Utopia Talk / Politics / WTF? "Plasma" Stealth?

Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 16:59:16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_stealth In 1956, Arnold Eldredge, of General Electric, filed a patent application for an "Object Camouflage Method and Apparatus," which proposed using a particle accelerator in an aircraft to create a cloud of ionization that would "...refract or absorb incident radar beams." It is not known who funded this work or whether it was prototyped and tested. U.S. Patent 3,127,608 was granted in 1964. [2] During Project OXCART, the operation of the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft, the CIA funded an attempt to reduce the RCS of the A-12's inlets. Known as Project KEMPSTER, this used an electron beam generator to create a cloud of ionization in front of each inlet. The system was flight tested but was never deployed on operational A-12s or SR-71s. [3] Despite the apparent technical difficulty of designing a plasma stealth device for combat aircraft, there are claims that a system was offered for export by Russia in 1999. In January 1999, the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency published an interview with Doctor Anatoliy Koroteyev, the director of the Keldysh Research Center (FKA Scientific Research Institute for Thermal Processes), who talked about the plasma stealth device developed by his organization. The claim was particularly interesting in light of the solid scientific reputation of Dr. Koroteyev and the Institute for Thermal Processes, which is one of the top scientific research organizations in the world in the field of fundamental physics. [4] The Journal of Electronic Defense reported that "plasma-cloud-generation technology for stealth applications" developed in Russia reduces an aircraft's RCS by a factor of 100. According to this June 2002 article, the Russian plasma stealth device has been tested aboard a Sukhoi Su-27IB fighter-bomber. The Journal also reported that similar research into applications of plasma for RCS reduction is being carried out by Accurate Automation Corporation (Chattanooga, Tennessee) and Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia) in the U.S.; and by Dassault Aviation (Saint-Cloud, France) and Thales (Paris, France). [5]
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 17:01:22 http://ser...rorg/mil/radar/B2_Conden_1.jpg
nhill Member	Mon Jan 18 17:03:23 sweet
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 17:07:45 Apparently they can not only use plasma to make a vessel invisible, but they can also use plasma to make a perfectly aerodynamic "almond" shape around a vessel to make it fly with little wind resistance. http://discaircraft.greyfalcon.us/picturesm/gem10.jpg
Seb Member	Mon Jan 18 17:27:12 Yeah, plasma stealth is interesting, but I wouldn't make too much of it. The picture you show of a B2 is not plasma stealth, but condensation triggered by high velocity through humid air, you can normally see this most dramatically when a plane is traveling supersonically, and the condensation is triggered off the compressed shockwave... water vapour is "squeezed" out of the air. However, if you have humid air, then the compression caused by a fast moving object will trigger the same effect. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Sound/soubar.html You can use it to reduce drag, and refract certain radar bands to give stealth, but making a plasma "wing", which is what you would be talking about by enveloping the entire aircraft, would be tricky. Also it would not work well at supersonic velocities. Plasma seems to be a sort of handy clothes peg to hang all sorts of fruitloopery. (I have a PhD in plasma physics, and am a Scientist working in magnetically confined plasmas, and am about to start teaching a course on industrial plasma applications, before the "you don't know what lockheed knows" stuff starts)
Seb Member	Mon Jan 18 17:35:29 Interestingly, I reckon the B2 uses some plasma stealthing. I have heard talk of an active stealth mode, and some crazy talk about it exploiting anti gravity because it fired electron beams into the engines (which is guff) and that it needs AG as it's aerodynamics don't work make a degree of sense when you consider an electron beam could be used to generate a plasma to baffle certain reflective points and/or an RF plasma discharge on leading edges could enhance radar absorption in some bands and lower air resistance. It's difficult to say. It's certainly been thoroughly investigated by the military however, shortly after the first academic paper reporting it's impact (reduced air resistance etc.) the volume of academic research on plasmas and aerodynamics dropped significantly (normally a sign of D notices being stamped on everything), and all the big windtunnels operated by BAe, Boeing, Lockheed closed for major upgrades.
