Talk:Pyotr Ufimtsev

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and regional and topical task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.
Stub	This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the quality scale.
Additional information and associated task forces: Associated task forces (general topics): Military biography task force Military technology and engineering task force

Professor Ufimtsev should be discussed in the Stealth technology page. His paper, published in 1964 in the Journal of the Moscow Institute for Radio Engineering, became the basis of the F-117 (a Lockheed analyst found and translated the article).

What is needed here is to obtain a reference for the English translation of the paper, or at least a reference to the Russian journal itself, itself, which is part of the open scientific literature.

Ufimtsev himself built upon work done by German physicists during WWII.

16:17, 3 March 2007 (UTC)raryel

[edit] clarifications

The F117 did not benefit very much from Ufimtsev's work. Lockheed had a concept called the "hopeless diamond" . An aircraft shaped like a diamond would reflect radar away from the transmitter but would not be able to fly. The F117 is an implementation of this concept which does not require Ufimtsev's analysis techniques nor computing power that became available for the B2 program. Because of the use of flat slabs on the F117, it is not stealthy from certain directions. The F117 is very unstable and at least 2 were lost in low altitude testing. With the use of Ufimtsev's models, Northrop was able to design complex shapes that were both good at sending radar reflectors away from the transmitter and aerodynamic.

A citation should be found for Ufimtsev's use of German work. He is very well aquinteted with all prior work in math and physics that could help him in his work. We once discussed Russian mathematicians, and I was amazed at his depth of knowledge about their lives as well as their work. Saltysailor (talk) 20:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC)