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It's important to remember that "stealth" isn't exactly a real thing and leads people to think airplanes are invisible. Stealth aircraft are simply harder to observe with radar. This could render them invisible to certain radars, could reduce the range at which they are detected on others, could be detected but dropped as clutter or an insignificant item by the software in systems, etc.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 18:46 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 18:20 |
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Does anyone remember the air show days during the initial "stealth" (F-19, etc) entering the national consciousness? There'd often be a "stealth" "static display" where an area would be roped off with chocks and stiffened tie downs attached to an "invisible" plane
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 18:51 |
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That is still very much a thing in various air museums. There's one at the boneyard, still. There was one at a local air museum, but they removed it to make room for new exhibits. The local museum even put down landing gear struts and a drip pan with some oil in it with a placard explaining that when retracted, the gear become hidden by the stealth body.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 19:09 |
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Hah, funny stuff. I remember the first time I saw it I was still young enough to believe it to be within the realm of possibility.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 19:16 |
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grover posted:A lot of aircraft look perfectly smooth in photos, but look quite different up-close, with rivets and seams damned near everywhere. That's my point: I'm reading http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A2DIW3C/ref=pe_245070_24466410_M1T1DP and he mentions that not fully closing a panel completely compromises the plane's RADAR cross-section. That got me wondering - if a few loose bolts could compromise LO, what happens when the ailerons or rudder deflect?
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 19:49 |
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hogmartin posted:That's my point: I'm reading http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A2DIW3C/ref=pe_245070_24466410_M1T1DP and he mentions that not fully closing a panel completely compromises the plane's RADAR cross-section. That got me wondering - if a few loose bolts could compromise LO, what happens when the ailerons or rudder deflect? Control surfaces move. Radar detection isn't a once-and-done type of thing, if you only show up on a couple of sweep, you'll get dismissed as clutter. Civilian marine radar ARPA will drop a tracked target after something like eight sweeps if it goes undetected, with the slowest scanners around that's about 40 seconds, more like 20, and I think it needs a dozen sweeps to auto-acquire something. Radar operators also tend to assume that something that shows up for a few sweeps then goes away is clutter, it's not like everything lights up and goes "POSSIBLE STEALTH PLANE HERE!!!" because you'd end up shooting down a lot of birds. A badly coated seam or whatnot is going to stay visible constantly, so that'd be a much worst issue.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 20:03 |
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hogmartin posted:That's my point: I'm reading http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A2DIW3C/ref=pe_245070_24466410_M1T1DP and he mentions that not fully closing a panel completely compromises the plane's RADAR cross-section. That got me wondering - if a few loose bolts could compromise LO, what happens when the ailerons or rudder deflect? Contrast that with the edge of a panel that's not flush- a panel edge can reflect that radar energy in unpredictable directions, including back towards the source. But it's not like that stealth plane with a loose panel suddenly blazes bright on radar scopes- it may increase the radar cross-section from the size of a hummingbird to the size of an eagle, or something along those lines, and make it detectable from a longer range than it otherwise would have been. If the mission planner thinks an enemy SAM missile radar can't detect a particular aircraft at ranges beyond 10mi, but a loose panel makes it detectable at 25mi, that pilot's in for a rude awakening if he tries to thread the air defense needle at a range of 20miles.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 21:01 |
