10 World Famous Maps

1. Cartography's Foundation: Ptolemy's Geography (150 AD)

Humans have been sketching maps for millennia, but Claudius Ptolemy was the first to use math and geometry to develop a manual for how to map the planet using a rectangle and intersecting lines—one that resurfaced in 13th-century Byzantium and was used until the early 17th century. The Alexandria-based Greek scholar, who may never have drawn a map himself, described the latitude and longitude of more than 8,000 locations in Europe, Asia, and Africa, projecting a north-oriented, Mediterranean-focused world that was missing the Americas, Australasia, southern Africa (you can see Africa skirting the bottom of the map and then blending into Asia), the Far East, the Pacific Ocean, and most of the Atlantic Ocean. Ptolemy's Geography was a "book with a 1,500-year legacy," Brotton says.

2. Cultural Exchange: Al-Idrisi's World Map (1154)

Al-Sharif al-Idrisi, a Muslim from Al-Andalus, traveled to Sicily to work for the Norman King Roger II, producing an Arabic-language geography guide that drew on Jewish, Greek, Christian, and Islamic traditions and contained two world maps: the small, circular one above, and 70 regional maps that could be stitched together. Unlike east-oriented Christian world maps at the time, al-Idrisi's map puts south at top in the tradition of Muslim mapmakers, who considered Mecca due south (Africa is the crescent-shaped landmass at top, and the Arabian Peninsula is in the center). Unlike Ptolemy, al-Idrisi depicted a circumnavigable Africa—blue sea surrounds the globe. Ultimately, the map is concerned with representing physical geography and blending traditions—not mathematics or religion. "There are no monsters on his maps," Brotton says.

3. Christian Faith: Hereford's Mappa Mundi (1300)

This map from England's Hereford Cathedral depicts "what the world looked like to medieval Christians," Brotton says. The organizing principle in the east-oriented map is time, not space, and specifically biblical time; with Christ looming over the globe, the viewer travels spiritually from the Garden of Eden at top down to the Pillars of Hercules near the Strait of Gibralter at bottom (for a more detailed tour, check out this handy guide to the map's landmarks). At the center is Jerusalem, marked with a crucifix, and to the right is Africa, whose coast is dotted with grotesque monsters in the margins. "Once you get to the edges of what you know, those are dangerous places," Brotton explains.

4. Imperial Politics: Kwon Kun's Kangnido Map (1402)

What's most striking about this Korean map, designed by a team of royal astronomers led by Kwon Kun, is that north is at top. "It's strange because the first map that looks recognizable to us as a Western map is a map from Korea in 1402," Brotton notes. He chalks this up to power politics in the region at the time. "In South Asian and Chinese imperial ideology, you look up northwards in respect to the emperor, and the emperor looks south to his subjects," Brotton explains. Europe is a "tiny, barbaric speck" in the upper left, with a circumnavigable Africa below (it's unclear whether the dark shading in the middle of Africa represents a lake or a desert). The Arabian Peninsula is to Africa's right, and India is barely visible. China is the gigantic blob at the center of the map, with Korea, looking disproportionately large, to its right and the island of Japan in the bottom right.

5. Territorial Exploration: Waldseemuller's Universalis Cosmographia (1507)

This work by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller is considered the most expensive map in the world because, as Brotton notes, it is "America's birth certificate"—a distinction that prompted the Library of Congress to buy it from a German prince for $10 million. It is the first map to recognize the Pacific Ocean and the separate continent of "America," which Waldseemuller named in honor of the then-still-living Amerigo Vespucci, who identified the Americas as a distinct landmass (Vespucci and Ptolemy appear at the top of the map). The map consists of 12 woodcuts and incorporates many of the latest discoveries by European explorers (you get the sense that the woodcutter was asked at the last minute to make room for the Cape of Good Hope). "This is the moment when the world goes bang, and all these discoveries are made over a short period of time," Brotton says.

