Flying Aircraft Carriers are Possible. Here's Why we Don't Use Them.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- Today we build the ultimate Flying Aircraft Carrier in Flyout!!!!
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To me the likeliest reason something like this was never done was that half the reasons you might do it vanished with the advent of aerial refuelling and the rest are accounted for by strategic bombers with ALCMs
It's a bit more complicated than than. Even after aerial refueling become widespread tests with parasite fighters were made but the whole idea turn into a dead end both due practical reason and the need for specific platform which cannot be built due technological limitations, which is why US test the idea to use first modified bombers and then even 747 as flying carrier, at least until a Korean civilian liner was shot down by Soviets after have been mistaken for a military aircraft.
Not to mention how easy it is to shoot down big planes.
The real reason is that one anti-aircraft missile could theoretically take out an entire air wing.
@@andrewzamora2689 No. We have ways to counter missiles, back then there were other reasons, the problem was a plethora of smaller issues.
@@ANDREALEONE95”mistaken”
"in a world where Bezos invests in a sky carrier" me getting flashbacks to Max0r's Ace Combat 7 summary
The package is death you will now die. cease to be.
I love messier 82 basically the reason why Ill be studying aviation/aerospace engineering soon.
Same, so lucky to have such an inspiring and creative person with the tools to express that creativity in a field im so interested in
same
I can relate.
It's my dream to become one.
(I originally wanted to become a pilot but then health issues lol come)
I’ve heard it’s a trap
Godspeed y’all. My advice, whenever you are going into an industry find the pain point and be good at it. Learn to enjoy doing what others hate
“That’s all they’ve really been. A concept”
USS Akron and USS Macon: *Am I a joke to you?*
exactly what i was thinking! airship aircraft carriers were pretty much the first flying aircraft carriers and were some what successful! it makes me so sad proper rigid body airships disappeared i love them so much
@@therealtwo2deedont forget us Airplains witch docked smsller aircraft under neath.
Or Soviet one
@@jokekopter2509 true!
Honestly the idea of combining an Airship with an Airplane could result in something really interesting.
@@ThatSpaceMann I wonder if you could maybe do something like the inflatoplanes from good year, but larger and filled with lifting gases. On another note, the Airlander airships (the ones that look like a giant ass) do produce aerodynamic lift to assist in lifting
It's funny that you mention the Arsenal Bird, the ACE Combat 7 drone mothership, but not ACE Combat 6's actual flying aircraft carrier/cruise missile platform, the P-1112 Aigaion. I think they did a good job of making it seem feasible, they mentioned how it was so big it was built on and took off from the ocean, and while it can land in the ocean it instead is kept continually in the air, used as their main "Heavy Command Cruiser" and they even show it being refueled by 6 DC10 tankers, which really puts its scale into perspective. They even took it a step further and had it be escorted like an actual aircraft carrier, always being accompanied by 4 smaller but still absolutely massive (I believe) drone gunships ,of which there were two different models of, I recall one specializing in missiles and electronic warfare, and the other just having turrets all over it. 100% By far my favorite example of the flying aircraft carrier concept.
That looks like one of the flying battleships from Project Wingman, which is something you might be interested in!
not enough railguns
Ace combat
@@riley_ae86 Project Wingman has a couple that fight each other
No, those are airSHIPS not airborne aircraft carriers. They might’ve been used as supporting ships for the carrier group but this is more like the Arsenal Bird.
@@Han_Solo6712 yea because the arsenal birds carry aircraft under and in it's wings, project wingman ones don't carry aircraft. However Project Wingman is like a funky high quality fan made ace combat. They were definitely based on arsenal birds but had to be different in some way.
