Glad to know you know more about what I am talking about than I do. However, that should have been the B-70 not B-1. As I recall the B-70 was originally designed for 8 turbojets, or 4 atomic engines. I think the two actually flown had 6 turbojets. I believe a lot of the technology developed for it was used in the Blackbird. The idea with the nuclear engines was an aircraft that could remain on station in the air for two weeks at a time, sort of like a flying nuclear missile submarine. One of them showed up at an Air Base where I was stationed once, but the security was such that you could not get within a half mile of it unlike the B-1 I saw at an air show where you could walk up and touch it.
BTW, how many operational B-36's have you seen? I will always remember six of them passing over my dad's Studebaker at about 200 feet when I was a kid. They were making a pass at an air show. Dad was too cheap to buy a ticket so we were parked outside the fence at Willow Run. John Sessoms wrote: > From: graywolf > >> A conspiracy theory there, Bob? Personally I like the one for the >> nucular engines for the B-1 Bomber. "When you are dealing with atomic >> energy and you get 10 times the power output you thought you were >> supposed to, you do not proceed with testing". > > The nuclear engine testbed was the XB-36H [modified B-36 bomber], and it > wasn't 10x the power that was a problem it was 10x the radiation ... > took too much shielding to make it "safe" for the crew, and the added > weight of the shielding canceled out the bomb load. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
