Hacker News Comments on
Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.One of the best books I've ever read, courtesy of Hacker News.http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...
⬐ smclI keep seeing this mentioned on HN and other places, I must have added it to my "to read" list about 3 times I think⬐ chiph⬐ cushychickenIt really is an excellent book. Buy it.⬐ wlesieutre⬐ NoneIs it $500 excellent?⬐ chiphIt's $9.99 for Kindle excellent.None⬐ pklauslerMy favorite section in that book is when the Skunk Works guys trucked their stealth fighter prototype out to Edwards AFB for radar cross section testing. They stuck it up on a pole and then the AF guys in a radar van lit it up. And they could see it on radar just fine, and the Lockheed engineers were mystified, and the AF guys were giving them a hard time... until the vulture that had been perched on the prototype flew away and left nothing behind.⬐ robotresearcherAnd then the skilled radar techs look really, really hard and see... the pole.Totally agree. A great read. Ben Rich makes the material really approachable, even for non-tech folks. (I gave it to my mom to read and she really liked it!)
I'm reading through Skunkworks (http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...) on a recommendation from HN, and thoroughly enjoying it.I'd heard this before, but the actual genesis of Lockheed's Have Blue/F-117 was this: 1) Petr Ufimtsev in the 1960s develops the equations for calculating the radar energy reflected by a given geometric configuration 2) USAF notices and translates this into English 3) Denys Overholser and Bill Schroeder at Lockheed find, read, and implement it in software (which the Russians didn't have the computational power to do) 4) Lockheed is looking for a new Skunkworks project (this is post-SR 71, and Kelly Johnson was transitioning out of Skunkworks after handing things over to Ben Rich) and decides to bet on stealth ("What?! That'll never work! It's crazy!") 5) {... many, many, MANY person-hours later} 6) F-117
Side note: the reason the F-117 has geometric surfaces is that when it was being designed in the 60s and 70s there wasn't enough available computational power to calculate more complex shapes (e.g. F-22).