I suspect that one is a bit of guess work as well given that the published max speed of the F-15 has been Mach 2.5 for decades and is probably a cliff rather than a point.

The M2.5 are for a clean aircraft with engines operating in a special mode.
When the author of that graph did his job well, which I think is a fair assumption (after all, I linked that graph), he compared to similar configurations.
With a typical missile arrangement the F-15 makes M1.8 (like the F-4).
The clean max Mach number is M2.3 (you get an additional 0.2 when using the Vmax button).

Not quite. Airbus officially plans A380-700, too. However, there has not been much recent airline interest.

The A380-700 is basically dead. If the B747-8I is canceled Airbus may think again about it, but currently I don’t see many airlines keen on that aircraft, and consequently Airbus will not pursue that variant. Remember the glamorous success of the B747SP, and especially its fugly appearance.

I’ve often wondered why they didn’t make the D-21 into a missile. Might not have carried a huge warhead but by then they’d brought the size down and guidance systems were getting better.

Why the headache? The system wasn’t ready before late 1960ies and in terms of capability it still was clearly beaten by an ICBM. ICBM require large installations, but an SR-71 is not exactly the item you can use from makeshift airfields.
And: a 3000km cruise missile needs target information, and in the end can only attack pre-identified targets. All the Russian fanboys forget that if you wanna hit a pre-defined target over such distance you could easily use an ICBM.

The more reliable concept is always to saturate the enemy and count on numbers and acceptable quality, and not the one do-it-all hickey. A force of 12 B-1B could take out all cities in Western Europe.

The thing about sustaining flight in the stratosphere with the F-22 is that you don’t need to fly straight and level. You can fly a swerving course with the nose pitched up, banking back and forth to sustain lift. The entire aircraft is a lifting surface. If the beast was simply going to fly straight lines and drop the rod of god from above they wouldn’t require so much experience out the pilots.

What exactly do you say?
At the required speeds the lift comes more or less exclusively from the wings.

I think a HAS was originally designed to withstand nuclear attacks on airfields.

The advantage of a HAS: it always looks the same, no matter if a 200 million USD F-22 or a 200 USD load of crap is packed inside. And it forces the opponent to put substantial resources into the attack.

My strategy would be to disperse the aircraft to not allow a cheap victory (dispersing also means switching between several airfields). Guam and Okinawa have some room to waste.
The expensive assets should always be parked outside the range of enemy attacks.

In the end: Pearl Habour was a tactical success, but the Japanese didn’t win anything from it strategically (the lost battleships were useless anyways, the number of sunken ships didn’t really have an impact on the USN warfighting ability, the port was usable the day after the attack). It might even be that Pearl Habour saved American lives.

In the case of the B-58 they planned (and tested) on dropping the bomb/pod from 60,000ft at Mach 2.

I said subsonic. The operational envelope of the B-58 is known and altitudes above 50k are limited to M1.4ish, and endurance is weak at those speeds.

Not according to actual F-104 pilots.

Nope, the F-104 might achieve those heights, but will not sustain it for long. A trick, not more, in a normal mission without any relevance. What should an F-104 do up there?

Not yet… 737s retired largely as a result of downsizing / route cutbacks, and replacement by RJ (CR7/Emb170) flying. UA have an RFI out for 150 new narrow bodies, but no decision as yet – and in any case, IIRC that RFI is largely around a 757 replacement

Andy

Which would either call for the A321 or the B737-900ER.