6. Politicized Geography: Ribeiro's World Map (1529)

The Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro composed this map amid a bitter dispute between Spain and Portugal over the Moluccas, an island chain in present-day Indonesia and hub for the spice trade (in 1494, the two countries had signed a treaty dividing the world's newly discovered lands in two). After Ferdinand Magellan's expedition circumnavigated the globe for the first time in 1522, Ribeiro, working for the Spanish crown, placed the "Spice Islands," inaccurately, just inside the Spanish half of his seemingly scientific world maps. Ribeiro may have known that the islands (which appear on the far-left and far-right sides of the map) actually belonged to Portugal, but he also knew who paid the bills. "This is the first great example of politics manipulating geography," Brotton says.

7. Territorial Navigation: Mercator's World Map (1569)

Next to Ptolemy, Brotton says, Gerardus Mercator is the most influential figure in the history of mapmaking. The Flemish-German cartographer tried "on a flat piece of paper to mimic the curvature of the earth’s surface," permitting "him to draw a straight line from, say, Lisbon to the West Coast of the States and maintain an active line of bearing." Mercator, who was imprisoned by Catholic authorities for alleged Lutheran heresy, designed his map for European navigators. But Brotton thinks it had a higher purpose as well. "I think it’s a map about stoicism and transcendence," he says. "If you look at the world from several thousands miles up, at all these conflicts in religious and political life, you’re like ants running around." Mercator has been accused of Eurocentrism, since his projection, which is still occasionally used today, increasingly distorts territory as you go further north and south from the equator. Brotton dismisses this view, arguing that Europe isn't even at the center of the map.

8. Commercial Cartography: Blaeu's Atlas maior (1662)

Working for the Dutch East India Company, Joan Blaeu produced a vast atlas with hundreds of baroque maps gracing thousands of pages. "He's the last of a tradition: the single, brilliant, magician-like mapmaker who says, 'I can magically show you the entire world,'" Brotton says. "By the late 17th century, with joint stock companies mapping every corner of the world, anonymous teams of people are crunching data and producing maps." Blaeu's market-oriented maps weren't cutting-edge. But he did break with a mapmaking tradition dating back to Ptolemy of placing the earth at the center of the universe. At the top of the map, the sun is at the center of personifications of the five known planets at the time—in a nod to Copernicus's theory of the cosmos, even as the earth, divided into two hemispheres, remains at the center of the map, in deference to Ptolemy (Ptolemy is in the upper left, and Copernicus in the upper right). "Blau quietly, cautiously says I think Copernicus is probably right," Brotton says.

9. National Mapping: Cassini's Map of France (1744)

Beginning under Louis XIV, four generations of the Cassini family presided over the first attempt to survey and map every meter of a country. The Cassinis used the science of triangulation to create this nearly 200-sheet topographic map, which French revolutionaries nationalized in the late 18th century. This, Brotton says, "is the birth of what we understand as modern nation-state mapping ... whereas, before, mapmaking was in private hands. Now, in the Google era, mapmaking is again going into private hands."

10. Geopolitics: Mackinder's 'Geographical Pivot of History' (1904)

Don't let the modesty of this "little line drawing" fool you, Brotton says: It "basically created the whole notion that politics is driven to some extent by geographic issues." The English geographer and imperialist Halford Mackinder included the drawing in a paper arguing that Russia and Central Asia constituted "the pivot of the world's politics." Brotton believes this idea—that control of certain pivotal regions can translate into international hegemony—has influenced figures ranging from the Nazis to George Orwell to Henry Kissinger.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com

All About Bitcoin

To cut through some of the confusion surrounding bitcoin, we need to separate it into two components. On the one hand, you have bitcoin-the-token, a snippet of code that represents ownership of a digital concept – sort of like a virtual IOU. On the other hand, you have bitcoin-the-protocol, a distributed network that maintains a ledger of balances of bitcoin-the-token. Both are referred to as "bitcoin."

The system enables payments to be sent between users without passing through a central authority, such as a bank or payment gateway. It is created and held electronically. Bitcoins aren't printed, like dollars or euros – they're produced by computers all around the world, using free software.

It was the first example of what we today call cryptocurrencies, a growing asset class that shares some characteristics of traditional currencies, with verification based on cryptography.

Who created it?

A pseudonymous software developer going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto proposed bitcoin in 2008, as an electronic payment system based on mathematical proof. The idea was to produce a means of exchange, independent of any central authority, that could be transferred electronically in a secure, verifiable and immutable way.

To this day, no-one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto really is.