00:30 well, not really, the USSR tested and later used flying aircraft carriers (or at least one TB-3 that was modified to be a "mothersship") in 30 missions, with only 3 parasite fighter (Polikarpov I-16) was lost in combat. Their first real mission was to bomb a bridge in Romania which they did smoothly due to the enemy not minding the I-16s since it's a small fighter and they doesn't have that much of a range and their bombload is nothing huge or simply they just failed to identify them as enemy, that is a mistery. In fact those I-16s couldn't have even take of with the massive bomb they got during that mission so it was really practical to launch them from a moving flying platform. This doesn't mean that they are viable though, the TB-3S were only used there since no other plane was available during that time (or bomber, can't remember) so they used the otherwise outdated bombers-turned-experimental-failures into something useful. Very rare Soviet ingeniuity right there
(Those who are curious search for the 'Zveno project', I recommend Mustard's video on it but there are a lot of videos out there so pick your poison 😊)
This is one of my favorite things that were made in ww2!
there were at least three converted bombers. They used the parasite fighters because their current bombers couldn't hit that bridge, there were no dive bombers available, and the fighters didn't have the range or payload capacity needed. It worked for taking overloaded fighters beyond their combat range and payload capacity.
@@JaneDoe-dg1gv Didnt I-16 worked as dive bomber in said example?
Rex's Hangar also covered this as well
They were actually used to deliver smaller aircraft, allowing them to dive bomb enemy infustructer
Someone who just graduated from an aerospace masters here. Your videos are so genuinely enjoyable - I remember designing an AWACS style High Altitude Long Endurance UAV for coordinates search and rescue using drones in remote areas.
It was inspired heavily by a concept like this however.
Nuclear powered aircraft are all fun and games until you find yourself looking at Fukushima screaming out of the sky at 800mph.
If everything is done well, no.
@@calcog5716Yeah, a properly built reactor can survive a direct crash with a mountain.
@@jacextreme6432Check out the British testing of reactor casings.
@@jacextreme6432this is true for naval reactors at
That would have to be one hell of a tsunami to take out an airplane. I think we would have bigger problems at that point lol
Flying aircraft carriers are really cool, have you heard of the Russian 'Zveno' project from the 1930's. it ended up flying around 30 mission in active combat during WW2, and was surprisingly successful, despite being quite outdated. I just finished making a Kalinin K-7 Replica which carries deployable, and one controllable strike fighter(s)
And the US at the same time had the USS Akron and USS Macon.
Flying dronecarriers I can see, but other than that is beyond practical.
2 more very valid reasons as to why areal Carriers are not becomming a thing.
To take a significant number of aircraft, they need to be significantly large. And while the sky maybe near limitless for space, the ground where such an aircraft must take off from certainty is not.
And if that was not an issue, then you now have defend an airport the size of (insert obscenely large number beyond comprehension here) from enemy attack, all for some advantages you can do already at a larger and/or smaller scale, and some advantages you can honestly do without.
I mean one could in a way help "solve" i guess reduce both issues by making them float. Can't destroy the water.
@Caktusdud. port facilities, and one can argue at at such a point, it would be better to build an actual aircraft carrier
@@Foxtrot_UniformCharlieKilo I agree but lets just wing it
@@Caktusdud. it wouldn't be the first time
By "compression" you mean comprehension?
F = Fighter. C = Cargo..
It should have been the KC-01 Kraken, or the KCV-01 Kraken. K for refueler/tanker. CV for carrier. CVN for a nuclear carrier.
CV stands for Cruiser aViation.
@@CounterfeitDuck not quite, the V just means Heavier than Air aircraft, whereas Z means Lighter than Air aircraft, which is why something like the USS Akron and Macon are designated as ZRS. V standing for Voler and aViation are merely just guesses
I thought it was FC for Flying Carrier.
An orbital weapons platform would be cheaper and more reliable. 22 minutes to strike anywhere on Earth.
The psychological warfare of hearing that thing coming ALONE is severely underrated....want an RC one! Also, how have I not heard of this KSP for adults game yet??????
8:31 that sounds absolutely horrifying, I love it
Just like helicopter, nothing really fancy. Proper real-world sound would be Tu-95, saw this thing couple of times, it is as loud as helicopter next to you so high up in sky that you barely see it.
TU-95 vibes
I would scream
I mean tbf. DARPA did put a contract out for large non ground effect restricted Ekranoplans recently. So maybe not far off even if "Move entire battalions across an ocean in a few hours" isn't as flashy as a flying aircraft carrier.
Suggestions rotating radar is out of date fixed pod is in. Internal aircraft storage is a must for drag and operation maintenance and Stealth. A fat flying wing like a b2 seems a more useful shape. One of the newer reactor designs like molten salt and others may be lighter and not need as much shielding. possible direct electricity production to electric motors. AI injoyed your work
Awacs is long wavelength long range radar. You cant make it aesa quiet sp effcicie tly, because of the insane size needed for all the antennae, plus you'd need 4 arrays either way. You will see the aesa plates for shit like SAMs and counterbattery still rotate mechamically.
honestly, the question of "why" a flying aircraft carrier never really occurred to me.
