Proof the B-2 was built using UFO technology :-P
The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
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Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#22[deleted]
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#23Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…
As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still ne…
My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such.
Anyway the process as such did not work as documented.
You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere.
Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work.
Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting though, like software documentation that hasn't been updated over years of patches. Do you remember where you read that? Sounds like an interesting bit of history.
Also sounds like a git repository where people were working on local branches to do production work and then when they left the company, never pushed their branch upstream.
That's assuming there is a git repo or any kind of version control at all.
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#25Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…
I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
> I don't think we need the tinfoil hat. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Like the time we forgot how to may part of our thermonuclear weapons and had to reverse engineer that [0].
The really interesting thing about that is one of the main things they had to reverse-engineer was an impurity in one of the ingredients that the original designers didn't even know they were depending on.
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#26This is not new.
Older planes and other hardware have LONG had to be reverse-engineered (including microchips).
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#27The B-2 is ancient, doesn't seem very surprising.
It is by no mean ancient.
The introduction of the B-2 in service was ~24 years ago, this is one of the most recent jet in the US air force. By military standard it's definitely young.
There are only 2 planes in service in the US more recent than that, the F-22 and F-35 (not counting transport aircrafts).
Those planes are designed for lifespans of 50-100 years.
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#28This happens even outside Defense in all specialized industry. I was once asked if I could reverse engineer a part for a 30 year newspaper stacking machine in a printing press. Very interesting stuff and a consequence of being niche.
Also in auto repair. A shop told me they wanted to take a gasket from the engine, draw the part, then send it to a machine shop to have it fabricated.
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#29This brings up an important principle: the higher the tech, the shorter its lifespan. A cellphone from the 1980s won't function anywhere but in a Faraday-caged lab equipped with a suitable cell site, while 2G and 3G systems are fast disappearing. Only recently have landline telephone exchanges begun to drop support for pulse dialing, but otherwise, a rotary-dial desk phone from 100 years ago would still work today, and DTMF dates to 1963.
Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this kind of thing is all that uncommon for military airplanes that have been long out of production. I recall reading a decade or two ago that our local air guard wing had to fabricate some of its own replacement parts for its F-16s (IIRC, then some of oldest that were still in service). I also recall that Lockheed had to take special effort to preserve production know-how and tooling for the F-22 when…
>Long out of production. The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed. It reminded me of NASA's endeavor to reverse engineer the Saturn rockets https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
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