By The Engineer
Power, the main reason for weaponry inventions today, and the
greed for power has nations and governments spending huge amounts of their
capital in order to have better weapons than others and so invest even in the craziest
of ideas, often leading to absurd weapons that are disappointing and are
never developed.
The Unites States decided to blow up the moon in order to
enhance the public morale after the Soviet Union’s
early lead in the space race. The project was called 119-A, however it was
never carried out as they realized that having a man on the moon is far better
than to try annihilate it.
6. Iceberg Aircraft Carrier
In the World War II the British developed a plan, Project
Habakkuk, to build an aircraft out of a mixture of wood pulp and ice (pykrete).
The idea was dropped as they realized that was a huge waste of time and
resource.
5. The Flying Dorito
The Flying Dorito, also known as A-12 Avenger II was an
all-weather, carrier-based stealth bomber replacement for the Grumman A-6
Intruder in the United States Navy and Marine Corps. However due to the
troubled cost for the overruns, the project was dropped in 1991 after wasting
more than 5 billion dollars.
4. Soviet Doomsday Device
Former high-ranking members of the Soviet military and the
Central Committee of the Communist Party in a series of interviews to the
American defense contractor BDM admitted the existence of the Dead Hand in the
early 1990s. Although there were contradictory statements concerning its
deployment but for all we know it is possibly still a fully operational
nuclear- control system that can automatically trigger the launch of the
Russian Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) if a nuclear strike is
detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors, creating a
fail-deadly deterrence.
3. The Un-landable Plane
The US
government wanted fighters on all their ships instead of having an aircraft
take off only from carriers. The XFV Salmon plane was made with landing gear on
its tail. But since the pilots couldn’t land backwards on the ship and that the
jet was much slower than other contemporary fighters and was far too
complicated to fly, the idea of having fighter jets on every ship was dropped.
2. Intruder from the Future
Imagine a bomber, designed to carry atomic bombs that can
fly at an altitude of 15 miles and three times the speed of sound. The B-70
Valkyrie was supposed to be the aviation dream from the future, but while it
was developed, the improvements of high-altitude surface-to-air missiles, the
change to low-level penetration bombing, the program’s high development costs,
and the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBMs) led to the
cancellation of the B-70 program in 1961. Two prototypes were eventually used;
one of them crashed following a midair collision in 1966.
1. The Thunder screech
An experimental turboprop aircraft, the XF-84H was powered
by a a turbine engine that was mated to a supersonic propeller. But due to the
noise that the aircraft caused from its engines which could be heard 25 miles
away while starting up and caused severe nausea and blowing out eardrums to the
ground crew, led to its cancellation.
Source : http://wonderfulengineering.com
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