New Stealth Bomber Unveiling Tonight

The concept of passive radar has been around for quite some time. But it still requires a transmitter somewhere much in the same way SAM systems are set up with a radar in one place and the actual missiles elsewhere. That radiation still has to come from somewhere and would be targeted accordingly by wild weasel flights. The crews in Iraq and especially, Bosnia-Herzegovina were acutely aware of how quickly their transmitters met hot fire and lead while peeping the skies for allied aircraft.

Then there's the concept of quantum radar which the Chinese are supposedly maturing. It works by looking for voids in the sky, or rather, anomalies in background radiation since stealthy aircraft do return signals at some rate, but if the photons are molested in any way by RAM (radar-absorbing material), they come back out of phase/unpaired photons, which, give up the ghost in the sky. The problem is that it may work well for aircraft coming over the horizon at altitude, but as far as look-down/shoot-down capability, it probably has a long (long) way to go.

And you're right - payload is just a number, indeed. An F-16C can carry almost 17,000 lbs. on its nine hard points, but almost always, two of them are occupied by 600 gallon drop tanks. It all depends on the mission, as you're probably aware. The B-Ones operating over the middle east were just on-station bombers flying around and waiting for vectors to go drop that ordnance for guys operating on the ground.

The idea behind the SDB (Small Diameter Bomb (250 lbs), as you say, was as to avoid collateral damage but more importantly, to allow one aircraft to carry out more strikes per sortie. And that capability only became a reality thanks to better GPS/INS systems.

Tritonal is a wonderfully stable, and effective, explosive, no?

 

There is a drome bomber in development. We started with the landing systems over 2 years ago at my former employer

 

All I see is the spaceship that Will Smith flew in that stupid alien movie. But then again, I don't like MotoGP winglet bikes, either.

 

30,000 lbs