Cleaning & restoration process undwerway.
Colonial-Marine said:I loathe Wikipedia but I recently read on their YF-23 page that PAV-2 was grabbed by Northrop by 2004 and used to make a mock up of their interim bomber (FB-23?) proposal.
Is this true and if so have any photos of the resulting mockup been shown?
Colonial-Marine said:Is this true and if so have any photos of the resulting mockup been shown?
supacruze said:Orion: could you please post a larger res image of those YF-23 cross sections...
quellish said:The YF-23 had been on loan to the Western Museam of Flight, the museam was moving and NG took the opportunity to take back the YF-23 and restore it for display in a more secure location - that is what two NG El Segundo employees have told me.
I'm in on this. Allways loved that plane.Orionblamblam said:supacruze said:Orion: could you please post a larger res image of those YF-23 cross sections...
Tomorrow I'll put the 16"X24" F-23A blueprint on eBay. Hopefully the proceeds from that will be enough to fund going forward with similar prints of the YF-23.
UPDATE: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250595015775
SOC said:What we REALLY need is for someone to get off their butts and release an image of Northrop's NATF configuration!
That's a new for me. :note complicated faceted pattern of instrument panel's shroud
SOC said:Well I certainly gave him enough photos for it to be well illustrated ;D
can you show the crop of this document where it's written?supacruze said:Ok, fair enough.
Guys I have a theory: you know I said that PAV-1 was capable of carrying 3 AIM-120 and 2 AIM-9
supacruze said:well I have a hunch that PAV-1 was ONLY rigged to carry ONE AIM-120 and that's all. Based on what Ive read in the pilot's manual, Northrop docs, and Jay Miller's Aerofax on the F-22 (in which he asserts that PAV-1 actually carried an instrumented AIM-120 captive inert round for acoustic tests) I think that it never carried anything other than one AIM-120
supacruze said:If you look carefully at the PAV-2 bay pics of Tony Chong, you'll see that the V swing arms are quite light gauge (there doesnt even seem to be a hydraulic actuator for the arms), so I'm thinking that PAV-1's bay was the same except for the colour
I second that request.Perhaps I missed it in this thread, but has there been a confirmation of the YF-23's empty weight? I've seen anywhere from 29,000lbs to 37,000lbs.
That actually makes complete sence. It fits in with the airforce complain of single point failure affecting the launcher. While the prototype would cary only 5 missiles this way, it it possible to add 1-2 more AMRAAM due to the shorter wing span and with 3 AIM-9X at the front bay for a total of 9-10 missiles.Ok, here is the stuff: the Northrop dwg annotation, and a small teaser of my idea for the weapons bay to let you you know I have not forgotten. It's gonna take a little more time before I upload the hirez version, but you'll understand why when I do. But even with this image, you can make out where I'm headed and probably work out the rest.
supacruze said:I think the key really lies in careful study of the factory dwgs, which we can do now thanks to the generosity of people contributing to this thread... you can all see there is a big diff between the PAVs and the EMD, particularly with alteration on useable fuselage volume. I am convinced that Northrop never intended the PAVs to be a viable ATF as such, they were simply conceptual demonstrators.... they put all the effort into the EMD variant which quite clearly has enough volume to fit the ATF requirement in regards to weapons carriage. I think trying to work out how many missiles could fit into the the bay of a PAV from a weapons platform point of view is a waste of time, because it was not Northrop's intention to develop the PAV config. The EMD is really a totally new design from a clean sheet of paper. It shares very little in terms of fuselage cross sections, the structure is totally diff.... only the wing is the same. They just wanted to test acoustics on the PAVs, thats what I suspect, so I think ultimately they may have just made a rudimentary launcher to hold just one missile and thats all. But we wont know until someone at Northrop or the Nat AF Mus at Ohio is generous enough to give us some shots of PAV-1's bay..... hint.......hint........
Cant help with the weight figure... just yet...
supacruze said:Very true, but my comments were based on debate in the past about the viability of the YF-23 PAVs as actual ATFs, given that at the time we did not have access to the EMD dwgs, or even the PAV dwgs... people were trying to figure out how to fit all the required missiles into the YF-23 bay, without realising that the bay was not representative of the EMD config. Now that these dwgs are available, the situation is alot clearer. We can all see where Northrop's effort went and how they would have done it. I would contend that even though it's obvious the design process continues constantly until the money stops, I think that in hindsight, the YF-22 was much closer to EMD even allowing for the obvious evolution that occurred. The bay config remained essentially the same.