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Originally Posted by boxmonkeyracing
I love debating things like this. thanks for the debate. Are you considering enlisting or becoming an officer?
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I'm in AFROTC, so I'm gonna be a 2Lt. in under a year now (I want to start getting PAID). I got my pilot slot; just have to finish up my aerospace engineering degree and graduate. Then I'm off to do my dream job.
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Originally Posted by DGthe3
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?
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Yeah, the vertical tail thing was pretty much specifically to lower the X-S. Those engine blades are masked pretty good because of the ramjet shock cones (which move forward and back to get minimum pressure losses across the shockwave in front of them), another speed design component that turned out well on the radar screen too.
Back when it was the A-12 there were no chines along the fuselage, they put them on for shock and heat reasons (I'm pretty sure). Not sure if it ended up reflecting radar away or not.
RAM paint was first used on it too, but I think just on leading edges. They debated whether to paint the thing at all due to weight. It could have been a naked titanium bird flyin' around, but they ended up painting it.
During the F-117 project the stealth guys and the aerodynamics guys had a lot of differences. Had it not been for fly-by-wire that they tweaked from the F-16 that thing would never have gotten airborne. Oh, and by the way, it took the Skunk Works less money to develop the F-117 than it took Ford to develop the Taurus. Suck it Ford.