Chinese Researchers Reveal Active Stealthy Material (popsci.com) 138
hackingbear writes: Even after billions and billions of dollars spent on the stealthy skin used on F-22, F-35 and B-2, the material has weaknesses, and one of those is ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radar, which can pick up traces of the plane that other radar misses. Chinese researchers came to the rescue and created a material just 5/16 of an inch thick that can safeguard stealth planes against UHF detection. The material tunes itself to a range of detection frequencies, protecting against a large swath of radar scans. What's even more amazing? They published this seemingly top secret invention wide open in the Journal of Applied Physics .
Doesn't work (Score:5, Funny)
If this thing works, how did anyone notice it?
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If this thing works, how did anyone notice it?
This is a physics paper and the road to engineering is as big as the ocean.
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To me it seems to be similar to the technique used by glare-free glasses, but I may be wrong.
In any case - stealth only works for a limited range of frequencies and is not working well when you go outside that range - or have transmitter and receiver radar stations in different locations.
Today the HF bands in the range of 20 to 30 MHz already suffers from at least one radar station.
There is even statements by some that the stealth technology has lost its advantage due to the more advanced radar stations tha
Re:Doesn't work, No they stole it ... (Score:2)
with their cyber hacking on other countries.
Re: Doesn't work, No they stole it ... (Score:3)
If anything of that nature, I'd suspect it would relate to the helicopter lost during the Bin Laden raid, which was supposedly sold to the Chinese.
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they publishing it because (1) they have something better, (2) they have figured out a way to beat it and hope we will use it, or (3) they were simply incompetent?
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say they would show real competence by publishing before military dickheads of any one country can monopolize and weaponize the knowledge. War only works as long as one side believes to have a clear advantage.
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"War only works as long as one side believes to have a clear advantage."
Nonsense.
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They stole it from the Americans and want everybody to know because that's what is "really" used in US stealth aircraft, the bastards!
Well if you want to go down that route, the Americans stole stealth technology from the Russians. It was Russians that first published a physics paper on stealth technology although at the time it wasn't called that. Free science paper for all to read. The Americans read it, understood the implications and went the engineering road culminating in the SR71 and later the F117.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
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Mod Parent & Grandparent up!
This was exactly the story I thought needed to be added to the comment
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Even then the F117, sometimes called the wobbly goblin, had to sacrifice much in terms of aerodynamics and flight characteristics to implement the first true stealth aircraft.
Not quite true. Sometimes called the wobbly goblin is true, but in truth it flies very well [f-117a.com]. From this article:
There have been many names for the F-117A. Let me tackle the "Wobbly Goblin" one first. According to every F-117A pilot I've talked to, the F-117A flies like any fighter should. As one pilot said "Nobody actually associated with the program while I was in it EVER called it the "Wobblin' Goblin," although I've seen that in print a lot. It didn't wobble--was a rock-solid platform (watch the combat videotape!)." The nickname of "Wobbly Goblin" is fictitious-no one ever called the F-117A that. Apparently a couple of old F-117A test pilots were at a test pilot convention. One of them made the reference that the plane felt like a "Wobbly Goblin" right before some particular computer compensation kicked in during an early flight test. This was heard by one guy, who told his friend, who in turn talked to a reporter in New York over the phone. The reporter then wrote it in an article incorrectly saying that pilots routinely use the term "Wobbly Goblin".
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I don't think "incompetent" means what you think it means. They're competent if this works. And I doubt these scientists care about (2) unless they have some kind of private army. I guess you saw the word "Chinese" and your racism went into overdrive. Because, obviously, every Chinese person is engaged in the secret Chinese plot to take over the world.
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their government is far more coercive than you'd think. If this wasn't a deliberate publishing approved by the higher-ups, I'm guessing these guys will be in trouble.
Calling racism so readily is hardly adding to the discussion.
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Some options:
The US will race around and look back at all it old plans from the 1970-80's efforts and see if it can find a way information was overlooked. Often that induced frantic reach out can be more telling than any real product or news.
A kind of reverse Operation Merlin for the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] that has a nat
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Shifting the balance of power.
China alone can't maintain air superiority against the USA. They can (and will) use the technology but the numbers alone mean the US will keep ahead of them.
