Cray
04/15/03 01:50 PM
147.160.125.185
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SUPER WING
Type: IS Aerodyne (well, conventional aircraft)
Wingspan: 1000m
Tonnage: 35000 tons
Engine: 9100 tons
....Thrust: 4
....Overthrust: 6
SI (50): 8750t
Armor: 225t
Crew & Passengers: 2500t (5000)
Residents: 5000t (1000)
Weapons:
....None
Heat Sinks: 0t
Fuel & Pumps: 1530t
Bridge: 300t
6 fighters: 900t
20 small craft bays: 4000t
Cargo: 2695t (to be used for food and spares)
SUPER WING: OVERVIEW
Imagine a Chippewa (the 90-ton fighter) that had a pointed nose...or the XB-47 jet-powered flying wing of yesteryear. Imagine it with a 1-kilometer wingspan and nearly 600 meters long from nose to tail elevator plane.
Below, tiny petroleum-burning jumbo jets approach the fusion-powered behemoth. Glittering, barely visible cables snake down to them. Not flapping in the breeze at all, the grapple at the end of the cable has control fins to steer in for an effortless capture of nose hooks on the jumbos. The passenger-laden jumbo is pulled smoothly through the turbulent boundary layer of air below the titanic flying wing and nestled into a conformal dock on the underside of the flying wing. Over a dozen other jumbos are docking two at a time, and the entire operation will be done in minutes.
After the last of the jumbos dock and as passengers begin to disembark into the cavernous interior of the "Super Wing," the fusion engines that are the entire point of the Super Wing double, then triple their output. Electric ducted fans ten meters across adjust their pitch and spin faster, carrying the Super Wing from the low altitude rendezvous run to the cruising altitude of 20 kilometers.
On the grand promenade, the thousands of newly boarded passengers immediately (and with little decorum) rush for the leading edge of the Super Wing. (A half dozen major control surfaces flex and shift along the Super Wing to adjust for the movement of hundreds of tons of organic ballast. Hundreds of minor panels and air vents along the broad, broad back of the Super Wing work to smooth out the altered air flow.) At the front of the plane, the passengers (who will not not notice a wobble from their stampede - the huge plane is that precise in maintaining an even keel) find a string of giant windows framed in faux gothic "iron" columns, some of the windows as much as ten meters tall. From here, they can look down at the receding world below.
The magical moments are the passage through the clouds, towering columns of glorious white vapor that dwarf even the Super Wing, and finally leveling off at twenty kilometers far above even the cloud deck. The cafes and stores behind them are much like the ones they left in the airport, but they couldn't sip coffee or chase shrieking children with such a view.
The passengers have 6 hours on this flight across the Jones Ocean, the smaller of Claybrooke's oceans. The (appropriately, if unimaginatively named) Vast Ocean on the other side would take up to 20 hours to cross, and they would probably visit a sleeper section of the Super Wing on such a flight. But for 6 hours, the passengers will sit and gaze at an incredible view in an incredible vehicle. Except for the drone of conversation and noise of a crowd, the Super Wing's interior is much quieter than the noisy little jumbo jets they just left.
Mingling with the passengers, the tourists, are the permanent residents of the Super Wing. They live in the apartment towers of the vertical stabilizers, gazing down at a 650kph sculpture of stainless steel. As the stern of the stabilizers are mobile (the Super Wing's 200-meter tall rudders, of course), each of these very wealthy residents lives in the leading edge of the rudders. That leading edge is wholly transparent like a glass-walled skyscraper, a panoramic window that wraps the 10-meter wide stabilizer from side to side. Their view is infinitely better than that of the economy-class tourist drones below in the main wing. They can see occupants in the other stabilizer a quarter kilometer away, or out into the vastness of the sky to the other side, ahead across the cloudscape, or even quite a way behind the vessel, a 300-degree arc of vision when they are in the very leading edge of the stabilizer. So stiff, so insulated are the windows that not a whisper of the 650km/hr slipstream can be heard. Even further overhead, the residents have their own, smaller promenade in the horizontal elevator between the two vertical stabilizers.
The tourists would actually be surprised to find fast food restaurants and bland business offices in those upper decks, so exclusive to the rich and famous who live on the Super Wing. They pay a fortune for the "real estate;" they don't want to pay a fortune for everyday expenses, like a quick taco. If they want fancy eatin', they'll go down to the overpriced tourist trap restaurants in the main wing (which are 5-star, even if not worth the price). There are exclusive corporate offices in the upper decks and the stabilizers, of course. The scenery and prestige are just too much to pass up.
