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."
Man (Score:5, Funny)
What DIDN'T Hitler Do?
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
What DIDN'T Hitler Do?
make friends as a child?
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
Succeed as an artist?
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
I'm guessing you haven't seen Hitler's artwork.
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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]
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:5, Informative)
No, he lost because he over extended himself into Russia.
No weapon at the time wold have stopped the russians once the begain moving toward Germany.
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:4, Interesting)
As to the value of so-called 'wonder weapons', you should really read Arthur C. Clark's short story 'Superiority'. And before everyone says "it's just a sci-fi story, it has no bearing on real life" you should keep in mind that this story has been required reading at the US military colleges for almost 40 years.
It's not just the time and effort that goes into R+D; it's building up a manufacturing base, getting the necessary raw materials, training your soldiers on new equipment, adapting strategies to the new technology (often a forgotten step), shipping the new technology out into the field. Then, you've got a new, fragile, and rushed technology being subjected to the worst conditions imaginable and having people's lives rely on it.
The only obvious exception is the A-bomb, and even that was a fluke. The US was safe from invasion and damage, didn't have to worry nearly as much as Germany about having the whole project ruined in a bombing raid. You only need a few A-bombs to make a huge difference in the war, not true of most Germany's pet projects (except, obviously, their own A-bomb research). Since you only need a few, it's much easier to training, deployment, and maintenance are much simpler than a mass produced weapon.
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Pretty sure Hitler's problem was that he was a idiot (strategically at least anyway).
Trying to take over the Soviet Union. Ha! That really worked out well.
People point to D-Day and this and the other thing as his downfall.
Cold War BS aside, it was Russia that brought them to their knees, and Hitler's unending pursuit in Russia.
I am sure all his aides were like "Dude this is such a bad idea!" and "Man this is so not working out!" at least in their heads anyway...
For the grunt on the ground, hearing he was be
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:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:4, Interesting)
Had Hitler waited, he might have had the air power to definitively defeat Britain, which might have allowed him to take on the Soviets. In my opinion, even with Britain defeated, it would have taken several years of armament production before Hitler could have realistically taken on the Soviets, and it may have never really been possible, but it certainly wasn't possible with the state of his armies in 1941, particularly when he still had to heavily defend the Western Front.
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.
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Of course, the Soviet attitude at the time was that no invasion by Germany could be expected until 1942, and the Soviets themselves
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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
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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 o
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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, radioa
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The Germans had their own scientists (including the brilliant Werner Heisenberg [wikipedia.org]) working on an atomic-energy project. They never developed an actual bomb, though historians are split as to whether that was because of lack of resources, mismanagement/wasting time and effort on research dead-ends, or active sabotage by the German scientists involved.
Thomas Powers' book Heisenberg's War [amazon.com] is a fascinating history of the German atomic project.
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Had Germany won the Battle of Britain that year and not invaded the USSR, then in all probability Europe would still be in the hands of the Third Reich.
Germany never had much chance of invading Britain. Even if Germany had continued bombing British airfields, the British airforce was pretty evenly matched against the Luftwaffe, and had all the homefield advantages in terms of fuel and being able to parachute out onto friendly soil. The main problem the British had was not loss of equipment, but loss of skilled pilots; however, this was also a problem for the Luftwaffe.
If the Luftwaffe had somehow succeeded, the Germans still needed to get a large number of
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:4, Interesting)
Hitler-Stalin (Score:3, Interesting)
That's true, the non-aggression pact.
However, would Stalin have necessarily kept to it?
Especially with the stark ideological divide between fascism and communism, probably not.
Was it an uneasy alliance to begin with? Maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact [wikipedia.org]
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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
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:5, Funny)
Besides, where would we have entered it from?
Sarah Palin's house.
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Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:5, Funny)
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.
So, don't get involved in a land war in Asia. Got it.
Re:Good thing he wasn't a Nerd (Score:5, Interesting)
Hitler didn't make a single ultimate mistake. He made several. Launching into an unneeded second front when he broke the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union was a huge mistake. He also diverted a lot of supplies for his war effort into his political posturing bullshit about the purity of the Aryans. If he'd been like a real politician and just said what he had to, instead of actually following through with it, his trains could have been hauling soldiers and firearms to the front, instead of Jews and homosexuals to death camps.
So remember kids: if you want to eradicate people who look a certain way and you also want to become ruler of the planet, it's best to take over everything first, then you can genocide to your heart's content. Also, don't get involved with war in the winter in Russia.
