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The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

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Re: The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

#131

Post by egberts1 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #52

> The B-52 played a significant role in the Vietnam War, particularly during Operation Linebacker II which saw 729 B-52 sorties drop more than 15,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi and other targets. Oof. Not a great call-out, as one of the stupidest operational plans and misuse of sophisticated platforms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker_II#Init... In the initial phase and by design, the B-52s were sent…

yes, and I know two member of the crews of the two cells that perished on that 3rd leg of the operation.

I was dumbfounded about the “misplanning” when other crew managed to return and decades later bitched about the planning.

then decades later, I read the Vietnam excepts, it was a gamble as these anti-aircraft missile launchers were mobile enough to try for a different flight path. But they didnt change the missile sites. Mentions were made that it would have had taken too long to pack-up/move/recalibrate. I would have faulted on-ground intelligence for that lack of insight.

at any rate, modern gaming (Monte Carlos?) theory says always to try different routes.

Re: The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

#132

Post by duxup »

runjake wrote: post #3

The first prototype of the B-52 may have been designed in a weekend. The B-52 of today was iteratively designed over decades and the current H models are entirely different planes than earlier models (although structurally very close to the G model). Another HN commenter mentioned GPS being designed over a holiday. But we spent years and years in the military debugging GPS and making it functional. Claiming that some…

"Idea guys" everywhere salivate over these stories I bet.

Re: The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

#134

Post by hajile »

nradov wrote: post #125
hajile wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current F-22 looks and acts nothing like the YF-22 that won the competition (despite the YF-23 being much better, but that's another story). The fact that the B-52 production was not just similar to the prototype, but similar to a complete mockup is a testament to the accuracy of their initial vision. The fact that the US continues to use that design after so many decades is even more amazing.

The YF-23 was better in some ways, worse in others. Compared to the YF-22 it was faster, longer ranged, and (probably) more stealthy. But it had a smaller weapons bay and was less maneuverable. Both aircraft met the ATF program technical requirements. The final selection was based primarily on the Air Force having greater confidence in Lockheed over Northrop in being able to run the program on schedule and budget. Th…

I thought the YF-23 had a larger weapon bay, but there was some debate at the time about the design of the delivery mechanism. On the flip side, having one, large bay allows for weapons configurations that aren't possible with multiple, shallow bays.

Maneuverability in a stealth plane is not of much use. Just like the F-35, the goal of the YF-23 was to use its vastly superior stealth capabilities take out the enemies before a dogfight happened. Given that drones can take G's that will turn a human's brain to mush, this is a much more sensible strategy in modern combat and renders the F-22 vectored thrusters as mostly an expensive and useless feature that sacrifices the much more important stealth of the YF-23's hidden engines.

I believe the claims of being worried about timetables were just making up excuses to choose a worse plane. The F-22 was 100% redesigned anyway (making a "competition" nothing but a formality). It was delivered years late and WAY over budget.

Re: The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

#135

Post by kbenson »

edgyquant wrote: post #119
froidpink wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a strong conceptual design, yes. For my aerospace engineering undergrad we also had to create a conceptual design for a new aircraft. And of course, as university projects go, we basically did it in five days. But I won't tell you how many iterations we would've had to go through until we had an optimum configuration ready to be sent to detail design The headline makes it look like their design was a definite…

Okay and the point here is that this wasn’t a college project thrown together in 5 days this was a military grade design outputted over a weekend.

I'm pretty sure the point of this thread is that it wasn't a 'military grade' design over a weekend, and as GP notes took over four years. It's sort of like saying Microsoft Excel was designed over a weekend.

The problem people have is that designed is a very flexible word that can mean a great many different things, and because of that it's being used here in a way that means something akin to conceptualized, but also used in the title in this way specifically because it will suggest to people that all the design work was finalized in that period.

That's click-baity in that it plays with people expectations, and not in a way they generally enjoy, so they're annoyed. If you don't like click-bait, the appropriate thing to do is to complain or abstain, otherwise you're just reinforcing their decision to communicate in that way.

Re: The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

#136

Post by Tangurena2 »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #8

The B-52 design proposal was done in a hotel room over one weekend, the actual engineering took at least 3 years, including "670 days in the wind tunnel". That is not to say the weekend hotel proposal was not an impressive accomplishment in itself, it was. But there's a difference between laying out a software architecture and writing code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress#Des... > On Thursday…

Coincidentally, I was watching a YouTube video last night about the YB-60. This was a version of the B-36 with the same jet engines as the B-52. And the aircraft lost in a competition with the B-52 because the Boeing jet was just plain better than the Convair jet.

Boeing did a very good job. I don't think there have been (or will be) another aircraft that lasted this long in service. There are prettier aircraft (in my opinion), but "pretty" doesn't get the job done. The Big Ugly Fat Fella will be around for quite some time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcumiS0uk5o

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_YB-60

Re: The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

#137

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

urthor wrote: post #31

Out of the loop, exactly why does the USAF still fly this? Is it really a better alternative to putting some bomb bay doors on a modern Boeing? Without dismissing the entire field of aircraft design... the mind is definitely attracted to the concept of buzzsawing some doors onto the bottom of civilian airliner.

It is an experiment in long term maintenance. The type has long been planned to be in service for 95 years.

Re: The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend

#138

Post by zymun »

runjake wrote: post #3

The first prototype of the B-52 may have been designed in a weekend. The B-52 of today was iteratively designed over decades and the current H models are entirely different planes than earlier models (although structurally very close to the G model). Another HN commenter mentioned GPS being designed over a holiday. But we spent years and years in the military debugging GPS and making it functional. Claiming that some…

Also, the people designing these things have years of experience and are most likely thinking about these designs daily through out the years. So, in reality it's 100s of years of synthesized experience to be able to design something over a weekend.
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