garyd Member	Mon Jan 18 18:09:08 I wonder if that could explain some of the rather odd UFO sightings of late? Interesting stuff Seb.
ehcks Member	Mon Jan 18 18:26:59 Pff. That image of the B2 is just it breaking the sound barrier photoshopped onto a picture of a beach.
nhill Member	Mon Jan 18 18:29:47 Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but that picture isn't shopped.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 19:06:37 And it isn't breaking the sound barrier. Seb, I've personally theorized that some type of plasma or other air ionization technology was involved with the B-2 for several reasons: If there is an electrical charge being produced, the stealth could use it as some means of entirely electrically powered "supercruise" propulsion method. Once such a system was activated, the plane would go completely cold within minutes, thus producing no thermal signature, and it would be almost completely silent, making it completely invisible to any type of highly advanced acoustic signature detection devices. The way I theorize it could work with the B-2 is that the wings themselves would create some type of a static charge that would literally draw air over the wing surface, producing thrust and lift. However, contrary to your post, I've read that the B-2 has such vast amount of lift that in early tests it wanted to continue to float down the runway even at incredibly slow speeds. Thus even a modest air ionization system might produce low thrust, and still have enough oomph to allow the B-2 to loiter almost endlessly over a target while producing no thermal, infrared, or even mechanical /acoustic noise. And, if it turns out that it is using some sort of plasma shell, can you imagine what that would mean for the reduction in parasitic drag?
garyd Member	Mon Jan 18 19:13:36 One of the advantages of the B-2's taless design is that it does indeed reduce drag to an absolute minimum even without any electronic geegaws...
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 19:17:39 Anyone know what the "Ionic Breeze" air filter system is? http://www...-0019B9C043EB&mr:referralID=NA It is an air filter with no moving parts, and no motor. The fan blades are long slabs of metal that run up and down. They get an electrical charge and draw air through them. As a result, the system is totally silent and efficient. Imagine the B-2 using the same technology, like one long flying Ionic Breeze; the difference is in total electrical power being used, and a massive amount of ionization. Once the stealth is actually moving, very little thrust would be needed to keep it going. Anyway, that's my theory.
garyd Member	Mon Jan 18 19:24:17 One would of course have to ascertain whther or not a technology that is barely sufficient at moving air in a two or three foot tall and likely weighing in at 2 or 3 kilograms application would work as well as or better than that in an application fifty feet long and weighiong in at a few hundred times that.
Sam Adams Member	Mon Jan 18 19:37:35 "The picture you show of a B2 is not plasma stealth, but condensation triggered by high velocity through humid air" For subsonic aircraft, you actually want to be flying slower(higher angle of attack) and compression doesnt have anything to do with it until you approach the speed of sound. That B2 is flying at low altitude and therefore is probably flying slowly, and certainly not approaching the speed of sound at that altitude. In this cause it is caused by the decrease in pressure caused by the increase in airspeed around the wing. The decrease in pressure also causes a decrease in temperature, and therefore condensation. This is routine for airliners. The biggest variable is obviously humidity. The next variable is angle of attack, again with slow speeds causing more acceleration to a given airmass.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 19:45:22 "One would of course have to ascertain whther or not a technology that is barely sufficient at moving air in a two or three foot tall and likely weighing in at 2 or 3 kilograms application would work as well as or better than that in an application fifty feet long and weighiong in at a few hundred times that. " Also, consider the difference between a household appliance using 800 Watts (230Volts@50HZ), vs a massive state-of-the-art billion dollar aircraft producing perhaps 100 Megawatts.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 19:49:15 To put the price of a B-2 into perspective- at $1 Billion per unit, consider that a nuclear aircraft carrier- complete with a nuclear reactor, and thousands of crew sustained for months at sea, plus hundreds of suites of electronics, countermeasures systems, hydraulics, docking stations and oh-so-much-more, costs 2.2 Billion USD. So a B-2 costs roughly half of what a nuclear aircraft carrier costs. Why so much? We can only speculate, but I'd suspect there is more to it than just advanced materials and a cool shape.
