[Sussex] [OT] Warships of the future...

[Steve Dobson]

Hi John

On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 08:55:24PM +0100, John D. wrote:
> Whenever I read such stories, it remind's me of a couple of year's ago,
> when the US where shuttling a stealth bomber or two, over this way (not
> sure of the why's and how's but memory suggest's it might have been to
> do with the US bombing of Libya's alledged chemical/nuclear
> installations), and good old "johnny crabfat" (RAF) popped up and told
> them "ah ha!, we can see you (or word's to that effect, thereby negating
> the billion's of tax dollar's that "they'd" invested in the development
> of the aircraft - so amusing, it made national news).

ROTFLMAO - I was at Fanbrough the year the B2 first came over - awesome
sight - but the Racal stand had their heat seeking missile launcher track
it's engine wake as it buzzed the show.  Okay, the B2 isn't designed 
to operated and 200 feet, but it did make us smile.

I also heard that there is problem with the B2 that the developers did 
discover during testing of area 51.  If it flys through cloud it gets
lots of little water droplets that reflect radar just perfectly.
Maybe that is why America is only fighting wars in Iraq and other 
desert countries - it's the only place there technology works :-)

> Still, I suppose it serves to remind everyone, that it matters not, how
> clever/smart/intelligent/etc etc you may think you are, there's always
> gonna be someone with "more smart's" that you.

Sometimes you don't need better smarts, just older equipment.  In one of 
the NATO war-games one of the Scandinavian country tasked an intercept 
flight to check out "something odd" on their radar screen.  They were using
obsolete 1950s kit.  The flight intercepted a B2 and "neutralied" it.

As I heard it in the debrief afterwards the Americans were up in arms saying
there was "no f**king way" that the radar could detect the B2.  The response
was that no, they couldn't see the B2, but the could see a nice, noise 
free cone behind it.  They didn't know what was there, but they knew
something was.

I believe that the B2 now emits random radar noise in case the enemy are 
not using the latest US radar technology with all that nice computing 
hardware to clean up the display :-)

Steve D