sanity-checks dimensions
Here’s the F35 carrying a single AIM120 and GBU 31 per bay. It appears to be able to carry 3 AIM120s across with enough height to carry 3 AIM120s deep; lets not get carried away here, the need for ejector arms would make any attempt at fitting 9 AIM120s per bay impossible. But anyway it also has a similar length to the Raptor’s bays. Again we have small gaps on either side of the weapons and between them. Lets call the width and height 580mm, which is enough to fit the 458mm GBU31 and then some as depicted above. That gives us 1.3 cubic meters of space.
580mm=22.8 in wide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_seat
Seat width has varied over time. In 1985 none of the main four US carriers offered a seat less than 19 inches wide. Since the beginning of the 21st Century until 2018 average seat width decreased from 18.5 to 17 inches, and sometimes as low as 16.1 inches.
I’m not sure whether to be impressed or horrified that loading someone into an F-35 bomb bay is more luxurious for plus-sized passengers than a typical commercial airline seat.
*slaps roof*
This bad boy can fit so many fucking Saddams
In reverse, drop off terminators
Everybody knows hostage extraction is done with F-16s armed with 80s hair-rock on cassette.
As long as they’re fitted with standard mounting hardware, I don’t see an issue for use of the internal bays
As long as they’re fitted with standard mounting hardware,
If we can figure out how to slap together Warsaw Pact-to-NATO adaptive mounting hardware to stick HARMs and AIM-120s on Flankers, you gotta figure that NATO-to-human can’t be more difficult.
Talk about a wild ride.
I wonder if there would be a way to add an ODST style pod for infiltration missions. A 2 man team with gear weighs less than the bombs and would be a good way to drop and recover a fire-team of Delta or Seals.
Seals
You might need to get them there more-quickly, and the Navy has experimented with other options.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail
In 1959 the U.S. Navy submarine USS Barbero assisted the Post Office Department, predecessor to the United States Postal Service (USPS), in its search for faster mail transportation, with the only delivery of “Missile Mail”. On 8 June 1959, Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile – its nuclear warhead having earlier been replaced by two Post Office Department mail containers – targeted at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Naval Station Mayport in Florida. The Regulus cruise missile was launched with a pair of Aerojet-General 3KS-33,000 solid-rocket boosters. A turbojet engine sustained the long-range cruise flight after the boosters were dropped. Twenty-two minutes after launch, the missile struck its target.
At Mayport, the Regulus missile was opened and the mail forwarded to the post office in Jacksonville, Florida, for sorting and routing.
Back during the “War on Terror” era, when you had some defense contractors with no longer a Soviet Union but not yet a China and trying very hard to figure out some way that they could possibly sell their products when what the Department of Defense was mostly interested in was in dealing with random terrorists in a desert somewhere, I remember some torpedo manufacturer trying optimistically to sell a torpedo designed to deliver special operators to beaches.
They have to give you money to hide in the missile bay, it’s why you call them pay-load.
