One thing that strikes me is they added the almost "shark fin" ( which is also ahead of it's time ) tips to the ruddervator V-tails just like the wingtips vs the drawings. I wonder if that was done after wind tunnel testing, which begs the question was it wind tunnel tested...
Really neat story. I think one reason that the military wasn’t so keen on the design was because of their doctrine the time. Speed, firepower and EW. At that time EW was a strong suit in the arsenal. Radars weren’t all that sophisticated and the entire gamut of EW techniques were coming into their heyday. In essence, they felt they could avoid/obscure detection via standoff or own-ship EW (what’s now called EA/EP).
As radars became more sophisticated, then the area of detectability became more important.
There have always been technological outliers; potential weapons or products decades or centuries before their time. In the automotive world disk brakes, rack and pinion steering, overhead valves, fuel injection, safety belts, crush zones and many other inventions, were actually known about decades before they became generally available. There are a myriad of economic and technical reasons for this, but probably the bigger ones are not-invented-here, ego, and just plain stupidity on the part of people who could and did simply say, “no.”
I think they had a prop plane made entirely out of wood to just that istealthily in Vietnam
Back in the day water tunnels were used just as much as wind tunnels in aircraft design. Wright Patterson had quite a few.
And it still looks magnitudes more realistic and operable than that fake Iranian stealth fighter.