the green flame

a reply to: mbkennel

The SR-71 didn't fly subsonic from take off to the mission area, neither does this aircraft.

a reply to: mbkennel
maybe a meteorite but I don't think so, I've seen plenty of them and this was different




In my area it's worth keeping an eye to the sky. This was earlier today:

Is it an ISR platform and a fairly recent one?

The sighting seem to be fairly recent if you take this thread as a measure? So post Gw2? Perhaps designed to fly over say Pakistan or other countries with more sophisticated air defence.

Wonder if it's been watching what Russia is doing on Ukraine border or to see if Iran is keeping its promise on the nuclear deal?

Or is it a deep strike platform, are there more than one?

How come no one saw this thing being built and moved like oxcart?

a reply to: Forensick

They're way beyond moving them by truck like they did Oxcart. It would be easy to build it, launch with no notice, and recover at their new home station in the middle of the night.

a reply to: Bedlam

your right I want to go home....re-think my life.

wanders out of cantina in trance.

a reply to: Zaphod58

C-130 and if i were to have unlimited funds i would build my self a cargo double wide sub long enough to have its own runway when above the water land what ever you sent out take the wings off and submerge in a matter of mins.

a reply to: penroc3

Hell, if they wanted to, they could disassemble it, put it on one of the C-5Cs that went under upgrades at Skunk Works, fly it out to its home, and reassemble it there. No one would be the wiser.

a reply to: Zaphod58

true, but i want my submersible aircraft carrier*stomps foot*


i wonder if you had ohhh i dont know a stealth troop carrier if you could take out all the stuff you need for personal out of said craft and loaded your green lady in one or two if needed

a reply to: penroc3

The only thing big enough to move it would be a C-17 or C-5, and the C-17 couldn't carry all of it.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: Forensick

They're way beyond moving them by truck like they did Oxcart. It would be easy to build it, launch with no notice, and recover at their new home station in the middle of the night.

Their new home station or its......

Damn I want to see this thing!

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: penroc3

Hell, if they wanted to, they could disassemble it, put it on one of the C-5Cs that went under upgrades at Skunk Works, fly it out to its home, and reassemble it there. No one would be the wiser.

And does that mean then it is a Lockheed plane or are you just giving an example?

So how does Groom Lake (or whichever airbase) work, do people like Lockheed or Boeing or whoever get access and have personnel on site to maintain them and what if your Boeing team were there with one of theirs and the Lockheed one was there etc? maybe i need to ask this is the other forum.

a reply to: Forensick

No, just an example. Build it at Palmdale, have a C-5 there undergoing PDM or updates, and when it leaves, the Air Force puts it on the ramp, it gets loaded up, flies out and you have your project moved. Or the project gets covered up, moved over to the Lockheed hangar and loaded while it's inside still, and same result.

They all have personnel out at Groom working on different projects in different buildings.

a reply to: Forensick
Me too I would like to see it my dream child would become true. Do you think the people working with the green know the real chance they have ??

a reply to: darksidius

it would seem to me, that is is flying missions already or at the very least expanded testing as people have seen it. so my guess would be when you part of THIS project you know whats up. with exotic fuel comes exotic loading crews and fuel trucks and crew chiefs and pilots and radar operators and etc etc....


the fact ANYONE has seen it mean that (to me) it past its first stages of development, and sadly i bet there are Russian and Chinese defense guys that know ALLOT more about this then we will.

i wonder if it got to go over Ukraine and Russia recently with all the talk about moving nuclear assets around.

originally posted by: penroc3
a reply to: Zaphod58

true, but i want my submersible aircraft carrier*stomps foot*


i wonder if you had ohhh i dont know a stealth troop carrier if you could take out all the stuff you need for personal out of said craft and loaded your green lady in one or two if needed

If i recall that was a weapon in ace combat 4. a huge submersible submarine able to launch fighters off of it like a carrier.

Watched a program last night on YouTube about future weapons but I didn't see the date, although the program claimed to be new 2015 it didn't seem so.

Anyway they were interviewing DARPA team who were saying they get things into battle quickly and one thing they were missing (at some point) was this Mach 6 asset and then they went to Skunk Works, there was a mock up, looked like the scramjet test vehicle, wedge shaped.

Had a project name, I'll dig it out later, but sure it said it was a scramjet based vehicle and these vehicles definitely had an urgent need.

a reply to: Forensick

Scramjet is about the only way to get speeds like that.

a reply to: Zaphod58

And I was under the impression that the working scramjet was still the aeronautical equivalent of Tokamak fusion, i.e. something that the best minds have been "on the cusp of making it work" for decades.

Which would explain your hints that the green lady is to the blackbird what a supercharged, nitrous-injected drag car is to a '69 Chevelle. A careful application of assorted exotic technological tweaks to help push an otherwise more or less proven design to the ragged edge of its potential performance envelope. In this case, using boron fuels to push a J58-powered airframe (kingfish 2.0?) above 90,000 feet and Mach 3.5.

It would also explain your hint about the other asset that added a rocket-boosted suborbital hop to an SR-71esque flight envelope. That's another conveniently low-risk workaround to the "how do we get scramjet performance without the engine" question.

But that would all assume my hunch that scramjets have proven difficult to make work in either the white or the black world before the advent of 21st-century cfd software and manufacturing technologies.

a reply to: Barnalby

What seems to be the difficult part of the scram-jet tech is durability. However, if you don't care about that, and have unlimited funds to replace/rebuild each time (or after a limited use), then the tech could be considered "operational".

a reply to: Krakatoa

Which is why the Indians have made it work for missiles (and why we've been having promising Tokamak test shots for decades now). But making it "work" for a 5-minute burn before it plunges into a bunker or an aircraft carrier a-la the BrahMos is a completely different animal from making something that can handle even the 30 minutes to an hour of sustained operation that any aircraft would need.