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And Stalin was possibly doing the same. I've heard the hypothesis that Germanys initial success during the invasion was partly due to catching the Soviet Union while they were preparing for attacking instead of maintaining a defensive position.
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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 res
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Germany's war machine was not full geared up, true. But Britain's and France's were in worse shape. And given that both countries had more production capability, it would have worked against Germany to wait.
In fact, it is sometimes seen as a British blunder to get involved as early as they did, as a few more years of prep wou
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In his book The Origins of the Second World War [amazon.com] historian A.J.P. Taylor argued that the British didn't particularly want to fight for Poland; or, at least, their leaders didn't. But they were painted into a corner by decisions they'd made in response to earlier crises.
British Prime Minister Chamberlain believed that he had "appeased [wikipedia.org]" Hitler at the Munich Conference [wikipedia.org] by giving him part of Czechoslovakia, but Hitler went on to then conquer the rest of th
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Add to that the fact that after Hitler rose to power he and his cronies politicized academia and government research, and determined by their own whims which scientists were to be fired and which projects to fund, starving certain potentially useful research project of money. This resulted in many scientists leaving Germany and moving to Allied countries. This obviously ended up giving the Allies and the US in particular additional talented scientists. The Germans developed plenty of potentially effectiv
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
I'm glad that Indiana Jones was able to destroy this thing in Egypt, before it got off the ground. Otherwise, who knows how the war would have gone?
Best Photos (Score:5, Informative)
The most interesting photos:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-09_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-08_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-04_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-11_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
Tell them you were reminding yourself about just how bad a person Hitler was. And then chomp down on a big banger while saluting a picture of the queen to let them know how much you love England.
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
In America, we call it a sausage in the mouth.
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Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
I've got mod points, but I can't find anything that matches +1 Frightful Police State.
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
what with swastika flags and all. I'll be in trouble if someone has overseen my screen just then, being a german living in Britain.
Speaking of which (and paraphrasing The Extras), where did these people get those huge swastikas?
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:NSFW (Score:4, Interesting)
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He's just demonstrating that it's perfectly possible for a German to have a sense of humour.
Unlike some of the replies...
Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Interesting)
The development of stealth technology is one of those secretive fields that has an instant fascination. I quite enjoyed reading Ben Rich's autobiography [amazon.com]. Also Hitler's plan to atom bomb New York [youtube.com] and The Real Heroes of Telemark [amazon.co.uk] were both quite interesting, casting two sides of the same global battle from very different perspectives. German scientists were some of the best in the world (not that they are so bad today..). Sometimes I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.
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.
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But one German tank could shoot down ten Russian ones. So the count alone is not the point.
Besides, Hitler's advantage was the Blitzkrieg. He was too fast. That was all.
And in the end, that killed him too, because the army was spread to much, and they could not hold the areas behind the fronts anymore.
If he had just stopped at one point, where he could still hold it, he might have had a chance.
Then wait a generation, for people to get used to it. And expand again. Like breathing.
Of course, being evil to eve
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Umm, no. The Blitzkrieg was dead by 1943. Alas, it couldn't function well without air superiority. Which the Germans didn't have anywhere after 1942.
Guderian wrote a book on Panzer warfare in the early 30's. It included a really insightful table listing engine production by the major powers, which Guderian considered to be the most obvious metric by which one could assess a nation's ability to fight effectively using AFVs properly.
He made
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Don't see the Russians short. Their tanks may not have been as technically advanced as the Germans' were, but they were designed for the terrain where the battles were taking place (snow, cold, mud pits) and they were easier to repair and manufacture. I think that if we looked at what happened in these battles, you wouldn't see the lopsided a result you're claiming.
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Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone kills Hitler their first time.
Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly because you've bought into the hype surrounding WWII German VunderVeapons. In reality, Germany never had an atom bomb (they weren't even close), let alone a plane capable of delivering it over strategic distances (they weren't even close), let alone a plan to use these non existent bombs and aircraft to attack New York. Sure, they had enough bits and pieces that with enough hype and lack of journalistic integrity one could create the illusion of such things for entertainment value... But such entertainment should not be confused with a documentary.
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In other words, you've bought the hype. But what those books and TV shows about Enigma don't tell you about is HUFF-DUFF, traffic analysis, radar, sonar (ASDIC), the ASW patrols in the Bay of Biscay, the large numbers of convoy escorts built, the CVE/CVL (light carriers) programs, hedgehog, leigh lights, etc... etc...
Enigma was very important, of that there is no doubt. But it was only one arrow in a large and well stocked quiver.
