This is a stealth boat? #shorts #history

This wild looking thing is a stealth boat called the Sea Shadow. The genesis for this very unconventional design came from Ben Rich, who at the time was leading the legendary Skunk Works department of Lockheed. He got the idea after seeing how a photograph of the F-117 didn't look good. It looked out of focus, and it turned out that the stealth coating on that plane was messing up the camera's sonar-like focus device. The camera couldn't clearly see the plane. So he thought, what if we did the same kind of thing on a submarine and made it invisible to sonar? The initial design was a cigar-shaped vehicle with faceted walls to bounce the sonar signals off and make the vehicle effectively invisible. But it didn't really work. Then a Lockheed engineer came back from a trip to Pearl Harbor and told Rich about a small water area twin-hull vehicle that he'd seen. This catamaran-style navy ship that was really stable and might be the key to making a stealth boat. At the time, the biggest threat to U.S. surface vessels was the Soviet Roars satellite, which used X-band radar. A prototype was built in a pool and tested against a replicated Soviet radar, and it looked promising. Then in 1981, a full prototype started sea trials, and it wasn't great. Actually, in the water, it didn't fare so well. The radar could see giant waves, so the boat was far from invisible. And then it turned out one of the motor propellers was installed backwards. The issues were eventually solved, and the Sea Shadow went on to more testing. But it was eventually dry-docked and canceled before it got out of the test phase. But research on this program did eventually go to lowering the cross-section of submarine periscopes and the radar cross-section of destroyers.