B-21 "Raider" stealth bomber

Accourding to the Air Force secretary the B-21 actually will have more range the the B-2.

https://apnews.com/article/technology-china-business-air-force-palmdale-761db1dae42616181a2cc63966f43554

”We needed a new bomber for the 21st Century that would allow us to take on much more complicated threats, like the threats that we fear we would one day face from China, Russia, ” said Deborah Lee James, the Air Force secretary when the Raider contract was announced in 2015.

While the Raider may resemble the B-2, once you get inside, the similarities stop, said Kathy Warden, chief executive of Northrop Grumman Corp., which is building the bomber.

“The way it operates internally is extremely advanced compared to the B-2, because the technology has evolved so much in terms of the computing capability that we can now embed in the software of the B-21,” Warden said.

Other changes include advanced materials used in coatings to make the bomber harder to detect, Austin said.

“Fifty years of advances in low-observable technology have gone into this aircraft,” Austin said. “Even the most sophisticated air defense systems will struggle to detect a B-21 in the sky.”

Other advances likely include new ways to control electronic emissions, so the bomber could spoof adversary radars and disguise itself as another object, and use of new propulsion technologies, several defense analysts said.

“It is incredibly low observability,” Warden said. “You’ll hear it, but you really won’t see it.”

Six Raiders are in production. The Air Force plans to build 100 that can deploy either nuclear weapons or conventional bombs and can be used with or without a human crew. Both the Air Force and Northrop also point to the Raider’s relatively quick development: The bomber went from contract award to debut in seven years. Other new fighter and ship programs have taken decades.

The cost of the bombers is unknown. The Air Force previously put the price at an average cost of $550 million each in 2010 dollars — roughly $753 million today — but it’s unclear how much is actually being spent. The total will depend on how many bombers the Pentagon buys.

“We will soon fly this aircraft, test it, and then move it into production. And we will build the bomber force in numbers suited to the strategic environment ahead,” Austin said.

The undisclosed cost troubles government watchdogs.

“It might be a big challenge for us to do our normal analysis of a major program like this,” said Dan Grazier, a senior defense policy fellow at the Project on Government Oversight. “It’s easy to say that the B-21 is still on schedule before it actually flies. Because it’s only when one of these programs goes into the actual testing phase when real problems are discovered.” That, he said, is when schedules start to slip and costs rise.

The B-2 was also envisioned to be a fleet of more than 100 aircraft, but the Air Force built only 21, due to cost overruns and a changed security environment after the Soviet Union fell. Fewer than that are ready to fly on any given day due to the significant maintenance needs of the aging bomber.

The B-21 Raider, which takes its name from the 1942 Doolittle Raid over Tokyo, will be slightly smaller than the B-2 to increase its range, Warden said. It won’t make its first flight until 2023. However, Warden said Northrop Grumman has used advanced computing to test the bomber’s performance using a digital twin, a virtual replica of the one unveiled Friday.

Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota will house the bomber’s first training program and squadron, though the bombers are also expected to be stationed at bases in Texas and Missouri.

U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican of South Dakota, led the state’s bid to host the bomber program. In a statement, he called it “the most advanced weapon system ever developed by our country to defend ourselves and our allies.”

Northrop Grumman has also incorporated maintenance lessons learned from the B-2, Warden said.

In October 2001, B-2 pilots set a record when they flew 44 hours straight to drop the first bombs in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. The B-2 often does long round-trip missions because there are few hangars globally that can accommodate its wingspan, which limits where it can land for maintenance. The hangars also must be air-conditioned because the Spirit’s windows don’t open and hot climates can cook cockpit electronics.

The new Raider will also get new hangars to accommodate its size and complexity, Warden said.

However, with the Raider’s extended range, ’it won’t need to be based in-theater,” Austin said. “It won’t need logistical support to hold any target at risk.”

A final noticeable difference was in the debut itself. While both went public in Palmdale, the B-2 was rolled outdoors in 1988 amid much public fanfare. Given advances in surveillance satellites and cameras, the Raider was just partially exposed, keeping its sensitive propulsion systems and sensors under the hangar and protected from overhead eyes.

“The magic of the platform,” Warden said, “is what you don’t see.”

Nice one. Good find. A scoop picture of the rear end they were trying to hide.

so its just flat square nozzles, i thought it was something revolutionary..