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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:Best Photos (Score:4, Interesting)
Beautiful photos... I was surprised by the swastika banners in the background of the last one though.
I'm not offended. I've got absolutely nothing against swatikas per se, whether in the context of the nazis, general history, or otherwise and I loathe the kind of censorship that bans their display.
Still, I'm not the general public and given the sensitivity of segments of the general public to this symbol I think it's intriguing that someone would go through the trouble of a) creating the banners, b) getting on a ladder and hanging them in a hanger bay, and c) taking a "romanticised" photo of the whole thing. From the perspective of documenting a piece of technology it was unnecessary though it does add to the artistic aesthetic of the photo.
Is it a brave decision? An insensitive one? Maybe the swastika simply doesn't hold the kind of meaning it did 60 years ago? I just find it somewhat peculiar.
Re:Another Example of German Technical Achievement (Score:5, Informative)
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, it's the best explanation I read so far.
Re:Another Example of German Technical Achievement (Score:5, Interesting)
Very darwinistic view of the world that man has. If he's right, the tactics in life are the same as in quake. Anything that moves and isn't obviously on your side, shoot it. Anything that doesn't move, shoot it anyway because it's probably thinking about moving and killing you as soon as you turn your back.
Why are you making this out to be his worldview? That these were the tactics of the majority of humans for the majority of history is just a matter, of, well, history. Wars between nations, strong tribes subjugating weak ones, nation-states subjugating non-centrally-organized peoples, this actually happened and none of the people doing it read Diamond's book.
In fact, I can't recall him ever discussing it in terms of tactics or intent. The question he asked and attempted to answer was not "why did the Spanish come to the Americas to crush the Inca, Aztec, and Mayan empires." The question he asked was "when they came to the Americas with this intent, why were they able to succeed so handily?"
I mean he does discuss the success of European countries in terms of them being sizable enough to take advantage of specialization, but small enough and with enough similarly-sized and hostile neighbors that they couldn't afford to eschew some technology or tactic for cultural reasons -- the kind of every-wary shoot-first-ask-later strategy you are talking about. I don't think he ever hypothesized that a nation-state's neighbors must be hostile, or that the nation-state must subjugate those weaker than itself. That's just the reality of the situation in Europe.
But I could be wrong. It's been a few years since I read it.
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You're saying Quake doesn't teach Ammo Conservation?
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.
If it were only in the leading edge (Score:5, Interesting)
They'd only see the plane leaving, not arriving, which is quite an interesting compromise, as every other stealth programme goes with the notion that it has to be invisible at all times.
This was designed so that, once it passed Britains coastal radar, they wouldn't be able to scramble fighters fast enough once they did detect them. Rather ingenious.
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.
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That sounds like the SR-71 plan. Fly really high and really fast, and nothing will get you. :) I've read reports of missiles being fired at SR-71's. The SR-71 can simply outrun them without trying too hard. Of course, at over Mach 3, your travel time to anywhere is substantially reduced. :) I would imagine something like that even if it showed up on radar would look like an error. "We have a blip here. No, we have a blip there. No, it's gone, it was nothing." :)
Re:If it were only in the leading edge (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, ICBMs are pretty predictable, but, as the grandparent points out, intercepting something coming in at near-orbital velocity is hard even when you know where its going to be. And, of course, this is ignoring MIRVs, decoys, etc.
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The Japanese would have solved this by not having any bomb bay doors in the first place.
not so fast (Score:5, Funny)
I believe that the advances in detection technology would always have allowed the allies to hear a Horton Ho.
Re:not so fast (Score:4, Funny)
I'd be more certain that the plane would pick up local BBC Radio chatter
meaning that maybe, Horton heard Dr Who...
So no one hears a Horton Ho? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So no one hears a Horton Ho? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure in 20 years we'll find German plans to make ray guns, giant mech fighers, etc. Castle Wolfenstein game plots seems less & less like fiction as the years go on. :)
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Hehe (Score:4, Funny)
From the article (yeah I know, Slashdot, not supposed to, etc)
IIRC the United States developed something called Atomic Bombs that would have counteracted any advantage Germany would have gained from stealth jets.
Re:Hehe (Score:4, Interesting)
According to Wikipedia, this design was proposed in 1943, at which point the Battle of Britain was already lost and a good portion of the German army had just been defeated at Stalingrad. Even without the US or Normandy, it's highly unlikely the Germans could have lasted long enough to produce these things in large enough numbers to make any difference.
