Bomber: Flop or Not

tyrodtom said:

When it comes to espionage you're never sure what your enemy can and cannot do.

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The problem is that eventually it reaches complete paranoia where you become completely unable to assess a threat and end up reacting when you shouldn't, doing nothing when you should, over-reacting, under-reacting and so on.

People that I was around seem to think the Soviets were supermen when it come to getting to our innermost secrets.

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They were highly effective...

Zipper730 said:

So it could have been both a plan to discredit them, and also a way to justify a political goal?

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Probably, and I guess the military would become tired of the public trying to uncover "secrets"...

Graeme said:

Probably, and I guess the military would become tired of the public trying to uncover "secrets"

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However, the nuclear powered bomber likely would not have survived had it not been for that article.

If anybody's got any answers on the above, I'd love to hear it but, otherwise, to get back onto topic.

I'd say the A3J/A-5 was an interesting flop in the role it was designed for because of the following

• It might very well have been able to meet all of it's speed requirements
• It was able to get on and off a carrier deck (however hard that was)
• It had advanced features

That being said the major problems it had seemed to be the bomb-train: While the design was otherwise quite impressive, the bomb-train seemed to be a train-wreck. From what I remember

• It didn't necessarily clear the aircraft which would be a major problem
• It allegedly came out once on the ground, and assuming that wasn't the only time, I could imagine that even if it didn't kill anybody, it'd make your heart skip a beat!
• The after body was grossly altered after the bomb-train was released and I'm not sure how that would effect drag

My guess is that the bomb-train was to eliminate the need for a post-target turn and possibly to improve ballistics.