In what ways is it different from traditional currencies?

Bitcoin can be used to pay for things electronically, if both parties are willing. In that sense, it's like conventional dollars, euros, or yen, which are also traded digitally.

But it differs from fiat digital currencies in several important ways:

1 – Decentralization

Bitcoin's most important characteristic is that it is decentralized. No single institution controls the bitcoin network. It is maintained by a group of volunteer coders, and run by an open network of dedicated computers spread around the world. This attracts individuals and groups that are uncomfortable with the control that banks or government institutions have over their money.

Bitcoin solves the "double spending problem" of electronic currencies (in which digital assets can easily be copied and re-used) through an ingenious combination of cryptography and economic incentives. In electronic fiat currencies, this function is fulfilled by banks, which gives them control over the traditional system. With bitcoin, the integrity of the transactions is maintained by a distributed and open network, owned by no-one.

2 - Limited supply

Fiat currencies (dollars, euros, yen, etc.) have an unlimited supply – central banks can issue as many as they want, and can attempt to manipulate a currency's value relative to others. Holders of the currency (and especially citizens with little alternative) bear the cost.

With bitcoin, on the other hand, the supply is tightly controlled by the underlying algorithm. A small number of new bitcoins trickle out every hour, and will continue to do so at a diminishing rate until a maximum of 21 million has been reached. This makes bitcoin more attractive as an asset – in theory, if demand grows and the supply remains the same, the value will increase.

3 - Pseudonymity

While senders of traditional electronic payments are usually identified (for verification purposes, and to comply with anti-money laundering and other legislation), users of bitcoin in theory operate in semi-anonymity. Since there is no central "validator," users do not need to identify themselves when sending bitcoin to another user. When a transaction request is submitted, the protocol checks all previous transactions to confirm that the sender has the necessary bitcoin as well as the authority to send them. The system does not need to know his or her identity.

In practice, each user is identified by the address of his or her wallet. Transactions can, with some effort, be tracked this way. Also, law enforcement has developed methods to identify users if necessary.

Furthermore, most exchanges are required by law to perform identity checks on their customers before they are allowed to buy or sell bitcoin, facilitating another way that bitcoin usage can be tracked. Since the network is transparent, the progress of a particular transaction is visible to all.

This makes bitcoin not an ideal currency for criminals, terrorists or money-launderers.

4 - Immutability

Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed, unlike electronic fiat transactions.

This is because there is no central "adjudicator" that can say "ok, return the money." If a transaction is recorded on the network, and if more than an hour has passed, it is impossible to modify.

While this may disquiet some, it does mean that any transaction on the bitcoin network cannot be tampered with.

5 - Divisibility

The smallest unit of a bitcoin is called a satoshi. It is one hundred millionth of a bitcoin (0.00000001) – at today's prices, about one hundredth of a cent. This could conceivably enable microtransactions that traditional electronic money cannot.

Source: shttps://www.coindesk.com

World Famous Games in Year 2018

1. Celeste

Release date: January 25 (Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC)

Not many masocore platformers are designed so that your seemingly endless string of deaths serves as a tie-in for a larger metaphor about overcoming depression and anxiety, but Celeste manages to do it artfully. Playing as Madeline, determined to summit the mountain Celeste, your pixelated character dashes, wall jumps, and climbs through the levels of the pseudo-haunted pastel 2D world, fighting the physical embodiment of her self-doubt, on her difficult, introspective journey to self-actualization. There are hidden rooms to find and strawberries, crystal hearts, and mixtapes to collect, but none of those things really matter in the end: Celeste is about celebrating screen-sized accomplishments and wearing your death count as a badge of learned honor.

2. God of War

Release Date: April 20 (PS4)

God of War is pinned somewhere between a hyper-realistic Norse mythology simulator and a satisfying 30-hour beat-'em-up that turns an axe into freaking Mjolnir (y'know, Thor's hammer?). Its storytelling, action sequences, art direction, and highly detailed approach to world-building draws up one of the greatest anti-hero stories ever told and delivers a sense of scale and scope that would throw George Miller into a tizzy. One minute, you're fully into a Man Of Steel-esque fight scene with a stranger and the next, you’re taking on a Valkyrie with your adoptive son. Its level of immersion detracts from God of War’s minor flaws and even goes on to question why some developers refuse to reinvent their intellectual properties. We may never see a Mass Effect FPS that looks like Cyberpunk 2077 or a Dead Space reboot that scares like P.T., but we are totally here for Cory Barlog and his team if they ever decide to do Wonder Woman justice.

