Originally Posted by
unmanned_droid
You can see, through the development of the various manufacturers designs a norming of features and sizes. Capabilities and a lot of equipment being set by the Air Ministry.
On a point of order - the Air Ministry ceased to exist in 1964, well before many of the projects you refer to were defined.
There were also a few privately funded projects with some of the most interesting coming out of Kingston (SABA and X-wing/twin Boom PCB VTOL).
Well I'm not going to disagree with that - it was one of our sadder days when we anbandonned the P.1216 three-nozzle supersonic ASTOVL family at the behest of the septics. A friend of mine (Dr Mike Pryce) wrote quite a good (if a bit short)
after completing his PhD research on the histoiry of VSTOL projects, and there were still vestiges of it kicking around the front office block and experimental hangar at Kingston when it closed in the early 90s.
I've also felt it ironic that SABA (P1233/n) was formally abandonned in mid 1990 with the announcement that "as the likelyhood of any significant tank warfare is very low for the forseeable future there is no requirement for such a dedicated anti-armor platform". It was only a matter of months after that that the Army found itself in the middle of the biggest tank war isnce el alamein (and again ten years after that).
SABA would never have been available for GW1, but it would have been an extremely useful platform had it been available for GW2. It would also have been one heck of a fun aeroplane - the size and weigh of a sea fury but with over double the power delivered via an large unducted fan for low-speed brute grunt and a long straight wing with nine pylons, right on the CG.
In fact that canard-pusher config for a dedicated CAS/anti-armor aeroplane wasn't as novel as some had suggested, because it's pretty similar to the Boulton-Paul P.100 proposal for precisely this role in 1942!
PDR