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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."
They'd only see the plane leaving, not arriving, which is quite an interesting compromise, as every other stealth programme goes with the notion that it has to be invisible at all times.
This was designed so that, once it passed Britains coastal radar, they wouldn't be able to scramble fighters fast enough once they did detect them. Rather ingenious.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
It's kind of scary all the truly advanced tech Germany was working on at the end of the War. They're rocket scientists were disturbingly advanced compared to anything on the Allied side. It took Korolyov YEARS just too replicate Von Braun's V-2 in Russia, and that was working *with* Von Braun's own assistant, Helmut Gröttrup.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The British de Havilland Mosquito was also very hard to detect with radar due to its wooden construction. It served in fighter (day and night) and fighter-bomber roles amongst others so they did see action against the P-51's contemporaries.
The development of stealth technology is one of those secretive fields that has an instant fascination. I quite enjoyed reading Ben Rich's autobiography. Also Hitler's plan to atom bomb New York and The Real Heroes of Telemark were both quite interesting, casting two sides of the same global battle from very different perspectives. German scientists were some of the best in the world (not that they are so bad today..). Sometimes I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.
This article is utterly bogus. Not that National Geographic has ever been known for quality writing on highly technical topics.
The Ho 229 was built as it was specifically to meet the "1000-1000-1000" bomber contract. This called for an aircraft that could fly 1000 km at 1000 km/h while carrying a 1000 kg warload. And it had to be built of wood, because all of the aluminum, and metalworkers, were accounted for in current projects.
The only way to possibly meet the speed requirement was through jet engines. However, jet engines of the era were extremely inefficient, especially German ones where poor alloys limited exhaust temperatures in the turbine. So in order to get the range while keeping the speed, you needed to cut drag to an absolute minimum.
And that's why the 229 looks like it does. It lacks the profusion of surfaces that conventional designs had, and minimized wetted surface due to the almost non-existent fuselage. This thing is all wing, which means you're losing all the parasitic drag.
ANYTHING else, including these "stealth" features, were utterly secondary.
Moreover I have a very serious problem with the claims that this plane is stealthy. Compressor disks in the engines are an extremely effective radar mirror. This is why the F-117 has "blinds" over the inlets, or why the F-22 has a S-shaped intake system. As you can see in the pictures, in the 229 the compressor face is directly exposed to the front.
Sure, the CH radars were longwave and wouldn't have been good against this aircraft, but that would be true of any small jet of the era. They were extremely good against targets a few meters in size, like a propeller, but anything smaller would be difficult to see.
Claiming this plane was developed _as a stealth plane_ is like claiming the DC-3 was a swept-wing design. Accidental features do not indicate design intent.
Maury
The Germans were doomed as soon as they opened up a second front against Russia. The Japanese getting the US involved obviously didn't help, but once Hitler decided to split his forces and assault Russia, his days were numbered. A technology like this may have been effective in the Battle of Britain, but it came too late for that, and stretching the timeline enough to allow for a rebuilding of the Luftwaffe and mass production of these planes, even ignoring the US completely, is not a realistic scenario given the events on the Eastern Front.
According to Wikipedia, this design was proposed in 1943, at which point the Battle of Britain was already lost and a good portion of the German army had just been defeated at Stalingrad. Even without the US or Normandy, it's highly unlikely the Germans could have lasted long enough to produce these things in large enough numbers to make any difference.
This design is one of a number of things the Germans could have accomplished that might have made a difference had they not been so eager to go to war in the first place. The French and British policies of appeasement, and their policy of rearming only in accordance with the provisions of Versailles while allowing the Germans to break that treaty at will without consequence, meant that before the war time was on the Germans' side. Had they waited until 1942 or 43 to attack Poland, as most of the Generals were suggesting, the outcome of the war might have been very different.
Hitler didn't make a single ultimate mistake. He made several. Launching into an unneeded second front when he broke the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union was a huge mistake. He also diverted a lot of supplies for his war effort into his political posturing bullshit about the purity of the Aryans. If he'd been like a real politician and just said what he had to, instead of actually following through with it, his trains could have been hauling soldiers and firearms to the front, instead of Jews and homosexuals to death camps.
So remember kids: if you want to eradicate people who look a certain way and you also want to become ruler of the planet, it's best to take over everything first, then you can genocide to your heart's content. Also, don't get involved with war in the winter in Russia.
Learn something new.
Well, that was his second fatal mistake ;). This is one of the things that makes WWII so interesting from a military perspective...there are many points where you can find mistakes by Hitler and his cronies, and you can debate endlessly if the avoidance of that particular error might have turned the tide of the war.
Had Hitler waited, he might have had the air power to definitively defeat Britain, which might have allowed him to take on the Soviets. In my opinion, even with Britain defeated, it would have taken several years of armament production before Hitler could have realistically taken on the Soviets, and it may have never really been possible, but it certainly wasn't possible with the state of his armies in 1941, particularly when he still had to heavily defend the Western Front.
Very darwinistic view of the world that man has. If he's right, the tactics in life are the same as in quake. Anything that moves and isn't obviously on your side, shoot it. Anything that doesn't move, shoot it anyway because it's probably thinking about moving and killing you as soon as you turn your back.
Why are you making this out to be his worldview? That these were the tactics of the majority of humans for the majority of history is just a matter, of, well, history. Wars between nations, strong tribes subjugating weak ones, nation-states subjugating non-centrally-organized peoples, this actually happened and none of the people doing it read Diamond's book.