Sam Adams Member	Mon Jan 18 19:51:31 Why so much? Because it cost a shitload to design and test the B2 and then we only bought a handful of them. While the fleet carrier design we use is essentially unchanged from the first CVNs 50 years ago.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 20:00:58 A single B-2 costs more than 60 F-16's. There is more to it than just R&D, especially when you factor in a. the efficiency of computers and b. the volume of research produced through the development of Have Blue and the F-117, the SR-71, et. al. We're talking some kind of exotic hardware that drove the price up that much.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 20:02:58 And by the way, according to some sources, when you actually count the R&D, spare parts, and more you get a cost of more than $2.1 Billion per unit in 1997 dollars: "The total program cost, which includes development, engineering and testing, averaged US$2.1 billion per aircraft (in 1997 dollars).[3]"
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 20:07:08 I was just reading that the 2009 "incremental cost" for the twin engined super-stealthy, supercruising F-22 is only $138 million per unit. That's still less than 1/12th the price of the B-2.
Sam Adams Member	Mon Jan 18 20:35:40 Thats because we are buying a couple hundred F22s.
Seb Member	Mon Jan 18 21:33:44
Seb Member	Mon Jan 18 21:52:08 ecks: B2's do not break the sound barrier, but it is a similar phenomenon to what you see when a plane breaks the sound barrier. In that case, watervapour condenses as air is compressed at the shockwave, here the condensation is on the pressure front of a B2 going relatively fast, but subsonic, through very humid air. Alex: "If there is an electrical charge being produced, the stealth could use it as some means of entirely electrically powered "supercruise" propulsion method. Once such a system was activated, the plane would go completely cold within minutes" Where would you get the electrical power and the thrust from? People have suggested various ways of using an electrostatic system as a drive, but the power densities you need are't really credible. You'd need a gas turbine to generate the electricity, aka a jet engine. Stealth bombers just fly really high and mask the jet exhaust to make it hard to see from the ground. The exhaust cools pretty quickly, the IR trace isn't a big problem for detection from below, detection from above would be a major issue, but not many countries maintain AWACS good enough. Garyd/Alex: Bare in mind this is supposition based on someone who was full on moonbat talking about AG... their claim is that a fully laden B2 would be too heavy to take off at the runway speeds. I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but the details of the supposed AG system sounded very much like what I thought to be a plasma stealth system, firing electron beams into the jet intakes. I don't know if it is used for the aerodynamic properties (f.ex it might do something that makes the jet engines less detectable through turbulence reduction, but that is pure speculation) or purely for stealth. I do know that when B2's were tracked flying over for fanborough air show by the RAF watch stations, USAF people said it was because the B2's were not employing their stealth during the flight. I can't remember quite what the phrase was, but it was more than just not having a suitable flight plan, but implied some active measure, and plasma stealth would be about the only way I could think of having something active that reduced your radar cross section. Sam: Interesting, it is the opposite of what I had heard of as an explanation, but the drop in pressure makes more sense thinking about it. I remember asking at the time why the condensation didn't look like how I imagined the bow shock should be shaped. Alex: 100megawatts means a gass turbine or a nuclear reactor. The former means you are using a jet engine, the latter is not suitable for running a plane. "Why so much?" Because geometric stealth required some seriously expensive composite materials and dedicated super computer capacity, while a blended wing design was a brand spanking new idea well ahead of