Remembering the Sea Shadow, America's 'Invisible Warship'
Our 1993 report takes a closer look at a stealth warship that never was.
By Abe Dane
Dec 3, 2020
sea shadow
Popular Mechanics
In the July 1993 issue, Popular Mechanics explored the U.S. Navy's new stealth creation, the Sea Shadow. The one-off research vessel resembled an F-117 Nighthawk on water, and its mission was similar—create an "invisible" ship by reducing its signature. The Sea Shadow would never officially join the fleet, but according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), designers applied lessons learned from the Sea Shadow for the Navy's new Zumwalt-class destroyers.
If on a certain night the moon were full off the California coast, and you could somehow infiltrate the encircling picket line of military vessels to get within a few hundred yards of the right spot, you might see with your naked eye what you could see no other way
Disgorged from a hulking, barge-like mothership, a thin, prismatic shadow glides silently out onto the shining water like a splinter of obsidian. It is a ship of some kind, but there is something baffling about its shape. As it slowly turns to head for open water, its faceted surface presents the silhouette of a different object with every few degrees of rotation. One moment, it is a long, sloping trapezoid, then it foreshortens into a jumbled gemstone, then it resolves into a truncated letter A standing upright on the water.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a34715297/sea-shadow-history/
