![]() ![]() Because Denny's early work was totally funded with Lockheed funds, the computer program and the faceted designs belonged to Lockheed. Using a Cray computer, Overholser developed a program that could model the scattering from Schroeder's new faceted shapes, and predict their Radar Cross Section (RCS), in a reasonable amount of time. Schroeder took the problem to Dennis Overholser, a software engineer. It was as if a diamond had been cut to the shape of an aircraft, and the technique came to be called "faceting". Veteran designer Bill Schroeder sketched a flyable, controllable aircraft with no curved surfaces at all, except for small-radius, straight edges to its wings and tail surfaces. Two Skunk Works engineers cracked Maxwell's ciphers in 1975. James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist, has derived a set of equations that could predict how a body of a given shape would scatter, or reflect, electromagnetic radiation. One of the disadvantages involved in the use of faceting on aerodynamic surfaces was that it tended to produce an aircraft which was inherently unstable about all three axes - pitch, roll, and yaw. An additional reduction in radar cross section was to be obtained by covering the entire surface of the aircraft with radar absorbent material (RAM). The surfaces were arranged in such a way that the vast majority of the radar incident on the aircraft will be scattered away from the aircraft at odd angles, leaving very little to be reflected directly back into the receiver. Faceting is a technique allowing the ordinarily smooth surface of the airframe to be broken up into a series of trapezoidal or triangular flat surfaces. The technique that they came up with was known as faceting. Hopeless Diamondĭuring 1975, Skunk Work engineers began working on an aircraft which would have a greatly reduced radar cross section that would make it all but invisible to enemy radars, but would nevertheless still be able to fly and carry out its combat mission. The product of Project Harvey was the Hopeless Diamond. Dick Scherrer was the Project Harvey Program Manager and Leo Celniker was the Proposal Manager for the XST proposal. ![]() This Lockheed XST Program was named "Project Harvey" after the 1950 movie titled “Harvey”, staring James Stewart, about an invisible six foot rabbit that could only be seen by one person, Stewart. ![]() In 1975, Ed Martin and Ben Rich solicited the help of five engineers from Lockheed's Advanced Design and Skunk Works Engineers to help prepare a proposal for the Experimental Survivable Testbed (XST) program using discretionary funds. ![]()
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