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
