Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider (LRS-B)

[Training_Dummy]

Crud, you could probably stick 32x AIM260s into a B-21's bomb bay. 2 missiles per face of the rotary launcher, and the rotary launcher is long enough to hold two of those twin-racks.

Only 8x AIM174s, though.

The beauty of the CCA conceptual structure is you can design a UAV around that anti air mission and offload the emissions bloom of that salvo to a platform(s) at an arbitrarily large distance.

 

[4decaa]

The best "missile truck" B-21 would be a B-21 carrying no missiles, with CCA's doing all the work and using the B-21 for CEC...(apologies if I'm beating a dead horse here)

Good point Dummy

Aim260s just seem so much less plausible than even Aim174s becuase I doubt they will even come close to the range of the 174, which means a whole lot less distance for an adversary fighter to cover while searching for whatever just launched a bunch of really smart missiles at his buddies.

 

[Josh_TN]

They are being built using production tooling. It would seem the minor instrumentation could me removed eventually, if necessary.

Perhaps they'll stay test airframes to work through future upgrades?

The four B-2 EMDs were brought to production standards. I’d be shocked if the B-21 EMDs were not eventually.

 

[FighterJock]

Same here Josh_TN, even though the B-21 will have a longer production run than the B-2 did. I expect that Northrop will do the same thing to the B-21. Throwing away such an expensive aircraft would be a bad mistake.

 

[NMaude]

I expect that Northrop will do the same thing to the B-21. Throwing away such an expensive aircraft would be a bad mistake.

The USAF had so few B-2As that it ended up getting NG to refurbish to operational standard AV-1 and put it into service.

 

[Josh_TN]

The USAF had so few B-2As that it ended up getting NG to refurbish to operational standard AV-1 and put it into service.

Possibly will be done for the B-21 prototype as well, since it was produced on production machinery and has full avionics. It probably will not be a heavy lift to make it production representative.

 

[Hydroman]

If the USAF buys 100+ B-21's, they will more than likely have maybe two to three vehicles for continued flight testing for upgrades and improvements over the life of the program. If you have noticed, even with now 19 B-2's, there is always one aircraft in "flight test", it seems they rotate the fleet to this position over time.

 

[Scott Kenny]

The beauty of the CCA conceptual structure is you can design a UAV around that anti air mission and offload the emissions bloom of that salvo to a platform(s) at an arbitrarily large distance.

Sure. Though I'd still stick a few AAM racks into the B-21 that is quarterbacking this show. Especially if the AIM260 is reasonably capable as an antiradar missile versus ground targets, since you can carry twice as many AIM260s as you can carry AARGM-ERs.