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What Scorpions Have To Teach Aircraft Designers
First time accepted submitter elloGov writes "The north African desert scorpion, Androctonus australis, is a hardy creature. Most animals that live in deserts dig burrows to protect themselves from the sand-laden wind. Not Androctonus; it usually toughs things out at the surface. Yet when the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage thanks to the unique structure of its carapace. Dr Han Zhiwu of Jilin University and colleagues have found that surface irregularities based on the scorpion's exoskeleton could substantially minimize atmospheric dust damage to aircraft."
It doesn't? The F-117 can't even fly without a computer constantly making tiny adjustments. I'm not kidding either, it would literally crash if you tried to fly it manually. It's a flying brick.
The Nighthawk was still designed as much as possible like a true airplane; it's only unstable because they couldn't build a more aerodynamic stealthy shape using only flat surfaces (they used flat surfaces because the math for radar deflection depended on computer simulations, and computers couldn't do good enough calculations for curved surfaces in the late '70s).
Calling it a brick is really quite inaccurate. It had an amazingly narrow wingspan, but it's still a plane and it still produced sufficient lift to fly straight on a reasonable power budget. It wasn't stable without computer correction, but that doesn't mean it's a brick. It's not as if they simply strapped enough rockets onto a random shape to get it airborne.