it's time and never really done successfully before, requiring even more computer time for CAD and devising aerodynamics. I am sure a lot of the composites we now see in the aerospace industry are spin offs from stuff developed for the B2, or which were developed later independently. Doing all of that with limited resources (by which I mean having a smaller intellectual base due to secrecy) requires a lot of finanance. Development work on the B2 probably started in the late 70's or early 80's, much of the development work was probably harder and more costly than you are imagining. The high ticket price is because the entire R&D programme, tooling costs etc. is embodied in a handful of planes. You could almost certainly build something similar now for a lot, lot less.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 22:33:21 Yeah, I'd say anti-gravity is out, but electrostatic manipulation of the aircraft's slipstream is highly likely. And I just threw a massive quantity of electricity out there, but there is no reason to believe the B-2 would require even a significant fraction of that. I'm far from any kind of scientist, but I have a vivid imagination, and I could see how the B-2's engines could work in synchronicity with a (for example) Lithium Ion battery bank that was charged when the craft was in turbine-powered flight. This model would be similar to the way modern "Hybrid" cars work. When their gasoline engine is running, part of the power produced is stored in battery packs. When the batteries are used the engine is turned off. There is no reason to believe a similar method could not be used with the B-2. On the contrary, there are plenty of really good reasons to believe it may function this way.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 22:37:47 Thus, on takeoff, or in times of acceleration, the B-2 would use its jet engines. When entering a stealthy mode, the B-2 would literally activate the leading edge of its wing- which would produce enough thrust to keep it moving at a relatively stable velocity. Perhaps the B-2 might assume a slightly negative angle of attack, a rate of descent shallower than a completely unpowered glide slope, but just shy of level flight. The massive surface area of those wings, and the sheer magnitude of the payload capacity leaves PLENTY of room for an incredible suite of energy storage (like Lithium Ion battery banks).
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 22:42:46 And I hear what you are saying about managing heat signature, but what you are saying is "near" zero thermal signature. What I am saying is true zero thermal signature. And don't forget about acoustic signatures. There are commercial devices that can register a human heartbeat at 20 feet away by detecting the acoustic signature. I'm sure first world governments have developed directional acoustic sensing technologies that can detect even a highly baffled jet engine approaching through likely corridors of attack in times of increased tension or hostility. The B-2 designers would ideally have overcome such impediments by implementing a series of technologies that make acoustic detection sensors completely obsolete from the outset. The fundamental principles behind electro-static thrust generation widgets is already decades old.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 22:46:08 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4MwRPhba3U
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 22:48:53 In my link, you 'll see a "lifter", a little home science kit where the metal forces air downward, generating upwards lift. Now imagine embedding the same technology on a perfectly designed, ultra low drag flying wing. Instead of electrostatically directing the air downward, direct the air over the upper surface of the wing. Instant lift. Zero sound, zero heat. Voila.
Alex Member	Mon Jan 18 22:53:24 ooops. Should say "*electrostatically charged metal panels force* air downward, generating upwards lift.
Hrothgar Member	Mon Jan 18 23:57:46 B2's also have an interesting feature that involves water getting splashed on them during take off can cause them to go haywire and crash. Wonder if they fixed that yet?
