Stealth Headed for Mothballs

Yeah - nothing with corners. Corners are BAD. If you remember, even the seal hooks for the canopy latches are conical in shape, with blunt-round ends.

Hmmnnn...all depends on what parts of it you're talking about, but I'd suspect that portions of the chillers would have been used to cool the FLIRs.

You know, as I recall they didn't use their chutes going in and out of here. Probably because they weren't loaded and just plain didn't need to use them for our field length.

That's the second time they ran into a fastener problem; on the A-12/SR-71 they couldn't use Dzus fasteners because their springs would detemper from the heat of Mach 3 flight. I've never seen any design info on it, but Lockheed once tried to design a all-plastic recon plane that radar would pass through rather than reflect off of. This would work fine except that there was no way to hide the engine inside it from the radar. The Lockheed B-2 competitor was a interesting design, looking like the original Northrop B-2 design with a boom-mounted butterfly tail on it:

by that photo, the intakes must be belly mounted.

Pat

They were indeed on the bottom; here's a photo of a RCS pole model:

That's one of the many reasons I can think of for stealth being "highly overrated". It only works to a point, and just like any other tech it has it's limitations. Problem is that the signal to noise to cost ratio on the tech is about the biggest detractor when it comes to employing it with any level of repeatable and sustainable success on a fighter aircraft. I think it's far more suited to applications with smaller vehicles like UCAVs.

I think that turned into this -

Want to see something funny? Here's the original Lockheed "Hopeless Diamond":

led to the XST and F-117. And here's the Northrop X-47A: 's getting even here. "Oh yeah? You needed a tail on the finished aircraft. We didn't. Screw you." The new version is probably better as far as fuel use for range goes, but one has to admire rubbing Lockheed's nose in it. :-)

Pat

Pardon my ignorance but I would have thought the USAF needed every stealth type it could get its hands on for the forthcoming action against Iran?

(kim)

MIRV warheads don't need stealth.

I saw a plot of the real theoretical "hopeless diamond" that this class of jets was developed to once - tried to Google it, but all I get is pictures of this funky paper airplane. It's not as squashed as the airplanes are...I thought I saw it on the web someplace, but I can't find it.

There's one here from the original Lockheed patent:

design evolution is over here: stealth patent drawings here: Pat

The Spy Glider! Of course, developing the high-altitude, supersonic tow plane might take a while. The Space Shuttle shows that a rocket launch can give quite the range, dunno about maneuverability.

None of those are what I was thinking of...what I'm thinking of was a purely theoretical mathematical plot of the shape that falls out if you require zero (or near zero...) return of a radar reflection along some selected set of axes. A probability density type plot, I think...it was actually a sort of dual-diamond.

It arose from a theoretical study, and was dubbed the "hopeless diamond" when someone first speculated on the "hopelessness" of the possibility of building an airplane based on such a shape. I thought I'd seen it on the web someplace, but I can't find it. Anyway, it was the starting point for what followed.

This?

Cheers,

No - I'm not thinking of an airplane or drawing of an airplane. I'm thinking of a plot of a mathematical solution to a set of constrained equations. The plot resulted in a large diamond with a smaller diamond stuck on the end of it. But the result such plots was what inspired the aircraft configurations the keep coming up.

You know, they weren't using their brains there; seal the whole engine in a flat-walled diamond profile container (a rectangular box rotated forty-five degrees) and all the radar waves get reflected away from the emitter. The Lockheed flying-wing U-2 replacement under the "Gusto 2" program looked like something that came straight out of Nazi Germany circa January 1945. :-) The all-time winner is of course the Navy rubber inflatable Mach 3 ramjet powered spyplane that headed up into the sky under the huge Skyhook balloon in competition with the Kingfish and A-11. Haven't even ever seen a artist's conception of what that thing would have looked like.

Pat

If you want to do the perfect stealth design, make a aircraft that has no flat surfaces on it whatsoever, and indeed has every exterior surface convex so that any incoming radar wave gets reflected back in multiple directions and dissipated on striking it. That was Kelly Johnson's concept for the Have Blue.... a perfect flying saucer, like the dual-convex lens of a magnifying glass with no straight edges on it anywhere. That would defeat the bistatic radar threat to stealth as well.

Pat

Problem is that none of that stuff really totally "defeats" radar - it only minimizes the return and not "eliminate" it. And even then only under specific conditions, and once those become apparent it's back to the drawing board.

...and it was probably that last bit that got that one Nighthawk shot down.