100%. I note you are an engineer and as such I’m sure you appreciate better than I do the link between the available technology at the time and the perfect solution. Perhaps this puts Barnes Wallis in context on reflection.
Quite true, given what was available back then, the bouncing bomb is an excellent solution. Of course these days, some sort of guided missile would do the job much better and probably be launched sufficiently far away as to avoid putting the launch aircraft in the direct line of fire.
Whittle’s early gas turbines are a good example. As well as being more robust, you can of course achieve a much higher pressure ratio from a single centrifugal stage than you can from an axial flow device and thus avoid the problems associated with multistaging or even going to multiple spools.
Of course sometimes you know what you would like to have but just dont have the ability to make it practicable. The Froude efficiency shows why its better to have a bypass turbofan than a pure turbojet for subsonic operations, but although that can be mathematically shown on half a page, making something that exhibits that and makes use of it is quite another thing. I dont know what the BPR on the Conway was but on the Spey it was only 0.64:1 compared to ~8:1 on something like an RB211!
Back to the matter in hand, does anyone have any thoughts on how easy it would have been to repair damaged sections of geodetic framework, compared to the repairs made on more conventional aerostructures?
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