3. Monster Hunter: World

Release date: January 26 (PS4, Xbox One)

If you've been itching to invest all of your foreseeable free time into an expansive sandbox world, consider Monster Hunter: World! Easily the most accessible game in the Monster Hunter franchise, this one still doesn't quite hold your hand as it runs you through its basic machinations, like how to track down monsters or properly upgrade your weapons, but it offers enough direction to send off even the newest players on a big dino-monster slaying adventure. Figuring out your combat style and quest strategy (sometimes with friends!) is just part of the fun.

4. Dead Cells

Release Date: August 7 (PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch)

Dead Cells is an overstimulated fever dream, sure, but Motion Twin’s debut hits every checkmark that’s attached to rogue-lites and Metroidvanias. It’s an action platformer that keeps you grounded and invested -- throwing you head-first into a 2D pixelated nod to Dark Souls that replaces "serenity now" with "kill, die, learn, repeat." Its difficulty is right up there with the likes of Spelunky and Hollow Knight, but it balances those hair-pulling, pixel-perfect deaths with a ridiculously awesome upgrade system that makes "loop" feel like a dirty word. It’s an Early Access game done right and one that gives every run a genuine purpose.

5. Florence

Release date: February 14 (iOS, Android)

Mountains’ Florence is a twee look at love and heartbreak, and how both can permanently change a person for the better. It follows Florence Yeoh, a 20-something who puts her everyday routine on pause when she falls for a bearded cellist named Krish. Florence's story, told through a beautiful interactive puzzler, is wordless, swipe-friendly, and full of minigames that recall the golden days of WarioWare, but the way in which it unfolds and uses its aesthetic to carve relatable moments into your heart is second to none. Interactive art really can sweep you off your feet.

6. Shadow of the Colossus

Release date: February 6 (PS4)

Remaking an original work largely considered a masterpiece is a tricky dance to pull off, but the newest version of Shadow of the Colossus makes it look easy. The spirit and adventure of the 2005 PS2 game remains the same -- fight the gigantic stony colossi, ride your horse around a ruinous fantasy landscape, save the befallen maiden -- but it looks a whole lot sleeker thanks to Bluepoint, the studio also responsible for the PS3 remaster, rebuilding the improved graphics from the ground up in ultra HD. Return players will be glad to hear the controls are less cumbersome; newcomers should revel in their fortune for not gaming harder sooner.

7. Octopath Traveler

Release Date: June 5 (Switch)

The Bravely Default team’s SNES-inspired, HD-2D turn-based battler is a remarkable tribute to every JRPG ever. It binds its stunning pop-up book design to highly detailed sprites that recall Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6; harmonizes its eight different characters with superb level design and an overworld that is crawling with secrets; and swaps the endless grind of similar RPGs for an intuitive play style that requires a whole lot of hypothesizing to deal massive amounts of damage. Octopath Traveler is everything you would want in a 70-plus hour adventure and new NVIDIA cards be damned, it’s one of the best-looking games of this decade.

8. Mario Tennis Aces

Release Date: June 22 (Switch)

Mario Tennis Aces revives Mario Tennis in the right way. It’s extremely competitive, Wario is there, and Spike coughs up tennis balls while Chain Chomp somehow embodies Andre Agassi's prowess. The Switch title has its imperfections -- its story mode is an in-depth tutorial with a few hazards along the way -- but its flaws turn into the fodder for lonely GameFAQs diatribes when you jump online and discover Aces is actually just a fighting game. Rackets have their own health bars and can be broken, resulting in an instant K.O., and there’s a barrage of trick shots and special moves that turn a set of tennis into a full-on cage match. It still could use a few revisions, but at least Birdo and Koopa Paratroopa are on the way as playable characters.

