Morning all- I keep waiting for the mods to pull the trigger on this thread- but I suppose we are amusing.
First off, Dharris- I'd like to say thank you for your service, and all of our cold warriors here, and thank you to all of our uniformed members, past and present. I used to sleep a bit more soundly as a kid , knowing you guys were out there sitting on that GOLF,latter YANKEE that used to sit south of Hawaii aimed at the north west. It took stones like bocchi balls to go dragging your coat-tails under the noses of a lot of trigger-happy folks to keep tabs on what they were doing.Those of us who stood to back then found the 'Cold War' was often uncomfortably hot... for more information on the flying end
http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/index.shtml
The Air Combat Information Group is doing a fine job of uncovering and saving the history of that age
Alien scientist rocks! He's a nack for conveying abstractions and ideas- nearly all university proffs could learn from this guy, if they didn't know every thing allready...
This the concepts and mechanisims sound like; and I hate to say it; because the guy is a bit sketchy- Bob Lazars descriptions of work being done at Groom Lake...
Like Bruce Dickensen- he comes of as a...well...moonbat...but there is truth there...
In truth,Townsend Browns work isn't really 'anti-gravity'- it just looks that way. Its a way to generate lift with out fixed or rotating airfoils. The mechinisim is sometimes called
Biefeld-Brown effect, or 'capacitance effect'. The short form is, Dr Brown found that in a charged capacitor, the negative end will try to migrate to the positive end, generating force. The more juice one hammers into the capacitor, the more 'push' it generates. The axis of the capacitor from neagative to positive is the force vector. How does this relate to the B-2, and perhaps the OXCART successors?
as early as 1980, odd datums began to trickle out about a project going on at plant42-Palmdale- the ATB. one report noted a 'Dielectric' airframe, others mentioned 'charged leading edges'. As noted earlier, when the B-2 came into sevice, and details became avaliable, questions started being asked concerning, supposed range/payload/performance shortfalls-the air craft should not be able to go as far, carry as much, and fly as fast as was claimed based on published (grain of salt...) engine thrust, SFC, and drag figures. Hmmm. And yet, there it was... the best description of what may be going on, was from Bill Gunstone(AirInternational, Jan 2000)-and lets just say that Mr. Gunstone has been a very credible aerospace and defence analyst with a record of being right where every one else got it wrong, back to the 1950's -to paraphrase:
'I have numerous documents, all published openly in U.S., which purport to explain how the B-2 is even stranger.. far, far.. stranger.. than it appears. Most are articles published in commercial magazines, some are openly published US Patents, while a few are open USAF publications by Wright Aeronautical Laboratory and Air Force Systems Command's Astronautics Laboratory. They deal with such topics as electric field propulsion, and electrogravitics (or anti-gravity), the transient alteration of not only thrust but also a body's weigt.
Sci-Fi has nothing on this stuff.
The literature goes back to Faraday, but the idea of electrogravitics really took off in 1920s when an American physicist, Townsend T Brown, carried out extensive experiments. He may have been the first to recognise that a capacitor (a dielectric material sandwiched between positive and negative plates)
experiences a force tending to move it in the direction of the positive face. He found that the electrostatic charge induced a gravity field between the two plates. Soon he was making capacitors rotate on whirling arms,
and measuring the loss in weight of the capacitor with positive face turned uppermost.
In 1953, Brown demonstrated to the USAF a whirling rig of 50ft (15.2m) diameter, which at 150,000 volts (150kv) became a mere blur. The subject was immediately classified, and for the next 40 years, while 'black' research in this field made astonishing progress, it was not reported. Though private individuals continued to experiment, and to take out unclassified patents, not much surfaced. Exceptions were
Electrogravitics Systems (Feb. 1956) and
The Gravitics Situation (Dec. 1956), published for subscribers only by Aviation Studies (International). This was London-based 'think tank' run by two very bright young men, R G 'Dick' Worcester and John Longhurst. Unlike the established journals, they published reports and informed comment without the slightest regard for questions of 'security'.
The only time they were taken to court, they won their case and collected heavy damages.
