Nose cone

A nose cone is the conically shaped forwardmost section of a rocket, guided missile or aircraft, designed to modulate oncoming airflow behaviors and minimize aerodynamic drag.

Nose cones are also designed for submerged watercraft such as submarines, submersibles and torpedoes, and in high-speed land vehicles such as rocket cars and velomobiles.

Due to the extreme temperatures involved, nose cones for high-speed applications (e.g. Supersonic speeds or atmospheric reentry of orbital vehicles) have to be made of refractory materials.

Given the problem of the aerodynamic design of the nose cone section of any vehicle or body meant to travel through a compressible fluid medium (such as a rocket or aircraft, missile or bullet), an important problem is the determination of the nose cone geometrical shape for optimum performance.

For many applications, such a task requires the definition of a solid of revolution shape that experiences minimal resistance to rapid motion through such a fluid medium, which consists of elastic particles.

A nose cone that contained one of the Voyager spacecraft, mounted on top of a Titan III / Centaur launch vehicle .
Boeing 777-200ER of American Airlines . The nose cone is the most forward fuselage piece (painted white here).
The nose cone of an RAF Typhoon F2.
Nosecone of a Jet Airways Boeing 737 .
A Messerschmitt Bf 109G . In pursuit of minimising weight and drag, the Bf 109's main gun was mounted in the fuselage with the barrel coaxial to the hollow propeller shaft, exiting via a blast tube in the nose cone - a rare configuration, but not unique to the Bf 109.