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 06:23:56 Any highly complex aircraft that relies almost exclusively on computers to remain stable in flight is subject to the potential for catastrophic failure. Even the ultra durable, super workhorse, the B-52, is subject to catastrophic failure, and its a technological donkey cart to the B-2 Ferrari. http://www...rforce_b52_crashreport_021309/
Asgard Member	Tue Jan 19 08:01:27 "http://ser...rorg/mil/radar/B2_Conden_1.jpg" Actually this is not condensation, but the air vibration produced at the moment of a sonic boom. this picture is of something that lasts 2-1 seconds, no more. Here is a video of exactly that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d9A2oq1N38
Seb Member	Tue Jan 19 08:24:30 Alex: Really, it's just not very efficient and not very necessary. I seriously doubt you could get the kind of thrust needed to keep a B2 in the air. As you note, the principle is already in the public domain. The key drivers for electricity storage are laptops and mobile phones, and the aerospace industry is crawling all over for "green planes". If this worked, the private sector has vastly more resources than the military, we would see it flying. "What I am saying is true zero thermal signature." No, because you can not convert energy that efficiently. Your cell phone and your computer get hot even though they run on battery. In practice, the same order of magnitude of heat will be generated by expending stored electricity and a jet engine to generate the same levels of thrust. Asgard: B2's don't break the sound barrier though, I believe the same effect as in sonic boom: water condensing due to air pressure changes. I retract what I said previously, I think Sam has it right, it's condensation in the rareified air behind the bow shock, and it only happens for the second or so after you break the barrier because more humid air can not penetrate the bow shock. If you look at the B2, it's after the thickest point of the wing, where the air pressure lowers.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 08:47:13 "Alex: Really, it's just not very efficient and not very necessary. I seriously doubt you could get the kind of thrust needed to keep a B2 in the air. As you note, the principle is already in the public domain. The key drivers for electricity storage are laptops and mobile phones, and the aerospace industry is crawling all over for "green planes". If this worked, the private sector has vastly more resources than the military, we would see it flying." *************************************** If Skunkworks developed this technique independent of the private sector, one has to admit it would not be the first time the industry was led from behind closed doors vis-a-vis the military industrial complex. We got Velcro, the internet, LASER and other advancements from grounds that had been plowed by the US Government. Electrostatic propulsion could easily follow suit.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 08:50:37 No, because you can not convert energy that efficiently. Your cell phone and your computer get hot even though they run on battery. In practice, the same order of magnitude of heat will be generated by expending stored electricity and a jet engine to generate the same levels of thrust. ************************************************** Superconductors would produce almost no heat in the conversion process. And again, we're talking about technology that already exists.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 08:51:59 Quite frankly if someone hasn't already developed what I'm describing, I'd seriously question why the fuck not!
Seb Member	Tue Jan 19 09:08:26 Alex: "If Skunkworks developed this technique independent of the private sector, one has to admit it would not be the first time the industry was led from behind closed doors vis-a-vis the military industrial complex." Yes it would actually. The military industrial complex doesn't come up with fundamentally new things: the possibilities are noted in academia when the fundamental science comes out, what the aerospace industries do is figure out the details of application. Velcro is a crap example, the internet was built off ideas already pre-existing for a more closed system linking academic computers, and the WWW was made to distributed data at CERN. The laser was conceived by Albert Einstein in academic papers (and developed in the civil sector actually). Superconductors produce no ohmic heating in transmission, but you can't make a battery that produces current without a chemical reaction, which releases heat. If skunkworks had Li batteries of that kind of energy density back when the B2 was built, we would have seen them in other applications long ago. As it is, the defence industries are still struggling to make electrically powered drones of the same performance as fossil fuels. The reason nobody has developed what you are describing is because I am being generous and not going into details of how your scheme doesn't actually work in the specifics, but parsing it to mean "some kind of electrostatic air flow". You could also make a jet engine that used an electric discharge to heat the air... but it wouldn't be an improvement on a jet engine and probably would require electricity storage mechanisms that are way beyond what can be built now (or perhaps even ever). Similarly, the reason it's only used on a fan is because it doesn't scale up. As I said, there are non security censored patents for electrostatically powered flying saucers (a hint that the defence industry does not consider this a winner, or the patents would have been redacted and nationalised on security grounds, as many patents are), the basic problem is that it just doesn't generate the kids of thrusts required.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 09:15:22 Fair enough. I honestly never have believed this method was capable of producing hyper amounts of thrust, however. I see an electrostatic propulsion method behaving more as a kind of "10th gear" on a 10-speed bicycle. That is, you can't use it to accelerate, climb, take off, or power out of something, since on a bicycle, 10th gear produces no torque. But once you are at cruising speed, that 10th gear requires little actual torque, and produces a very efficient means of continued propulsion. Regarding the B-2, an electrostatic propulsion method could produce a LOW THRUST means of cruising. The shape of the B-2 being uberefficient makes this a possibility- where it might not otherwise in more conventional designs (or applications like those you mentioned). In other words it is precisely because the B-2 is so utterly efficient in its design (100% wing) that the ES propulsion method can work. Now on the matter of scaling, I concede I have no idea, and I can take your word for it. And for the record I think you are probably in the coolest field of science there is.
