4a5c3183
From: stealthman@iglou.com
On Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:22:33 -0700 (PDT), obviouslydelusional
wrote:
>On Jul 18, 10:34 pm, Gosh Darn wrote:
>
>> I read in one of the F-117 books
>> by Sweetman or Ben Rich or somebody
>> that Lockheed employees wanted to
>> use curved or rounded fairings for
>> better aerodynamics, but the Air Force
>> specified -all flat surfaces-.
>
>Uh....no. Per Ben Rich., the guys at Lockheed who were trying to make
>the damn thing fly wanted to smooth out the shape, but the Lockheed
>radar nerds said if they did so it would compromise the RCS value.
>The AF couldn't care less about whether the surfaces were flat or not
>as long as it didn't show on radar. In general, the reason for the
>flat facets was the program Lockheed was using for RCS modeling (ECHO
>1) was not sophisticated enough to handle anything other than plane
>shapes. By the time the B2 was being developed, that limitation had
>been overcome, hence the sexy curves.
I wouldn't know, all I did was invent stealth shapes,
and specify flat plane surfaces as the easiest to implement.
>> From 1975 until 1995 I thought I
>> was the sole inventor of stealth shapes,
>> the read the cocky-mamie story about
>> a Russian mathematician and Maxwell
>> electromagnetic theory.
>
>Hardly cockamamie. There's a lot more to stealth than just flat
>surfaces. At radar frequencies sharp edges will absorb the EM
>radiation and reradiate unless properly dealt with. And every facet
>is surrounded by sharp edges.
I never saw a radar set in operation, even though
I spent a lot of time around Air Force operations and
weather stations in the 1946 to 1948 time frame.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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