This kind of thing feels like its own reward for my all-i-know-about-war-is-videogames brain
the radar dome's placement is a bit unrealistic, due to the size of the wings it would almost completely be blocked from looking down, which is a problem when this aircraft would have to be scanning well past the local curvature of the Earth. More likely a flying carrier of this size would have multiple phased array antennas across the leading edges of the wings, in the nose, and in the tail or in the wingtips so that it can have a 270 degree or greater radar arc around the aircraft.
The shear power of those engines at takeoff would rip anything behind them to particles if not fine sand... I love it.. ❤❤❤
an ejection plane instead of a seat would be hilarious
Another potential reason for this one specifically: it'd be very difficult to convince the international community that this thing isn't just a cover for developing nuclear ICBMs.
Messier you can control the plane with thrust vectoring engines, but that means moving the main plane as well
It's not the nuclear propulsion of the carrier itself, nor food stores. It's the refueling of the planes carried on the carrier itself that will limit the flight time of such a plane.
The other, even greater problem for an extended flight is water usage. Even the smallest, most streamlined carriers will have a crew supplement between 2000-3000 personnel on board, not to mention the over 6000 on the US supercarriers today. They easily use at least 20 gallons/75 liters of water per person per day. Minimum. And that's being conservative. A waterbound carrier has enough water around it to desalinate it onboard. A flying carrier does not. That means such a carrier gets lighter each day by, again very conservative calculations, at least 2000 * 7.5 liters per day, assuming a full 90% recovery rate of used water, which is an almost unheard of recovery rate. So the flying carrier would loose around 15 tons of water a day, which it can't recover until either a flying support plane brings in that water, or the carrier lands and restocks on the ground. Dito for food supplies. After one month of flying such a carrier would have no more water on board, forcing it to land to allow its crew the required drinking water.
So basically a bad idea compounded by nearly impossible logistics.
"Drone defense! Hold my beer!" said the hacker...
This has a very Miyhazaki look... Like some of the flying monsters from Nausicaa or Future Boy Conan. love it
If we are going to start talking about putting nuclear reactors on aircraft you might as well just use electric motors for propulsion and the reactor for generating electricity. There is no point in adding another layer of complexity to an already unproven system. Also having the reactor for solely generating power would make for a better self contained system. This modularity would also make refueling or changing the reactor better. It would also make it easier to power the aircraft with a different type of generator if needed. The other major advantage is the reliability of electric motors. You could even potentially have multiple motors connected to a gear drive to power the props, so you could in theory disengage a faulty motor and replace it during flight. This redundancy would be essential for an aircraft meant to stay in the air for weeks or months at a time.
Hey Messier, loving your videos! I was wondering if you would consider doing an "improved he 162" build/challenge. Where, with the power of hindsight, you would design the best possible version of the he 162, with the same engine or another engine that was available in Germany at the time of the 162's creation. This aircraft would have to be simple and cheap to produce, as that was most of the point of the 162.
Thanks and keep up with the great content!
When I saw the Arsenal Bird in Ace Combat, I thought it was cool but I also thought how stupid it was because of it's size. I like speed and streamline designs, big looks cool but I would get frustrated quickly and cost is another factor. That's my thoughts on flying carriers. Big, Slow and vulnerable.
Somehow I doubt you want to shield only the part between the crew and the automated section.
I'm not an engineer, but I seem to remember radiations can damage electronics (which are generally very useful for automation, unless you use analogic automatons)
And then, you don't really want to shower the people you fly over with sweet radioactive death.
The concept is now reality! Well in a sense, The C-130 is able to launch and recover The X-61 Gremlin ;)
Can't say about real life, but it fit perfectly in GI JOE's universe. Cheers!
i love the AWACS radome-dish on the top
Other issues would be wingtip vortexes and prop wash (turbulent air caused by generating lift and thrust). Landing a small aircraft on a larger aircraft would be extremely difficult. This issue could be solved by using lighter than air aircraft. But to do that the size would grow to even more insane proportions, and the speed would slow to a crawl.
