Re: Well played Northrop, well played



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Message posted by casper_n (Member since 01/24/2011) on December 06, 2022 at 17:12:01 PST:

That's what I understood he was saying, too.

If that is the case, then this will go down as one of the best disinformation campaigns ever executed. Think about the resources involved. The SecDef, one of the Joint Chiefs, dozens of generals, industry leaders, multiple members of congress, etc., all flew across the country and sat out in the cold to watch a "decoy" roll 1/4 of the way out of a hangar in the dark.

Smythers certainly has proven to know his stuff and I wouldn't be surprised if he were right, but if it were pretty much anyone other than him or Peter Merlin throwing this out there, I think we'd all be much less inclined to believe it.

I think there is an alternative narrative to at least consider.

They were designed for the same function (loitering over contested territory and providing P/ISR), so they could indeed look very similar or even be based on the same platform with a bomb bay replacing some of the sensor/imaging space on the RQ-180.

If we look back at the "open architecture" comments from the Air Force of late, this could be a much more literal definition than we had considered.

"Hey guys, Northrop has cracked the code for stealth, so everybody is going to use this shape and this bat-white coating and you just put your own payload and tech inside of it." Can you imagine if the RQ-180, the B-21, and NGAD were all essentially identical from the outside, or even better if they were literally the same airframe and there was a hot swappable bay to allow them to take on a sensor package, a complement of A2A missiles, a solid state laser, or a nuclear bomb turret depending on the mission set?

I mean, there comes a point when given materials technology and computational abilities, you can't get any more stealthy. What if we're there? What if you feed the data to the super computers and they keep spitting out the same answer? You run with it!

Just an idea.


In Reply to: Re: Well played Northrop, well played posted by SMW on December 06, 2022 at 16:07:17 PST:

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