Air Force Legends: Northrop YF-23 ATF by Paul Metz

[Trident]

Treated myself to the book this month and I can so echo the praise here!

Like Sundog and SOC I too had always wondered about the wedges in the intake ducts - I even had an inkling that they were probably vortex generators, so the joy at having this educated guess confirmed was only amplified

Something I noticed in the book is the model of the "production" F-23 (DP232) is actually longer that what is shown in the drawings of the production version. You can see the distance from the apex of the wing root, where the fuselage waterline goes straight forward from there, is longer than is shown on the drawings. You can also tell the canopy is further ahead of the wing than shown on the production F-23 (DP-232) drawings. Is this an error, a different "production" version, and if the latter, which is correct? The model or the drawing showing a production version?

Aldo spadoni gave me some information about that. As Tony chong says in its book, DP231/DP232 were EMD proposal but were actually only starting point and not even the latest configurations at the time of the proposal. The were frozen as this to have coherent description along the proposal. One thing aldo told me is that the DP232 wasn't really detailled in the EMD proposal because the plan was to get to the DP231 three spike trailing edge eventually. The illustrations made by Aldo (that are in Paul Metz book) are actually neither DP231 or DP232 but a more refined version that whatever the engine had the 3 spike TE. As such his hypothesis is that Tony's model was actually the real DP232 (or close to) and that the technical drawing was just a placeholder since in any case the DP232 would be short lived.

Some other notes, while the "know only what you need to know" was the rule for the time (he was not only artist but avionics engineer during the EMD phase) he told me further iterations were already studied during the EMD phase but he doesn't recall any drawing from them.
He also confirmed me that fitting the aim-120c was envisionned but he doesn't know much more about this.

Now that's interesting, because another OCD thing I noticed involves one of Spadoni's drawings: on page 67 the main landing gear doors are of the type seen on the DP110 HSF (suggesting the landing gear retracts toward the centre line, not aft as on the PAVs and DP231/2). Is that perhaps accurate for those post-DP231/232 iterations?

Speaking of DP110, I got a chuckle out of seeing a mechanically scanned radar in technical drawing of such an obviously stealthy, 5th generation design - kind of hammered home Metz' point about the technology envisioned being far beyond the contemporary state of the art!