In the heart of the wing, in the thickest, 50-meter deep middle, two of three fusion reactors are operating at seventy-five percent of their capacity. They are supplying the power to lift 35000 tons of steel and titanium to twenty kilometers and fight the drag of 650kph air flowing over more than one hundred thousand square meters of surface area. No small part of their power goes into pressurizing the vast volumes of the Super Wing and keeping it habitable. Their third sibling is currently inactive as twenty crewmen pull out one of the twenty-ton containment coils, a superconductor with radiation-damaged insulation. The replacement coil was ferried up on another airplane days ago and awaits in another part of the cavernous engineering bay. This huge chamber brings to mind a football stadium with its size. It is not a dark dungeon one might imagine in the bowels of a gothic-themed Super Wing. Indeed, neither is it noisy. If the workmen had not been maneuvering twenty tons of metal (it seems as much with their curses as the overhead crane), it would be one of the quietest parts of Super Wing. The fusion reactors do not thrum or boom or like cinematic "warp drives". The liquid sodium coolant pumps circulate the metal with electromagnetic coils - there are no whirring motors or gearboxes to add noise. Air circulation, as elsewhere in the Super Wing, is accomplished with carefully shaped and damped vents.
There are noisy parts of the Super Wing. Enclosed within meters-wide ducts running from bow to stern are dozens of electrically-powered, ducted fans. Most are operating just fine, but there are extras (just as with the fusion engines) in case of trouble or routine maintenance. There is some repair work today: the starboard number three bank of fans is all out of commission. A suicidal flock of large birds has dinged and dented quite a few of the 5-meter tall compressor blades. The bank's inlet ports and exhaust ports are all closed now and small workers move about the gleaming metal duct. They use cranes to dismount damaged blades, which will be repaired, or new ones made, in the Super Wing's machine shops. This is truly the least of the Super Wing's internal repair capabilities, the watching tourists are told. The frame of the Super Wing has extra trusses and spars, more than it needs to stay together. An old or damaged spar (yes, one of those huge I-beams you see overhead in the Grand Promenade) can be dismounted for reworking and repair.
Now, in just a few more hours, the stewards will shuffle the herd of tourists back to their planes. The jumbo aircraft will detach at twenty kilometers and almost glide to a landing at the airports the Super Wing flies over. When all 20 are free, the giant aircraft will drop to a mere three kilometers above the ground and, at the same time, conduct its lumbering turn over a one hundred kilometer radius. It will pick up a new group of jumbo jets and carry them across the ocean again, back to the continent whence it came.
SUPER WING HISTORY
The 35,000-ton "Super Wing" is a dropship-sized, fusion-powered aircraft used on the FWL world Claybrooke. Oil-rich but tech-poor Claybrooke had thriving (primitive, 21st century) industries and a decent standard of living for its billions of inhabitants. (Well, the ones that hadn't been thrown into labor camps by Claybrooke's dictator.) The "Super Wings" were introduced in the late 30th Century and remain in use into the 32nd.
It was able to manufacture fusion power plants locally, but only large, municiple-sized engines. The availability of fusion engines from off-world suppliers for any non-military application was nil; airlines were stuck with petroleum-burning jet liners. However, one of the dictatorship's more grandiose schemes actually made a modicum of economic sense: if jet liners only had to climb to 3 kilometers and, say, 300kph, before coming under tow by an aircraft large enough to harness those fusion power plants, then the airliners could save a great deal of money on fuel. The catch was building the dropship-sized aircraft inexpensively enough; each one couldn't cost more than 2-3 billion C-bills, and would need to carry at least a dozen airliners per trip to pay itself off.
The result was the (first generation, or prototype) Super Wing in 2962. After several weeks of test flights and docking operation tests, it was declared an aerodynamic and (potentially) an economic success. However, it had some...issues. The wing tip "flutter" on a 600-meter flying wing involved a 30-meter oscillation that made the outer third of each wing basically uninhabitable. The stress of part of the plane entering turbulence (or an air pocket) but not another was almost more than the frame could handle. The first Super Wing conducted the first landing after three weeks in the air and would never fly again. Indeed, the cracked frames and torn skin were so damaged that the whole thing was sold for scrap.
