cool conceptual paintings of "super-weapons"

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#21

While the radar cross section may have been lower given the lack of vertical surfaces, I see nothing to suggest it would have been anything like low enough to count as stealthy. Notice that even the F-117 has vertical tail surfaces. Flying-wing is NOT inherently equal to stealthy - not by a long shot.

For my “private reading” (as opposed to academic) in January I was reading a book about the Senior Trend programme that produced the F-117 Stealth Fighter. Not only did the theory for shaping an aircraft for low RCS [radar cross section] take a Russian research paper to solve, but surprisingly little of the various “bodges” and “fixes” to reduce RCS originated from WWII Germany.

That design in particular seems to exhibit NO understanding of the matter.

As Crab says - the antenna are there for radar to see. Naughty and it’s going to ruin any efforts at stealthing the bulk of the airframe.

The wing angle is also WRONG for reducing RCS. Hate to disagree with you here Crab on

The sweep angle looks rather close to that needed on stealth aircraft of the 1980s vintage to maintain the ‘stealth’ nature.

Assuming “head on” is the aspect you’re trying to make most stealthy (good assumption), you’d actually need a sweep angle of 45 degrees or MORE. Look at the F-117 and then look at that Horten design… the F-117 is using a wing sweep angle which is beyond 60 degrees… not too easy from an aerodynamics, stability and control point of view - although while statically unstable in pitch (and I think yaw) this was DELIBERATE (as it so often is) and not an inherent feature of the airframe configuration. That said, when messing about with “stealthier” wing sweep angles, you have to be careful - the Have Blue prototype used a sweep angle past 70 degrees and one was lost because of it. Assuming they stumbled across the high-sweep answer, how many test pilots would the Germans have killed before they just gave up?

Then we have the engine installation… Oh yes. THE downfall. How stealthy do you think an gas turbine compressor face looks? With all those radar reflecting surfaces whizzing round at so many RPM? And yet, here, we have the engines mounted so far forward, in a straight line with their intakes, on the wing that they can’t POSSIBLY have included the necessary intake to give this aircraft appreciable stealthy properties (and grossly inefficient from a propulsion point of view even if they managed it… 30% loss if you use the F-117 as the benchmark… and that would have been heavily optimised by WWII standards) and assuming they get it right and it doesn’t ice up - not easy if the experiences of the Senior Trend programme are anything to go by.

Basically, this aircraft has apparently NO stealthy features beyond a lack of vertical aerodynamics surfaces - which is something of a case of “big deal”.

It’s far more likely that the Horten bros. toyed with the idea of flying wings because of NON-stealthy reasoning like reduced drag, and would never have arrived at a true reduced-RCS effect unless they’d gone looking for the other ways to reduce it.

I’ve seen it said at one link that Horten’s jet was “virtually invisible” to radar, and I don’t really see how his jets in particular could have been. Sure, perhaps a part-wooden flying-wing may have been of reduced RCS, and given the less advanced radar at the time that’s perhaps not surprising - but it’s missing so many parts of the puzzle I don’t see how it could be have combat-effective (for want of a better word) stealth

#22

Thanks for expanding a tad on my answer guys.

This is the usual, Nazi superweapons myth. If they had spent more time on normal weapons maybe they would have done a bit better.

#23

OK POSTS DELETED AND RECCOMMENDED FOR WARNING :!:

#24

GODDAMN IT, YOUR WORKING ON 2ND WARNING, HEAT ME UP AGAIN, AND I’LL RECCOMMEND YOU BOTH FOR BAN :!: :!:

#25

OK THAT’S IT, I’LL HAVE FW OR GEN.SANDWORM WORK OUT YOUR BAN, YOU’RE TROLLING MEMBERS AND WE HAVE NO USE FOR YOU HERE ON OUR FORUMS!

#26

I wonder if you two are the result of our discussion about changing IPs yesterday?

Hmmm, who hasnt posted today?

:wink:

#27

Smart, maybe we shouldn’t have those conversations anymore…

#28

STOP, your not Commando Jordovski, he knows the rule about having more than one account and you get 2 Formal Warnings, so if you were really Commando Jordovski, you would recieve 4 formal warnings which leads to the concequences of a ban for a week.

#29

Credible strategic bomber in credible numbers would have been a start…

#30

Not much to add - you’ve done a pretty good job on trashing the design. Few things to add myself, but I’m thinking along the same lines.