9. Dragon Ball FighterZ

Release date: January 26 (PS4, Xbox One, PC)

PSA: Dragon Ball FighterZ is anime on bath salts. The latest entry in Akira Toriyama’s series is a hyper-stylish 2-D fighter that sticks to its source material. Its three-versus-three approach makes last year’s Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite look like Shaq Fu with infinity stones, and its shared command list is a welcome change for newbies and EVO heads. There’s levels to the mechanics but you’ll mostly find yourself getting whooped by some 10-year-old from South Dakota who triggers a Dragon Ball Z finish that you haven’t seen since your Pepsi Blue days.

10. Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life

Release Date: April 17 (PS4)

Like Yakuza 0 and the Kiwamis before it, Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life sticks to a highly specific tone and aesthetic, never letting up. The Western port follows an older Kiryu who finishes a three-year prison sentence only to find out his surrogate daughter is in a coma and he’s now responsible for looking after her son. There’s still a whole lot of Hiroshima yakuza drama -- making it a weird Passions-meets-Full Contact mashup that thrives on over-the-top combat that’s downright silly, stylish, and super-addicting. It’s also one of the few action genre titles in which you can play Space Harrier, throw darts, take up batting practice, bond with a personal trainer, visit a popular cat cafe, and karaoke your heart out until sunrise. It’s weird, for sure, but it’s why the Yakuza series remains one of the most creative time-killers since the PS2 era.

11. Overcooked 2

Release Date: August 7 (PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch)

Ghost Town Games’ Overcooked 2 is a damn good time as a proper sequel that spoon-feeds you another helping of what it’s really like to deal with too many cooks. Throw in an Arcade Mode, emotes, online multiplayer (and local wireless play), dynamic kitchens inspired by the Dreamcast’s Power Stone 2, and the ability to throw ingredients, and voilà! You have a recipe for disaster that will happily forge some of the greatest (and most frustrating) three-minute bursts of your gaming existence. You will laugh, cry, yell, and repeatedly hit someone in the face with unnecessary amounts of chopped fish, but that’s just a part of Overcooked’s divisive charm.

12. Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

Release date: March 23 (PS4, PC)

Like most good JRPGs, Ni No Kuni II transcends the age of its youthful protagonist (in this case, a boy king) to offer a more fulfilling, mature, and fucked-up experience to a wider audience. I mean, a city is bombed to bits in the opening scene. Though this sequel didn't have the direct support of Studio Ghibli like its predecessor, Ni No Kuni II still had a former Ghibli character designer on staff to maintain the beloved studio's level of charm. With simple gameplay and a manageable open world, it's a great entry-level title for gamers at any age.

13. Into the Breach

Release date: February 27 (PC)

The premise of Into the Breach is simple: Take control of powerful mechs from the future in order to defeat an alien threat. As much as it sounds like some weird X-COM 2 meets Armored Core visual novel fetish, it’s not (for now, anyways) -- Justin Ma and Matthew Davis’ follow-up to 2012’s FTL: Faster Than Light is surprisingly irresistible. You're thrown into a turn-based world fighting pixelated kaiju on eight-by-eight grids, and since you’ll die, like a lot, you’re locked into a perk- and skills-filled progression that makes every 20-to-30-minute run feel meaningful.

14. The Adventure Pals

Release Date: April 3 (PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch)

The Adventure Pals, Massive Monster’s debut, takes the idea of a "boy saving his dad from being turned into a hotdog" and stuffs it into a meme-heavy aesthetic that sits somewhere between Castle Crashers and Adventure Time. It balances its internet humor and thrill for giraffe BFFs named Sparkles with questing, sticker packs, levelling systems, and light combat that is more focused on the visual idea of fighting bosses made out of bacon and eggs. The Pals' quirky simplicity and old-school heart makes it a pleasure to play -- especially if you’re looking for a casual weekend adventure that doesn’t come with a side of "griefing" and loot grinds.

15. The Awesome Adventures Of Captain Spirit

Release Date: June 26 (PS4, Xbox One, PC)

The creators of Life Is Strange know a lot about the blues. While The Awesome Adventures Of Captain Spirit isn’t a direct sequel to the original or Before The Storm, it is a precursor to a new episodic series that takes place in the same universe. In it you meet Chris, a super-imaginative 10-year-old boy, who offsets a fractured relationship with his father and the disappearance of his mother with a superhero alter ego who harnesses the ability to do "awesome" things. Its tightly scripted storyline is weaved through interactive puzzles and exploration, and when the feelings hit, they hit hard. There’s a ton of charm and relatable human drama packed into Captain Spirit’s 120 minutes and it’s a (free and) worthwhile pickup for anyone who was raised by a single parent or has found some solace in a Sufjan Stevens song.