This design is one of a number of things the Germans could have accomplished that might have made a difference had they not been so eager to go to war in the first place. The French and British policies of appeasement, and their policy of rearming only in accordance with the provisions of Versailles while allowing the Germans to break that treaty at will without consequence, meant that before the war time was on the Germans' side. Had they waited until 1942 or 43 to attack Poland, as most of the Generals were suggesting, the outcome of the war might have been very different.
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.
Minor mistake in the heading (Score:3, Informative)
The Horton was a bomber, not a fighter. It was part of Hitlers 1000,1000,1000 goal. 1000kg of bombs 1000km at 1000km/hr.
Bah, another crappy science article in NG (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is utterly bogus. Not that National Geographic has ever been known for quality writing on highly technical topics.
The Ho 229 was built as it was specifically to meet the "1000-1000-1000" bomber contract. This called for an aircraft that could fly 1000 km at 1000 km/h while carrying a 1000 kg warload. And it had to be built of wood, because all of the aluminum, and metalworkers, were accounted for in current projects.
The only way to possibly meet the speed requirement was through jet engines. However, jet engines of the era were extremely inefficient, especially German ones where poor alloys limited exhaust temperatures in the turbine. So in order to get the range while keeping the speed, you needed to cut drag to an absolute minimum.
And that's why the 229 looks like it does. It lacks the profusion of surfaces that conventional designs had, and minimized wetted surface due to the almost non-existent fuselage. This thing is all wing, which means you're losing all the parasitic drag.
ANYTHING else, including these "stealth" features, were utterly secondary.
Moreover I have a very serious problem with the claims that this plane is stealthy. Compressor disks in the engines are an extremely effective radar mirror. This is why the F-117 has "blinds" over the inlets, or why the F-22 has a S-shaped intake system. As you can see in the pictures, in the 229 the compressor face is directly exposed to the front.
Sure, the CH radars were longwave and wouldn't have been good against this aircraft, but that would be true of any small jet of the era. They were extremely good against targets a few meters in size, like a propeller, but anything smaller would be difficult to see.
Claiming this plane was developed _as a stealth plane_ is like claiming the DC-3 was a swept-wing design. Accidental features do not indicate design intent.
Maury
Re:Bah, another crappy science article in NG (Score:5, Informative)
You are going on about the shape, which wasn't even claimed to be for stealthiness. The claimed stealth feature was the layer of carbon material sandwiched into the leading edge of the plane to reduce its radar signature. Thus, it was the first plane to incorporate design features specifically for stealth. Nothing you said even addresses that. Whether stealth was considered of secondary importance, or whether all the components were designed for stealth, is irrelevant.
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> Whether stealth was considered of secondary importance, or whether all the components were designed for stealth, is irrelevant.
Except that it's called a "Stealth Fighter", not a "jet bomber with some stealthy features". The implication is clear, and you're take seems widely off the mark.
> Northorp Grumman says their tests proved the stealth value of the aircraft
And NG didn't put engines in the thing. So it's basically worthless.
Maury
Shame we didn't learn this lesson in Vietnam (Score:3, Interesting)
It's remarkable that we had in our hands a German aircraft that contained within it a very important lesson that we flat out ignored. Building a stealth plane in 1943 meant the Germans had learned something it would take us another 30 years to figure out. Stealth is essential in aircraft.
Instead, we had the likes of unstealthy aircraft flying over Vietnam and getting shot down with rather significant losses to surface to air missiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War [wikipedia.org]
More than 1700 US aircraft were shot down. That's a catastrophe. It was in response to that that the US Stealth fighter program was initiated in the early 1970s. But, just imagine if we had thought, geez, the Germans had came up with a way to evade radar, we have the plane, newer technology...
You have to wonder, what if?
Re:Shame we didn't learn this lesson in Vietnam (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, the utterly stupid and ridiculous rules of engagement forced on US forces by the civilian leadership for most of the war prevented them from doing anything against those air defense sites except in reaction to being fired upon. It's kinda like fighting while handcuffed.
Also, the German technology was mostly serindipitous. Radar cross-section is much more a function of airframe shaping than materials; it just happened that flying wings tended to be better-shaped than traditional aircraft. But all of this was a trial-and-error process. We learned some from this, and incorporated those lessons into the B-70 proposal and the SR-71. However, it wasn't until the F-117 program (and its contemporaries) came along that we had
A. The theoretical base on which to reliably compute radar reflections (ironically enough, most of that was developed by the Soviets and seemed to be largely ignored by them for a while).
