Understanding Fundamentals of Modern Stealth and Exploring Potential Vulnerabilities
In unraveling a mystery concerning why America can never make another F-22 Raptor again if they wanted to, I have drawn certain conclusions about the mechanisms through which stealth may be achieved, stealth being defined as the ability to absorb or reflect EM energy to evade RADAR detection.
According to multiple sources, after manufacture of the F-22 Raptor was completed to contract, the “machine tools” used in building the aircraft were disassembled and destroyed. The idea was to help to prevent anyone from discovering the secrets of the aircraft. Secret machine tools? What’s going on?
Modern stealth is predicated upon the ability to absorb electromagnetic energy as completely as possible, and the best way we know how to do this is with something called a copper-wire mesh, preferably in a hexagonal configuration. There is a similar mesh in the door of your microwave oven. The aperture size of each mesh, if it is going to resonate with EM of a particular frequency, must exactly match its wavelength. One mesh buys you stealth against a single wavelength, with a small margin for error. By overlapping very fine mesh layers, progressively more frequencies of EM may be absorbed. The limit is the number of layers that may fit in the aircraft’s skin. With advanced machine tools, as they call them, extraordinarily thin wires may be manufactured, layered on top of the previous layer, separated only by a few hundred atoms of radar-absorbing material, and adhered by a layer of the liquid form of the material, which is allowed to dry before another mesh layer is added. In this way, an aircraft can have protection from anywhere from 80 or so bands of radar to, with the most advanced tooling, 345 unique bands, making certain assumptions about mesh thickness and hull thickness.
In unraveling a mystery concerning why America can never make another F-22 Raptor again if they wanted to, I have drawn certain conclusions about the mechanisms through which stealth may be achieved, stealth being defined as the ability to absorb or reflect EM energy to evade RADAR detection.
According to multiple sources, after manufacture of the F-22 Raptor was completed to contract, the “machine tools” used in building the aircraft were disassembled and destroyed. The idea was to help to prevent anyone from discovering the secrets of the aircraft. Secret machine tools? What’s going on?
Modern stealth is predicated upon the ability to absorb electromagnetic energy as completely as possible, and the best way we know how to do this is with something called a copper-wire mesh, preferably in a hexagonal configuration. There is a similar mesh in the door of your microwave oven. The aperture size of each mesh, if it is going to resonate with EM of a particular frequency, must exactly match its wavelength. One mesh buys you stealth against a single wavelength, with a small margin for error. By overlapping very fine mesh layers, progressively more frequencies of EM may be absorbed. The limit is the number of layers that may fit in the aircraft’s skin. With advanced machine tools, as they call them, extraordinarily thin wires may be manufactured, layered on top of the previous layer, separated only by a few hundred atoms of radar-absorbing material, and adhered by a layer of the liquid form of the material, which is allowed to dry before another mesh layer is added. In this way, an aircraft can have protection from anywhere from 80 or so bands of radar to, with the most advanced tooling, 345 unique bands, making certain assumptions about mesh thickness and hull thickness.