The only thing innovative about having a stealth rear is russia designing flat square nozzles with efficient thrust vectoring capabilities  I know it's not needed for stealth bombers but still why the effort to conceal the rear of the aircraft if it appears to be nothing newly innovative?

Actually thrust vectoring nozzles would be useful for a flying wing aircraft, as long as it is not too maintenance heavy...

If you have ever been in a jet boat, you know it takes a bit of power to lift the boat up so it sits on the water instead of pushing its way through, which means you angle the propeller or jet wash thrust to lift the boat so it sits on the water rather than pushing its way through.

They call it trim and it is all about changing the angle of the water thrust from the propulsion system... once you are up and out of the water and moving at speed you can change the angle of thrust so you are no longer lifting the boat and you are just providing speed so you can reduce the throttle and maintain speed.

With a flying wing of course you need to get up to speed but with thrust vectoring engines you are not going to perform loops and rolls, you are going to change the angle of attack of the wing body to minimise drag and maximise lift.

In other words you trim the aircraft so you minimise drag and RCS and allow an optimum flight angle to maximised cruise range while also minimising RCS...

For a fighter it would not be worth while, but for a flying wing that spends hours at at time just cruising along at altitude at high subsonic speed it can make a huge difference in range and speed.

Thrust vectoring nozzles, especially square ones often reduce thrust, but they do increase airflow mixing of the jet air moving through the engine that reduces the IR signature as well as the square shape making the RCS spikey instead of smooth.

Polished shit...
I'm not so sure spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an airplane in this age of kamikaze drones and hypersonic weapons is the ideal solution..
Sometimes I think that the Russian investment in the Ohotnik does a good part of the job that a bomber like B-2 or 21 but without a crew, a shorter range and a smaller payload.
That idiotic American story about how the B-21 will fly over the country it would bomb is a simple abomination for consumption by the Western public opinion. I have NO WAY to believe that this nonsense is a better investment of money than hypersonic weapons, especially since it is inevitable that the range of these weapons will only increase. This bomber, like previous American bombers, will continue to be used against some poor sheep herders.
In that nuclear triad that the US and Russia have, the bombers have been the weakest link for a long time.

Podlodka77 wrote:Polished shit...
I'm not so sure spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an airplane in this age of kamikaze drones and hypersonic weapons is the ideal solution..
Sometimes I think that the Russian investment in the Ohotnik does a good part of the job that a bomber like B-2 or 21 but without a crew, a shorter range and a smaller payload.
That idiotic American story about how the B-21 will fly over the country it would bomb is a simple abomination for consumption by the Western public opinion. I have NO WAY to believe that this nonsense is a better investment of money than hypersonic weapons, especially since it is inevitable that the range of these weapons will only increase. This bomber, like previous American bombers, will continue to be used against some poor sheep herders.
In that nuclear triad that the US and Russia have, the bombers have been the weakest link for a long time.

This is why I think the PAK-DA project is rather not ideal. The Su-57 is already receiving new weapons in its bays that have long ranges or hypersonic speeds thus Su-70s can be equipped with them as well and the stealth drone itself already flies far.

What RCS value will "western experts" attribute to this plane? 0.00000001 m2?

The thing with flying wings isn't just about the stealth or whatever. A flying wing also has way more range than other designs.
The US basically wants this to be able to project power away from its landmass into other continents. It is as simple as that.

Although I follow aviation and am not a fan of it, many things stink to me.
And while the Russians are developing the MiG-XX (PAK-DP) with a planned speed of over Mach 4, with bombers everyone is going for subsonic stealth platforms.
There is neither logic nor sense...
I think the Russian idea is better, as long as it is implemented and I don't like the idea of ​​a new stealth bomber with the flight characteristics of a B-52.
Is it impossible to build a bomber with reduced radar reflection that would at least have the possibility of supercruise?
Nothing without...

The thing with flying wings isn't just about the stealth or whatever. A flying wing also has way more range than other designs.
The US basically wants this to be able to project power away from its landmass into other continents. It is as simple as that.

For anyone old enough to remember when the B-2 first came out it was supposed to be a super bomber that was so stealthy it would fly all over the Soviet Union and blow up Soviet ICBMs on their trucks and Soviet Air Defence wouldn't know what hit them... it was a bomber that carried bombs.

Since the 1980s Soviet and Russian strategic aircraft have been cruise missile carriers and were never intended to penetrate even the fairly weak US air defence network... a network further degraded because ICBMs and SLBMs would arrive hours before their Bears and Blackjacks arrived to launch their missiles.

