I suppose an interesting question is why the Soviet Union never came up with real stealth. Ufimtsev’s Theory of Physical Diffraction was produced in the Soviet Union, but was not considered important enough to classify. The theory of Physical Optics was well known, and there were other ways of computing the RCS of an aircraft. They did have access to computing resources capable of doing crude calculations. They had access to a crashed D-21 drone, which, while outdated, would have given them some ideas- chining, re-entrant triangles on leading chine/edge, composite skin.
Curved surfaces are the norm on modern stealth aircraft, so the Soviet approach was not too far off, and the logical course for evaluating the PTD equations (or any other sort of computational modeling task) on a computer is to discretize your system- in the case of the F-117, it meant dividing the surface into planar surfaces, which carried over into the design of the aircraft itself. I suppose it is very odd though to carry over an artifact of your modeling studies into the actual aircraft geometry. But it probably is not too big of a jump. I think the only thing they were missing was edge alignment (and that’s a big issue).
I suppose hindsight is 20/20. Perhaps the Soviets were not faced with the same challenges that confronted western designers- i.e. a dense SAM network protecting the USSR. Maybe it is just a case of mirror imaging US systems against Soviet systems. And after all, HAVE BLUE was nearly shelved and put away without any further study as I recall reading, until it became apparent that the B-1 was incapable of handling Soviet air defenses, so the US almost didn’t design stealth aircraft either. Maybe they just never really tried to design a stealth aircraft, as it may have not fit their needs or doctrine.
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