Eli5 why does the US still use a bomber from the 1950s when they have built two newer ones since then?
In: 7
Another view is that the B-52 was designed with an old-fashioned mentality of fly high, fly far, carry a lot, drop it on the enemy. Later designs like the B-58, B-70, B-1, and B-2 sacrificed a lot of that “carry a lot” and “carry it far” for the sake of “carry it really fast” or “carry it really, really fast” or “carry it invisibly” in the hopes of getting through enemy air defenses. Only it turns out sometimes the enemy’s air defenses are so good that just going fast or high is not a sufficient defense, so out go the B-58 and B-70. Also, sometimes the enemy air defenses are gone, so you don’t need all that special high-fast-invisible flying, you just want cheap carrying capacity.
Shifting to a metaphor, you might buy a race car to get to work faster, but if there’s traffic the race car’s capabilities are nullified. And what takes sixteen trips in the race car can be done quicker by one trip of the old pick up that won’t go over 60 without a tailwind and steep slope.
At the end of the day sometimes there are designs that are so good that they last a really long time. Someone might come up with something that’s better in certain circumstances, but in general use the old reliable is, well, the old reliable. John Browning’s 1922 .46 automatic pistol and his M-2 .50 caliber machine gun would be two examples. The M-16 has been the army’s rifle for longer than any other. People still race P-51 Mustangs. Your basic hammer has been for sale for hundreds of years even though there are specialty hammers that outperform it in particular situations. The sphygmomanometer that measures blood pressure has remained mostly unchanged for a surprisingly long time. The bicycle continues to evolve, but the basic design has been the same for many decades.
It would take a lot of money to develop a new “sky truck” like the B-52, and no one’s sure enough that we’re going to need one long enough to spend the money when we can just keep upgrading these. We keep thinking that soon there will be no need for bombers, and we keep being wrong.
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