Comment by ykl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ykl | Hacker News Reader

One of the aircraft named is the Kalinin K-7 [1], which is a favorite ridiculous aircraft of mine. It's the most literally "flying fortress" looking aircraft ever made. The design process for the K-7 was "add engines until it flies".

Basically, the Kalinin K-7 was an attempt to build an extremely heavy, high capacity aircraft before the jet engine was introduced. As a result, the entire plane is prop-driven, and the plane has a crap-ton of engines. There's 6 on the leading edges of the wings, but when it turned out 6 wasn't enough, they just started adding engines anywhere they could until the thing flew. By the end, there were the 6 original engines on the leads of the wings, plus 4 more engines on top of the wings and two more on each side of the cockpit/cabin.

For some more reading/pictures, see [2][3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalinin_K-7

[2] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/military-vehicle-news/serio...

[3] http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/models/aircraft/Kalinin-K7.html

Shades of the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, the predecessor to the B-52. "Six turning, four burning" because it had six piston-powered pusher propellers and four jet engines in underwing pods for take-off boost and high speed bombing runs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker

They also experimented with tracked landing gear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_can...

A parasite fighter for bomber defense (the XF-85 Goblin):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin

And as a test bed for nuclear aircraft propulsion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H

I would say the NB-36H because it actually flew and because "The original crew and avionics cabin was replaced by a massive lead and rubber lined 11 ton crew section for a pilot, copilot, flight engineer and two nuclear engineers. Even the small windows had 10-12 inch thick lead glass."

The thought that the X-6[1] and WS-125[2] would be good ideas further lead me to nominate the NB-36H.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_X-6

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-125

Sort of flew. It flew, yes, but the nuke was never used to actually generate power.

Yes, the didn't power the airplane with it, but my point is the thought it was a good idea to put a nuclear reactor in a plane.

As my Dad said to me a few too many times in my youth: "I'm amazed and appalled - amazed you thought of it and appalled you actually did it"

If any of the various ""intrinsically safe"" small reactor systems get into production, no doubt someone will propose this again. Or the Lockheed Martin vapourware fusion reactor. http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...

And for some reason the photo of the K-7 used in the quora thread is a photoshop of the plane with 2 heavy gun turrets from a battleship... When the original is this incredible, why add lipstick?

And for some reason, anyone who posts anything about it online seems obligated to put it alongside those stupid battleship hybrid renderings.

Those strange mockups/renderings look way bigger than the actual plane.

the rendering is of the planned, enlarged, successor to K-7. It just never happened.

No it isn't. It's just an artist's fantasy. It has no more basis in history than the Nazi flying saucer depicted in the other renders of the set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan

While not a plane the sheer idea of this craft shows that sometimes near unlimited military budgeting can result is strange ideas taking "flight".

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