Hitler's Stealth Fighter 582
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."
Re:If it were only in the leading edge (Score:5, Insightful)
every other stealth programme goes with the notion that it has to be invisible at all times.
Not exactly. You will never be invisible, and stealth technology/employment is a lot more complicated than "we'll just be invisible". Even today, remaining undetected until past the threat is a fairly well-used technique. Just look at the F-22. And even if your airframe isn't fully-LO, you see a lot of emphasis on reducing frontal RCS. The B-1, Typhoon, Rafale, and Super Hornet all use some degree of RCS reduction, which buys them that much more time to get in close. Modern cruise missiles use the same principle.
Interestingly enough, raw speed can buy you some of the same advantages. Go fast enough and high enough, and the defenses just won't have enough time to react, even if you're lit up like a billboard.
Re:The German's are doing it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Man (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I like the decoration (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old News (Score:3, Insightful)
Hand in your geek card, youngster. I was flying this in "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe" from LucasArts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Weapons_of_the_Luftwaffe [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:4, Insightful)
Hitler wasn't some demonic bad-ass bad-guy. He was a crazed political genius at the right place and right time. His downfall: he wasn't a real geek! He lost because of technical cluelessness! He didn't have the technical knowledge to realize the value of the wonder-weapons until late in the war when the 3rd Reich got desperate, and then it was too late. His right-hand man Goering didn't have a complete grasp of the importance of good intelligence and command and control. (He would have won the Battle of Britain, but he didn't know that he should've continued his campaign against the sector stations.) Even Hitler's understanding of economic warfare was that of an enthusiastic amateur.
We won not because our geeks were better, though they were darn good. We won because we *listened* to them!
The Secret History of Silicon Valley. (How geeks won WWII and the Cold War, and how that led to Silicon Valley.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ [youtube.com]
tech vs manpower (Score:2, Insightful)
It's quite an amazing feat of the German scientists, if they hadn't scapegoated the jews to get into power they may have also had the atom bomb but years before the usa.
The allies only won the war because they just threw a lot more bodies than there were German bullets for the invasion of normandy.
Re:The German's are doing it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone in a plane that could out-run it.
The P-51 Mustang had a top speed of between 400 and 440mph. That's close to the upper limit for a propeller-driven aircraft. This thing was intended to be capable of 600mph. Granted, that's an estimate made by the plane's designers, so they may not have been able to achieve it, but the Me 262 (German jet figher) was capable of 580mph already. No Allied figher could keep up with an Me 262 anyway.
Presumably, the plan was to hide from radar detection until over the coast. At this point, the aircraft would travel the 80 miles or so to London in around 8 minutes. It would have to do this unescorted - German fighers would be detected on approach, and wouldn't be able to keep up anyway. By the time the RAF got some fighters in the air, it'd be too late for them to intercept, assuming they could even catch up. Drop bombs over London, turn around, and run like hell. Hope to evade the fighters, which are now directly ahead of you, and return home.
Getting back home would be the tricky part.
Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Insightful)
Not hardly, as Jacob McCandles would have said. The Germans biggest problem in the war wasn't their technology, it was their production. The USA built enough tanks that they could afford to give away more than the total German tank production. The Soviets built more tanks than the USA.
Airplanes, the USA built enough to give away more than the Germans made. The Soviets didn't build more than the USA, but they built nearly as many.
The USA built more ships than everyone else combined, much less the Germans.
And on and on like that. Nothing the Germans could have done would have mattered a hill of beans, really - the only way they could have won that war was if they'd started building up their industry to USA/USSR levels in the 20's.
And even then, their chances would have been slim at best - they didn't have the manpower to operate industry at our level and put 20 million men in the field at the same time.
Re:Hehe (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe learned a lesson from the fascists. Curtailing free speech was a powerful aid in keeping those regimes in power.
Therefore, in order to completely disavow that era, European governments have decided to turn the power to curtail free speech towards the purposes of good. If you are a European government minister, this makes complete sense.
It's important to bear in mind that free speech has never had the same value or application in Europe that it has in places like the US. In the US, its a sacred right, the Most Holy First Amendment. In Europe, it's just considered a pretty good idea, as long as it doesn't get overly inconvenient or embarrassing for the government. Just because they invented the concept doesn't mean that they have fully implemented it.
Re:Best Photos (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best Photos (Score:3, Insightful)
German scientists were some of the best in the world..
Yep, and were a little to Jewish or otherwise and left Germany and then ended up in the Manhattan project. Define Irony.
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:3, Insightful)
He was under enormous economic pressures to continue the process at that point (much of which was his own fault - while Germany's economy had, of course, been trashed after WW1, there were new economic problems from the occupations themselves - Austria wasn't too bad, a bit over budget, but Czechoslovakia cost much more than projected and return benefits were much, much lower. You could compare it to the US claims circa 2002 that the Iraq war would cost 40 Billion total and oil production would be fully restored within 9 Months, although the Reich's predictions weren't that far off.
Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because people were generally stupid then.
Other astounding inventions from tree-dwelling tailhangers in the first half of the 20th century: nuclear power, transistors, purified penicillin, and television.
Re:If it were only in the leading edge (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:3, Insightful)
One other issue that eventually doomed the German war effort was their abject refusal to commit their industrial resources to "total war."
Allied factories were running around the clock. Not the German. They actually hamstrung their own industrial capacity by not doing this almost as much as the allied bombing efforts did.
Of course, by not taking Britain out of the war before Barbarossa, the allies were eventually able to deny Germans access to resources, and the German industrial capacity eventually wore out.
Re:Hitler-Stalin (Score:3, Insightful)
If such a thing had occurred, it would have been very unlikely that any ground gained could be occupied by the USSR - the gains made in WW2 were solely due to the fact that the USSR was the sole army making those gains from the East, handing most of Germany and Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Its highly unlikely the USSR would have ended up with those same gains with a fully mixed Allied army involved.
In all likelihood, the pact between the USSR and Germany would have held, but remained uneasy. Thats not to say Hitler wouldn't have tried something later, but he might have been in a better position to press home any attack.
Early cloaking technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Reminds me of early attempts to cloak planes to the naked eye by putting a row of lights around the edges. It was reasonably effective on a bright overcast day.
Stretching Credibility (Score:4, Insightful)
"RCS testing showed that an Ho-229 approaching the English Coast from France flying at 550 mph at 50 to 100 feet above the water would not have been visible to Chain Home radar."
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design [wikipedia.org]. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named. It took until the 80s for them to figure it out and make a success of the B2.
So, so long as a pilot could buzz the waves at an altitude that would make most pilots of conventional fighters of the era nervous, at the high end of speeds for the era (a good 100mph faster than a P-51 Mustang), before flitting up over the cliffs of southern England (the famed white cliffs of Dover reaching up to 106m, a good 70m over the 100 feet the plane was flying across the channel at), then it could have been invisible to British radar of the time.
One can only imagine, if production had worked out, the teenagers Germany was strapping in to planes at the time (having lost most of its experienced pilots by that point in the war) would have been doing this on a daily basis.
Re:NSFW (Score:3, Insightful)
He's just demonstrating that it's perfectly possible for a German to have a sense of humour.
Unlike some of the replies...
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:3, Insightful)
You forget one thing (and this - being German - is where I'm glad that things went the way they went): the US had several thousand people working on the A-bomb.
There is no doubt that its primary target was Berlin - and only the initially slow progress and the fast defeat at the end made its use there unnecessary.
Had Germany not been defeated by May 1945, later that year in August we might have seen Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Munich, and the area around the "steel-belt" being turned into smoldering, radioactive ash-trays.
That is the way things would have turned out. Nothing else.
Some of the (Jewish) scientists working on project Manhattan consequently refused to continue to work on the project at first, after they learned that Hitler was dead and Germany defeated.
But the bomb had already taken a life on its own....
I do, they lost ok? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even in ancient times when country "A" conquers country "B", "A" often takes people from "B" back to "A" to do stuff for them. That does not mean "B" won. Far from it.
Plus Hitler died and stayed dead. That's not normally considered winning.
When you eat bacon does that mean the pig won? I doubt it.
Germany did well after the war and so did the USA. So that's a win-win, but Hitler and the Nazis most certainly did lose.
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's likely that when the history books are written 100 years from now, World War 2 will be viewed as a great war between the two conflicting ideologies of fascism and communism, with the majority of the text being devoted to the Eastern front confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Quantitatively speaking, the amount of men and material devoted to that aspect of the conflict makes the war on the Western front look like little more than a sideshow, with the other players falling in line behind one of the aforementioned two. The battle of Kursk, for example, had more divisions engaged in battle than were engaged on the Western front during the entirety of the Allied campaign.
It's a chestnut about as old as the war itself, but it has been said that the Allies defeated German Fascism to make the world safe for Soviet Communism, but it bears repeating. For example, much is said about the Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps during the war, but it is little noted that by the German defeat in May of 1945 the Soviets were operating the largest concentration camp in Europe, and the "liberation" of the camps in Poland that came under Soviet control after the war was less a liberation and more of a corporate restructuring. A "Under New Management" sign was metaphorically put on the gates, and similar atrocities were committed; only the admission requirements had changed.
Re:NSFW (Score:1, Insightful)
Another American Hill Billy trying to lecture Europeans about Freedom, In Europe its not rare to see political parties covering the full expectrum from the left to the right, and its OK and life continues, in the US being a Comunist is a mayor crime, being a fascist is OK if you are white anglosaxon believe in god and swear for the stars and stripes, there is not chance whatsoever fior a atheist candidate to became President, as for free speech, yea, like mafia infiltrating workers unions with the bless of the government, with nice historical figures like Macarty or E. Hoover, media manipulation, the best government propaganda money can buy, wire taping, NSA, CIA....
as for the topic, those planes looks fantastic even for today standards