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China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

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Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#101

Post by maxerickson »

kragen wrote: post #100
maxerickson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't super sized, but between the C-17 and C-5, the US has ~250 large cargo planes in service. There's also hundreds of 747s that could be pressed into service (or just utilized) in a world gone to hell scenario.

I don't think of it as a "world gone to hell scenario" so much as a "World War II scenario" or a "Bronze Age collapse scenario". Smaller cargo planes should be somewhat more survivable than bigger ones in an environment full of Angels' Teeth and other micro-drones, but downing 250 large cargo planes still only requires landing 250 small robots on them and cutting a fuel line or something.

Oh, another WWII scale event meets my definition of world gone to hell.

I suppose I could have more clearly stated that I was arguing that the US is already leaning on large aircraft strategically, it wouldn't be a shift.

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#102

Post by kragen »

maxerickson wrote: post #101
kragen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think of it as a "world gone to hell scenario" so much as a "World War II scenario" or a "Bronze Age collapse scenario". Smaller cargo planes should be somewhat more survivable than bigger ones in an environment full of Angels' Teeth and other micro-drones, but downing 250 large cargo planes still only requires landing 250 small robots on them and cutting a fuel line or something.

Oh, another WWII scale event meets my definition of world gone to hell. I suppose I could have more clearly stated that I was arguing that the US is already leaning on large aircraft strategically, it wouldn't be a shift.

Oh, I agree! But I think we've seen a trend away from things like the 747-400 and the Ан-225 already over the last decades, and not just in the military, and I wonder why that is.

It seems likely that the current war, if it really takes off, is going to be more significant than WWII. In WWII, major parts of Earth were not battlefields: the Americas, Antarctica, Australia, most of Africa, India, Mongolia, Siberia, parts of China, and orbit were spared. And there were no nuclear weapons on the table until the end of the war, and no precision-guided munitions at all anywhere.

It seems like this war, if not stopped quickly, could lead to the end of territorial monopolies on force, and thus geopolitics as we know it. What will it look like? Both the war and its aftermath are literally unimaginable. We can't even say it'll be better or worse than WWII — precision-guided munitions mean there's no more need to expensively Dresden a city to destroy its industrial infrastructure, but it also means you could be killed without warning at any moment because an IA misinterpreted your Facebook status or your cellphone metadata, like Malik Jalal.

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#103

Post by sologoub »

The main problem for most post-Soviet production has long been that the supply chain now includes 2+ countries. Antonov is a prime example - had AN-124 and AN-225 been "Ukrainian" planes, we would have seen more production and commercializations.

The problem is that these are Soviet planes and with the current Russian-Ukrainian relations in shambles, the production has stopped. Much of avionics and those turbofans are (were?) made in Russia: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/ukraines-antonov-will-weste...

In my view, this is just thrashing in a frantic bid to keep the company alive. Sad, given its storied past.

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#105

Post by tim333 »

tw04 wrote: post #98
Someone wrote: post #84

"it carries a world record payload of 250 tons (to put this into comparison, it can carry around 300,000 lbs more than the US military's Boeing made C-17" What was the writer thinking? My readers won't understand what 250 tons is, so I'll use imperial metrics, too? Net effect is that this only makes full sense to those who understand both metric and imperial units. (I think a pound is 454 grams ('easy' to remember be…

Given the publication, I would imagine he's an American author writing to an American audience. I didn't think twice that 1 ton = 2,000 lbs so it made perfect sense here. Makes sense it would be confusing to people on the metric system, but I doubt he thought twice about it.

I think the author just isn't very good at weights and measures. According to wikipedia the max payload is 253,820 kg which is 253.8 tonnes or 280 US tons or 560,000 lbs.

A C17 can carry 170,900 pounds so it carries 339,000 lbs more approx.

Reminds me of one of my high school geograph teachers who gave the length of the Grand Canyon in miles and the width in km because he couldn't do the conversion.

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#106

Post by [deleted] »

tgb wrote: post #16

So this was originally made to carry the USSR's Buran space-shuttle-like project. I'd never heard of Buran before, but I have heard many critiques of the US's space shuttle program. Yet Buran looks almost identical from a cursory view. Why would the Soviet's independently develop a highly flawed project? This article does a decent job answering that: http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a9763/did-the-...

[deleted]

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#107

Post by flukus »

icegreentea wrote: post #33
wallace_f wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it difficult enough that not even a nation state as large and powerful as china has obstacles to develop a heavy turbofan? With respect to other tech they've developed I don't know what is technologically difficult here -- I'm asking genuinely as a layman, it's not a rhetorical statement of disagreement.

Should probably begin by saying that there's no fundemental reason why China could not eventually develop their own modern turbofans without outside assistance. But obviously now is better for China. Designing and building modern turbofan engines is incredibly dependent on your mastery of materials science and fabrication. These are areas of science and engineering that are notoriously "art like" or even "black magic…

How much of that trial and error can be skipped with modern computer simulations?

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#108

Post by johnhess »

Someone wrote: post #84

"it carries a world record payload of 250 tons (to put this into comparison, it can carry around 300,000 lbs more than the US military's Boeing made C-17" What was the writer thinking? My readers won't understand what 250 tons is, so I'll use imperial metrics, too? Net effect is that this only makes full sense to those who understand both metric and imperial units. (I think a pound is 454 grams ('easy' to remember be…

It's also unclear why they compare to the C-17 instead of the C-5, which is larger and handles a heavier payload (by about 100,000 lbs). Heck, even a 747 has a higher payload than a C-17. Being the biggest wasn't the C-17s goal.

Might as well tell us how much more payload it has than a Cessna 172

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#109

Post by icegreentea »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #94
DashRattlesnake wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a 3 letter agency or the pentagon wanted to use it for satellite maintenance/retrieval. Never happened I think they did do satellite maintenance from the shuttle a few times, most notably on the Hubble telescope.

Speaking from memory, but AFAIR the biggest impact of those military requirements on the Shuttle design were coming from the "nonstandard" orbits and orbital schedules those missions would require.

The Air Force requested the ability for the shuttle to take off from Vandenburg Airforce Base, go into polar orbit, and then land back at Vandenburg at the end of that one orbit. This required that the Shuttle have ~1000nm of cross range (that is that once it deorbits, it needed to deviate from its ballistic path by 1000nm). This required big ass wings (which the shuttle got).

The Airforce also helped drive the payload (weight and dimension) requirements, but I feel that this is secondary to the cross-range requirement.

Re: China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane

#110

Post by GunboatDiplomat »

kragen wrote: post #90

From the title, I thought this was going to be about the Spruce Goose, but it turns out the Spruce Goose was designed only for a 75-ton capacity, not the 250 tons of the Ан-225. The Spruce Goose had a larger wingspan (97.5 m rather than 88 m) but the Ан-225 is longer (84 m rather than 66⅔ m). It's interesting to reflect that the previous "world's largest plane," and still the one with the widest wingspan, dates from…

I was so hoping that China had decided to build a gigantic flying boat from wood.
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