Horten Ho 229

[Capt. Vick]

Excellent. So if charcoal is present in the adhesive at all, there may be an alternate reason for it. Would this have been added by the manufacturer or would it have been an old wood workers trick?

Yes, I have read the same about Tego and the corrosive effects of its replacement. Obviously this is what I was alluding to in my previous post. Perhaps, if it is present at all, this was why charcoal was mixed with it, and NOT for its assumed RAM properties? To cut the acidity? More questions... I love these thought experiments.

 

[stona]

What adhesive was used on the Ho 229 would be the pertinent question? Did the less than exhaustive testing done on the extant Ho 229 even answer this basic question, or was it just attempting to grab a headline for a second rate TV show?
It's not a difficult question. There were only three or four systems for bonding laminates in use at the time as far as I can tell. The Germans must have been using a version of one of them.

I assume it wasn't the TEGO film as the factory had been bombed in early 1943 and anyway the process was a 'dry' process using heat and impregnated paper. Without going all chemist I can't imagine why you'd add charcoal to this 'base catalysed' reaction, even if it was possible.

There may be a reason it was done during whatever process the Hortens were using in 1944/5.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Graeme]

If you go to the "Talk" section of the Wikipedia article on the Gotha 229, some guy/gal wrote this...

With regards to "but it has carbon loaded glue; that makes little sense except for stealth" - simply put nothing could be farther from the truth.

When the 229 was under construction there was a dire lack of resin wood glues to work with, since pretty much all the factories producing resin were no longer in operation. So what were the Hortons to do? Adding charcoal to wood glue is a very old, simple and cheap method of improving the strength of wood glue. I believe this is the primary, if not sole reason for the presence of carbon in the wood glue.

And to add to that simply adding charcoal to glue is not going to magically give you reduced RCS properties. The RAM materials used on stealth aircraft do have carbon in them, but it is far more complex then simply tossing some in to the mix. The size of the carbon "pellets" are carefully selected and applied to the skin in a way that ensures an equal, grid like distribution. This is far beyond just adding charcoal to the glue.

As far as Myrhas claims that the aircraft was designed for stealth, keep in mind that this is based on interviews he conducted with the Horton brothers after the B-2 became known publicly. In the years after WW2 the Horton brothers published several books, and not a single one of them made any mention of stealth in the design of the 229 or any other aircraft designed by them. Until the B-2 came out of the black that is - then they released a new edition of an earlier book with mentions of stealth and the addition of coal to the glue as an attempt at making RAM. Furthermore interviews with other engineers at Horten after turn up zero mentions of stealth. And one interview with an engineer in the 90s, when asked about the stealthy aspects of the 229, stated rather emphatically that there was no attempt at stealth with the 229. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2620:117:C080:520:5E26:AFF:FEFE:8C40 (talk) 07:10, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

 

[stona]

Exactly. As I posted some way back up the thread, the first claim for any kind of stealth capability for the Ho 229 was made by Reimar long after the war at a time when stealth technology for aircraft was firmly on the agenda.

The claims that the Ho 229 or any other of the brothers' designs were intentionally stealthy are not supported by any evidence at all.

It's a red herring, about as plausible as German nuclear tests or flying saucers launched from bases in Antarctica. It did grab enough attention to promote more than one television show and several articles.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Capt. Vick]

Busted then? I think so, without going to the original source material that is.

 

[stona]

I think so.

'Hitler's Stealth Fighter' sounds a lot better than 'Hitler's prototype flying wing'. At least the National Geographic channel thought so particularly when backed up with utter BS like this:

'In the final months of WWII a jet powered flying wing made its first test flight from a remote airfield deep inside Nazi Germany. Generations ahead of its time, the Horten 229 had been designed to be a lethal fighter bomber and more importantly, virtually undetectable to Allied radar.'

There's not much that is actually true in those first two sentences from Nat Geo's promotional blurb

"first test flight from a remote airfield deep inside Nazi Germany"...nope, Oranienburg, near Berlin, about 25 miles from the capital of the 3rd Reich. I wouldn't call that 'remote'.

"Generations ahead of its time"...nope, nothing new about the concept of flying wings and other aircraft were already flying with turbo-jets. The construction techniques used on the Horten aircraft are actually quite primitive for the day.

"the Horten 229 had been designed to be a lethal fighter bomber and more importantly, virtually undetectable to Allied radar"... the first bit is wishful thinking, the second simply not true.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Capt. Vick]

Yeah baby!

 

[GregP]

You mean there aren't any flying saucers operating from the Antarctic? If that is true, where are they coming from?

 

[Capt. Vick]

Uranus?

 

[Monkeyfume]

You mean there aren't any flying saucers operating from the Antarctic? If that is true, where are they coming from?

Outer space, you dumbass.

 

[FLYBOYJ]

Uranus?

There are only Klingons around Uranus!!!

 

[N4521U]

In the Navy they are referred to as Dinglberries!

 

[Milosh]

Heard them called 'will knots'. Happens after passing lumpy gas.

 

[Capt. Vick]

Oh man

 

[GregP]

Crunchy peanut buter ... and it builds racing stripes on your underware. That's why they went to dark colors that are relatively impervious to brown additions.

 

[GrauGeist]

Outer space, you dumbass.

Not all "flying saucers" come from space, asswipe...

 

[Monkeyfume]

Not all "flying saucers" come from space, asswipe...

View attachment 277907

View attachment 277908

View attachment 277909

Avro Canada Avrocar, it is really slow
Vought Flying Pancake, just a regular plane with fat wings
Something made by nazis, never seen it before but probably same as above.

They are not real flying saucers because they do not travel at light speed.

 

[GrauGeist]

Flying Saucer: disc-shaped vehicle/craft capable of flight. This is pretty straight-foreward, the aircraft I posted up there meet the criteria of a "flying saucer".

As far as speed of light goes: "Light travels at a constant, finite speed of 186,000 mi/sec. A traveler, moving at the speed of light, would circum-navigate the equator approximately 7.5 times in one second. By comparison, a traveler in a jet aircraft, moving at a ground speed of 500 mph, would cross the continental U.S. once in 4 hours."

So if you've seen a flying saucer moving at the speed of light, you've got some damn-good eyesight...

 

[davparlr]

I agree that the very profile of the Ho229 presents a low RCS by virtue of design, however, how sensitive was WWII era radar in respect to the turbojet inlets, versus what we know and use in modern radar technology/stealth profiles?

In otherwords, technology has taken a quantum leap in the 70 years or so since that technology was employed. Back then, a U-Boat could talk to Berlin on it's two-way with an antenna that was the length of the boat and required a great deal of power. Now, we can do the same thing with a hand-held device using only a few volts and an antenna that's less than an inch.

So radar technology today is highly sophisticated, extremely sensitive and has a broad range of counter-measures versus the archaic "analog" systems of WWII.

Radar reflectors are efficient reflectors of radar energy. Radar targets using radar reflectors can represent very large aircraft with a surprising small target. Variations in radar sensitivity would be proportionally equivalent. In other words they would have been equally effective with WWII technology as with modern technology.

 

[stona]

Objects might reflect similar radar waves in similar ways but advances in how those return signals are received and much more importantly how they are processed have moved forward in ways unimaginable to WW2 engineers.
Cheers
Steve