Seb Member	Tue Jan 19 09:21:37 "And for the record I think you are probably in the coolest field of science there is." Thank you... but if only you knew the terrible truth... *sigh*. Having worked on this field for six years now, all in all, I can say I see things going on routinely that make me want to bang me head against the wall in frustration and the sheer, obstinate stupidity of the whole programme (I mean globally, not just where I have worked). It's too academic in focus, too many physicists and not enough engineers. Science is like a sausage... you might like the end result, but perhaps best not to see how it is made.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 09:26:38 Do you (and other physicists) spend massive amounts of time applying for research funding, or is this a task that gets handled by an administrator running a labratory/university? I have no idea the way it works. The reason I ask is that I wonder if in order to be successful, a Physicist may concentrate solely on his field, or if he ends up being forced to assume the role of sometime-salesman too.
Seb Member	Tue Jan 19 10:54:19 It depends. Many groups have to struggle to get their own grants, stuff that is more "big science" (the experimental side of Fusion for example) on the other hand tends to result in dedicated institutions, which free researchers to focus on science, with dedicated management sorting out funding at a high level (this has a price tag in the tens to hundreds of millions) and standing teams of researchers, but can get bloated with superflous crap like PR departments to do the outreachy BS (take the kiddies round the machines). I think this is part of the problem: it breeds complacency and ivory-tower thinking. For example, one of the main problems with fusion reactors is how to have physical surfaces that handle the enormous power fluxes from the plasma. I suggested diamond would be an interesting material to study (you can make it now for peanuts, relatively speaking) and nobody at my lab seemed to know this was possible. They had worked cradled to grave in this institution, which tends to mean ideas stagnate and attitudes ossify compared to the univesities, where people move around more and get exposed to radically different ideas from other fields... most physicist in a university will be constantly exposed to other branches of physics, and also biochemistry, engineering etc. etc. whereas fusion researchers just sit and stew with other fusion researchers. In this case, some of the big advances in material science in the last 15 years had completely passed them by... cutting edge as they were with plasma physics, they essentially knew little about what was cutting edge in materials science, which is a massive problem when the biggest challenges to overcome in fusion are materials issues. Of course in the university, as you guess, you have smaller groups and less infrastructure to help you getting funding, which means you do have to do more work as a salesperson applying for grants etc. This results in your standard higherarchy where the head of group (we call them professors in the UK, it's kind of like being a supreeme court judge: someone has to die or retire before you can become professor, whereas in the US any accademic with tenure is a professor) who is at the peak of their career handles a lot of the grant application stuff, below them are the PI's, principle investigators, tenured accademics who write the proposals for grant applications and do the main leg work in sorting out funding, and direct the actual research programmes. Below them you have a few post docs, like myself, who have a PhD but don't really have tenure. They carry out much of the research, along with PhD students, with the PI's doing some research but largely managing. This is a stereotype of course, it varies alot. I have never really working in a university group, the group I work in now is basically part of an institutional higherarchy with TJ-II in spain, but sited remotely. There are pros and cons to both models, but on the whole I think it works well in universities (even if that kind of decentralisation would never really work for something hugely capital intensive like nuclear fusion or building a giant particle accelerator), whereas some instution sized big science works well whereas others have a bad culture that could benefit from a dramatic shakeup. In my view, fusion would be a lot better if it were run like the Apollo Programme: far more heavily goal oriented and less academically oriented. Scientsits tend to be rewarded by frequency of publications, which tends to incentivise churning out the same kinds of papers again and again and again, often rediscovering the same thing as was discovered on an older machine on a new machine. This will eventually figure out fusion, but it is akin to inventing the steam engine by slowly and painstakingly exploring ever possible phenomenen that can occur in a pressurised vessel with water that is being heated. This encourages a mentality that fusion will always be 30 years away, which tends to result in incrementally reduced funding, which results in the scientists wishlist for the "next experiment" (i.e. new machine) being reduced, which then fails to meet expectations as it is isn't up to spec, and rather than openly admit this, the pressure is instead to produce lots of publications from whatever results you do get... but not necesarily dramatic progress toward a genuine reactor. The big machine they are building in France, ITER, cost 10bn Euros and ought to produce net energy, but will require almost every trick in the book we have for getting really good confinement, and no nasty surprises, and also require pushing the materials and engineering to the limit. It's half the size in every linear dimension (so about an 8th the volume) of what the original plan was because the money wasn't there. Rather than shoot for the moon, it would have been better to take an incremental approach, build it big so we can make it work with crappy techniques we know we can do, and then improve the performance incrementally, so that DEMO (a demonstration commercial reactor) can be designed on a more realistic budget suitable for industry.
