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

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!_