But after releasing it to the public, every half-civilized country will be able to make their own stealth fighters. And who has more airplanes: the USA, or the rest of the world? With the cat out of the box, USA will be facing competent opposition in any major conflict involving aerial forces, which will slow down their adv
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, which country has the U.S. stolen since WWII, Tibet? Which sea is the U.S. claiming to entirely own, the S. China Sea? And them missiles aimed at Taiwan, the U.S. is claiming to own that as well?
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Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
They just set up the puppet governments that do the US bidding.
Friendly yes puppets no. Its true that the governments we helped stand up after or during various conflicts are usually friendly to us. That is beneficial yes its good to have friends. Its good for them to keep us as friends too, in almost all those cases those governments could not resist the various threats to them without an umbrella of US Military protection or at least apparent protection.
The are not puppets though, their self interesting in survival, not causing us to have to sever ties with them is a requirement for that. Even with that said most of those governments very much have at times resisted our policies in favor of their other interests. We have permitted them to do that as well. Its not colonialism and its not expansionism its something certainly but its neither of those things.
I am not saying its all good either, just trying to be fair.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the first free elections in Iraq. The Nation spoke. They wanted islamist fundamentalist party at the helm. The USA choose to simply disregard the results of the elections and set up a government of their choice. "Democracy."
"Puppet government" and "government friendly to us" is just two different names for the same thing, depending on which side you're sitting.
"self-interest in survival" is a very interesting way to put their motivations behind remaining friendly to the USA.
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Who says the election was rigged or faked or anything? The UN supervised it, found no significant violations, the results were announced, and then summarily discarded.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Although, to be strictly fair, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yemen weren't so much "stolen" as destroyed. Of course, that's not nearly so bad.
As for Germany, if the German people could get rid of political leaders who (for some inexplicable reason) seem to be more loyal to the USA than to their own nation... It couldn't have anything to do with money, do you think?
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Advances in Sociology have destroyed Democracy.
The few informed voters are simply drowned out in the sea of people who buy into the sociological tricks of the parties. The people who control the campaigns control the country. The nation is offered an illusion of choice and a colorful show, but the real decision is made by the people who write the candidates lists.
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While this is largely true, it's not so much democracy that has been destroyed as it is that the USA's democratic republic has become corrupted.
All governments are susceptible to corruption, and the USA's system which relies on less than 600 elected officials to dictate national law for the other 300 million Americans just took a while to get this bad. I can't imagine any one person representing half a million people effectively. So, if you allow 600 people to be split among mostly 2 parties and have mos
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"alive and well" to a degree - the more economically oriented a country, with more influential corporations and big financial entities, the deader the democracy. There are the banana republics where dictatorship barely disguises the corruption, and there are the 1st world powers where the corruption is well hidden behind the show of "democracy". The situation is best mid-way between, like in Iceland or Greece, where the governments actually represent the nation, but swing either way, towards authoritarian r
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I think SharpFang has a very good point about the corruption that ensues when big corporations and rich people get too much power. Another factor that counts against the USA is just that it is so big: over 300 million people in one of the largest countries in the world. That means there is hardly anything in common between people's interests in, say, Alabama, Alaska, and Montana. That, together with the strong "business" slant of the national culture, leads to Congress being less a forum for reasoning and e
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>I'm actually now against democracy but haven't got a solution
Try this: One dollar, one vote. For every dollar you send in in taxes you get a vote. The rich tax evaders will be disenfranchised as will those on the dole. One could have a bicameral legislature where one chamber is one dollar one vote, and all spending bills arise there; the other is one anus one vote, treaties come from this body. Bills must pass both.
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Chinese power projection (Score:3)
China alone can't maintain air superiority against the USA.
Not today but there is no reason to believe that will have to remain the case forever. However any likely direct military conflict between the US and China would take place on or close to Chinese territory where China has advantages besides their fighters that even the US military would struggle to deal with.
But after releasing it to the public, every half-civilized country will be able to make their own stealth fighters. And who has more airplanes: the USA, or the rest of the world? With the cat out of the box, USA will be facing competent opposition in any major conflict involving aerial forces, which will slow down their advance of power, giving China a chance in the race..
