Enzo is too slow, and way too easy to drive

It's the "Bird of Prey"..... a technology demonstrator built by Boeing's Phantom Works. Do a search and you should be able to find some stuff.

 

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And stuff like that started the rumors about "alien" ships being tested at "area 51".

If people get freaked at the sight of a Ferrari, imagine what they'd have thought at a pre-Kuwait war glimpse of an F-117. One reporter captioned a picture of the B-2 with "Lord Vader, your bomber is ready".

 

anyone see the aerodynamic test mule they used for the B-2.........this thing had been flying for years before it was declassified, same goes for the F-117 Stealth Fighter........funny they probably have something now in the air that won't be declassfied for another 20 years...........any takers on the Aurora project that accidently showed up in the defense department budget one year then not the next......

 

B-2, F-117, Bird-0f-Prey, yadda yadda yadda, etc. They're all still horizontally flying jet aircraft propelled by burning tanks full of jet fuel. Nothing radical about those. And they sure don't seem to do much toward preventing a bunch of radical terrorists from car bombing those road block check points in Iraq. Which puts them right up there with the B-2 bomber. Or yeah, that B-2 really strikes fear in the hearts of those radical terrorists doesn't it. Yawn,....not.

Show us something that operates on magnetic propulsion or gravity field bending. Show us something that will silently fly like a hummingbird with up/down/left/right/hover capability or make 90 degree or less high speed turns like the UFOs that have been sighted.
Then we'll be impressed because those things could be used to track down terrorist troops in the Afghanistan or Iraqi desert without being seen.

 

You gotta admit, it took huge cocakkas to fly those things. The test pilots must have been nuts in one sense or another. Then again think back to WWI. Some pilots took rocks with them because their guns jammed so much. They wanted to have something to throw at the other guy!

kcv

 

odds are The X-15 jockey would have been Neil Armstrong but - Chuck Yeager is a better candidate as he was the main hotshoe in the Airforce.

Yeager was overlooked for the Astronaut program because he lacked a university degree and the pr people at nasa wanted to have only the educated in the program, terrible shame as he was able to do some amazing things in the air

http://www.chuckyeager.com/home.htm

 

If the Aurora is infact the replacement for the Blackbird, it must be amazing.

As for the X-15, i dont know why the nose was rounded but i'd love to know if anyone knows the real reason. Although when it reached speeds of over mach 6.5 im sure it was very high (it flew so high that some of its pilots got astronaut wings), and there wasnt much atmosphere to cause friction since it pretty much flew in space. I wish i knew the real reason, but i never studied compressible flows (much less hypersonic ones) so I dont really know much about why planes like that are designed the way they are. Fluid mechanics can be hard enough (and mathematically intensive enough) as it is without worrying about changing fluid density. If I had to guess i woud agree with shiggins and say that it's to create optimal shockwaves in the same way that all the early spacecraft did. However, those were blunt to create a strong shockwave infront of the vehicle and dissapate energy away from where the heat would do damage. I once saw schlieren images of a blunt body and a pointed body and the shockwave far in front of the blunt body is very clear.

 

found the pictures- near the bottom of this link
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-440/ch6-2.htm

ps- nasa has a lot of great archives like this one, and a lot from when it was NACA. Many of the articles are technical too.