The aircraft was conventionally arranged with a rounded, shallow nosecone, single-seat cockpit with ejection seat, and tubular / oval airframe tapered at both ends. The mainplanes were straight appendages situated at midships with clipped tips and wide roots while being mid-mounted along the sides of the fuselage. The tail unit would feature a "V-type" ("butterfly") plane arrangement in which a pair of outward canted rudders would satisfy the actions of both elevator and rudder fin. The engines were to straddle the fuselage and be aspirated through semi-circle intakes at front and rounded exhaust ports at rear. An arrestor hook would be featured at the extreme end of the tail section.
As this aircraft was undercarriage-less by design, no true landing gear would be featured. The weight-savings could then be transferred to additional fuel stores, increased mission equipment, or general structural design enhancements to improve capabilities of the fighter. Conversely, the weight-saving could also make for a dimensionally smaller, lighter, and potentially faster aircraft.
Armament for the fighter centered on 2 x 30mm Aden automatic cannons buried in the fuselage - a common armament fixture to many British warplanes of the post-war period.
Power was to stem from a pair of Rolls-Royce AJ.65 turbojet engines delivering 6,500lb of thrust each unit. Gross weight was to reach 15,500lb on paper. Dimensions included a running length of 46.8 feet and a wingspan of 35 feet.
As drawn up, the Type 505 was estimated to have a maximum speed of 685 miles-per-hour through its general design and twin-engine layout though this would never be proven.
In any event, the Type 505 was simply not meant to be: trials of the "carpet deck" were still far off in the future and the fighter, therefore, had no future of its own without them. The work undertaken by Supermarine did, however, lead to the follow-up Type 508 prototype which actually did fly in 1951 (with undercarriage). This X-plane aircraft is detailed elsewhere on the Military Factory.
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