“If you hear this, you weren’t the target”
So…its basically a giant sci-fi A-10?
you will hear the A10 if you are the target what you won't hear is the gau 8
I'd really like to see M82 do a size-ordered lineup of all of his crafts, probably via photoshop or something, just so we can get a true perspective of the dimensions of all his aircraft.
I always loved the one from ace combat Aigon p-1112
I tried to make it in ksp before with welding but still had issues with crashes etc
Wonder if you could make it in this?
Something potentially more realistically done in real world is the new types of zepplins/blimps they are making for hauling cargo long term albeit at slower rates than normal planes. Make them big enough, and they can carry basically any load anywhere on the earth without much issue.
It's to small & practical. It needs to be bigger.
That thing sounded like a lawnmower on a time lapse doing a drive-by, that was awesome sounding in the weirdest kind of way
Hey ... silly question ... why are the AWACS mounted on top of the plane? Wouldn't it hinder coverage of the ground? Wouldn't the plane itself block the radar? It's something I've always wondered about.
Have you looked into the parasite fighters used by the soviet union in ww2? the carrier was used to extend the range and payload capacity of the fighters. While the range issue is solved with aerial refueling, the payload increase is an interesting idea. I think Mustard has a good video on it.
What i wouldn't mind to se is a large Aerial Warship, that just carries a lot of VLS Cells, CIWS and maybe some anti ground howitzer
I've loved your vids since I discovered them but tbh this style of making a super realistic planes once a week isn't as nice as the decent but very frequent builds that you were posting like half a year ago. (I still would like to see that vampire style plane make a return though)
Where have you been all my life!!? As a diehard Ace Combat/Macross/General flying machine and other flying stuff, this channel is truly a blessing. Aw man, this is the kind of channel (if I have money) I'd be a member of. For now I'd just watch and liked every videos you make. Also, reality is a cruel mistress, how boring a technically possible sky carrier be, but it's life and loving it!
Subscribed with bell, this is the first video I got notified for since the cinematic trailer. TH-cam is being annoying again.
Literally the arsenal bird with whole fighter jets instead of drones
Id call it the Jericho due to the horn like sound and the destruction itd bring
Please create a flying Gunship Fortress! Something like The B-52, C-5, and or Dreamlifter! Please include at least Two 105mm Cannons/Or perhaps One Larger Cannon of your choice, Three Bofors 40mm Cannons, and Four 30mm Cannons, All Broadside Weapons!! Next short range defense! Essentially Phalanx CIWS on top of the aircraft, Two GAU-17 retractable underbelly Cannons, 50mm Tailgun, and if possible at the nose of the Plane a Laser Cannon or Railgun! (If not I leave something exotic for you to decide;) Standoff Weapons Air-air and Air-ground Hypersonic Missiles! For instance for Air-air something like The AIM-260 and for ground attack AGM-183! Plus JATO Take Off😅🙏
Oh my god that flyby... music to my ears
15:04
That literally sounds like _86_ if it had _Ace Combat_ planes instead of mechs
Flying aircraft Carriers are something I, an amateur youtuber but a legend at creating things, would exploit by creating the KMS Nue Berlin, a Flying Aircraft Carrier that rely on stealth to go unnoticed while carry less than 90 FW-290 Jets, with several kilatons of fuel, weapons, and more, and later on, would create the KMS Hainan, a Flying Aircraft Carrier, two different beasts, 2 different designs modes, 2 hugely different engine designs, but made by the same guy, *me😏* also, alcohol is not allowed on Aircraft, let alone MILITARY Aircraft, anways, the FC-1 Kraken, KMS Nue Berlin and Hainan are flying aircraft Carriers and being ridiculously large are what the three have in common, but the cost of having an Airborne Carrier Group is something the Greater German Colonial Empire doesn't give a flying fuck about
You mention Ace Combat 7, but don't forget about the much more direct Ace Combat 6's "P-1112 Aigaion", the flying stingray guarded by EWS and CAS support flying ships that can carry carrier aircraft and even has the capability to carry powerful cruise missiles.
I played with a nuclear powered spaceplane with a payload of well over a kilotonne. (I don't remember exactly.) I based it on the Star Raker using DUMBO-esk rocket cores.
