Horten Ho 229

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

 
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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
 
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
 
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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...
 

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.
 
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
 

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