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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
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.
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
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