In fact, I can't recall him ever discussing it in terms of tactics or intent. The question he asked and attempted to answer was not "why did the Spanish come to the Americas to crush the Inca, Aztec, and Mayan empires." The question he asked was "when they came to the Americas with this intent, why were they able to succeed so handily?"
I mean he does discuss the success of European countries in terms of them being sizable enough to take advantage of specialization, but small enough and with enough similarly-sized and hostile neighbors that they couldn't afford to eschew some technology or tactic for cultural reasons -- the kind of every-wary shoot-first-ask-later strategy you are talking about. I don't think he ever hypothesized that a nation-state's neighbors must be hostile, or that the nation-state must subjugate those weaker than itself. That's just the reality of the situation in Europe.
But I could be wrong. It's been a few years since I read it.
The enemies of Democracy are
But one German tank could shoot down ten Russian ones. So the count alone is not the point.
Besides, Hitler's advantage was the Blitzkrieg. He was too fast. That was all.
And in the end, that killed him too, because the army was spread to much, and they could not hold the areas behind the fronts anymore.
If he had just stopped at one point, where he could still hold it, he might have had a chance.
Then wait a generation, for people to get used to it. And expand again. Like breathing.
Of course, being evil to everyone but a small group was not doing him any good anyway. I would have done it like the Chinese did, up to the 13th century.
They came with a *huge* army. Like 10 times what the others had. And much more advanced. But they did come not with kills, but with gifts. So much, that nearly everybody gave in, and joined their empire. It was nearly a win-win.
They nearly came to Europe with this tactic. But some retard thought that now China had to capsule itself off from everyone. So they stopped and shrunk.
I wonder how it would have ended, if they continued that method until now. Eurasia as one Chinese country, without communism, but with a democracy instead. America found by Columbus, the Spanish-Chinese. became independent too, but in a much bigger war, which could have been called World War I.
Or would the have been fallen into pieces, like any giant Empire ever (Egyptians, Romans, Chinese, Nazis, UDSSR, USA?, Arabic Union?)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The eastern front was not an inevitable defeat for the Germans. It was won not only because of the material advantages of the USSR but also because of the surprising determination of its soldiers. The war was lost (or won) at Stalingrad and that was a battle were determination to win counted most of all.
I think there is a lot to suggest that may have been the case. In addition, I've read documents stating that Stalin was in shock for a few days after the initial German offensive, but upon recovering he quickly ramped up for a massive counter offensive. I think Stalin did have a time frame for attacking Hitler, but I think Hitler took him by surprise by moving up the time frame that Stalin had in mind.
Prior to Hitler invading the USSR, remember that they were allies themselves - why would the USSR have allowed the US et al to attack Germany through them? My scenario above assumes no invasion of the USSR at all - it assumes Hitler and Stalin kept their pact to parcel up the eastern states between them.
As to the value of so-called 'wonder weapons', you should really read Arthur C. Clark's short story 'Superiority'. And before everyone says "it's just a sci-fi story, it has no bearing on real life" you should keep in mind that this story has been required reading at the US military colleges for almost 40 years.
It's not just the time and effort that goes into R+D; it's building up a manufacturing base, getting the necessary raw materials, training your soldiers on new equipment, adapting strategies to the new technology (often a forgotten step), shipping the new technology out into the field. Then, you've got a new, fragile, and rushed technology being subjected to the worst conditions imaginable and having people's lives rely on it.
The only obvious exception is the A-bomb, and even that was a fluke. The US was safe from invasion and damage, didn't have to worry nearly as much as Germany about having the whole project ruined in a bombing raid. You only need a few A-bombs to make a huge difference in the war, not true of most Germany's pet projects (except, obviously, their own A-bomb research). Since you only need a few, it's much easier to training, deployment, and maintenance are much simpler than a mass produced weapon.
I can not find it now, but I remember encountering an article several years ago in a local Las Vegas newspaper that described how the stealth fighters could be detected easily. In places like Nevada where there are secret military bases all over the place, there are hobby stealth watchers and they had discovered that there are so many cell phones in use all over the world that stealth fighters get lit up like a x-mas tree from the ground based signals emanating from the cell phones. Even amateur stealth watchers could track them flying around the Western United States. It was not long after that article the military officially started dropping all plans for future production related to designs based primarily on right angles and radar.
Can anyone find the article or info on this?
Living in Chile
Beautiful photos... I was surprised by the swastika banners in the background of the last one though.
I'm not offended. I've got absolutely nothing against swatikas per se, whether in the context of the nazis, general history, or otherwise and I loathe the kind of censorship that bans their display.
Still, I'm not the general public and given the sensitivity of segments of the general public to this symbol I think it's intriguing that someone would go through the trouble of a) creating the banners, b) getting on a ladder and hanging them in a hanger bay, and c) taking a "romanticised" photo of the whole thing. From the perspective of documenting a piece of technology it was unnecessary though it does add to the artistic aesthetic of the photo.
Is it a brave decision? An insensitive one? Maybe the swastika simply doesn't hold the kind of meaning it did 60 years ago? I just find it somewhat peculiar.
I'm French but I must agree. The US can suffer criticism for a lot of reason, but when it comes to free speech and its protection we can shut up. And it's not just legal, if you make a joke of dubious taste about the Jews then not only will you get prosecuted and fined but you'll get publicly crucified on television even after you're done flatly apologising.
You just got troll'd!