Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit

flateric said:
Original LIB-28 purpose was revealed somewhat 20 years ago in AWST
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The proposal described in the article for decoy or jammer missiles sound very much like MALD/MALD-J.
 
LowObservable said:
I could tell you about it, but then I'd have to dunk you head first in a bucket of chlorosulfonic acid.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3517505A/en
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"A further object of the invention is to prevent the formation of a jet engine contrail by introducing a uncleating substance into the aircraft exhaust stream thereby producing smaller, less visible particles rather than the larger visible particles which would ordinarily be produced as a product of combustion of the jet fuel".

I bet you 20 quid the patent examiner didn't realise this was a typo, they probably assumed uncleating = the opposite of nucleating .... :p
 
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Just reading through a novel published the year after the B-2 rollout, the cover makes for an interesting comparison to the 1988 publicity material.
 

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Graham1973 said:
Just reading through a novel published the year after the B-2 rollout, the cover makes for an interesting comparison to the 1988 publicity material.
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That's not quite correct - 'Target Stealth' - First Edition (January 1, 1989) - a month after official B-2 rollout (November 22, 1988).
Moreover, cover art is a blatant rip-off of famous Honda CRX Si 'Stealth Bomber' ad campaign October 1988. If you will say again that Honda was a seer - again, not.
Ad art was very _artistic_ improvisation of an official B-2 artist's impression released by DoD in APRIL of 1988.
 

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My Step-Father worked for for the contractor who made upgrades to the mfg facility that the B-2 was made in. He worked up in the rafters for months while they built the B-2 below him :)
 
He would have had a tense sense of professionalism because such things are not easily done (was done also above the Rafale line at the time ;) ).
 
Wow...
Also , see that kind of mesh on the canopy glass ? Makes it looks like pixelated .
 
Matej said:
There is no real chance to re-open B-2 producton line. In may 2001, shortly after Northrop/Grumman high-officer Roche nomination as ministry of USAF, was proposed that 40 new B-2 could be build under fixed price 29,4 mld. USD.
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Surely this must be a typo, right? Either 290,4 million apiece, or 29,4 billion altogether. I can't imagine that even a conventional B-2 would only cost 30 million dollars to manufacture. Even in 2001 money.
 
SOC said:
Matej said:
I think it was not posted before - two special airframes for B-2 static tests.
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One of those was cleaned up and put on display in the USAF Museum. I've always wondered where the other one got off to.
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Apparently the second was used for structural tests and and live fire test to see how much damage a B-2 could withstand and was tested to the point of destruction, at least according to one of guides I asked at the USAF Museum.
 
I don't know if this question has been resolved in another thread but I want to ask:
Was the B-2A Spirit ever mean to use the cruise missile AGM-129? If so, could have actually do so?
I ask because some places like FAS say the B-2 could carry 16 AGM-129, which seems weird considering the B-1 Lancer could carry in it's bomb bays 24 Nuclear bombs or 8 AGM-86s
Then again, the B-2 can carry 8 GBU-37/28 adn 2 GBU-57 which no other bomber could do.
 
It doesn't appear that the B-2 was ever armed with the AGM-129, and it wasn't planned to.
 
bring_it_on said:
bobbymike said:
Sorry to be politically incorrect but during the video I imagined the camera swinging around to a room filled with middle aged Chinese men all vigorously taking notes, "Yes we're Peninsula Seniors"
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This one is a goldmine
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn0lSoreB1g
he mentions how easy was to get models made and that now you have bureaucracy getting in the way of developing new ideas. I'm guessing the Chinese don't have these issues.
 
That does look somewhat familiar. I helped modify the lines for the nose of the test sled so that the real ones wouldn't show. It's interesting, they tested the system for launching three seats but I don't know of any time the B-2 has flown with three crew members.
 
B-2-Underside.jpg
 
What type of airfoil does b-2 use? it doesn't look conventional at all and the wing looks thick. I also had a similar impression when I saw the f-22 wing while parked at an airshow, but it looks like it is the complex washout they incorporated into the wing design. The su-57 seems to have a less aggressive design, it is like the Russians prefer their wings a straight as possible.
 
Probably some kind of supercritical airfoil, somewhat like a modern airliner (these also have fairly high t/c ratios for a transonic wing).

What you observed on the F-22 is called conical camber, and yes the Su-57 has a similar geometry, albeit less pronounced. My guess is that this is related to the sweep angle (which is of course lower on the F-22), with more sweep requiring less camber. On the Concorde and Tu-144 SSTs the outer wings with lower sweep are also more dramatically cambered than the inboard, highly swept part.

One supersonic aircraft which didn't bother with any such complexities incidentally is the YF-23!
 
And we have a request for solicitation for a reverse engineering work on the heat exchanger (see attached doc) :
https://twitter.com/x/status/1366408888220741632
View: https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkThompson_DC/status/1366408888220741632

Despite the irony of Mike T, those things are fairly common in countries that still protect IP* (Bless them).

*occasionally a subcontractor would close its doors without being re-acquired by a third party (foreclosure, retirements of the owner, change in activity or market) and the engineering material or know-how would be simply lost.
 

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