You think building a competent stealth fighter is merely a matter of pasting a bit of (allegedly) radar absorbing material on a jet? There's a WEE bit more to it than that. Frankly this argument is
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Stealth technology, as hinted at in the article, has been susceptible to UHF radar systems since the 1940s. It's always been a gimmick and it's never worked as advertised since every country in the world has sophisticated enough radar to pick up stealth planes. At best, they reduce the size of the blip on radar a tiny bit depending on where the plane is in relation to the radar dish, but stealth tech changes the shape, and thus the capabilities of the planes as well -- mostly, it makes the planes less ma
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any decent radar can see them coming because their bottoms are flat and reflect well
I the radar is perfectly perpendicular with the jet. If your radar signal has any angle to it, it'll reflect off in another direction because of the flat surface, and you get very little signal reflected, now this is key, back at you. Round surfaces love to reflect signals from all directions back at the sender. Flat surfaces rarely reflect back at the sender.
When watching documentaries about radar tracking, many used the notion of a ball bearing of a given size for tracking and signal strength. Ball bear
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and this special material works only in the normal direction - that is perpendicular to the surface... so exactly where it counts.
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Who, in this day and age, *needs* ICBMs?
If they want to nuke the USA, all they need is to hide it in a transport of cocaine.
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm also reminded of how the US once published spy satellite pictures of the Nile delta showing all of the subterranean waterways as a means of informing the Russian military that they could, by inference, also see all of the missile silos and other underground facilities the Soviets had build in Siberia, etc.; so this is probably also about sending a similar message. Quite nicely done too, unlike the Russian's ham fisted efforts with their "leak" of nuclear torpedo schematics via state TV over the weekend. Yeah right, like the Ra-Ra-Putin Channel doesn't have an official censor to vet everything it airs...
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(4) They don't really see it as a threat. Most stealth technology falls down when challenged by adequate ground based detective capability.
Its unlikely you can get far in US or Chinese air space without being spotted by one detective device or an other. Where stealth tech helps you is against enemies with limited air defense capability or when operating in territory that isn't the home turf of a major power and does not have the array of detective gear in place. Stealth does make it hard for other fighte
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Are they publishing it because (1) they have something better, (2) they have figured out a way to beat it and hope we will use it, or (3) they were simply incompetent?
Or, perhaps, they have decided they want to let someone else work out the engineering...then steal the design back.
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They're publishing it because they stole it from the United States and want to gloat a bit over it.
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They're publishing it because they stole it from the United States and want to gloat a bit over it.
And the US can't even admit that it was stolen from them, can't claim any credit for it because its so heavily classified. And now everyone in the world can look at this super secret classified tech and start finding holes in it. Go China!
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A distraction? You think everyone will just drop what they are doing to work on this? A small group will be tasked with seeing how well it works and then how it doesn't work [what frequencies it fails at].
Obligatory (Score:2)
Admiral Akbar [youtube.com]
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Turned absorption (Score:2, Informative)
As with almost any tuned system, it works very well and damping a particular frequency, but very poorly off resonance. The article describes a "broad-band" anti-reflective material, which is misconstrued in the summary. In fact they made a material which can be tuned over a relatively large frequency band ("0.7-1.9GHz) by adjusting a bias voltage. In reality, at any given time the bandwidth is only ~0.2GHz. Moreover, their structure only absorbs one polarization of radiation, and was tested only at normal
Re:Turned absorption (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still better than nothing. A passive broadband radar will take milliseconds to adapt the coating to any single radar frequency. With more than one it will run into trouble, but again, multiple blips at predictable intervals are quite easy to program, so the airplane would be able to hide from multiple radars.
This can be thwarted relatively easily with a radar that constantly shift frequencies randomly, but... you need to build one. The old infrastructure becomes obsolete, necessitating costly upgrades. It may provide exactly zero battlefield advantage in the long run but if it forces the opponent to suffer costs of performing upgrades of their infrastructure which would be otherwise not needed, it's already a win. And by publishing the paper (instead of costly building air force exploiting the new tech, which *might* leak through the opponent spies (and become obsolete fast), or might remain secret and become obsolete much slower) they are simply running the costs up for the USA.