B. The computational power to work out reflections over even a simple faceted shape.
C. The control technology to make such shapes flyable.
And even then, the result was a flat-faceted, ungainly monstrosity. It took a little longer before we could compute reflections of curved surfaces, and develop something like the B-2.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
"Superiority" required reading at West Point! (Score:5, Informative)
There was a short story written by Arthur C. Clarke titled "Superiority" that discussed this. Of course, it being science fiction, the weapons were very interesting (matter annihilators, space distortion systems). Also, since it was written (in the 50s?) some of the vocabulary is quaint (I think the term "torpedoes" refer to what we would call missiles).
Still I didn't know (according to Wikipedia) that it was (once?) required reading at West Point! (For those not from the U.S., that is one of the premiere military academies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story) [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You actually didn't show that their strategy wasn't bad at all. On the contrary, prima facie their argument can seem reasonable because the germany had limited number of material, pilots, engineers and workers in general, so it is natural to expect to go high tech to combat the mass numbers of allies.
Moreover, they didn't have much problem with the technology by the end of the war, they had extremely large problem of material and fuel supplies. This is one of the reasons the horten (which was build at the e
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Speer was of course a liar about many things.
How is this News? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone familiar with WWII and aviation history knows about this. The U.S. also had a stealth flying wing bomber. The idea was patented in 1910, and by early 30's was being kicked around for stealth usage. Basically stealth aircraft designs where around before radar, or at least developed alongside radar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_wing [wikipedia.org]
What Killed the Stealth fighter design? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can not find it now, but I remember encountering an article several years ago in a local Las Vegas newspaper that described how the stealth fighters could be detected easily. In places like Nevada where there are secret military bases all over the place, there are hobby stealth watchers and they had discovered that there are so many cell phones in use all over the world that stealth fighters get lit up like a x-mas tree from the ground based signals emanating from the cell phones. Even amateur stealth watchers could track them flying around the Western United States. It was not long after that article the military officially started dropping all plans for future production related to designs based primarily on right angles and radar.
Can anyone find the article or info on this?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The military couldn't drop what they didn't have... The F-117 was all angles because the computation required to design a smoother shape were essentially impossible to accomplish at that time. The cost of computation dropped greatly between the F-117 and the B-2, and thus the flat/angular stealth scheme vanished into history. Cell phones had fuck-all to do with it since they wouldn't become common until a decade after this happened.
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.
What really happened (Score:3, Informative)
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.
There were indeed technical issues with Northrop's flying wing designs, but they were in no way considered insurmountable. Northrop's wings were killed by the USAF not on technical merits, but from political scheming. The Air Force wanted Northrop to merge with Convair, and Jack Northrop refused. As punishment, his wing designs were canceled and the prototypes ordered destroyed, and in a particularly petty and sadistic twist, Northrop employees were made to watch as USAF officials literally took buzzsaws to
Re:The German's are doing it. (Score:5, Interesting)
The British de Havilland Mosquito was also very hard to detect with radar due to its wooden construction. It served in fighter (day and night) and fighter-bomber roles amongst others so they did see action against the P-51's contemporaries.
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:Control surfaces? (Score:5, Informative)
Not exactly. It is possible to build a flying wing type aircraft that is stable. They're generally not as easy to fly as more traditional designs, but it's possible. Also keep in mind that aircraft of that era flew much slower. Part of the difficulty with modern designs is with the insane speeds they can reach. The aerodynamics of very fast (ie. supersonic) craft are much different from slower craft.
Re:I like the decoration (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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]
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
It just took quite a few years for us to make a plane that looked like a Horton. :) Actually, there were quite a few developed and some manufactured [wikipedia.org]. They simply weren't as popular as "conventional" aircraft. I would suspect part would be due to the difference in manufacturing cost, and some to do with customer faith. "I know an airplane with wings and a tail can fly. Why should I believe something like that can?". Maybe the long gap in development of flying wing aircraft wasn't. It was just classified. What do you think they do at Area 51 (among other secret facilities), store alien bodies and reverse engineer wormhole technology? :)
I love aviation, and have been amazed with Horton's aircraft. There were several similar aircraft. I saw one in person at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles. There's a Horton Ho IIIf on display (hanging from the roof), part of a Horton Ho IIIh, and I found reference to a Horton Ho 229 being restored for display there. If I remember correctly, you'd go straight in the front door, and to the left behind the SR-71, but before the room with the Space Shuttle Enterprise. They have some beautiful aircraft there. It's worth the visit if you like aviation.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Goodwin's Law: The longer a thread gets, the higher the chance someone will misspell 'Godwin'.