And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Pretty much simultaneous development to Concorde (and the XB-70), but substantially different in detailed design. TU-144 beat Concorde into passenger service, but at cost of rushed design, inadequate testing and poor construction. The British and the French separately worked on supersonic transport designs it the 1950s, and combined for the Concorde (for political reasons) in1962. The USSR published its SST concept the same year.
While the Soviets were not adverse to copying (they once copied an IBM computer chip right down to a flaw it contained), the rules of physics are the same for everyone and separate designs will often converge to similar solutions. They probably fed whatever the could steal from the west to their own designers; it's worth noting that prior to agreeing to work together the French designers covertly acquired British design documents on the SST wing and labeled them as their own in proposals to the French government.
The Russians often had excellent, even outstanding theoretical designs, but they did not have a system able to efficiently and effectively turn them into working products. Coincidentally in the same time frame,1962, Pyotr Ufimtsev in Moscow published his theoretical work “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” which the USAF translated into English in 1971. A Lockheed engineer working on a secret project read the translation a couple years later and realized it gave him the roadmap on how to design radar reflecting surfaces to minimize detection, and the F-117 resulted.
How many of those Boeing copies burst into little pieces before they were abandoned?
ReplyDeleteMore of a Concorde copy surely?
ReplyDeleteOften referred to as the "Concordski"
DeleteLot of XB70 rip off too. Russkis are equal opportunity opportunists.
DeletePretty much simultaneous development to Concorde (and the XB-70), but substantially different in detailed design. TU-144 beat Concorde into passenger service, but at cost of rushed design, inadequate testing and poor construction. The British and the French separately worked on supersonic transport designs it the 1950s, and combined for the Concorde (for political reasons) in1962. The USSR published its SST concept the same year.
DeleteWhile the Soviets were not adverse to copying (they once copied an IBM computer chip right down to a flaw it contained), the rules of physics are the same for everyone and separate designs will often converge to similar solutions. They probably fed whatever the could steal from the west to their own designers; it's worth noting that prior to agreeing to work together the French designers covertly acquired British design documents on the SST wing and labeled them as their own in proposals to the French government.
The Russians often had excellent, even outstanding theoretical designs, but they did not have a system able to efficiently and effectively turn them into working products. Coincidentally in the same time frame,1962, Pyotr Ufimtsev in Moscow published his theoretical work “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” which the USAF translated into English in 1971. A Lockheed engineer working on a secret project read the translation a couple years later and realized it gave him the roadmap on how to design radar reflecting surfaces to minimize detection, and the F-117 resulted.