I'm sorry, super late to the party, but I think you might've just re-confirmed that I saw the F-117 back in about 1998. It was in the dead of night, at this boy scout summer camp. Same summer I learned the value of a lock-blade, 8 stitches later. Stupid Swiss Army knife. I managed to (maybe) identify it because I had this thing as a kid. The Nighthawk (y u no namedrop?) flew over our campground, relatively low to the ground, and slow enough to make out the triangular shape, without making a sound. I was alone, nobody believed me, and I had no way of easily finding out whether or not there was a nearby military base with Nighthawks. Thanks.
I didn't call it a "nighthawk" because I grew up with this thing: That thing caused such a sensation there were congressional hearings about a fucking plastic model. Based on the success Testor's came out with a Soviet version, which was supposed to be slower, shittier, and primarily just a bomber: So one fine friday, the day we were all piling onto the school bus to go to music camp, this bullshit shows up: It was a horrific letdown. It's slower, shittier and basically just a bomber. The brilliant stealth future we were promised was actually our parodic Soviet past. A couple years later they were used in anger for the first time in Panama and succeeded in hitting exactly fuckall. Then Desert Shield happened and that was such a jingoistic clusterfuck that watching dead iraqi kids on FLIR would make a pacifist out of anyone. Then a few more years pass and fuckin' back-asswards Serbians using weapons we were assured were obsolete plucked one out of the sky. I grew up with this: Yours is a Mitchell Gant world and Ben Rich gives you the "hopeless diamond". Fuckin' "nighthawk." please.
It was like a prescient military embodiment of the 80's polygon obsession, right? Of course the aerodynamics were terrible, with a series of flat surfaces instead of smooth tapering, it had to fly slow. No similar planes exist anymore, soooooo not a good look? Missiles, and then drones, both at least sometimes using laser targeting (and other tech that I totally can't imagine whatsoever) killed the bomber, along with anti-aircraft tech. Oh, and the Space Force. It's crazy, but no drawbacks were ever mentioned on the mail-order binder page for the F-117. In fact, no airplane had drawbacks. Drawbacks are not a thing to worry about, m'boy. My entire childhood is full of shit like this. In fact, it was only a few years ago that I found out thanksgiving is a fucking lie. Embarrassing.
The '80s polygon obsession was due to '80s processing power. That '80s processing power belonged to the government in the '70s. People forget: The Last Starfighter was rendered on a goddamn Cray X-MP. Some wag pointed out that the F-117 was the first, last and only airframe ever designed by electrical engineers.
Of course! I'm intimately familiar with the triangle mesh of stereo lithography (.stl) files. Hadn't made that connection yet. Thanks.
Those are curves. The world in the '80s belonged to polygons. Somewhere I have a Rhino 0.9 disc from McNeel & Associates. They were the local AutoCAD vendor and had been failing for more than a decade to convince Autodesk that there was a place for non-platonic solids in engineering so they came out with their own. They actually spelled out "Non-Uniform Reticulated Rational B-Spline" on the face. I did finite element analysis in the late '90s. We were still very much integrating by polygons. Deep down in the heart of it all, all your NURBS processing is integration by parts anyway.