Radar Cross-Section Lab: A Stealth Physics Playground
An interactive web app where high-school and undergraduate physics students drop 3D shapes into a virtual radar field and watch the radar cross-section change in real time, learning the F-117 math by doing instead of from a wall of equations.
High-school and undergraduate physics and engineering students studying electromagnetism
- Drag-and-drop 3D primitives with live RCS polar plots
- Side-by-side comparison with historical aircraft RCS numbers (F-15, B-2, F-117)
- Exportable worksheet problems for classroom use
- Built-in physical-optics simplified solver using the same PO assumptions from the article
A widely-shared new blog series re-popularized the elegant Soviet-stealth math, and physics teachers are hungry for visual replacements to wall-of-equations lessons on RCS.
HN source post had only 14 points and 2 comments — modest, not viral demand; academic interest confirmed by an IEEE paper on teaching RCS to undergrads and Radar Laboratory's positioning for engineers.TEACHING RADAR CROSS SECTION CONCEPTS TO UNDERGRADUATES WITH A CAD-BASED TOOL ↗Radar Laboratory — Interactive Radar Phenomenology ↗
No PhET-style consumer RCS playground exists; closest competitors are the engineering-focused Radar Laboratory, the academic GitHub project Open RCS, and the paid pro tool Predics — leaving a gap for an HS/early-UG educational sandbox.Open RCS: an open-source platform for calculating Radar Cross Section from 3D targets ↗Predics | Products ↗
Free norms dominate (PhET is free; Open RCS is open source); student audience has near-zero willingness to pay and PhET's paid tier is the exception — B2C monetization is weak.PhET Studio Overview - Pricing ↗PhET Interactive Simulations ↗
RCS/EM fundamentals are stable curriculum that persists decades; PhET has operated since 2002 on essentially the same physics, indicating long shelf life for a well-built tool.PhET Interactive Simulations ↗
RCS math (POFACETS/physical optics on faceted bodies) is well-documented and open-source reference implementations exist; building a Three.js-based playground with simplified solver is feasible but non-trivial.Open RCS: an open-source platform for calculating Radar Cross Section from 3D targets ↗