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FrozenVent posted:Control surfaces move. Radar detection isn't a once-and-done type of thing, if you only show up on a couple of sweep, you'll get dismissed as clutter. Civilian marine radar ARPA will drop a tracked target after something like eight sweeps if it goes undetected, with the slowest scanners around that's about 40 seconds, more like 20, and I think it needs a dozen sweeps to auto-acquire something. This. Also, regarding the networking multiple radar sites together...that's an essential part of an IADS (integrated air defense system). Iraq had one of the most advanced IADS in the world in 1991, and the F-117s picked them apart. Yes, it can help in detection, but you're unlikely to get anything solid enough to actually call it "tracking" (that's a word with a specific meaning in these matters). Further, low-observable aircraft are "tuned" to be effective against certain frequency ranges. Nothing is invisible across the spectrum. Over the past few decades, basically everyone interested has learned how to generate radar signals with specific properties...wavelengths, frequency, etc. Some signals are better suited for specific tasks than others. Large, early-warning radars generally have a lower pulse repetition frequency than a target-tracking radar, for example. Your EW radar will have a much longer range and search volume, but won't have the resolution of the higher-frequency TTR. So being able to get intermittent contact with an EW radar on a stealth bomber isn't the same thing as shooting it down, but it's one step in the chain of events that need to occur. Iraq is another great example here. They had a robust IADS in place, with redundant comms and so on, but their radars were systems the US knew all about thanks to Vietnam. Our weapons at the time were specifically designed to be able to defeat them. You can bet the SA-2 was a major influence on how the F-117 (and the B-2) was designed. We'd seen the wave's characteristics and designed counter technologies such as improved ECM and low-observability. How effective any of this stuff is depends very much on the systems as well as the human element. I've seen a number of Soviet/Russian radar scopes, as well as US systems. They all have their pros and cons (in general I like ours better, but Russian stuff had some neat features). I got pretty good at breaking out actual contacts through clutter caused by a variety of influences, such as weather, ground clutter, mountain tops, chaff, and jamming. Training plays a HUGE role in this, and knowing your system.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 22:30 |
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Godholio posted:I got pretty good at breaking out actual contacts through clutter caused by a variety of influences, such as weather, ground clutter, mountain tops, chaff, and jamming. Training plays a HUGE role in this, and knowing your system. This a million times. I've spent so much time looking at scopes on various systems that I can see the story of the battle when watching a radar screen. And I still have a fraction of the hours that dedicated AWACS crews have. Even as a competent operator, people without a lot of experience will alternately freak out over or be oblivious to obvious spurious tracks, lose track of J-link track swap, get confused when they see air-to-air fires or payload separation, not realize that the recurring "spurious" track is really a low RCS track hugging the ground, and generally fail to realize when their system is doing its job and when it isn't. Once you've sat a bunch of hours with live air on multiple radar systems, it all comes together to where you will have a way better idea of what is happening and isn't happening than someone who has done nothing but basic table training. It's really cool being in an IADS with a ton of systems and seeing exactly who is affected by what and how you can use cross tell or other tactics to get the job done, even when one system is blind to a given threat. I've seen live jamming break an air defense crew, even when the actual result of the jamming was pretty minimal, and I've seen cocky SEAD guys get absolutely murdered when flying against us while we were playing the red team. edit: For news, MEADS was cancelled. Sucks to be Germany and Italy right about now. mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Jan 18, 2014 |
# ? Jan 18, 2014 22:42 |
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Huh. Instructors just would't shut up about riser-sinkers (contacts appearing and then dissappearing in a few sweeps) when I had "radar operator 101". "That right there is a periscope untill proven otherwise!" or something along those lines.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 23:22 |
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Such contacts can be rough, and it's part of why having good intel is key to knowing if you should worry about them or not. And then there's fun interference from stuff like other radars, buildings, the ocean, atmosphere, whatever. It's equally maddening seeing an operator freak out when the same spurious track keeps showing up, screaming in toward the unit every five minutes, in contrast with the operator who knows full well that cruise missiles are a threat, but who is ignoring intermittent contacts showing up cresting ridges then disappearing only to lose his or her poo poo when it becomes a solid track right in front of the unit.