I was fascinated to read those reports, but had no wish to reside in The Tower , so I refained from discussing clever aeroplanes with leading edges charged to millions of volts positive and the trailing edges at millions of volts negative. In any case, it all seemed a bit far-fetched, especially as it appeared that the gravity field could not
only propel aircraft to supersonic speed with propulsive efficiency
greater than 1 but could also lift them
independently to the atmosphere.
Various snippets appeared suggesting that electrostatic fields could not only do wonderous things in the field of propulsion, but could also reduce aerodynamic turbulence (at any mach number), reduce radar cross-section and even virtually eliminate sonic boom. Indeed, back in 1952, Dr M. Rose had noted in unclassified literature: "The positive field.. travelling in front.. acts as a buffer which starts moving the air out of the way. This.. field acts as an entering wedge which softens the supersonic barrier.." From 1985, the name P A LaViolette emerges as author of a shoal of interesting electrogravitics articles in professional literature.
The first Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber was rolled out on Nov. 22, 1988, and anyone with the slightest interest in the aircraft could not fail to have noticed the unbelievable leading edge, with deep profile coming to a knife-edge almost in line with the upper surface. In 1990, a NASA 'boffin' retired and perhaps foolishly talked to
The Arkansas Democrat who did not understand his story and ran it under the headline "Ex-NASA expert says Stealth uses parts from UFO".
What really put the cat among the proverbial pigeons was a feature published in a March 1992 issue of
Aviation Week & Space Technology, entitled "Black world engineers, scientists,encourage using highly classified technology for civil applications". For the first time in open literature, this article explained how the B-2s sharp leading edge is charged to "many millions of volts", while the corresponding negative charge is blown out in the jets from the four engines. There is more: though the General Electric F118 engines can operate as ordinary turbofans,
in flight they act as flame-jet generators (Note-MagnetoHetrodynamic electrical generation-an energetic-read hot-conductive fluid-jet exhaust seeded with a salt works fine- moving through a coil, produces a whacking amount of juice), pumping out gas greatly diluted by fresh air, all at millions of volts negative. The word 'flame' gives a rather false picture, because in fact the jet comes out not very much hotter than the surrounding atmosphere.
Unclassified articles have described in some detail how the leading edge is divided into eight sections, each individually ionised. The section on each wing immediately upstream of the engines cannot be thus ionised,
because the air would then enter the engines and cancel out the negative charge in the jets. accordingly, this is where the Hughes covert strike radars are installed. They would not be able to 'see' forwards if they were
anywhere else.
Take-off trust of the F118-100 at sea level is given as '19,000lb (84.5kN) class' by Northrop Grumman and as '17,300lb (77.0kN)' by the USAF. These are startlingly low figures for and aircraft whose take-off weight is said
to be 336,000lb (152,635kg) and which was until recently said to weight 376,000lb (170,550kg). Aircraft usually get heavier over the years, not 20 tonnes lighter. Even at the supposed reduced weight, the ratio of thrust to weight
is a mere of 0.2, an extraordinarily low value for a combat aircraft.
The USAF has never said anything about B-2s speed. It has been tacitly assumed to be in the Mach 0.8 class, but according to extensive open literature, the four F118 engines equate to about 25 MW (megawatts) of electrical power at the take-off, but under the influence of the electrogravitic field the speed could soon become supersonic, the output of the air-diluted exhaust then rising to t least 100 MW.
Everyone who has heard a B-2 take off has been astonished at the quietness. Obviously the noise would not be in the same class as the F101 engines of the B-1B in full afterburner, but writers have used the words 'shocking',
'uncanny' and 'incredible' in describing B-2 departures. Another point to note is thet the channels downstream of the jetpipes appear to be carbon-fibre composite, which is incompatible with normal jet temperatures
(not because of the fibre, but because of the adhesive sticking them together).
Other writers have commented on the size of the B-2 wing and noted that its stealth depends on the huge black skin being made of RAM (radar-absorbent material). This, say the physicists, is 'a high-k, high-density dielectric ceramic, capable of generating an enormous electrogravitic lift force when charged'.
Hmmm. If any one lives near Whitman, has a Campbell Scientific Ltd. CS110 field meter, and wants to test this hypothesis...As a very bright guy who dabbled in physics at Princeton once noted...'The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; its stranger than we can imagine' ...though as Han Solo noted..' I dunno...I can imagine quite a bit!'
Now, I'm with you, Pam. Coffee and a smoke!