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Nothing like X-32, which I was also involved with as a St Louis team member. The problem there was that the airplane was just too heavy, and we'd stretched the engine to the limit, there just wasn't any more thrust to be gained for hovering. St Louis came up with a solution involving changes to the exhaust nozzle but Seattle had already decided on "lift thrust augmentors" which were additional little jet engines pointed down for use in hover only, so they rejected our suggestion and pretty much doomed the program because if the Marines weren't going to buy an airplane that needed 2 engines to hover, they certainly weren't going to buy one that needed half a dozen. Which is too bad., because on a lot of other evaluation criteria our design scored "competitive advantage" over Lockheed's, and if it had just been a CTOL competition we might well have won.

<blockquote data-quote="stever_sl" data-source="post: 730048" data-attributes="member: 5090"><p>Nothing like X-32, which I was also involved with as a St Louis team member. The problem there was that the airplane was just too heavy, and we'd stretched the engine to the limit, there just wasn't any more thrust to be gained for hovering. St Louis came up with a solution involving changes to the exhaust nozzle but Seattle had already decided on &quot;lift thrust augmentors&quot; which were additional little jet engines pointed down for use in hover only, so they rejected our suggestion and pretty much doomed the program because if the Marines weren't going to buy an airplane that needed 2 engines to hover, they certainly weren't going to buy one that needed half a dozen. Which is too bad., because on a lot of other evaluation criteria our design scored &quot;competitive advantage&quot; over Lockheed's, and if it had just been a CTOL competition we might well have won.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="stever_sl, post: 730048, member: 5090"] Nothing like X-32, which I was also involved with as a St Louis team member. The problem there was that the airplane was just too heavy, and we'd stretched the engine to the limit, there just wasn't any more thrust to be gained for hovering. St Louis came up with a solution involving changes to the exhaust nozzle but Seattle had already decided on "lift thrust augmentors" which were additional little jet engines pointed down for use in hover only, so they rejected our suggestion and pretty much doomed the program because if the Marines weren't going to buy an airplane that needed 2 engines to hover, they certainly weren't going to buy one that needed half a dozen. Which is too bad., because on a lot of other evaluation criteria our design scored "competitive advantage" over Lockheed's, and if it had just been a CTOL competition we might well have won. [/QUOTE]

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