"Upgrade all your radars to frequency-hopping right now, before anyone builds a plane that will be invisible to them". And the plane *will* be built somewhere, because there are many countries that just can't afford upgrading their radar infrastructure, and their opponents would benefit greatly from planes invisible against them - even if they are useless against the (upgraded) USA radars. And the USA will definitely dislike the option of having 3rd party airplanes in the air which they can't see, even if they don't mean a direct threat currently.
Economical warfare: at relatively low cost for yourself force the enemy to spend a bunch of money on defenses they will probably never need. (but will never need them only if they build them... if they don't, they'll regret they didn't.)
multifrequency radars. Off-normal incidence (Score:3, Informative)
Radars have been wideband (wider than the absorption peak of this new material) for at least 30 years, and probably longer. Pulse compression with multi-hundred MHz bandwidth is a standard thing, and has been for a very long time. The SPY-1 on Aegis cruisers is a good example.. It's L-band (where this material seems to be designed) and the bandwidth is very wide. (hundreds of MHz). And the frequency on modern radars is agile. The air traffic radars at 5GHz that have the interference problem with WiFi ar
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Radar systems already have this capability. There's no need to upgrade anything. Any radar system not using multiple simultaneous frequencies -- especially in the UHF range isn't a modern system.
I say go ahead and spend a fortune building this new super invisible wonder-woman spyplane with expensive electronic skin... it'll be interesting to see how far it gets before it's detected with current tech. My guess would be about half a mile. Maybe less if we upgrade our tech before the plane is built? Anyo
Gamble? (Score:2)
Stealth is great and all, but we should also have a modern fighter plane that says, hell with stealth, I'll be fast, maneuverable, and mean.
We seem to be putting all our eggs into the stealth basket. If somebody defeats stealth, then fast may be the next best alternative.
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The problem is we've already tapped out that skill tree. Air-Air engagements have been primarily over the horizon followed by a quick pass for a while, and we've hit the point where just going faster isn't really that useful anymore. Maneuverability is still a thing, but primarily for dealing with ground targets since again air-air is primarily a game of electronic warfare from over the horizon. The same goes for meanness... the A-10 is as ugly as a dump truck and twice as tough but that's so it can soak up
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Yeah, the key is to make planes fast and cheap. No system in existence can deal with a few tens of thousands of planes attacking a target at once. If military planes can be made to follow Moore's law of sorts then that is far better than stealth. The problem is we are taking the opposite track. Every next generation of planes is more fancy but also much more expensive than the previous one.
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Yep. Better flak jacket for soldiers to survive more powerful rounds? Harder tank armor to withstand multiple hits from armor-piercing rockets? It's all a dead end.
We've developed so efficient assault capabilities - rockets, ammo, smart bombs - that they've outpaced the defensive technology so far they just won't catch up. The only way not to die currently is to either not be stopped or to kill them before they can kill you. Dodging or soaking damage is no longer really an option.
Re:Gamble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dodging in the form of guerrilla warfare where you move around all the time seems to work still. It's why it was so hard to find Bin Laden and that there's still ongoing work trying to locate IS leaders.
Bunkers are outdated when it comes to serious assault stuff, but such weapons are expensive and limited in supply so if you can trick your opponent into wasting bunker busters and missiles by fake bunkers and similar then you can at least let things play in your favor.
During WWI it was not unusual to have the "disappearing guns" in fixed artillery fortress locations protecting harbors. They became obsolete with the advent of the bomber aircraft, which resulted in a ceiling on the fortresses to protect against incoming bombs, which was pretty common during WWII. When the battleships got gyro-stabilized guns with high precision and aircraft able to do precision attacks on bunkers they became obsolete too since they now were essentially death traps.
That's why most artillery units (both coastal and land) today are highly mobile. They can be operated by 1-2 men, stop and fire several rounds in under a minute and then be on their way again. (Bofors Archer)
When you look at aircraft today it's a lot of stealth, but the downside with that technology is that it limits the punch it can carry. The A10 is non-stealth, and carries over 1000 30mm rounds, carries rockets externally to the level that it looks like a porcupine while the F-35 has a few hundred 20mm rounds and have to hide every rocket inside the hull. The stealth capabilities are also constraining the aerodynamics so that maneuverability suffers.
