Re: Stealth

On Wed, 1 Dec 1999 09:33:46 +0000 CGS 
<michael@carrickfergus.schoolzone.co.uk> wrote:

> My favourite stealth story is the engineer telling the journalist to 
look at the model kit of a hypothetical Russian plane if he wanted to 
know what the F-117 looked like. The Skunk Works must have wet 
themselves the first time they saw that kit, but it shows that the 
designer really knew his stuff. <

Not really. By the time the "Mig-37 Ferret" kit was released, it was 
reasonably common knowledge that one way of "doing stealth" was to use 
faceting, as in the F-117 (not named or seen yet), but this was thought 
to be an early, and fairly crude method. The mysterious "F-19 Stealth 
fighter" was thought to be beyond that and use "more advanced" curved 
shapes -- rather like the B-2 does -- so the kit designers came up with 
an angular shape intended to have some stealth characteristics but be 
less advanced than the "F-19" -- which they had already made into a kit 
and a die-cast toy. If you want to see what that looks like, find a 
copy of the Steven Coontz book "The Minotaur" -- it features on the 
cover, and also as one of the contenders for the "A-12" inside.

The "Ferret", interestingly enough, looks not unlike a cross between 
the F-117 and the YF-23, so it could well be quite stealthy -- if it 
were real.

As regards the Skunk Works, a (possibly apocryphal) story that I heard 
had it that when the first F-19 kit came out, the team working on the 
F-117 descended en masse on a toy shop in a nearby mall and bought lots 
of kits -- presumably to laugh at, 'cause it looks nothing like the 
real thing. And, of course, there was the unnamed Skunk Worker who was 
quoted as hoping that the KGB really believed that the Stealth aircraft 
looked like the kit....

We won't even mention the _other_ "F-19" kit, which appears to have 
been cribbed wholesale from an electronic company's advertising -- and, 
as such, could well have real problems in the air.
 
Phil, who always enjoyed using an "F-19" in the Air Superiority 
boardgame -- at least it was a _fighter!_
------------------------------------------------------------
 Gravity is a Downer... So let's go flying!
   -- so sayeth Phil Atcliffe (Phillip.Atcliffe@uwe.ac.uk)