How do you make a stealth ship?

when you look at the design of some ships you instantly know they're meant to be stealthy they're designed to be as hidden as possible but your what about their design is it that actually makes them stealthy I'm going to start off by going right back to basics if you're only interested in particular aspects there'll be time stamps in the description below so you can go and check those out the most basic way to hide a vessel is to paint it to blend it into the background have you noticed how military ships they usually painted battleship gray this is meant to make them harder to spot on the horizon their color helps them to blend in where the sky meets the sea of course as soon as you add in some rain or fog the ship becomes even harder to spot a different way of using color to hide a vessel is to use what's known as dazzle dazzle isn't designed to actually hide a vessel like regular grey paint is actually meant to confuse the observer dazzle makes it harder to determine the aspect of a vessel which makes it harder to determine in which direction they are traveling if you're observing this vessel for example you could easily determine the direction they're heading so it'd be relatively easy to position yourself in a position to attack if they're using dazzle painting and they're able to fool you into thinking their heading is slightly different to reality you would be expecting them to follow this path and you'd position yourself accordingly when you then observe them in their actual position you would need to take more time to reposition yourself and get ready to attack dazzles not designed to hide a ship it's designed to make it harder to predict movement of course today there are numerous other ways to detect a vessel other than by only using sight modern detection methods include acoustic thermal and radar to be a proper stealth ship today you need to be designed to suppress your signature across all those detection mediums acoustic is relatively simple to understand you need to make the ship as quiet as possible considering that sound is simply the transfer energy through a medium you can see it's easier for energy to transfer through water than it is through air this is because water is more dense you can make a ship as quiet as possible by adding things like shock absorbers around machinery swapping out your machinery for quieter versions and you could even consider electric propulsion instead of internal combustion engines in general though reducing acoustic detection is far and more important for a submarine than it is for a surface vessel this is simply because you can see a surface vessel which will have far more of an impact than its acoustics thermal suppression is similar to understand - acoustic you want to give the ship as lower heat signature as possible again it's relatively simple to achieve through a combination of insulation and sea water cooling finally radar designing a vessel to reduce their radar signature is what gives stealth ships their distinctive shape they're designed to counter the five elements that affect target resolution on a radar screen we're talking a course of our aspect shape size material and texture first of all we're going to look at aspect if we consider this vessel is running their radar the radar screen is just going to look like this with the transmission sweeping around the screen what's actually happening is that millions of pulses are sent out each pulse is sent directly from the ship and then the scanner listens for an echo the scanner then turns slightly and repeats the process gradually sweeping all the way around if there's another vessel the pulse will hit that vessel and return to the scanner the software can calculate the range of the echo by using the formulas speed equals distance over time it knows the speed it can measure the time so it can work out the distance if however the other vessel is turned slightly the pulse sent out would not return to the scanner this means that no pulse is received so the radar cannot paint the echo in reality ships are a far more complex there's always going to be some part of it that will return an echo stealth ships use aspect to try and reflect radar pulses away from the source if you notice the large flat surfaces angled upwards they're designed to reflect the pulse up into the air instead of allowing it to return to its source the next element is shape we've seen how a slab-sided shape returns a very strong echo in a single direction we counter that by making sure that the single return is reflected away from the receiver but what the shape is now round instead of a slab there is now no way to angle this shape to reflect the signal in a different direction one part of the circle will always return an echo to the receiver the only way to counter that is to make sure that there are no rounded areas take another look at this vessel all the lines are sharp there are no rounded edges compare that to a traditional shape where there are lots of curves able to return an echo aspect and shape can be combined into the cat's eye effect this is a phenomenon where the signal can be reflected straight back to its source by right angle shape if you imagine this shape here we send a pulse at it from a random angle it will be reflected off the first panel at a set angle we can see the angle by drawing this right angle which is the normal and making sure this angle here matches this angle here then it's going to approach the second panel and we can do the same thing again this time everything is off by 90 degrees so this angle here now matches this angle here which also matches this angle the pulse is then returning straight back to its source this principle is used in radar flexures they're designed to make small vessels actually show up on radar if you take a look at any ship there are loads of places which can act as a cat's eye increasing their radar signature on a stealth ship you need to eliminate all of these this means no recessed door frames no recesses for windows or navigational lights and no recesses for rescue boats or weapons everything needs to have a door over it at the same level as the main hull angled in the same way the third element that affects radar signature is size size is really determined by the expected use of the vessel and to the most part it's out of the control of the designers in terms of a stealth ship it just makes sense to make the ship as small as you can so that it can still accomplish the missions it was designed for the fourth element is material by material we're talking about what the vessel is actually made out of different materials have a different impact on how well it will reflect the radar signal generally metals are good reflectors and composites like carbon fiber and fiberglass are poor reflectors this is why it's recommended for a fiberglass boat to carry a radar reflector unfortunately metal is usually the most suitable material for construction due to both its strength and its cost the USS lyndon b johnson which is the final vessel of the salt class stealth destroyers actually ended up having steel superstructure commissioned instead of the composites that we used on the other vessels of the class with cost cited as the overriding factor the effect of this is simply an increase in its radar cross-section which makes it show up better on the radar of observing vessels the final element is texture much the same way the circle will always have a face towards the observer to return a pulse a rough surface also will rough surfaces effectively scatter a radar pulse increasing the chance of part of it returning to the observer a smooth surface should reflect the signal in a uniform direction as long as you've taken precautions to make sure that that direction is somewhere other than towards the origin of the signal you won't be detected if we take a look at this vessel which is the USS Zumwalt we can see all of the stealth factors in use we have the tumblehome hull which directs radar pulses upwards rather than back along the surface to the observer there are no spherical surfaces every surface is flat and the corners are all sharp there are no right angle areas everything from the hangar doors to the mooring areas is all covered with a door so that there is no cat's eye effect the superstructure is made of composite materials reducing the reflection properties of the area of the ship which is above the water and finally the hull is kept smooth which keeps radar pulses together when reflecting them away rather than scattering them and that brings us to the end of today's video if you enjoy these slightly longer more informational videos do let me know in the comment section below I do enjoy making them but they do take somewhat longer than usual to make hopefully you found the information today useful until next time thank you for watching and good bye

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Views: 1,207,540

Rating: 4.9348722 out of 5

Keywords: stealth ship, uss zumwalt, uss linden b johnson, stealth vessel, stealth technology, radar detection, radar reflector, ship, stealth warship, casual navigator, how does a stealth ship work, radar cross section explained, radar cross section

Id: elIEC6F0x-0

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018