>>63858291
look, Northrop was, if anything, conservative and reasonable in his paper designs (if cutting edge in his physical ones)

the secret to understanding the military is knowing that for every single piece of equipment you see, there were like five dozen alternative designs in the running

individual companies would often submit 3 or 4 configurations for a single aircraft, and submit several entirely seperate aircraft concepts, then they'd iterate on all of this over months and years