Another dumb question: what would make a ski jump/ramp (a longer gentler one) not work for a larger aircraft e.g. length of an a380 roughly?
I admit it's straying offtopic but there is a reason for asking. I'm thinking of a huge vehicle which needs a 5.5km long, reinforced runway to take off and I'm wondering if e.g. a jump of some kind might make that runway 1/5 less expensive to build (assuming the jump itself wasn't inordinately expensive to build). The normal takeoff speed would be m0.5. My very dodgy arithmetic says the thrust/weight ratio would be about 0.26 at sea level.
I imagine there are other considerations like extra space for aborting or whatever that might make it all pointless but I'm interested most in just whether it's ridiculous (of course it is) and roughly why.