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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."
What DIDN'T Hitler Do?
The most interesting photos:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-09_10240768.jpg
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-08_10240768.jpg
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-04_10240768.jpg
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-11_10240768.jpg
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.
I believe that the advances in detection technology would always have allowed the allies to hear a Horton Ho.
what with swastika flags and all. I'll be in trouble if someone has overseen my screen just then, being a german living in Britain.
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.
Not exactly. It is possible to build a flying wing type aircraft that is stable. They're generally not as easy to fly as more traditional designs, but it's possible. Also keep in mind that aircraft of that era flew much slower. Part of the difficulty with modern designs is with the insane speeds they can reach. The aerodynamics of very fast (ie. supersonic) craft are much different from slower craft.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
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.
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, it's the best explanation I read so far.
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.
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
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
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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It just took quite a few years for us to make a plane that looked like a Horton. :) Actually, there were quite a few developed and some manufactured. They simply weren't as popular as "conventional" aircraft. I would suspect part would be due to the difference in manufacturing cost, and some to do with customer faith. "I know an airplane with wings and a tail can fly. Why should I believe something like that can?". Maybe the long gap in development of flying wing aircraft wasn't. It was just classified. What do you think they do at Area 51 (among other secret facilities), store alien bodies and reverse engineer wormhole technology? :)
I love aviation, and have been amazed with Horton's aircraft. There were several similar aircraft. I saw one in person at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles. There's a Horton Ho IIIf on display (hanging from the roof), part of a Horton Ho IIIh, and I found reference to a Horton Ho 229 being restored for display there. If I remember correctly, you'd go straight in the front door, and to the left behind the SR-71, but before the room with the Space Shuttle Enterprise. They have some beautiful aircraft there. It's worth the visit if you like aviation.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Hitlers single, fatal mistake was taking on the Soviet Union without first ensuring that Britain and the rest of the Allies were out of the war for good. Had Hitler not committed to the Eastern Front, he could have easily have prevented an Allied invasion, and indeed have triumphed in North Africa.
Hitlers basic failure was greed. He wanted the Soviet Union as well, when there was no possibility he would have won that war due to the sheer size of the USSR. He had no heavy strategic bombers, nothing to interfere with Soviet production facilities once they were moved further east, and that doomed him to lose.
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.
To be fair, the utterly stupid and ridiculous rules of engagement forced on US forces by the civilian leadership for most of the war prevented them from doing anything against those air defense sites except in reaction to being fired upon. It's kinda like fighting while handcuffed.
Also, the German technology was mostly serindipitous. Radar cross-section is much more a function of airframe shaping than materials; it just happened that flying wings tended to be better-shaped than traditional aircraft. But all of this was a trial-and-error process. We learned some from this, and incorporated those lessons into the B-70 proposal and the SR-71. However, it wasn't until the F-117 program (and its contemporaries) came along that we had
A. The theoretical base on which to reliably compute radar reflections (ironically enough, most of that was developed by the Soviets and seemed to be largely ignored by them for a while).
B. The computational power to work out reflections over even a simple faceted shape.
C. The control technology to make such shapes flyable.
And even then, the result was a flat-faceted, ungainly monstrosity. It took a little longer before we could compute reflections of curved surfaces, and develop something like the B-2.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
There was a short story written by Arthur C. Clarke titled "Superiority" that discussed this. Of course, it being science fiction, the weapons were very interesting (matter annihilators, space distortion systems). Also, since it was written (in the 50s?) some of the vocabulary is quaint (I think the term "torpedoes" refer to what we would call missiles).
Still I didn't know (according to Wikipedia) that it was (once?) required reading at West Point! (For those not from the U.S., that is one of the premiere military academies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
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.
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I don't think Hitlers underestimation, if he even did, of Britain and Frances wish to fight for Poland was damaging at all - by the middle of 1940, Germany had caused France to capitulate and thrown the British army out of Europe. Had Germany won the Battle of Britain that year and not invaded the USSR, then in all probability Europe would still be in the hands of the Third Reich.
Without Britain as a staging post, the US, Canada and Australia would have had no firm base to launch an invasion of Europe. With Britain out of the war, Hitler would have held North Africa as well, preventing the Allies from using that as an invasion staging post. Basically, the Allies would have lost any easy gateway into Europe, and with that went any hope of liberation.
He wanted the Soviet Union as well, when there was no possibility he would have won that war due to the sheer size of the USSR.
So, don't get involved in a land war in Asia. Got it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
No, he lost because he over extended himself into Russia.
No weapon at the time wold have stopped the russians once the begain moving toward Germany.
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Besides, where would we have entered it from?
Sarah Palin's house.
"But this one goes to 11!"
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?
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