Originally Posted by
Mike6567
I always understood the original design included built in front boarding stairs? Resulting in nosewheel retraction sideways.
Lots of types have forward airstairs without needing a sideways-retracting nosewheel.
The extra space on the Trident that a conventional forward-retracting nose gear would have required was instead used for an avionics bay containing all the Autoland kit - some of it (the triplicated VRUs, for example) being pretty humungous, as I recall.