I've no special knowledge of Skylon or military applications but I have read up on it quite a lot:
- The Skylon vehicle is optimised for a particular purpose - dropping stuff off in low earth orbit cheaply. If that has a military use then you have an answer. It's not a bomber.
- The payload can be attached to a kind of tug that pushes it into geostationary orbit then comes down and is retrieved by Skylon. The tug can be reused on some number of flights so the overall effort is still cheap.
- A civil airliner version of the engine technology has been studied (see Lapcat A2 - Reaction Engines Ltd - LAPCAT A2). I can imagine this being turned to some military purpose but it's very big (makes an A380 look like a midget) and probably very expensive. Having a 20,000 km range and being able to do that in under 5 hours with 300 passengers might be something in itself.
- The heat exchanger technology required by their SABRE and Scimitar engines has been described as too expensive for other than space applications. I would be surprised if this continued to be the case indefinitely and that might mean that ordinary jet engines could become more efficient via some adapted version of it. Presumably that would have military impact.
Last edited by t43562; 15th Jul 2013 at 08:03.