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A comment on The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend. Parent comment

Re:The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend by nradov on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @12:18PM (#32839334)
The YF-23 was better in some ways, worse in others. Compared to the YF-22 it was faster, longer ranged, and (probably) more stealthy. But it had a smaller weapons bay and was less maneuverable. Both aircraft met the ATF program technical requirements. The final selection was based primarily on the Air Force having greater confidence in Lockheed over Northrop in being able to run the program on schedule and budget. The notional production F-23 would have been quite different from the prototype.

https://youtu.be/_MUK241uZHM

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Re:The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend by Maursault on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @02:36PM (#32841350)
> The final selection was based primarily on the Air Force having greater confidence in Lockheed over Northrop in being able to run the program on schedule and budget

Unexpected. The Lockheed YF-23[1] looks like it would fall apart if you breathed on it wrong, while the Northrop YF-23 is such a slick design it looks like it's moving while standing still.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/YF-22.jp...

[2] http://www.diseno-art.com/images_10/Northrop-YF-23-8.jpg

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Re:The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend by nradov on Thursday September 15, 2022 @12:50AM (#32847180)
Well the Lockheed YF-22 prototypes didn't fall apart through an extensive flight test program including multiple supersonic flights and weapon launches.
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Re:The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend by hajile on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @12:49PM (#32839818)
I thought the YF-23 had a larger weapon bay, but there was some debate at the time about the design of the delivery mechanism. On the flip side, having one, large bay allows for weapons configurations that aren't possible with multiple, shallow bays.

Maneuverability in a stealth plane is not of much use. Just like the F-35, the goal of the YF-23 was to use its vastly superior stealth capabilities take out the enemies before a dogfight happened. Given that drones can take G's that will turn a human's brain to mush, this is a much more sensible strategy in modern combat and renders the F-22 vectored thrusters as mostly an expensive and useless feature that sacrifices the much more important stealth of the YF-23's hidden engines.

I believe the claims of being worried about timetables were just making up excuses to choose a worse plane. The F-22 was 100% redesigned anyway (making a "competition" nothing but a formality). It was delivered years late and WAY over budget.

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