Eli5 why does the US still use a bomber from the 1950s when they have built two newer ones since then?
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The B-52 is not supersonic, so once you decide that you have a need for a heavy dump-load that doesn’t need to outrun enemy fighters, then…you have achieved air-superiority.
Once you are not afraid of enemy fighters and SAM’s, why send six medium bombers instead of three heavy bombers? So you have decided you need a heavy bomber that can carry a shit-ton of ordnance. If you were designing a brand new bomber from the ground-up, what would you change?
It needs to take off and land on the hundreds of existing strategic runways. It needs to fit inside the hundreds of existing Air Force hangars. These two facts pretty much limit you to a max size of the B-52. So, the new bomber will be the same size.
There are hundreds of various existing weapons pallets that fit into the B-52 bomb-bay, so the bomb-bay of the new bomber will need to accept these existing weapons modules.
Boeing is known for having a large vertical stabilizer. A smaller one would have less drag, but bombers need to have exceptional stability for bombing runs when using the more-affordable unguided bombs. The new bomber will have a large single vertical stabilizer.
Aerial refueling: In Desert Storm, B-52’s flew 35-hour round trip missions from the continental US to Iraq.
The extra-large bomb-bay forces the designers to have a high-wing, which also has the benefit of shortening the landing gear, once it is now forced to be located on the fuselage (like the C-17).
Private airliners have gone to two large engines, instead of three or four smaller engines. This has reduced life-cycle engine costs for maintenance and repair. The B-52 has four twin-engine pods for a total of eight jet engines. A move to larger engines “could” allow the air Force to use four or six engines instead of the current 8.
Other than that, a “new” heavy bomber would probably end up looking a lot like a B-52.
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