Random question here:
Anyone know of any designs for catamaran (i.e., two fuselages, connected somehow) aircraft? (There are plenty for caramaran aircraft carriers, alas, which make searching for the topic kind of annoying.)
But at some point in the design of airliners surely someone’s thought of going wide to increase capacity rather than just for longer and fatter cylinders, and catamaran designs seem like an obvious intermediate step on the path between wide-body and flying wing.
The first thing that comes to mind is the F-82 Twin Mustang, and the last is Stratolaunch’s Roc mothership. There are no intervening entries, unless you count twin-boom designs like the P-38 and (insert Burt Rutan design here)
Thanks.
I also found this not-quite-a-cat war-era German design:
The Blohm & Voss BV 141, which was weirdly functional for its asymmetry, offsetting the prop torque and giving the recon crew a better view. But the Focke-Wulf was already doing the job and didn’t look so weird, so they never built very many.
Hrm. I think this might support the existence of the Silver Cloud Simurgh, an airliner pushing its way past “Heavy” and “Super” into the realms of “Heckin’ Chonker”.
White Knight One is catamaran-ish - I’m not sure if the other fuselage is anything but structural.
Quite a few listed on the twin-fuselage aircraft page, if you haven’t searched for that specific term.
I thought about including this one, but one-and-a-half-maran wasn’t exactly what you asked for
You could keep going with more-and-more-marans honestly. If we take it to the logical extreme and really stretch the definition of ‘fuselage’, we have the NASA Helios prototype which has I think 5 fuselages spread across a ludicrously high aspect ratio wing
For those in the Empire who think aeronefs have been slept on
Serendipity is a strange beast. A few days after reading ‘Sky Chonker,’ I stumbled across a Wikipedia article about a 1929 concept aircraft by Norman Bel Geddes called ‘Aircraft Number 4.’ While it never got past the concept stage, the parallels between it and the Simurgh are uncanny.
It undoubtedly couldn’t have flown as fast as modern jetliners or imperial aeronefs, and was in fact intended to compete with transatlantic ocean liners and zeppelins. Its nine decks had space for luxuries such as deck games, an orchestra, a gymnasium, a solarium, a café, public and private dining rooms, two airplane hangars, and individual passenger cabins in the outer wings. It was designed to land and take off in water, like most transcontinental aircraft were before WWII drove countries to build runways large enough to handle very large aircraft near every location of importance. I suspect it didn’t have much cargo capacity beyond what would be needed to carry consumables for the trip and a few sacks of air mail, but haven’t looked deep enough to verify.
P.S., I really enjoy reading your work. You’re creating a fascinating universe here.
Thanks for posting that (and for your kind words) - I hadn’t seen that design before, and she’s a beautiful dream!
…the Imperials would have just loved Bel Geddes and his work.
As a side note, I found myself looking at one of the largest aircraft actually built in that era, the Dornier Do X, a twelve-engine biplane flying boat. This is its dining room, which really does show how standards have slipped these days:
