We should make drones and fighters and planes with every combination of engines we have access to. Single and twin engine variations and also planes with 3 and 4 engines. Imagine we make a bomber with 4 MMU engines, and Mach 3 business jets that can take our MOFA to the farthest countries in a...
You are missing a major difference between turbojet and turboshaft. Turboshaft is not meant to generate thrust therefore the exhaust gas is less energetic.
You don't want to deal with too many innovations at a time. Re-usability is about cost reduction which is only a secondary goal for us. Once we pull off the main goal of acquiring the basic capability we can always go for re-usability going forward. This way we can progress without snags.
You can only test with what you have access to. The engines will do the job for when the plane is not fully loaded. Like without the weapons load and the full fuel load. Near the dry weight of the plane which is usually around half the take off weight.
5x7m is a round number. This sheet of...
There must be engineers somewhere that can come up with good solutions to all the problems that will be thrown at them. You can probably make additions to the sides of the ship to accommodate the machinery that will operate the cable. Or maybe you can place mobile attachments on the deck that...
We won't stop making it because it is hard to make.
We don't need to keep many fighter planes on the ship. Even 4 planes can give the punch we need for most operations we can hope to make from this ship. And we will most likely have the second one, we can operate them together if need be.
We can do even better. We can fit our existing LHDs to operate light aircraft from.
Full size Aircraft Carriers should be made for our full size aircraft the MMU(TFX).