However the advantage with stealth is that the first strike may appear with little warning, but after that the advantage is lower - and since the carried payload is lower it takes more missions to get the job done. A war zone is also highly fluid - the weapons you brought with you at the beginning of the mission may not be the right weapons when you arrive in the strike zone.
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Which is why I think we need to get out of this "does everything best/only need one" mindset and get back to having a few different models of aircraft that are reliable, dominate their particular role, and are affordable enough that we can actually USE them. If we want a stealth plane make it invisible and stupid fast so it can do its job and then GTFO if it's spotted. If we want an air superiority fighter make it fast, extremely maneuverable, and give it an ECM suite that would make Ghost in the Shell jeal
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Guerilla warfare is the epitome of stealth. With drones armed with infrared gone are the days of partizan groups hiding in forests - currently they hide in plain sight, among civilians, undistinguishable until it's too late. It's still stealth, but of a different kind - blending into the background in such a way that the soldier staring you in the face doesn't know you're a combatant.
Mobility is another means of stealth: if firing reveals your position and draws enemy fire, you need to relocate quickly and
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It's why it was so hard to find Bin Laden
I hadn't realized they'd found the body...
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It's a little different on the ground but largely because the fight's asymmetrical in both training and technology. A lot of the less educated insurgents think our guys are literal demons because they just don't understand body armor or how advanced our med tech is. Similarly our tanks basically no-sell old soviet era handheld antitank weaponry.
That's why they try to stick to ambushes, potshots, and IEDs. Rigging up a bunch of old bombs makes an explosion big enough to blow up anything and it comes as a suc
Re:Gamble? (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how fast your plane is, there will always be a missile that is faster.
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Then carry advanced decoys. If you don't have to design around stealth, then you have more room and power for such.
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then fast may be the next best alternative.
No matter how fast your plane is, there will always be a missile that is faster.
Certainly true so long as you have a pilot in the cockpit and a human in the decision loop.
Remove both of those and the Plane (or Autonomous Drone/Skynet Precursor if you prefer), while certainly still fulfilling your premise of being slower than a missile, can come a heck of a lot closer to that missile's speed, performance envelope and reaction time.
Re:Gamble? (Score:5, Interesting)
The future of air warfare (neglecting space) is pilotless aircraft. They can pull much higher Gs and no pilot means you don't have to put up with propaganda showing captured pilots. Just about all of the U.S. military knows this except a few spaghetti splattered uniformed Air Force generals.
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But hacking and radio jamming may limit what bot-jets can do in some cases. That's why multiple techniques and strategies are needed: one can defeat some of the plane types all of the time and all of the plane types some of the time, but not all of the plane types all of the time. (My apologies to Mr. Lincoln.)
And that approach may still be cheaper than the one-size-fits-all approach that the f35 tried and failed at.
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... but you will have to put up with this: http://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com... [cbsistatic.com]
Re:Gamble? NOPE (Score:2)
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Yes, drones will do the job. And stealth is not that important - drones can be mass-produced. They are small and hard to hit, so it doesn't matter that missiles are faster. Missiles are cheaper than planes, but not cheaper than drones. And without the pilot, the drone can take much more beating too.
Send a hundred thousand drones - many can be cheaper decoys with the same radar signature as the armed kind. See them waste all the missiles in their stockpile, bomb whatever you need to bomb, get 90% of the dro
F-117 stealth radar coating (Score:4, Insightful)
Although it was hard to see from where we stood, I think that the exhaust structure had been removed. Compared to some of the pictures I have seen, I also think that they removed features like the bomb bay doors.
Even so, it was a fantastic experience to see one up close. If you ever git the chance to visit the museum, take it. There is a long waiting list, you can't just go there and get in. Planning is required.
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mind games? (Score:2)
Maybe they know the US already discovered it in secret, and they are thumbing their nose at us, or trying to coax us to abandon it by implying they can study it in detail.
5/16 Inch = 8mm (Score:5, Informative)
Translation: 5/16 Inch = 8mm
Re:5/16 Inch = 8mm (Score:5, Informative)
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That still depends on density. If it's a solid of >1g/cm^3 that's a lot. If it's a foam-like coating, that's not such a problem.
