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Originally Posted by wild_weasel
The SR-71 really was the first "stealth" aircraft. You sure as hell are right on that. A lot of its cross-section savings were due to trial and error and experience on the part of the Skunk Works guys which I think is a real testament to their skills. Real understanding of how to trick radar didn't come until Denys Overholser got a hold of a Pyotr Ufimtsev paper on obscure e-mag calculations.
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They figured out that having a vertical tail the size of a barn door makes for an awfully big target. Plus the thing has minimal frontal cross section and the fan blades for the engine are masked pretty good. So yeah, I imagine that its pretty stealthly. There is also something special about the paint, but I don't know if it was radar absorbant or if it was to help disapate heat. Could be both too I guess. But it sounds like alot of the stuff that made it stealth was not so much specific design choices as things that were chosen for speed then tweaked to make it stealthier. But the team at Skunk Works are pretty much the best engineers in aerospace. I wonder what they are working on now?
Ah, the hopeless diamond solution. I would have loved to be there when they tried to make that thing into an airplane. Hopeless Diamond->Have Blue->F-117 Nighhawk. Wonder who was the first to propose that plane didn't need to be aerodynamic or stable to fly?