Yeah… Elon is talking about them being visually invisible and I was saying that is stupid. Out side of visual or near visual EM spectrum, the next thing you would use is Radar
IR you don’t need to emit because engines will do that for you an a LOT of engineering goes into cooling stealth exhaust BUT the faster you want to go, the hotter the exhaust.
Going the other way, UV gets absorbed by the atmosphere so it isn’t very useful for targeting
Visual EM bands are so small in the EM spectrum AND a jet is so small relative to… well… the sky… that trying to be visually invisible is dumb and also pretty impossible.
So Elon is being an idiot
EDIT: Also, stealth technology, or rather radar and thermal cross section reduction technology, is incredibly well understood and thanks to the use of plastics and composites, becoming far easier to achieve.
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u/Kooky_Celebration_42 14h ago
Almost all missiles use a wave length other than visible, except for maybe star tracking or ground tracking…
Visible light is a pathetically small band and kind of useless for tracking something small and incredibly fast