Sam Adams Member	Tue Jan 19 19:50:43 "The shape of the B-2 being uberefficient" I dont have cruise numbers for a B2 but I am pretty sure it is less efficient than most airliners.
Cloud Strife Member	Tue Jan 19 20:06:28 I wouldn't be surprised. It looks like fucking origami.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 22:42:58 You're thinking some other aircraft. The B-2 is one of the most efficient aircraft ever made. Pilots have described how it seems to want to endlessly float down the runway. "theoretically the flying wing is the most efficient aircraft configuration from the point of view of aerodynamics and structural weight. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_wing
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 22:44:05 http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~mason/Mason_f/FlyWing03.pdf
Sam Adams Member	Tue Jan 19 22:48:40 Practically, the US military has an unlimited supply of fuel(especially for nuclear bombers) and therefore are not quite as efficient as they could be. Also, you are forgetting economy of scale and engine technology, both of which favor more modern and larger airliners.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 22:56:08 By efficiency, I'm referring to Lift-To-Drag Ratio. The only aircraft that can carry comparable amounts of ordnance would be the B-52 which carries 70,000lbs of ordnance. The Lift-to-drag ratio of a B-52 is somewhere around 21 or 22. For a B-2, the Lift-To-Drag ratio is an astonishing 0.205
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 23:01:15 Uh oh, scratch my numbers they are totally wrong. A B-52 Lift To Drag is 21.5 A B-2 Lift To Drag is around 28 (similar to a U-2) http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b-2-history.htm
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 23:02:18 I quoted the Thrust to drag ratio- which is exceptionally low. The aircraft seems woefully underpowered which makes me believe there is some exotic technology at work.
Alex Member	Tue Jan 19 23:04:12 DAMMIT, Should say *Thrust to Weight* ratio. In other words, it has exceptional efficiency, and surprisingly little conventional power. By comparison, the B-1 has a thrust to weight of .38
Sam Adams Member	Tue Jan 19 23:07:28 Umm, efficiency is usually how far you can send a given payload with a given amount fuel. L/D is only part of that. And a B52's airframe is not 100 times less efficient than a B2. Just think about what you are saying before you make your next post. 100 times? This fucking laptop isnt even 100 times less aerodynamic than a B2.
Sam Adams Member	Tue Jan 19 23:10:03 "A B-52 Lift To Drag is 21.5 A B-2 Lift To Drag is around 28" that sounds better. ----------------- A B2s thrust/weight ratio is about the same as an airliners... and it flies at the same altitude at the same speed. What about that sounds weird to you?
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KreeL Member	Thu Apr 29 23:22:59 Why not put these devices on cars so we can all get 50 mpg?
pillz Member	Thu Apr 29 23:59:08 Something about them being unnaturally expensive, I think.
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