Landing gear was a serious problem! In fact, I found them to be unmanageable. The solution, and you're going to laugh, was to make it a sea-spaceplane. The wing area was large enough that heat shields were not necessary, though active cooling had to be implanted it the hot zones. So, salt corrosion was manageable. Turns out, if you can deploy water wings at take off, much of the complex shape of a sea plane can be eliminated. You don't want to land that way, but it greatly simplifies taking off... IF you have the power.
The vehicle required a very long runway. I think it was 5 to 10 km, depending on payload and aerodynamic assumptions, but it was perfectly doable. Bat-sh*t crazy, but doable.
First
this type of vehicle could be used to break records in speed by using other prototype aircraft without wasting its fuel when takeoff!
Your videos are relaxing❤
they developed lightweight ceramic reactor shielding during project pluto.
Air carriers will likely never happen, but an orbital carrier potentially could. Power needs become less of an issue as you only need to maintain a stable orbit, and prepped fighters can be dropped from the carrier to complete a mission, then return to a ground base to be boosted back up to the orbit platform along with resupply missions. Definitely a long term option rather than something currently possible, but its more feasible than at atmospheric carrier. Plus it would give the Space Force something to do instead of making memes.
well you did kinda make the arsenal bird, If you switched this concept to the idea of a large plane full of cruise missiles to retain the standoff advantage and response time you could get a much more practical design. I've heard ideas of shoving a bunch of cruise missiles in a B-52 after all
You realise missiles come from the ground? How’s the Gatling on this huge flying wing supposed to stop them? Take your trillion dollar aircraft out with a man pad.
How would the megalith engine deal with the tips of the turbine blades spinning faster than the sound barrier? Considering Its radius, that could be a huge problem. Is there some sort of anti-ram like intake configuration that would decrease air pressure so much that this isnt a problem?
Imagine taking the term air fleet a bit more literally.. like that this carrier had a whole group of gigantic aircraft following it: destroyers, frigates, maybe even dreadnoughts
You should make a supersonic biplane
Pretty sure it would tear itself in half.
Imo. Instead of an airborne aircraft carrier, a regular aircraft carrier equipped with a swarm of various drones and commander aircraft allowing for sorties operating anywhere at any time and able to be equipped with any form of ordnance in the form of a drone commanded by a piloted aircraff
The arsenal bird and all of Ace Combat are some of my favorite things ever, they should hire you to build the next super weapon haha
wouldn't that one soviet bomber carrying smaller combat planes count as an aircraft carrier? or would that just be seen as a range extender for the combat planes?
really cool, but the advent of surface to air and air to air missles pretty much makes something this big and slow a non starter.
Can you build a boeing aircraft with doors that automatically fall off upon take off in flyout? :D
IDK, I feel like the Aigaion from Ace Combat 6 made more sense design-wise
Concept? Akron and Macon worked, granted the sisters were very unsafe in bad weather
FC is Fighter-Carrier. Are you sure this is the right designator?
he should make a submarine in flyout that would be funny
like if u agree maybe he'll see this comment
A flying submarine
Picture this: an Ohio-class submarine with wings
@@lockheedx33 and the screw of the Submarine can be a massive pusher-type turboprop
When someone says Flying Carriers I want to say the test of the B-29 and the small jets or the old Blimps and biplanes come to mind first but I think of Ace Combat 6 with it's Aigaion Class comes up first.
It would be one of the coolest sounding flybys but also one of the most terrifying.
You would need to wait like an half hour for wake turbulence after that thing took off.
damn bro, your plane sound like the tripod in the war of world movie
can someone tell me the name of the first song of the video? I wanted to know it since ages
Not giving a shout-out to crimson skies carrier Zeppelins :( I'm sad now
But the question is, can the Kraken survive a Stonehenge shot?
Could you build a hypersonic bomber in a future video
i think my favorite fictional airborne aircraft carriers are the ones from the game highfleet! basically big steel ships kept up by massive jets with the aircraft carriers featuring a decently long runway on the top for aircraft to launch and land from and huge legs like landing gear that means they can just become portable airstrips
my design would be a double wing, for store planes on top and still have lift on the under wing, and it would be much smaller, just to carry 10 fighters for the mission, and a an124 is allready big to it... and it would need to land on water, becouse in a war it would be capable of refueling with ship, and also would be able to refuel submarines...
