I'm reading through Skunkworks (http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743305/ http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lock

I'm reading through Skunkworks (http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743305/ http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...) on a recommendation from HN, and thoroughly enjoying it. I'd heard this before, but the actual genesis of Lockheed's Have Blue/F-117 was this: 1) Petr Ufimtsev in the 1960s develops the equations for calculating the radar energy reflected by a given geometric configuration 2) USAF notices and translates this into English 3) Denys Overholser and Bill Schroeder at Lockheed find, read, and implement it in software (which the Russians didn't have the computational power to do) 4) Lockheed is looking for a new Skunkworks project (this is post-SR 71, and Kelly Johnson was transitioning out of Skunkworks after handing things over to Ben Rich) and decides to bet on stealth ("What?! That'll never work! It's crazy!") 5) {... many, many, MANY person-hours later} 6) F-117 Side note: the reason the F-117 has geometric surfaces is that when it was being designed in the 60s and 70s there wasn't enough available computational power to calculate more complex shapes (e.g. F-22).