Pictures requested by popular demand of planes in Groom and the NTS

reply to post by GroomLakePolishFAN


Not all of it is a fail. Most of it yes, but there have been one or two little tidbits in there that haven't been quite wrong.

reply to post by gariac


Plasma actuators will only give you stealth of you want it to, otherwise your transponder is going to give you away anyway.

In the case with the V-22 they were using plasma actuators to try to achive better fuel efficiency with better aerodynamics.

Originally posted by GroomLakePolishFAN
Can someone confirm existance of aircraft with designation F-121/A-17? I don't think that aircraft with this designation really was built but maybe in this shape? How many of these aircraft were at Groom?

Did you mean A-11 instead of A-17? There was talk of a designation for an aircraft called the Astra with the designation of A-11.

As for the other it may be quite possible as aircraft in that line of designation have been tested at groom;

YF-110B: Mig-21F-13
YF-110C: J-7B (mig21 varient built in china)
YF-110D: Mig-21MF
YF-110E/L/M: possibly used as foreign aircraft designators. (1987-1995 time frame)

YF-112: possibly used as designator for Sukhoi Su-22, could also have a C designation after.

YF-113A: Mig-17F (used in have drill program)
YF-113B: Mig-23BN
YF-113C: J-5 used in 'Have Privelledge' program
YF-113E: Mig-23MS
YF-113G: Been a bit of a debate about this one could possibly be foreign but may be a new testbed aswell
YF-113F: Possible foreign aircraft from 1987-1995 time

YF-114C: Mig-17F used in 'Have Ferry' program
YF-114D: Mig-17PF

YF-116A: Possible foreign aircraft type from 1987-95

YF-117A: Probably already know this one. It's Senior Trend
YF-117D: Tacit Blue technology demonstrator
YF-117E: reported by Joseph Jones to be a classified prototype unrelated to the F-117
YF-118G: Bird Of Prey

F-121: Also reported by Joseph Jones to be a high speed classified aircraft

YF-24: Classified aircraft from late 1990's to early 2000's. there's a PDF file on ATS that goes into a fair few details about it.


From that list the last two aircraft to be declassified were Tacit Blue and Bird of Prey, declassified on April 30, 1996 and October 18, 2002 respectively. Now their designations were YF-117G and YF-118G respectively, now you have to wonder why the jump to F-121, what about the 119 and 120 designations?

Just some food for thought

reply to post by Stealthbomber


What a great flow of messages Thanks. Some of aircraft I know from claims by other interceptors.

reply to post by Stealthbomber

Plasma actuators will only give you stealth of you want it to, otherwise your transponder is going to give you away anyway.

I'm not sure how to parse your reply, but clearly a plasma actuator will not give you stealth. It just replaces the physical actuator. It does not provide a plasma around the entire aircraft.

Did you read the "cold plasma" paper at the link I provided? This scheme, though quite insane since it requires a duel hull system, is what it takes to do active stealth. The plasma needs to be pretty thick to be effective and contained so it doesn't produce a trail. The outer hull is a radome to allow the RF to reach the plasma. Still the plasma at 500 deg F will create quite a thermal image.

Anyway, my point here is to not mix applications of plasma unrelated to stealth in the discussion.

Note that traveling faster is in itself a means of stealth. The term radar lock is used quite often, but few people know what a lock really means. In radar, you have a time window to receive the return echo. [I'm avoiding calling it a pulse for technical reasons.] Radar will have multiple returns due to clutter. However, to lock on a target, what you effectively do is reduce the size of the window so that it just receives the return echo of the target, plus some margin. This improves the signal to noise ratio. But the faster the target moves, the more margin needed in the window, hence more chance for noise to get in the system.

When the dust settles, moving quickly and not in a straight line is very effective.

reply to post by gariac


Ah yes, my mistake. I meant to just write plasma and didnt proof read it, sorry Gariac. I haven't actually had a chance to read through it yet, been working crazy hours at the moment.

reply to post by gariac


Did you have a look at the SBIR on the Osprey?

reply to post by Stealthbomber


Sure. I even followed up on the contract. The Navy spent about $70k on it. [Hard to get rich that way.] Here is the vendor:
plasma actuator vendor for Navy

But this isn't plasma stealth. It is more like come and get me. ;-)

Look at it this way. SECDEF Rumsfeld was pissed that the Iranians had night vision and were detecting convoys using IR headlights. What an ass. You take a measure, the enemy takes a countermeasure. That is how you play the game. You light up your aircraft with plasma, don't bitch when the enemy builds a weapon to target the plasma. You need to think at least three steps ahead of the enemy to thrive.