P-1112 Aigaion next, please! =^x^=
This is more of a mobile base than an aircraft carrier lol.
I know you coloured your reasons for not doing it early in the video but I would love to see your take on a Sky Destroyer to escort this ting. I sky carrier task force would be a cool sight to see.
This is a cool concept and you put a lot of effort into it. Well done! My question would be however, if you just hang the fighters under the wing, how do you refuel and rearm them? I think if the carrier has to act autonomuous, then he culd not send them back to some groundbase but it should be done on board.
It’s basically an arsenal bird from ace combat 7
In theory yes but they are so impractical no military would dedicate the time and resources to them.
Yes I know flying aircraft carriers technically already existed, the USS Akron, it never saw combat and I think only carried one plane.
The soviet union had one to, I don't remember what it was called and I think it saw combat but once again didn't do much
The soviets mounted two fighters under the wings of an obsolete bomber to extend their range and payload capacity. It actually worked really well. Mustard has a video on them.
3 planes and had capacity for 5. Could`ve used all of them if not for crash due to navigational errors (like most airships of a time did), but i hardly doubt it would be of use in war beyond reconnaissance and sub hunting. Too slow to accept (and launch) modern aircrafts like mustangs or P-40`s, and "landing" with them would be nearly impossible, as it wasnt already extremely hard with planes that actually could do it.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 If we ever do get flying aircraft carriers. They are no going to be giant warships like arsenal bird. They are probably going to be like AC130 sized drone carriers
The issue with very large aircraft is that weight scales in the cube and span scales linearly. For smaller aircraft, this can be made up with by speed. That is, the larger aircraft fly faster. This works great until about mach 0.9. Over that speed, it don´t work at all. Over a certain size the increase in the weight of the wing will be larger than the increase in total carry capacity, actually decreasing the load you can carry. This makes sort of a ceiling of any practical size of a aircraft with a span of a bit shy of 100 meter (i guess that could probobly be expanded a bit with a all composite wing). If you want a larger aircraft it need to be supersonic.... or... ground effect. Ground effect planes are not limited by the cube-liner law.
The radiation problem for flying reactors was largely a myth. While Alfa and beta need mass to be blocked, its really not much mass, and it will be totally blocked by the reactor shell. Neutron radiation can be blocked with a thin layer of boron. Here is the part that may surprise people. Gamma radiation is not all that dangerous. More over, the energy range of gamma that is the most dangerous, is esially stopped with metal foam, or distributed shielding.
This was all known in the 60s, its nothing new. The real reason why nuclear aircraft was never built was very simple. The logistics was to hard. Protecting the pilot was really not a issue. Protecting the ground crew was much harder. A nuclear turbine also need maintenance. How do you maintain it when its activated? Of cause, today we can do that in BWR. But even there, that took many years to make that streamlined.
Messier has come such a long way, it’s beautiful
tbh you were the main reason i got into flyout, thanks man
Just use some modernized B17 and B29s that have their bomb bays replaced with swarm racks for missiles, along with dedicated missile jamming aircraft for the flight group.
Does this game calculate durability?
If anyone didn’t know at the very beginning of WW2 flying aircraft carriers were used because they had a few prototypes in storage and they needed something to attack a bridge but they didn’t have anything other than these relics to do it. Another fun fact was the fighters used weren’t attacked by the Germans because they were so far behind German lines that the Germans thought that they were captures planes.
big boy plane 👍
one of the other main reasons big planes don't really exist (as much as it would be nice), is that most governments do not want to spend the trillions upon trillions that it would take to make specialized runways just for these things
Love the Avro Arrow wing notches 🤘👍
1 month ago, I made several airborne warships, like the KMS Kiev, a destroyer, KMS Bremerhaven, a Missile Ship, and the KMS Hainan, another flying aircraft Carrier, has 2 airfields, and coupled with other Airborne warships, it makes a formidable fleet if the ships were actually built, but with the M7676 Flying Cruise ship, I realized "oh shit, I can make a Military transport using the same creation!" And that's what I'm gonna do, the M7676-T-1, a Transcontinental Military Transport Aircraft
Edit: and thats what I did