Another pie-in-the-sky Q for you guys:
Concorde carried 100 fare-paying pax.
Hence, If you were looking to redesign Concorde today, to be more cost effective, you would I assume look to increase passenger loads?
Would this purely be a case of sticking everything in the photocopier and hitting the 'enlarge 150%' button? or could you have got away with expanding the cabin width or lengthwise without totally ruining the performance envelope? (a total redesign of the structure notwithstanding)
and which way would you expand? cabin width or length? or both?
Also, I assume a lot of the heavy analogue avionics kit would be replaced with lighter, microprocessor-controlled kit, giving more space and weight for fuel?
The Olympus engines replaced with more efficient ones given the march of technology?
So basically, if the British & French governments had another brain-fart and decided in 2011 to build Concorde2, what would you keep? what would you junk? and what realistically would we end up with in terms of pax numbers, performance, range, etc?
(you have an unlimited budget but need to make the thing a better economic prospect than if just presented with a fleet of de-mothballed Concordes).
Cheers,
Mike.