On Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:22:33 -0700 (PDT), obviouslydelusional
<obviouslydelusional@gmail.com> wrote:

On Jul 18, 10:34 pm, Gosh Darn <stealth...@iglou.com> wrote:

      I read in one of the F-117 books
by Sweetman or Ben Rich or somebody
that Lockheed employees wanted to
use curved or rounded fairings for
better aerodynamics, but the Air Force
specified -all flat surfaces-.

Uh....no.  Per Ben Rich., the guys at Lockheed who were trying to make
the damn thing fly wanted to smooth out the shape, but the Lockheed
radar nerds said if they did so it would compromise the RCS value.
The AF couldn't care less about whether the surfaces were flat or not
as long as it didn't show on radar.  In general, the reason for the
flat facets was the program Lockheed was using for RCS modeling (ECHO
1) was not sophisticated enough to handle anything other than plane
shapes.  By the time the B2 was being developed, that limitation had
been overcome, hence the sexy curves.

        I wouldn't know, all I did was invent stealth shapes,
and specify flat plane surfaces as the easiest to implement.

      From 1975 until 1995 I thought I
was the sole inventor of stealth shapes,
the read the cocky-mamie story about
a Russian mathematician and Maxwell
electromagnetic theory.

Hardly cockamamie.  There's a lot more to stealth than just flat
surfaces.  At radar frequencies sharp edges will absorb the EM
radiation and reradiate unless properly dealt with.  And every facet
is surrounded by sharp edges.

        I never saw a radar set in operation, even though
I spent a lot of time around  Air Force operations and
weather stations in the 1946 to 1948 time frame.