White Knight in patent form

 aircraft, drawings, spacecraft
Jun 272011
 

Patent drawings (design patent D612,791) for the Scaled Composites “White Knight carried aircraft, part of SpaceShipTwo.

       

 Posted by at 11:01 am

  5 Responses to “White Knight in patent form”

  1. Michael Holt says:
    June 27, 2011 at 11:07 am

    It looks like the wild stuff from the “1946” Luftwaffe secret projects fantasy world.

    Would it have been less expensive to lease a B-52?

    • admin says:
      June 27, 2011 at 1:04 pm

      > Would it have been less expensive to lease a B-52?

      Almost certainly *not.* If the intent was a “stunt,” maybe, but certainly not for an operational vehicle which would be intended to fly many, many times.

    • Pat Flannery says:
      June 27, 2011 at 7:50 pm

      There was actually a German design that looked a lot like the original White Knight, and I always wondered if Rutan was inspired by it:
      http://www.luft46.com/db/dbbomba.html
      WK 2 has a German ancestor also, that actually got built as a glider tug:
      http://www.aviastar.org/air/germany/he-111z.php
      It looked mighty strange, but pilots who flew it said it had surprisingly benign, if somewhat sluggish, handling characteristics.
      I applaud whoever figured out to avoid flutter on WK 2’s wing, particularly given the twin fuselages and what turning would be like in how they would flex the wing.

  2. gaetano marano says:
    June 27, 2011 at 3:01 pm

    .

    so, they’ve patented the airplane… 🙂

    the SS2 is TOO dangerous x.co/Jeb4

    .

  3. Michael Antoniewicz II says:
    June 28, 2011 at 12:39 pm

    Didn’t Aldrin and Barnes cover this *exact* design (including saying that it would be done by Burt Rutan) back in 1996’s ‘Encounter With Tiber’?!?

    Talk about “prior art”. 😉

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