The second generation Super Wing was much more reinforced and included extensive anti-flex control surfaces (that aerodynamically damped structural "flutter") and memory metal-based reinforcements in the frame to "muscularly" damp structural movement. These features proved overkill; the problem the second generation would have would be in-flight maintenance and poorly thought-out interior layouts rather than cracking in meter-thick main spars. The second generation Super Wings were all out of service by 3007.
The third generation Super Wing is the modern form; incremental upgrades have occurred through the succeeding decades to minimize maintenance demands on the crew. It is flying wing with 1-kilometer wing span and belly docks for 20 airliners. When small fusion engines did become more common in the mid-31st Century, the trouble of supplying water, ammonia, or some other reaction mass to the jet liners kept the Super Wings in service. Larger "third generation" Super Wings would enter service in the 3040s to handle the Vast Ocean, where the lower number of daily flights each Super Wing could make made the smaller, 20-airliner Super Wings less economically feasible.
SUPER WING FEATURES
The Super Wing is powered by a dropship-sized fusion engine. It uses this differently than most BT aerospacecraft. Rather than using it to heat reaction mass, it powers fans - large, ducted fans. Electric fans. The Super Wing thus has no fuel requirements (the 1500 tons it carries are for visiting aircraft) and has a reasonable, if subsonic, speed, but its acceleration is low (it can accelerate by 0.2 thrust points per turn, taking 20 turns to reach its normal cruising speed). The Super Wing's turn radius is typically 100km at its cruising speed, though it can turn more sharply (this would just disturb the passengers). The Super Wing is not a spacecraft.
The fusion engine consists of 3 reactors, any two of which can maintain up to 5 MP per turn, or any one of which can maintain up to 3MP per turn. The multitudes of fans also include spares that can be taken out of service for repair either in their ducts (in which case the ducts are closed off for and aft to provide a pressurized working environment) or dismounted and moved on in-wing trolleys to the Super Wing's very complete machine shop. Most Super Wing electronic and mechanical systems can be built from scratch in those machine shops, but most repairs are made with stockpiles of spare parts. Fusion engine components generally require shipment from the ground. (One of the many commercial airfreight jets that dock with the Super Wing will deliver the components; delays for spare part delivery are rarely more than 12 hours.) As noted in the tour, the Super Wing's framework is redundant, allowing sections to be repaired in flight. A handful of systems (like the massive electromagnetic pistons that move the main control surfaces) can be repaired internally, but in unpressurized areas - depending on the length of the repair, this is either done on the half hour to hour the Super Wing is at low altitude picking up new visiting aircraft, or the work is performed in light spacesuits at cruising altitudes. Very few systems but the hull itself cannot be withdrawn into the Super Wing for repair. In the case of the hull, the Super Wing typically spends an extended period at 3 kilometers of altitude and a "mere" 250kph-300kph. Windbreaks are raised (from purpose-built slots in the hull) and workers perform the repairs in the shelter of the break.
Defensively...well, the Super Wing has no integral defenses. It's a civilian airliner. It certainly has the tonnage for weapons. It does have 6 fighter bays (well, underside fighter docks), but these typically hold 4 to 6 "Inter-Wing Shuttles" that make emergency ground visits or transfer people directly between Super Wings. Some actually do carry fighters. There are no escape pods or life boats in the dropship sense. The theory is that a Super Wing will either be able to land (see below) or will fail catastrophically if attacked. As a seaplane, the Super Wing does have ocean-going lifeboats (and seat cushion floatation devices) for after it lands.
Planes dock by being snagged by a triplet of steerable cables. The nose is snagged first, followed by the wing tips, then the plane is reeled in through the considerable boundary layer of the Super Wing. Near the Super Wing, a large mechanical arm grabs the mid-section of the of the planes and pulls it firmly into place. "Into place" is a more-or-less conformal alcove in the underside of the Super Wing where pressurized docking tunnels allow passengers to enter the Super Wing. Planes suitable for docking with the Super Wing typically have double tails rather than a single large rudder - the Super Wing's narrowest dimension is its height, and large jumbo jet tails could enter quite a ways through the thickness of the Super Wing towards its wingtips. Available docking space is another problem - while the Super Wing is big, it cannot fit jumbo jets internally. (The largest available spot in the center of the wing is occuppied by the engine room.) This limits the Super Wing to carrying about 2 dozen jumbo jets.