Source: https://www.thrillist.com

World Fastest Airplanes

10: Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker. 

Its top speed of 2.35 mach brings it to the very edge of USSR craftmanship with a twin engine and the first fly-by-wire control system on a Russian jet ever. It was built for air superiority to counter 

the new American 3.5 gen fighters such as the F-15 Eagle. It is armed with a 30 mm gun and 10 external pylons that can hold both Air-to-Air, heat-seeking, short and medium range missiles. Due to all its accomplishments and popularity it has very many different variants. Some of which are top-modern even today, 35 years  after the first flight of the Flanker (1977). Some of them are:

Sukhoi Su-30

Sukhoi Su-33

Sukhoi Su-34

Sukhoi Su-35

Sukhoi Su-37

And – the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker was once available for passenger fun flights with MiGFlug!

9: General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark. 

Number nine on this list is not a fighter but a tactical bomber capable of flying at mach 2.5. It had, before its retirement in 1998, 9 hardpoints and 2 weapon bays, together being able to deliver a payload of 14,300 kg of bombs, a nuclear bomb, air-to-air missiles or a 2000 round machine gun could be fitted. However due to the Aardvark’s role in air it was rarely fitted with the gun. The Aardvark was the first aircraft in production with a variable sweep with configuration which is why it was also tested for carrier-based operations, however this was never completed (although there were some successful tries).

8: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle 

The F-15 has been claimed to be one of the most successful aircraft ever built and is still in 

service with the US Air Force. The Eagle’s twin-engine and thrust-to-weight ratio of almost 1:1 can propel the 18,000 kg aircraft to more than 2.5 times the speed of sound. It was introduced in 1976 and will continue to be  a part of the air force beyond 2025. There has almost 1200 F-15s built and it has been exported to among others Japan, Saudi Arabia and Israel. The current plan is to keep producing them until 2019. It was first designed as an air-superiority aircraft but later the F-15E Strike Eagle was built, a Air-to-Ground derivative. The F-15 can load a variety of Sparrow, Sidewinder, 120-AMRAAM, drop bombs ( for instance Mark 84 or 82) or external fuel tanks on its 11 hardpoints. Together with its 20 mm M61A1 Vulcan gun it is no surprise that this buster has over 100 confirmed aerial combat victories. By the way a lot of visitors are interested in flying the F-15 – so we wrote a small article about that topic. Click the link for more information.

7: Mikoyan MiG-31 

Foxbat With a top speed of mach 2.83, the next aircraft on our list is the Mikoyan Gurevich-31 Foxhound (also this one was once available for tourist flights!). Due to its enormous twin-engine with a thrust of 2*152kN it was able to fly at supersonic speeds at both high- and low altitudes. It is a Soviet Interceptor built to take out enemy aircraft and has great capabilities to do so using a combination of active and passive radars. Four Foxhounds can together control a front of 900 kilometers in length. The weapons that it has to its disposal are:

One 23 millimeter gun with 260 rounds.

Under fuselage:4x R-33 Air-to-Air (heavy) or 6x R-37 Air-to-Air missiles.

On pylons:Long or medium range missiles, short range IR missiles or a special medium-range Air-to-Air missile for high speed targets.The production ended in 1994 but is unknown exactly how many MiG-31 that were built but between 400-500 is said to be a qualified guess. The MiG-31 is still today in service with the Russian and Kazakhstan Air Forces. The MiG-31 is a derivative of the MiG-25 which can be read about further down (place 4) and in the link at the very end of the article.

6: XB-70 Valkyrie. 

The XB-70 Valkyrie was a unique aircraft with six engines which together could accelerate the 240,000 kilogram aircraft to a velocity of mach 3. This speed resulted in the frame of the aircraft being heated up to as much as 330°C on some areas. The extreme speed was needed for two reasons: 1: To accelerate away from Soviet interceptors and 2: To be able to escape the blast of the nuclear bombs that it was capable of dropping. The big size (weight) was needed to carry the fuel needed for the 6,900 kilometer flight into the Soviet Union and escape without refueling and to house the 14 nuclear bombs that it was capable of carrying. The aircraft had its first flight in 1964 and is now retired, only two were built.

