ratio of the basic model while retaining or even improving its performance advantage, and with better (both more powerful and more efficient) engines also expanding its all-up weight, hence both range and payload.
 
For info on projected Vulcans and other V-bomber designs have a look in British Secret Projects : Jet Bombers since 1950 by Tony Butler, loads in there up to the Phase 6 Vulcan and phase 4 victor and Valient Mk3 and a supersonic Valient version :):):) Great book
 
Yes, it did live long enough to manage to generate some diagrams, and from what I can remember from Project Cancelled, the revised wing looked very much like a crank arrow design...
 
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