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How come Russian helicopters look way more badass than American? 🤔 They look like flying tanks, American ones look like showy supercars
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I've been told its because the American vehicles were designed with 1980s computers (which actually made stuff look low-poly like the f117 nighthawk) while the Russian ones were basically designed like cars which are carved and sanded out of wood by hand.
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I think we used computers in the 1970s for pure cfd. For the f117 it was used to simultaneously optimize both aerodynamics and stealth.
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I recall reading that the low poly geometries were specifically due to the raytracing for radar signature optimization being very heavy compute? Could be wrong, but I’d be surprised if CFD forces geometries as radically.
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There are people at NASA who specifically work on algorithms to reduce the number of polygons on meshes for CFD. It's a issue even today.
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