5: Bell X-2 Starbuster.

The Starbuster was an American research aircraft which had its first flight in 1955 and was retired in 1956. It was a continuation of the X-2 program and so Its area of investigation was to see how aircrafts behaved when flying at speeds higher than mach 2.0. It did, as can be understood, not carry any weapons and featured a back-swept wing which made it have little air-resistance and was by that able to achieve the stunning speed of 3.196 mach in 1956. However soon after this speed was attained the pilot, Milburn G. Apt, made a sharp turn and the aircraft tumbled out of control. He could not regain control of the aircraft and bailed out. Unfortunately, only the small parachute of the escape shuttle was opened and he hit the ground with too high speed. This fatal crash ended the Starbuster program.

4: Mikoyan MiG-25 Foxbat.

This jet was a Soviet machine built to intercept American aircraft during the cold war like the SR-71 and high- slow flying surveillance aircraft. Since it was built to intercept the SR-71 it was required to have an extreme speed, hence its mach 3.2 top capability. The Foxbat, unlike the Blackbird, featured 4 air-to-air missiles which made it an interceptor rather than a reconnaissance aircraft. It has never shot down a Blackbird but it has had many other combat missions which have been successful, for instance in the Iran-Iraq war. Over 1100 Foxbats were built between 1964 and 1984, however today the use is limited, with its only users being Russia, Syria, Algeria and Turkmenistan. For more information about this astonishing bird see the link at the bottom of the article. The MiG-25 was also the fastest plane ever offered for fun flights by MiGFlug – it was mainly used for Edge of Space flights.

3: Lockheed YF-12. 

This jet was an American interceptor prototype with a top speed of mach 3.35. It looked almost like the SR-71 Blackbird and featured three Air-to-Air missiles. The reason for it looking a lot like the SR-71 was because the SR-71 was based on the YF-12, and also because both of them had the same designer, the extremely famous Clarence “Kelly” Johnson. Only 3 YF-12’s were built but the program still made it into the history books with its  “highest speed”, “highest altitude” (both of these were later surpassed by the Blackbird) and “biggest interceptor” records.

2: Lockheed SR-71 

Blackbird After its introduction in 1966 it has been used by both the USAF and NASA. 32 Blackbirds were built, all used for reconnaissance and experimental research. It featured stealth technology but if it was, against all odds, spotted by enemy forces, it could outrun the interceptors or surface-to-air missiles that was fired at it, due to its fantastic speed. The Blackbird was so fast that the air in front of it did not have time to escape, hence building up a huge pressure, and raised temperature. The temperature of the aircraft, which could reach several hundred degrees high, expanded the metal, hence it had to be built by too small pieces. Because of this, the SR-71 actually leaked oil when standing still. The Blackbird holds the record for manned, air breathing aircraft, see here. A nice documentary about the SR-71 for those who love this plane as much as we do:

1: North American X-15 

This aircraft has the current world record for the fastest manned aircraft. Its maximum speed was mach 6.70 (about 7,200 km/h) which it attained on the 3rd of October 1967 thanks to its pilot William J. “Pete” Knight. To be stable at these super high velocities, it had to feature a big wedge tail, however the downside of this was at lower speeds the drag was extremely big from such a tail. Therefore a B-52 Stratofortress had to carry it up to an altitude of about 14,000 meters before dropping it at which it ignited its own engines. Just imagine sitting in a rocket measuring only 15 m in length and then being dropped, must have been a truly magnificent feeling! The X-15 was used at such extreme speeds so that it did not use traditional ways to steer (using drag over a fin) but instead it used rocket thrusters! This made it possible to reach altitudes higher than 100 kilometers, which was one of its world records. These are the three records that brought the X-15 rocket jet into the history books:

It was the first operational space plane.

It got to a height of more than 100 km.

It flew more than six times the speed of sound (mach 6.70).

Source: http://www.migflug.com/jetflights/the-10-fastest-aircraft-in-the-world.html