"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" Reborn - The Horten 2-29

Top thread,
I just watched:

channel.nationalgeographic.com...-Videos/06807_00

Great program,
Very interesting about how the Horten brothers taught themselves how to build and fly their own aircraft.
And they managed to get the contract for the planes which were to have been at the front line of hitlers "wonder weapons"-the Ho XVIII (Horten 18 Amerika Bomber)-essentialy a 6 engined big brother of the 229,designed to deliver the Nazi Atom bomb,in 1946-7ish.Targeting the east coast cities of America with A bombs was somthing they were planning.
The way the Northrop team stuck to the original build methods was great-NAILS plywood and GLUE!!

What a plane,but

"Wood!! the first stealth material!!"

said the prehistoic man who hid behind a tree...



Makes me wonder what super secret aircraft projects are underway today.
Things we can only try to imagine.

Edit!!
Found these pictures of the HO 18,some dudes making an RC version but these are his reference documents,and some CG pics.Worth a look:

www.rcgroups.com...




[edit on 14/7/2009 by Silcone Synapse]

Originally posted by gimmefootball400
Then again, the Germans did have technology for then was years before its own time.

No they did not. Nazi technology was "of the time".

The Nazi's developed and pioneered some interesting technologies which had practical application and were used to effect. So did the UK and the US and the rest of the allies. With the exception of (say) the V2, all Nazi technology was countered or within the capabilities (industrial and technological) of being countered by the allies had there been a real threat.

Regards

reply to post by paraphi


Neither for or against what you say but do you have data to back that up?

Photos of secret US/UK planes?

Would be curious to see what their "counter" to the Horton was.

cheers

Originally posted by warrenb
Would be curious to see what their "counter" to the Horton was.

The Horten was a fantasy plane. A couple of design prototypes. A fantasy specification which was technically unachievable and worth nothing more than the paper it was written on.

The counter to the Horten was total air superiority and strategic bombing, the latter had degraded Nazi industrial capability significantly.

The fact (which has been pointed out in this thread) is that had the Nazi's actually come up with a serious challenge to allied superiority then it would have been countered, or bombed into rubble.

If in 1944 all the aircraft companies of the UK and US were told "go an do whatever you like", you can bet that a bunch of interesting designs would have appeared.

Regards

Originally posted by paraphi
If in 1944 all the aircraft companies of the UK and US were told "go an do whatever you like", you can bet that a bunch of interesting designs would have appeared.

Regards

You are quite right in what you say. There were many unusual designs on a par with the Horten produced by the allies, but that does not fit in with todays curious 'Nazi-as-superhero' obsession.

Where the Horten was different was that it LOOKS, to modern eyes, what we would expect a futuristic or stealth plane to look like but its contemporaries do not, or at least are less so. What people fail to appreciate is that this is merely cosmetic or superficial, however people do read too much into the superficial in all walks of life these days so it should not come as a surprise.

If anyone has an understanding of the design of the Horten they should also look to aircraft like the Northrop XP-56, Miles Libellula, Handley Page Manx or several others to see that Germany did not have exclusive knowledge of unorthodox aircraft.

Because the allies understood better than the German commanders that what you need is numbers of practical aircraft many of these designs went no further than a single prototype or even didn't get built at all. Just because Germany invested in trying to get these aircraft into production does not make them 'ingenious', merely 'impractical'.



[edit on 16-7-2009 by waynos]

can some one help me, i currently doing research on nazi physics done in Houska Castle in the Czech Republic ,has any one found any documents relating to this, if so,could you help me out by sending me to them,i did find a book writtten by the ceo of warp drive tenologys ,with references to nazi resourses ,in dealing with telaportation tests,and other theroiries, but no actual real evedence or reference to Houska Castle .any help would be great,

Also, I wonder if George Lucas got some ideas for his crafts from things like this?

Actually he has stated before that the majority of his fighters and transport vehicles in the SW movies are based on real aircrafts. Almost the entirety of his dog fights in the X-wing vs TIE fighters is based on old WW2 dog fight recorded footage. The sounds that the big transport crafts make are recordings of old prop planes flying by that have either been pitched up or down, speed up or slowed down.

Sorry to get off topic there.

I wonder how it would have flown, and one more thing. Why was it in storage for 50 years, who found it, where did they find it?

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


To defend the US here a little bit,, the US did have its own flying wing designs as well. It was just the Germans that had it first attempt to mass-produce it as a weapon.

Flying Wings:
· The French Charles Fauvel designed AV3 glider, featuring a self-stabilizing airfoil on a straight wing, was successfully flown in 1933.
· The German Horten H1 glider flown with partial success in 1933, and the subsequent H2 flown successfully in both glider and powered variants.
· The American Freel Flying Wing glider flown in 1937.
· The American Northrop N-1M of 1940.
· The British Baynes Bat glider of 1943.
· The Northrop XP-79 "Flying Ram 1943


Although IMO it was the US that won the race due to its jet engine designs.

