Lockheed selected by NASA to build quiet boom demonstrator

a reply to: grey580

I have one. It looks straight ahead at the idiots. Heh.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I've been wanting to get one.

I've been thinking about putting the video on youtube. lol

a reply to: grey580

I've got them facing front and back in mine and the wife's car. They don't do a very good job of recording fine detail of distant objects, they're usually too wide angle for that. Maybe catch a flash in the sky, that's about it.

a reply to: Sammamishman

like how one of them is green and has a skunkworks logo on the side.

a reply to: BASSPLYR

They do seem to have a sense of humor, don't they...

a reply to: Barnalby

I'm convinced that NG and LM are in a war to see who can piss the Avnerds off the most with there innuendos and veiled reveals.

Northrops getting back in the game with their teasers in their latest commercials, which is nice to see. I'd like to see them continue in that direction. They are trying to sell their product's name to a public that largely has no idea what they do or care.... but they could care more if northrop made the commercials more engaging to the average joe public..

Their prior ones including the "Superbowl" add were boring and lackluster. They need to interview us members to see what we would like to see in their adds, granted that they are allowed to show.

I dunno, I just get frustrated watching their adds. I'm like you guys build some of the coolest stuff on earth....literally. can't you make your adds a little more bad ass. I should watch a Northrop add and start chanting USA!USA! or singing America F Yeah! after it's done airing. Not going really northrop, you couldn't have hired a director with a little more vision or a better portfolio. Couldn't get a campaign vision put together for your markeing or adds. Stop letting the executives write the commercials. They sucked.

Honestly it does look like they hired a better team cause the last commercial was much better.

Lockheeds commercials in contrast are exciting and engaging. Plus you know how I feel about their trolling when it comes to "releases" of "proposed" aircraft. It's like if you know how to read the signals their releases seem to say "but wait! There's more!" Lockheed commercials come out swinging a little more. It's like they seem to say 'lockheed, we build bad ass stuff... and here's more stuff we plan to do to make them even more bad ass.'



Tl:dr Hey Northrop! Focus Groups....they were invented for a reason!!!!!!

a reply to: Sammamishman

Heh..."flight experiments"

I wonder if we'll ever see Brightstar

a reply to: Northernhollow

would go great with dark star.

a reply to: BASSPLYR

They must have a grey star somewhere

a reply to: Northernhollow

Part of me feels like this quiet boom talk might be the prelude to another declassification, at least once the public is aware of the maturity of the concept by way of this demonstrator.

Kind of like how Northrop was able to show us the Tacit Blue once the B-2 demonstrated to the public that we knew how to build non-faceted stealth aircraft.

I'm not expecting a certain grande dame to make an appearance, but this would be a perfect opportunity to pull the curtain back on Lockheed's quiet boom demonstrator from the 90's the way Boeing showed us the BoP.

a reply to: Barnalby

thats what im saying. something is coming out into the light(i hope)

if you look at the NASA video they look like some fasssst air craft.

(i did catch the green stripe on that skunk)

Its only taken them like 60 years to start doing demonstrators

To answer a previous question, the fins on the tail are to help control the shockwave.

a reply to: Zaphod58

So here's a question I have about Lockheed's design progression, particularly in terms of how they got to the design seen in their NASA concept renderings.

There seems to be a ton of 1950's DNA in this design, to the point that it looks almost like the love child of a Fairey Delta and an upside-down XB-70.

So my question is, who was it at Lockheed who looked at these old designs and decided to merge the way in which early "slide rule and a whole lot of intuition" high-speed aircraft kept their shock cones well clear of any wings or control surfaces with the way in which the XB-70 shaped its shockwaves to produce compression lift.

I mean, flip an XB-70 upside-down, and suddenly all of its [s]calamitous, window-shattering sonic booms[/s] Compression Lift is now being directed up and away from the ground.

a reply to: Barnalby
Good questions.

The length of the fuselage is important. The longer and slimmer the better IIRC. Also critical is the nose shape. If you look at the designs the nose and fuselage are slightly flatter on the bottom and more swollen on the top. This makes the bow shock wave asymmetrical where as more of the shockwave goes up then under or something along those lines.

Although everybody says it's crazy. I wonder if converting the exhaust into some sort of plasma could create a virtual fuselage behind the plane and dramatically reduce the boom signature. Haven't read this anywhere just my crazy thinking.


For me I'm more interested in the wings and winglets. They remind me of work the navy did on their screws to reduce cavitation caused by them going through the water. Thinking about the Swept, Cut-back screw shapes and applying those ideas to the wing. Also the concept of variable pitch screws I think about too. Would variable pitch and MAW/MAT concepts and technologies be useful to to help manage or finesse air flow and shockwaves.

a reply to: Barnalby

Nasa released a very good pdf called Sonic Boom, Six Decades of Research. It is very informative, but 539 pages long.
Quite a good read if you have some spare time

a reply to: Barnalby

They've had decades of sonic boom studies to understand how they act and what role shape plays on them. The best way to delay or alleviate the boom is a shape similar to this.