"Beijing's engineers have reportedly designed a hypersonic aircraft carrier-essentially a large, super fast drone mothership that can deploy several more drones. It uses an variable oblique wing, a historic, experimental design that has one single wing that rotates depending on the aircraft's speed rather than fixed classical symmetrical wings in traditional planes. To laymen used to regular aircraft it may look bananas,"
"Hypersonic flight is the key for the war of the future. While many intercontinental ballistic missiles fly at more than five times the speed of sound-the definition of hypersonic flight-they follow a predictable ballistic curve trajectory that make them easy to intercept for anti-air weapons like the Patriot batteries. But vehicles like this hypersonic craft will fly in unpredictable manners, like a regular airplane."
China's engineers have designed a hypersonic aircraft carrier, a large, high-speed drone mothership that can deploy multiple drones. The design employs a variable oblique wing that rotates with speed instead of fixed symmetrical wings. The variable-oblique-wing concept originated with Nazi engineers and was pursued by the U.S. in the mid-20th century. Hypersonic flight combines extreme speed with airplane-like maneuverability, making interception by systems tuned to ballistic trajectories difficult. China already built the subsonic Jiu Tian mothership capable of deploying a hundred combat drones. A hypersonic variant could penetrate U.S. defenses and launch drone swarms to strike infrastructure early in a conflict.
Read at Fast Company
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