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Hitler's Stealth Fighter
DesScorp writes "Aviation Week reports on a television special from the National Geographic Channel on what may have been the world's first true stealth fighter, the Horten Ho 229, a wooden design that was to include a layer of carbon material sandwiched in the leading edge to defeat radar. Northrop Grumman, experts at stealth technology from their Tacit Blue and B-2 programs, have built a full-size replica of the airframe and tested it at their desert facilities where they determined that the design was indeed stealthy, and would have been practically invisible to Britain's Chain Home radar system of WWII."
every other stealth programme goes with the notion that it has to be invisible at all times.
Not exactly. You will never be invisible, and stealth technology/employment is a lot more complicated than "we'll just be invisible". Even today, remaining undetected until past the threat is a fairly well-used technique. Just look at the F-22. And even if your airframe isn't fully-LO, you see a lot of emphasis on reducing frontal RCS. The B-1, Typhoon, Rafale, and Super Hornet all use some degree of RCS reduction, which buys them that much more time to get in close. Modern cruise missiles use the same principle.
Interestingly enough, raw speed can buy you some of the same advantages. Go fast enough and high enough, and the defenses just won't have enough time to react, even if you're lit up like a billboard.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Doesn't matter what the plane is made out of as long as it's faster, accelerates faster, and climbs faster than than what the other side has.
Get into college?
If you aren't mature enough to look at a swastika in a relevant place (we're talking about Nazi Germany here) you shouldn't be on the internet. Let me guess, you are also for the elimination of the flag of the Confederate States too? Please, show some maturity, if you can't handle seeing a swastika, perhaps you shouldn't be looking up information on Nazi Germany.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hand in your geek card, youngster. I was flying this in "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe" from LucasArts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Weapons_of_the_Luftwaffe
Technical sophistication is one advantage on the battlefield, but manufacturing capacity is also important.
The Germans choose technical complexity over quantity believing that superior machines could beat the vast numbers of inferior machines the allies built.
The Germans were wrong.
As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all its own". A stealth aircraft or two may have been pretty trick, but if you have thousands of targets to bomb, you better have hundreds if not thousands of aircraft (and pilots) to do the job.
-ted
Hitler wasn't some demonic bad-ass bad-guy. He was a crazed political genius at the right place and right time. His downfall: he wasn't a real geek! He lost because of technical cluelessness! He didn't have the technical knowledge to realize the value of the wonder-weapons until late in the war when the 3rd Reich got desperate, and then it was too late. His right-hand man Goering didn't have a complete grasp of the importance of good intelligence and command and control. (He would have won the Battle of Britain, but he didn't know that he should've continued his campaign against the sector stations.) Even Hitler's understanding of economic warfare was that of an enthusiastic amateur.
We won not because our geeks were better, though they were darn good. We won because we *listened* to them!
The Secret History of Silicon Valley. (How geeks won WWII and the Cold War, and how that led to Silicon Valley.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
It's quite an amazing feat of the German scientists, if they hadn't scapegoated the jews to get into power they may have also had the atom bomb but years before the usa.
The allies only won the war because they just threw a lot more bodies than there were German bullets for the invasion of normandy.
Someone in a plane that could out-run it.
The P-51 Mustang had a top speed of between 400 and 440mph. That's close to the upper limit for a propeller-driven aircraft. This thing was intended to be capable of 600mph. Granted, that's an estimate made by the plane's designers, so they may not have been able to achieve it, but the Me 262 (German jet figher) was capable of 580mph already. No Allied figher could keep up with an Me 262 anyway.
Presumably, the plan was to hide from radar detection until over the coast. At this point, the aircraft would travel the 80 miles or so to London in around 8 minutes. It would have to do this unescorted - German fighers would be detected on approach, and wouldn't be able to keep up anyway. By the time the RAF got some fighters in the air, it'd be too late for them to intercept, assuming they could even catch up. Drop bombs over London, turn around, and run like hell. Hope to evade the fighters, which are now directly ahead of you, and return home.
Getting back home would be the tricky part.
Not hardly, as Jacob McCandles would have said. The Germans biggest problem in the war wasn't their technology, it was their production. The USA built enough tanks that they could afford to give away more than the total German tank production. The Soviets built more tanks than the USA.
Airplanes, the USA built enough to give away more than the Germans made. The Soviets didn't build more than the USA, but they built nearly as many.
The USA built more ships than everyone else combined, much less the Germans.
And on and on like that. Nothing the Germans could have done would have mattered a hill of beans, really - the only way they could have won that war was if they'd started building up their industry to USA/USSR levels in the 20's.
And even then, their chances would have been slim at best - they didn't have the manpower to operate industry at our level and put 20 million men in the field at the same time.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Maybe, maybe not.