The US B-2 has to fly over its targets to hit it and after Desert Storm when they found they had rather better air superiority than they could ever hope to get over Russia, their satellites were all working and they had free reign over a country as small as Iraq... made smaller because of the range of their modified Scuds which greatly limited the places they could actually launch from making the search area rather small and they didn't get a single Scud launcher... not one.

They also claimed that sort of TOPOL killer role for the B-1B but after Desert Storm they stopped mentioning that capacity.

When they realised their B-2 could be tracked they started flying at low level and then they realised they weren't built to fly low level and they were rapidly running out fo airframe life despite being the youngest bombers in the USAF by a wide margin.

These days the thing they talk about the B-2 the most is that they can attack targets all round the world when operating from US bases in the US.

I rather suspect a key feature of the B-21 apart from being able to fly at lower altitudes to penetrate air defences, is that the range will be further increased to continue to base them in the US.

Of course that demands lots of friendly countries around the world to allow fly overs and for inflight refuelling aircraft to meet your bomber on its way at various places...

They are going to keep their B-52s till at least 2050.

The Russians on the other hand will replace their subsonic Tu-95s with a subsonic flying wing, and they will also replace their Tu-22M3 bomber with it as well.

It will be a fraction of the price of the B-2 was in the 1990s, and will compliment the new Tu-160s they will be building to operate with it.

And while the Russians are developing the MiG-XX (PAK-DP) with a planned speed of over Mach 4, with bombers everyone is going for subsonic stealth platforms.
There is neither logic nor sense..

Their next generation cruise missiles are going to be 11 metres long two stage hypersonic missiles that will fly 11,000km range to target.

Why would you make the aircraft carrying that expensive to fly at hypersonic speed when the missiles they carry can penetrate the enemy air defences and hit the targets while the aircraft remains out of range and perfectly safe?

And also a flying wing is a very efficient low drag design and if made correctly should be very cheap to operate and keep in service.

Most of their nuclear warheads are in their ICBMs, so air launched missiles are backup force multipliers.

The point is that even now they could load hypersonic missiles on their heavy Tupolevs and attack targets with a very good chance of a hit with one shot.

How many hundreds of missiles is HATO going to need to fire to allow a few to get through... maybe.

The point is that the ones that get through are going for low priority targets like ships in drydock or non operational ships being handed over that might not even have armament on board.

When Russian missiles are blowing up HQs and comms centres and important bases in Europe, HATO missiles will be getting shot down.

I am sure after a few engine upgrades over the life of the PAKDA they could make it supercruise, but as I said... it will be carrying missiles with strategic flight ranges that are either stealthy or hypersonic... they don't need to get anywhere near the enemy defences to launch attacks.

GarryB wrote:When they realised their B-2 could be tracked they started flying at low level and then they realised they weren't built to fly low level and they were rapidly running out fo airframe life

B-21 will be able to fly continuously at low level, it has been designed that way.

Real or CGI ?

A manned flying wing design doesn't have much utility. Unmanned ones still have some. Perhaps the only reason why the US is building the B 21 is because they still cannot fully trust unmanned aircraft in the nuke delivery role.

B-21 will be able to fly continuously at low level, it has been designed that way.

So they have admitted stealth has failed... interesting.

Note the towed item in a few pictures... perhaps a towed jammer or decoy system... surprised they showed that.

MiG-31s already fly near the north pole scanning for bombers and low flying cruise missiles, so these aircraft should not be that big of a problem to spot.

A manned flying wing design doesn't have much utility. Unmanned ones still have some.

It is a delivery system that takes cruise missiles that lack the range to hit their targets from friendly airspace to a point in international waters where they can be launched safely and still reach their targets.

It essentially makes your cruise missiles smaller and cheaper... and gives them the reach to hit targets deep inside enemy territory... and also allow attacks from unexpected directions.

I still think that a subsonic aircraft with a takeoff weight of 100 tons, more or less, is not only unimpressive, but pointless.
The range of cruise missiles is advancing at such a rate that the Russians will soon be able to target S. Francisco or LA over Vladivostok and without leaving the airspace of Russia..
Hypersonic weapons are something else, but the US still does not have them and the range of application is drastically reduced.
They can also call it a flying wing, a flying surfboard, but I wouldn't fly near the Russian or Chinese border (an even crazier idea of ​​flying over Russian and Chinese cities), as they wrote for years about the B-2.

Flying Zumwalt...