The Military and Veterans' Room
About the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber
This plane is going to be a serious beast. They are using open architecture so it can be reconfigured for different missions. It should be able to penetrate Russian and Chinese air defenses if needs to delivery their payload undetected. Or in another role be used as an electronic warfare platform to prep the battle field for the attack forces.
Key point: The B-2 is already a powerful and sneaky bomber armed with nuclear weapons. But the B-21 promises to be even stealthier and with new technologies that will make it the ideal weapons system to carry out a strategic attack.
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A tailless, batlike aircraft, the official rendering of the B-21 Raider released by the Air Force bears a superficial resemblance to the B-2 Spirit bomber. There are important distinctions, however.
The B-21 moves its engines closer to the wing root, where they occupy the juncture between wing and fuselage, whereas the B-2’s twin pairs of General Electric F118-GE-100 engines are distinctly apart from the fuselage on the wing. The Raider’s engine air intakes are angled and not serrated like those on the B-2 Spirit. The Raider also has overwing exhausts to mask the infrared signature of the four engines, unlike the B-2.
(Interestingly, this is exactly how the B-2’s exhausts were depicted in an April 1988 artist’s conception of that bomber.)
The aircraft appears similar in size to the B-2 Spirit, almost certainly making it a four-engine bomber. The announcement of Pratt and Whitney in 2016 as a B-21 subcontractor narrows down the new bomber’s engines to two designs: the F-100 and the F-135. The mature F-100, which powers the F-15 Eagle series of fighters, seems a sound choice, but the Air Force may want the F-135, which powers the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for its growth potential and ability to lower engine costs for the F-35 fleet.
Like its predecessor, the B-21 Raider will be a heavy strategic bomber designed to carry both nuclear and conventional weapons. If the B-2 is of similar size, it follows it will carry a similar amount of ordinance. This means two bomb bays. In order to keep costs down, the Air Force may elect to reuse the Advanced Applications Rotary Launcher from the B-2 bomber. The AARL is fitted one per bomb bay, each capable of carrying eight bombs or missiles.
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