Re:5/16 Inch = 8mm (Score:4, Interesting)
And also I don't see much practical ground application, UHF isn't very useful for ground target detection due to it's inability to penetrate ground clutter. I suppose you could slap this stuff on a naval vessel and effectively "raise the horizon" on your vessel from surface detection but again, limited use.
I suspect the Chinese allowed this article to go to print as there isn't alot of military application here for a material as unwieldy as this, and they likely (and probably correctly) assumed that other governments are already aware of this material and have decided not to use it, for the same reasons.
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It worked for space shuttles (actually for the enormous fuel tank of the space shuttle) and with 2.5" of foam layer.
These are all engineering problems to be solved, not show-stoppers that make it useless.
Plus wanna bet how much this can be improved if one tosses a couple billion at improvement research?
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Aerospace, where this material would most likely be used first, still predominantly uses Imperial units. Does that mean you should "learn to live with it" as well?
As a trained engineer, I'm fluent in both Imperial and metric units (both CGS and MKS for metric). I've never really understood bashing each other over unit choices. We don't bash each other because a paper was published in Russian instead of English. (And no the Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost
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Imperial units are for the ass-monkeys of the British empire.
They already defeated this material (Score:1)
Why they disclose it? Because it is no longer a problem for them. They already have a radar or radar equivalent that detects planes wrapped in this stuff. If they can fool the others to use this material and believe to be invisible while they are not then Chineese can have much more fun compared to simply being invisible.
Vajk
UHF was never a threat (Score:3)
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Actually the UHF vulnerability has been known about for decades. An F117 was shot down during the Balkans war using fairly old Soviet equipment that was tuned to a higher frequency. It's a proven technique.
Sure, newer aircraft are designed to do better against it, but none of them are immune.
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And as was noted elsewhere, trying to remove the stealth coating is impossible without destroying the plane itself.
More than just UHF (Score:1)
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this compound is worthless (Score:5, Interesting)
China is giving up nothing. They have a compound that will absorb UHF, but all others are reflected. IOW, it is worthless.
So, why not publish it?
It's a trap.... (Score:2)
It's a trap..... Of course they want us to install this new material as they have a means of detecting it. They can get this material to light up on a new super secret radar like a Christmas tree.
Because it is pretty pointless (Score:1)
The claims that current stealth aircraft are very vulnerable to UHF radar systems in the first place is flawed.
UHF only works well very close up. At range it can at best tell you that "something is in that general direction" -- nowhere near enough data to launch a missile. The radar resolution cell (the "box" in the sky where the radar knows the aircraft is) ends up being VERY large. This also makes it especially susceptible to the affects of jamming, chaff, decoys, etc.
As a result UHF radar only offers a v
outstanding in his field (Score:4, Funny)
I've applied this new technology to my 1975 Toyota pickup. Here's a photo of me standing next to it:
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Inter... [usda.gov]
Two uses for military technology (Score:2)
2)Bluff. This category includes things like nuclear weapons. No (sane) person wants to use these. Most Americans currently alive, wish it had not been necessary to use them in WWII. Instead, we want the otherside to know we have it and are willing to use it. Which is half the reason why we did in fact use them in WWII - to demonstrate we had them and they worked.
Clearly, China has zero in
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1) War. You use this weapon in battle. We are most familiar with this class. Guns, tanks, bombs, planes, etc.
2)Bluff. This category includes things like nuclear weapons. No (sane) person wants to use these. Most Americans currently alive, wish it had not been necessary to use them in WWII.
How do you think the American people will react when they finally learn that, after the first nuke, the Japanese were actively trying to surrender and the US ignored that and went and nuked them again?
Theres no excuse for nuking babies, especially when their government is trying to surrender to you.
I've heard from someone reliable that... (Score:2)
...two aerospace companies in U.S. defense industry have had this technology for at least 6 years - whether they plan to use or it not she didn't know.
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Yes, and China stole it and are publishing for the world to see as their own research for cover. A nice little underhanded slap for the US' public stunt of sailing through the south China sea.
It's starting... (Score:2)
who even uses radar? (Score:2, Informative)
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Like the imperialist aggression in Tibet, the South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan?