US Air Force

light reading

CAC CA-18 Mustang

Convair B-36 Peacemaker Strategic Bomber.

In brief, one of the main ways that stealth aircraft avoid detection is by passively reducing their radar cross-section – or, in plain English, being shaped in a way that reflects radar signals in unexpected ways, thus making them appear “smaller” than they really are to anything that pings them.

The math required to calculate an object’s radar cross-section is impractical to do by hand, and even the computers that were available in the mid 1970s could only do it for relatively simple models with low polygon counts and few or no curved surfaces.

Unfortunately, the results from the simplified computer models were found not to be effective when applied to the complex shapes of real aircraft, so the designers of the F-117 found a workaround: they built it to be the same shape as the low-poly model from the simulation.