Side note- did you guys know that when the stealth fighter was first introduced to the public the pictures shown were skewed and streched so the nemey could not know a true definiton of its design.

Originally posted by paraphi
German (Nazi) technology was only ahead in some niche areas and these proved too insignificant in the great scheme of things.

Weeell......let's take it from the top:


Tanks: Tiger2 (Royal Tiger/King Tiger) - Could destroy all allied tanks at a distance off 3000 meters, all russian tanks within 2000 meters, this includes the IS3 that just missed the war, and the US Pershing.
There is a statement of a Nashorn (Same gun as King Tiger), killed off a IS2 heavy tank at a distance of 4.5 KM distance, that's INSANE for a 88mm gun.

E-100 - Chassie captured by the US, unfinnished, plans was to have either 88, 105 or 128mm gun, the 128mm gun could destroy any, and i mean ANY allied tank at a distance of 4.5 KM distance.

Planes:
Worlds best propel plane - Kurt Tank TA-152C/H, Allies had nothing that could compare with the C edition, in speed, firepower and manuverability, this was the ultimate.

The Arado 234 - opperational bomber/spotter plane, US failed to shoot down a single plane during the Italian campaign.

U-boat:
The german type 21, world's most up to date u-boat. So streamlined it was actually faster under water then above, the first of it's kind, considderd the grandfater of all moddern submarines.

Missiles:
V1 - First cruse missile, not accurate but did the jobb it was ment to do, strike terror.

V2 - First medium distance rocket, could not be shot down once in flight.

V3/V4 - Long distance missile, with wing's, designed with a lower fuel consumption, stil used a basic navigation system, possibly ment as strike element against US/moscow, Several of these was taken in launch silos around Germany, most shipped to US for testing.

Battleships:
H-Plan
Worlds largest land based gun, the Adolf gun in Narvik, was ment to be on this ship, it was to be faster, stronger and heavyer armed then any allied ship, and the H-45 plan was to have a ship at the size of Yamato.

Land canons:
Dora - 800 mm - Single handedly destroyed a ammo bunker at Sevastopol, bunker was under water, and under several meters of solid stone.

[edit on 18-9-2009 by Phoebus]

reply to post by Phoebus


Nice list, but hardly technologically advanced in the context of WW2 where Nazi technology was not anything special or out of the ordinary for such a war where advancement was both rapid and radical.

The only area of significant Nazi advance was rocketry. As has been stated, the V1 was mainly countered by radar controlled AA and fast fighters, V2 countered by the approaching front line and bombing. Not sure of the V3/V4 cited. I thought the V3 was an artillery concept of limited success prior to being bombed. If there were later iterations of the V2 they were too late, but please provide a factual link.

The other things you cite are just models of evolved systems, designs or wishful thinking.

Tiger II – Great tank. Too late to make any difference and apparently mechanically flawed. The 88 was a great weapon, but so was the British 17 pounder. Tiger II production curtailed by allied bombing. A pebble on the proverbial beach.

E100 – Nice and heavy, but a waste of development resources. It never left the prototype stage. Scrap metal. There is a reason why tanks never got that heavy and the Nazi’s were probably the first people to realise it!

Kurt Tank TA-152C/H – Again, too late. Nice plane but very few produced. It would have been countered by the normal evolution of aircraft as experienced throughout the war. The allies had total air superiority and nothing the Nazi’s did was going to stop that.

Arado 234 – Not sure of the “Italian” reference. Again, nice plane but no unique technology and too few and too late. Last Nazi plane to fly over the UK – apparently...

Type 21 Submarine – Yes, very nice with some useful evolutions, but Nazi U-Boats were countered by advances in ASW. Although submarines posed a threat right up to the end, their war had been lost. In the U-Boat pens were being bombed and were eventually over-run. That’s all academic of course because the Type 21 boat never sailed, as far as I know. Without a doubt the Nazis advanced submarine technology, but each advance was countered by ASW technology and doctrine and the allies won.

H-Plan battleship – By the end of the war the battleship was obsolete. The Nazi surface fleet was gradually reduced by the Royal Navy and any new surface vessels would have suffered the fate of the Tirpitz, Bismarck and Scharnhorst et al. Battleships were a technological dead end. The Nazis should have completed the Graf Zeppelin, but that would have been sunk too.

Dora guns – These were just an evolution of the railway artillery from WW1 and before. The Brits deployed some covering the English Channel, which were not as big as the Schwerer Gustav weapons that’s the only difference.

Regards

the americans copied it looks just like the B-2 Spirit, huh and then telling the russians we copy their ideas whereas after ww2 ussr,uk,usa got ALL the ideas from Nazi Germany

reply to post by naeem11111


Yes you are right, the B-2 does look exactly like a copy of the Horten. As long as you shut both eyes tightly and forget what the Horten actually looks like, bingo!

If you can post nonsensical tripe, so can I.

[edit on 8-6-2010 by waynos]

Documentry here about this aircraft