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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

> it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.

That’s not a gotcha you seem to believe it is, it’s like the first thing you learn about stealth technology and has been apparent to anyone following military news to any extent in the past forty plus years. That you somehow think it’s something that went unnoticed and the thousands of people working on this every day has been “pretending” after reading some Twitter posts is absurd and funny.

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Wow really? Someone else already noticed that invisible to radar isn’t invisible to eyesight and event teaching it? lots of smart people out there.

I’m happy that you’re feeling smart and superior but that’s not the point, the point is signal collection and processing came a long way, and maybe low radar cross-section isn’t that big of a deal anymore. At least enough to justify spending huge sums on a plane that keeps having issue and falling short.

>maybe low radar cross-section isn’t that big of a deal anymore

That's simply not true. There is not a peer or near-peer country that is not developing a variety of low-RCS aircraft.

It’s not as if stealth is foolproof even to radar:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

This incident happened precisely because the human controller activated radar twice to get a read on ground AA targets.

This is an operational/user fatigue error rather than a fault of the plane. It was completely blind to any and all AA until it turned on it's radar.

Which is to say, f35 Stealth characteristics are worth their weight until exactly the moment a human turns off "lane keep assist" because "they can do it better."

Your target is long gone by the time you can detect short wavelength visible spectrum. Jets don’t need to get physical with you to do damage, it’s not WW2 anymore. That’s not to say countermeasures aren’t a focal point of research.

There are lots of “smart people” out there shitting on very serious work after reading some tweets from captain obvious. There are lots of even smarter people who don’t think everyone else’s an idiot and therefore think long and hard before shitting on work they don’t understand.

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