Military technology is full of stupid blunders that might have looked good on paper until people thought of the countermeasures. Honeywell made an airborne people sniffer of sorts for use in Vietnam. The VC hung buckets of urine in the trees, and that was where the sniffer went.

reply to post by gariac


Fair enough, I wasn't aware of that. Doesn't seem like much money. How did you follow up and find out more information? If its easy enough I have a few more that I'd like to know a bit more about

Originally posted by Stealthbomber
reply to post by gariac

 

Fair enough, I wasn't aware of that. Doesn't seem like much money. How did you follow up and find out more information? If its easy enough I have a few more that I'd like to know a bit more about

Just google the number assigned by the Navy. These numbers don't change in the process from solicitation to award. Depending on your interest level, you can FOIA to get the list of those that competed in the bid. You can even FOIA for the results. Something like this is probably not very secret. If you look at FOIA logs (i.e. lists of what others are FOIAing), the loser often FOIAs about the bid decision and the results.

The DoD throws money all sorts of studies. My favorite is the ball lighting weapon study: afd-091008-049. Right up there is a JASON study on how to detect underground structures. In the commercial world, we call it throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

I don't know how the DoD handles spending on research, but in the corporate world, a manager has a certain dollar amount that he/she can spend without anyone questioning the expenditure. DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was famous for making computers that a manager at a Fortune 500 company could buy without needing approval from higher up. I suspect the DoD is similar. Spending $70k on a plasma actuator study is trivial compared to the cost of military marching bands, which is around half a billion a year.

One crazy study that eventually got built was the laser powered flying saucer. OK, that is my name for it. The idea is you can use a laser to heat the air, so they took a disk, and heated the air with the laser to make the disk rise. It was done at Edwards.

reply to post by gariac


Great, thanks do you have a link to the flying saucer? you can pm it to me if you don't want the thread turning into a "USAF's making flying saucer PROOF" thread lol

Originally posted by Stealthbomber
reply to post by gariac

 

Great, thanks

do you have a link to the flying saucer?

you can pm it to me if you don't want the thread turning into a "USAF's making flying saucer PROOF" thread lol

They had it at one of the Edwards open houses. I don't think I took a shot due to lack of a flash. Fortunately this website archived a space.com report on the project. The report indicated there was a propellant that was ignited by the laser, but my recollection was they just heated the air under the disk to make it rise.

Edwards flying disk

If you google AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2004-0024, there is a photo of the Edwards experiment on page 37.
Maybe this link will work:
Yet another Eric Davis crazy tech study

Of course, this never got past the gee whiz phase. In the commercial world, you pencil out this stuff on the back of an envelope or on a napkin in some Silicon Valley restaurant, but then you say "Nah, too crazy and too expensive." But the DoD doesn't live in the real world.

Davis was one of scientists that went to the Skinwalker Ranch. Came up empty handed. He would be an interesting character to run into given the number of crazy DoD studies he has done. He might be a JASON.

reply to post by gariac


That was a good read thanks. I guess they put so much money and effort into these crazy schemes In the hope that one might pan out, although I read an article that said that a lot of the stuff that's supposed to trickle down to the commercial sector never really does.

I remember the laser propelled flying disk. The Air Force Research Lab guys brought it to the Antelope Valley Fair as part of their exhibit. They didn't fly it at the fair unfortunately, but they had it on their display table. It was small like a Frisbee with a high dome in the center. There were photos of it inflight, and a video.

Other items on exhibit included various small objects made from a metal-ceramic hybrid material that had a rubbery texture and a lot of weight relative to volume. The sample objects included several different rocket components and a cute little rabbit figurine that I referred to as the "heavy bunny" ever afterward. These same items, and the laser disk, were trotted out at Edwards air shows for a few years as part of the displays in Hangar 1414.

reply to post by Shadowhawk


Hey Shadowhawk,

Would you be able to look at my post above and see if that a pretty fair representation of the correct designations? From the website I got the info off one of the sources cited was you, but not for all if the aircraft. So I was wondering if you could have a look and see if there's any incorrect info in there.

Cheers

reply to post by Stealthbomber


Stealthbomber, your list looks pretty good for the most part. I have never seen the designations YF-113F or YF-117E, but that doesn't mean they were not used. I have always assumed that the F-121 designation was just a fantasy like TR-3A and TR-3B.

There were a few known designations missing from your list. One I have heard is YF-43B, but I have not yet confirmed anything. The only reason I put any credence in it at all is because of the existence of the YF-24 designation, which similarly departed from the traditional YF-11X series. Also, the Red Hats reused the YF-113C designation in 1992, probably because they were unfamiliar with its use in the earlier Have Privilege project. As far as I know, that marks the first time that a single designation was used to refer to multiple aircraft models. YF-110B was the first designation used to refer to multiple examples of the same type.

The YF-11X-series designations were not assigned in any sort of logical order. Some people expect to find more aircraft with the "missing" designations (such as YF-115) but these may never have been assigned.

so much for the pictures.

Have a look in the aircraft forum there's another thread with pictures, this is a pretty old thread now so some of the pics would have expired.

reply to post by Stealthbomber


I'd rather not know potentially classified or sensitive information.

reply to post by teachtaire


And where are the classified airframes?