Obviously this is all speculation, and doesn't matter much when you're comparing it to a real timeline... Yes, the United States developed an atomic bomb... But the Germans were also working on one. So if you extend the timeline to allow the Germans to develop this stealth jet, would they have had time to develop their own atomic bomb as well?
Albert Speer (who as minister of armaments after '43 was in a position to know) wrote that the Nazi atomic program was in its infancy in 1943. When Hitler was informed that an atomic bomb would probably not be produced until the 1950s, he downgraded the priority of the research.
The Nazis' were hampered by Hitler's view of technology. The Me-262 (first jet fighter) was outfitted as a light bomber, for instance, because Hitler saw more value in bombing than in defending airspace (in 1945!). The V-2 rocket was pushed hard, even though a single B-17 raid carried more explosives than the entire V-2 production. Anti-aircraft missiles were ignored and naval armaments were always given a low priority.
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Europe learned a lesson from the fascists. Curtailing free speech was a powerful aid in keeping those regimes in power.
Therefore, in order to completely disavow that era, European governments have decided to turn the power to curtail free speech towards the purposes of good. If you are a European government minister, this makes complete sense.
It's important to bear in mind that free speech has never had the same value or application in Europe that it has in places like the US. In the US, its a sacred right, the Most Holy First Amendment. In Europe, it's just considered a pretty good idea, as long as it doesn't get overly inconvenient or embarrassing for the government. Just because they invented the concept doesn't mean that they have fully implemented it.
Some parts of the world got unlucky. The Soviets and Americans winning the war was not good for everybody.
German scientists were some of the best in the world..
Yep, and were a little to Jewish or otherwise and left Germany and then ended up in the Manhattan project. Define Irony.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Yes, because people were generally stupid then.
Other astounding inventions from tree-dwelling tailhangers in the first half of the 20th century: nuclear power, transistors, purified penicillin, and television.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Don't make those SR-71 pilots too cocky or they'll rub it in to the other airplane pilots.
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Its a difficult one, but its likely Stalin knew that the western powers disliked the Soviet Union anyway, so there was little in it for Stalin to help the Allies invade Germany from the East.
If such a thing had occurred, it would have been very unlikely that any ground gained could be occupied by the USSR - the gains made in WW2 were solely due to the fact that the USSR was the sole army making those gains from the East, handing most of Germany and Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Its highly unlikely the USSR would have ended up with those same gains with a fully mixed Allied army involved.
In all likelihood, the pact between the USSR and Germany would have held, but remained uneasy. Thats not to say Hitler wouldn't have tried something later, but he might have been in a better position to press home any attack.
Reminds me of early attempts to cloak planes to the naked eye by putting a row of lights around the edges. It was reasonably effective on a bright overcast day.
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"RCS testing showed that an Ho-229 approaching the English Coast from France flying at 550 mph at 50 to 100 feet above the water would not have been visible to Chain Home radar."
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named. It took until the 80s for them to figure it out and make a success of the B2.
So, so long as a pilot could buzz the waves at an altitude that would make most pilots of conventional fighters of the era nervous, at the high end of speeds for the era (a good 100mph faster than a P-51 Mustang), before flitting up over the cliffs of southern England (the famed white cliffs of Dover reaching up to 106m, a good 70m over the 100 feet the plane was flying across the channel at), then it could have been invisible to British radar of the time.
One can only imagine, if production had worked out, the teenagers Germany was strapping in to planes at the time (having lost most of its experienced pilots by that point in the war) would have been doing this on a daily basis.
He's just demonstrating that it's perfectly possible for a German to have a sense of humour.
Unlike some of the replies...
Uh they lost.
Even in ancient times when country "A" conquers country "B", "A" often takes people from "B" back to "A" to do stuff for them. That does not mean "B" won. Far from it.
Plus Hitler died and stayed dead. That's not normally considered winning.
When you eat bacon does that mean the pig won? I doubt it.
Germany did well after the war and so did the USA. So that's a win-win, but Hitler and the Nazis most certainly did lose.
Another American Hill Billy trying to lecture Europeans about Freedom, In Europe its not rare to see political parties covering the full expectrum from the left to the right, and its OK and life continues, in the US being a Comunist is a mayor crime, being a fascist is OK if you are white anglosaxon believe in god and swear for the stars and stripes, there is not chance whatsoever fior a atheist candidate to became President, as for free speech, yea, like mafia infiltrating workers unions with the bless of the government, with nice historical figures like Macarty or E. Hoover, media manipulation, the best government propaganda money can buy, wire taping, NSA, CIA....
as for the topic, those planes looks fantastic even for today standards