Shipbucket

That was done on some late-series B-52s in the 1980s, right? Though they only carried Harpoons on the external pylons IIRC, but that method at least could be carried over to the B-1.
A bit more design work to mate the AGM-84 fuselage with the folding wings of the RGM/UGM-84 and you've got yourself an internal-carriage air-launched Harpoon. From the dimensions only, those should fit where a SRAM fits, e.g. in a B-1 rotary launcher.

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
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The B-1B has magnificent munition carrying capacity, less so for the A model, but it had Mach 2 speed. If the political situation were just right, you could get away with building both versions, though probably not in the context of this particular AU.

(As for Brown, my favorite was "Day of the Cheetah." I loved how he almost made the plane itself a character, and watching the decline of James from the toll the ANTARES took.)

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We can't stop here--this is Bat country!

If it's close enough to cast a shadow, I think the flying house wins initiative.

Bronies are like the Forsworn. Everyone agrees that they are a problem but nobody wants to expend the energy rooting them out.

"That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way."

That was kind of my idea, which got me thinking about other things you might stuff in there, which then got me thinking about Dale Brown.

The main issue I see with the B-1 in this scenario is there are lots of good missions for it to do later on, as technology improves, but fewer at the time of its introduction to warrant the cost.

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We can't stop here--this is Bat country!

If it's close enough to cast a shadow, I think the flying house wins initiative.

Bronies are like the Forsworn. Everyone agrees that they are a problem but nobody wants to expend the energy rooting them out.

"That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way."

Counter-intuitively, high altitude affords the best protection. Radar energy is an inverse square (like any form of light), altitude requires higher energy (read: larger, more expensive) missiles to reach, and high altitude air defense systems are generally the easiest to locate and suppress because they require powerful emitters to operate. So you become less visible to everything that can see you at high altitude, less things can attack you when you are visible, and the things that can attack you can be located by ISR and destroyed beforehand or forced into hiding for ambush-type attacks. Further, energy is stored as altitude, so when you are attacked by high energy missiles you can evasive maneuver much more freely without risking crashing into terrain, and your options for evading interception are much more open in general.

Low level penetration died in Desert Storm because Jaguar pilots kept coming back with AKM rounds in their helmets.

That said it didn't stop B-2 from being modified for low level penetration (which had as much to do with its mission of hunting TELs in wartime using an LPI attack radar as anything), but B-21 is going to be all high altitude all day like some kind of super slow and super sneaky SR-71.

This wasn't really understood to the extent that it is now back in the '60s and '70s when low level penetration became the norm, because models in the '60s and '70s were about as advanced as Lanchester's square law. Read: hopelessly primitive and incomplete. The synergy of high altitude, high speed (or VLO, speed and stealth are basically equivalents), and advanced ECM is better understood now, which is why CAS is done at 20,000 feet and climbing, why F-35 is better than A-10, and why the intuition of "horizon is the best stealth" is dead since ~1983.

B-1 is built like the proverbial brick outhouse though, so it can manage both things just fine. Just give it an attack radar optimized for maritime/sea search and you have an overpowered supercharged maritime attack aircraft I guess. Since North Point is an island nation, maritime defense is probably a priority. Having an aircraft that can search large areas of sea rapidly (supersonic) for long periods (range) and large warloads (B-1's shtick) would probably be useful.

It's the only way I can think of handwaving a purpose for strategic bombers in the fiction, anyway. It would be egregious extravagance too, since a mixed unit of maritime patrol aircraft and naval attack aircraft al a Bundesmarine Tornado IDS or Australian F-111 would be a superior option, but I suspect that "sperglording" is a substantial reason for the fiction existing in the first place.
It was done in the '90s with B-52H, and the USAF still practices a bit for the sea control mission with Navy P-3s and E-2s. B-52G was tasked with maritime attack and patrol missions from introduction (the -G attack radar had maritime search and attack capability) until the end of WW3 in 1989.

Maritime patrol/attack is the only plausible mission set for a intercontinental bomber without nuclear weapons.

B-1 makes a better platform than a 767, though. It has a smaller signature, except in the infrared, but that's only fixed by flying subsonic, like B-52, or flying so fast that aerodynamic heating melts conventional IR transparent windows, like XB-70 or SR-71.

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The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9.6 [million sq. km]. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

Gallo-Varnian Atlas strategic airlifter.





Can airlift two MBTs and doesn't need uprated engines to do it.

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The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9.6 [million sq. km]. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

That's a cool-looking aircraft. Is it based on anything real?
Where does it load/unload its two MBTs though? I assume there is a ramp in the rear, or does the nose lift open? In both cases I don't see any lines outlining doors or ramps.

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
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It's Boeing Model 1050, the super-sized version of YC-14 that Boeing put in for C-X. It lost to McDD's C-17, and then McDD and Boeing merged, so now it is gone forever. RIP King of the Trijets. It has a powered ramp in the rear. I didn't draw it because it wouldn't be visible. It's roughly where the shadow is darkest, starting a bit behind the parachute door.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/653 ... ng-CXd.jpg

I might draw the ramp and gear down, with a pair of tanks rolling off, for illustrative purposes.

I'm BS'ing the two MBT part but only because CF6 is a beast and is used on C-5M vs. the puny weakling engines of the C-17. YC-14 could already lift a single M60 too, so a bigger YC-14 can probably lift two if we ignore the part where they added loads of weight. Truly it could Get Muscle To The Front.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/653 ... 6_AMST.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/653 ... C-X-FG.JPG

The parachute door is not actually blocked by the gear sponson either, the rear part lifts up so it acts as a shield against wind blast for the paratroopers:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/653 ... eld_01.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/653 ... eld_02.jpg

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The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9.6 [million sq. km]. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

ATM it's just a sizing thing but this is basically how it carries two tanks.

It's probably more like Half-A-C-5 or C-17-And-A-Half than actual C-17.

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The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9.6 [million sq. km]. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

Kattsun,

Thanks for the explanation. I had heard about the C-14 but not the full-sized tri-jet version.
From the look of it, I was just kinda worried about the structural stability of the tail-mounted engine with a ramp door cutting up the tail structure. Let's just trust Boeing on this one then.

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
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Not to steer the conversation back to the B-1 but realized I had never properly replied. The maritime strike / sea control mission would likely be accomplished with the carrier-based F-18s and E-2s, as well as air force Wentworth Shrike (think a cross between Tornado IDS and F-111) and I guess the F-2 force. The guy who plays Questers had mentioned wanting B-1s to perform surgical strikes deep into Songia (the China-style nation bordering him to the south) but this was dismissed when we discovered that a single B-1 costs as much as 200 Tomahawk missiles.

For reference, the map: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161 ... 161011.png - "Questers" is the generic name for the large country SW of the Oryontic Ocean made up of "Nampataland", "Straits Confederation", and "Persekutuan Nasional" (Malay Federation).

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