A layout drawing of the Chance Vought Corp. V-460, a VTOL cargo plane design from the mid 1960’s. It was unusual in having a tailless configuration similar to some designs put forth by German aircraft designers at the end of the second world war, but with a multitude of fans embedded within the wings. The fans were themselves driven by gas pressure produced by gas generators (read: “small turbojets”) located above the fuselage, and ducted through the wings. With this arrangement, the thrust lines of the engines roughly parallel the center of gravity of the loaded aircraft (when vectored down for vertical thrust). Thus all engines are used for both vertical and horizontal thrust, theoretically making a lighter weight, more efficient propulsion system… at the expense of added complexity in the hot-gas ducting.
A reverse-engineered “blueprint” based on an original provided by Mark Nankivil.
12 Responses to “Chance-Vought V-460: part 1”
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What an odd, yet attractive design.
It looks workable, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up for it having any great range given the number of engines, unless you shut around half of them down in horizontal flight.
The tail engine looks like it’s supposed to be a Pegasus.
Imagine the noise.
Jim
strikingly similar in top-down view to Rutan’s SpaceShip 1
Do you have it in your stuff?
> Do you have it in your stuff?
That’s, uh…. what?
I think he’s asking if it’s in one of the APR articles.
It actually does look a lot like SpaceShipOne in top view, doesn’t it?
I can’t quite figure out why they went with the fuselage top intake ducts rather than just stick them in the wing leading edges to cut down on internal duct drag, unless they wanted to get them as far away as possible from the dust and debris kicked up by landing in a unprepared site while dropping off troops or cargo.
The wingtip horizontal fins are odd also; I would have expected a high “T” tail, or sharply down-swept wingtip fins to box in the exhaust from the lift engines like the underbelly gun pods or fins of the Harrier do.
How many times has that idea been mooted, and how often has it flown? And how successfully?
It’s an ADAM concept; the fuselage top intakes are for the gas generators,
which gas-drive the wing mounted propulsion fans, which in turn produce lift/thrust by deflection of the wing flaps. The rear nozzles are for pitch trim.
The ADAM interpretation of the design makes more sense than it having separate jet engines in the wing, but the other ADAM designs: http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=561 had fairly small intakes for the internal gas generator compared to the big fuselage top duct on this thing.
In this article on the ADAM concept: http://www.aiaa.org/tc/vstol/unbuilt/ltv/index.html …it states: “A 75-ton military/civil transport was also thought possible.”
I assume this is that aircraft, as it looks like this: http://prototypes.free.fr/vtol/nouv1/vought_adam_05.jpg
…with an added tail Pegasus engine.
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