  1. Wing sweep but no fixes applied (crescent wing like the Victor, Kuchemann tips, or even wing fences) means it’s very vulnerable to tip stall. Being swept wing with no rudders, that presumably means it will go into an irrecoverable spin whenever you do suffer from tip stall. Basically, stall = crashed aircraft and probably dead pilot.
  2. Back to wing sweep, take a wild guess as to where the centres of pressure and lift are going to be for that aircraft. They look a LONG way apart to me, suggesting that the aircraft will be totally uncontrollable.
  3. Finally, they appear to be running reheated turbojets. With the flames from the reheat system touching the upper surface of the wing as they exhaust over it. Unless they were running either high-alloy steel or some exotic cooling that would melt the wing!
#31

Not much to add - you’ve done a pretty good job on trashing the design. Few things to add myself, but I’m thinking along the same lines.

  1. Wing sweep but no fixes applied (crescent wing like the Victor, Kuchemann tips, or even wing fences) means it’s very vulnerable to tip stall. Being swept wing with no rudders, that presumably means it will go into an irrecoverable spin whenever you do suffer from tip stall. Basically, stall = crashed aircraft and probably dead pilot.
  2. Back to wing sweep, take a wild guess as to where the centres of pressure and lift are going to be for that aircraft. They look a LONG way apart to me, suggesting that the aircraft will be totally uncontrollable.
  3. Finally, they appear to be running reheated turbojets. With the flames from the reheat system touching the upper surface of the wing as they exhaust over it. Unless they were running either high-alloy steel or some exotic cooling that would melt the wing![/quote]

Does this mean I came close with ‘Utter Tripe’ 8)

#32

firefly, what i was saying was their grand plan, but they didn’t get close. However, they did fly a prototype and radar was difficult to detect it. Saw this on the “history channel”

#33

It’s a succinct and highly accurate summary :slight_smile:

Hosenfield, I strongly suspect their detection problems say more about the capabilities of German radars than they do about the aircraft. There are sizeable numbers of other aircraft that they had trouble detecting too, notably the DH Mosquitoes. This had nothing to do with shape.

#34

Point conceded, but my comment stands.

#35

I know it’s not german, but didn’t the brits do concept drawing for the tortoise or turtle?

Sort of a British version of the mouse.

Looking around now but can’t seem to find anything on internet. But I did see it in a book of my mine - even if it was something childish like super machines or something similar.

#36

:smiley:

#37

From memory (can’t be bothered to look it up) both the US and UK were looking at super-heavy tanks to help break through the Siegfried line. In the event of course we blew straight through it before the tanks could have been in service, and they had some fairly major problems anyway.

#38

i’ve always thought the siegfried line was a tremdous waste of steel, concrete, and, worst of all, labor. They could’ve trained their troops better and built more weapons instead of building all that stuff.

#39

Utter tripe! :roll:[/quote]

IIRC the Germans did have a prototype of the “flying-wing” design by Horten which was poached by the Americans after the end of the war ending up ferreted away in the Smithsonian. When Jack Northrop was working on his flying-wing prototype bomber after the war he apparently went and had a look at the German design.
The Germans had lots of pie-in-the-sky weapon plans and one of them was for an intercontinental bomber based on this flying wing, the so-called Amerika Bomber. Like most of these systems they’d left it much too late to start thinking about long range bombers.
It may be apocryphal but I’m sure I’ve read or seen a programme that mentioned the low radar observability of the flying wing design although I don’t recall whether it refered to the Horten or the Northrop. I’m fairly certain that much of Northrop’s work made it into the B2 Spirit stealth bomber and he is supposed to have seen an early B2 test flight before his death in the early 1980s.

There’s a German “vapourware” website devoted to the planned advanced Luftwaffe designs called Luft46:http://www.luft46.com/. Check out the Junkers ground attack plane that’s very reminiscent of the A-10.

#40

EDIT: Deleted a lot of stuff which I realised was just repetition!

From an Aeronautical stand point, however, I think the Horten designs are simply wonderful. If I could be half the Aeronautical Engineer they each were, I’d be a very happy bunny. They were very talented and made some very ingenious airplanes. And ff they didn’t have Swastika’s daubed on them at ever oppurtunity, I’d even say they’re very, very beautiful designs.