Landing and takeoff. In an ideal world, a Super Wing will takeoff once and land once in its operational lifetime. About 70% of all Super Wings achieve this goal, while the others land for more extensive maintenance, repairs, or upgrades than is possible in the air. Later versions are becoming more reliable. The Super Wing is a sea plane - this avoids the trouble of finding airstrips able to handle the behemoth. It has 5 fixed pontoons almost flush with its body. Each is nearly the size of a 21st Century oceanic frigate. During liftoff, the Super Wing uses air injection under its pontoons to help break free of the water. With a surprisingly low stall speed (110kph), getting airborne is rather easier than might be suspected. However, the roaring engines and clouds of water are always spectacular. Likewise, on landing, the Super Wing often must work to defeat the wing-in-ground effect, or it can coast on a cushion of air trapped under its wings for kilometers.
The interior of the Super Wing, free as it is from fuel tankage, has a lot of open space. Requirements for machinery and access ways make the rear half of the Super Wing non-accessible to visitors (imagine a gleaming, clean metallic-walled factory space), while the large center is occupied by the power plants. This leaves about a quarter of the volume for passengers, who must still compete with the fore-to-aft fan ducts for space.
The passenger space is up to 10 decks near the front of the wing, feature a promenade over a kilometer long. (Remember: the wing is angled, so the actual length for the promenade is longer than the wingspan.) The promenade is filled with stores and "open air" cafes; hotel rooms with balconies overlooking the promenade are also here. Styles differ from Super Wing to Super Wing, ranging from Airport Chic to Victorian Steampunk Gothic to Mass Consumerism Mega Mall. The smell of tourist traps are strong in the air.
Crew members tend to work 6 days on, 2 days off, or 3 weeks on, 1 week off. They have spartan (but roomy) quarters behind the passenger areas.
The available space on the Super Wings has not been overlooked by visitors with a lot of money. Many Super Wings sport permanent residents, sometimes approaching 1000. The tail of the Super Wings (which looks much like the Chippewa's) consists of two vertical rudders the size of skyscrapers (200 meters tall, 100 meters long, 10 meters thick) joined by a horizontal elevator plane 250 meters wide (100 meters long and up to 10 meters thick) provide a lot of unused space. The trend has been to make the leading edges windows like the leading edge of the main wing and install apartments and offices. The front third of the rudders and front 40% of the elevator are available for occupation, and the view is absolutely outstanding. "Real estate" prices are obscene and go a surprising distance toward paying for the Super Wing, but the demand among the Claybrooke wealthy for Super Wing apartments is high. There is a culture of "Super Wing dwellers" who prefer never to touch ground if they can help it; some are snobs, some are romantics, some are just weird.
There are various "gondolas" and wing-top observatories to thrill visitors and residents alike. These transparent structures allow the viewer to marvel at the vast expanse of the Super Wing and the ground below or sky above.
Many of the main and resident's promenade decks actually "float" separately of the hull of the Super Wing. The Super Wing does flex by some meters, and it would be unnerving for visitors to see people hundreds of meters down the promenade raised or dropped suddenly. Thus the promenades are broken up into sections and decks isolated from structural members.
The bridge is the last notable feature of the Super Wing. Some models just bury it in the interior and provide a "flying bridge" (pun intended) for landing and takeoff, while others install it as a 100-meter long transparent tear drop on the top of the Super Wing (see the XB-49 pictures, below).
The Super Wing's tiny predecessor:
www.edwards.af.mil/gallery/html_pgs/bomber5.html
www.edwards.af.mil/history/docs_html/aircraft/yb-49.html
A much slower, chunkier "Super Wing":
home.att.net/~dannysoar/BelGeddes.htm
For the top picture only:
www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-440/ch5-3.htm
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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Vapor
04/18/03 04:45 AM
202.128.69.204
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You have too much time on your hands, don't you? 
"For those about to rock, we salute you." - AC DC
"The evil that can come, from the heart of a man, must be answered in kind 'till it disappears, and we're safe." - Kansas
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Cray
04/18/03 05:31 AM
65.32.253.120
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Nope, nope. Very busy. I'd never write up a lengthy thing like this at work. Never.  It was all written on lunchbreaks and the weekend. Yes, that's it, that's the ticket...
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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Vapor
04/18/03 06:15 AM
202.128.69.204
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LOL
It sounds like you and Boeing need to put your heads together and make THIS bird fly. 
"For those about to rock, we salute you." - AC DC
"The evil that can come, from the heart of a man, must be answered in kind 'till it disappears, and we're safe." - Kansas
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