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# ? Jan 18, 2014 23:30 |
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mlmp08 posted:edit: For news, MEADS was cancelled. Sucks to be Germany and Italy right about now. Germany has pretty much the same Patriot/Stinger combination the US uses, no? I think the Rolands have been retired. So we could probably just latch onto whatever the US does to upgrade the Patriot.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 01:01 |
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As someone with some familiarity with fixed ATC radar systems and the systems the controllers use (MEARTS, STARS), is there that big of a difference between the airport surveillance radars and the radars used for SAM's and such? I wasn't a radar troop, but from what I observed, the operator/controller looking at the scope wasn't really in a position to make a guess as to whether that little blip was a Russian stealth bomber or a glitch with the radar.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 01:43 |
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I still hope the Sgt York comes back.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 01:43 |
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ArchangeI posted:Wouldn't networking several receiving dishes together allow you to track a stealth plane, then? Provided that they are far enough apart to pick up the deflected energy. In one sense potently, think of stealth as a signal-to-noise problem where you're trying to make the returned signal no more powerful than the noise. So a bunch of dishes together/more powerful radar may be able to reduce the noise and provide a solid signal from a stealth aircraft. However there's a lot of environmental factors that will limit exactly how much noise can be reduced regardless of radar power.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 02:08 |
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So i found myself unexpectedly near the RAF museum in Hendon, North London last week. Unexpectedly, so no photos I'm afraid, although somebody's probably posted some in the huge upthread. Well worth a visit. Random Observations. The Eurofighter Typhoon is a better looking plane than the F35 The Vulcan bomber is HUGE! You see pictures of it and you mentally class it with similar shaped fighters. It's enormous. Most exhibits are cordoned off, the Vulcan you can literally walk around underneath. Identifying the plane before you read the plaque is a fun game, sure a Phantom or a General Electric Lighting is easy, but can you recognise a Beaufighter or tell the difference between a cannon armed Spitfire and a Tempest?
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 02:24 |
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I believe when the F-117 was shot down over ex-Yugoslavia that there was some hufflepuff about the Serbs using a setup with the radar transmitter and multiple recievers in distinctly different locations, to specifically catch oblique reflections. This turned into an urban legend eventually saying a low-tech force could catch a stealth plane with ease with something like an array of cell phone towers. IIRC there is some science to this (single transmitter, multiple recievers, not the cell phone thing) but the math gets really ugly really fast and only really works if you know where the plane is already. The F-117 shootdown turned out to have nothing like any of this stuff involved, but that's where the 'stealth loses to multiple radars' idea came from.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 02:31 |
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Wasn't the F-117 shootdown because the plane was in the same place at the same time every night? Which falls under the heading of knowing where the plane is already.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 02:39 |
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Yeah, stealth on both sides is basically a statistics problem. A lot of the viability of US stealth projects is that we know a lot more about adversary Radar/SAMs then they know about the RRCS of our aircraft. If you give someone a stealth AC and enough time they can build a sensor/radar to find it. There is some current research into 'reverse radar' (for lack of a better term) which finds anomalies of too little clutter/background radiation..etc. So you find a plane by not seeing it basically. fake edit: Apparently it's called passive radar.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 02:41 |
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Mortabis posted:Wasn't the F-117 shootdown because the plane was in the same place at the same time every night? Which falls under the heading of knowing where the plane is already. Supposedly that was the story, but if you know where the plane is going to be, you don't need to be nearly that fancy. "Find where the noise isn't" is also to some degree how passive sonar works, and it is also very hard to do.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 02:47 |
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Mortabis posted:Wasn't the F-117 shootdown because the plane was in the same place at the same time every night? Which falls under the heading of knowing where the plane is already. Kind of, but it was still hit by a radar guided missile, rather than mass fire from AAA, so yeah. A radar found it.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 02:52 |
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There have to be a number of fun ways to attack passive radar in the context of a full-blown assault on a hostile IADS.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 03:24 |
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pkells posted:As someone with some familiarity with fixed ATC radar systems and the systems the controllers use (MEARTS, STARS), is there that big of a difference between the airport surveillance radars and the radars used for SAM's and such? I wasn't a radar troop, but from what I observed, the operator/controller looking at the scope wasn't really in a position to make a guess as to whether that little blip was a Russian stealth bomber or a glitch with the radar. My experience with civilian radars is pretty limited, I've only been on-scope at three locations that relied on civilian radars (one of those was a shared ARSR-4 at Tyndall AFB, but the scope was actually an AWACS emulator). That said, yes, there can be significant differences. A civilian controller would have little trouble sitting at an AWACS scope and figuring out what he's looking at. The handful of Russian scopes I've seen were not only very different from US hardware, they were also mostly different from each other. They weren't all top-down, they weren't even all the same orientation. If I were trying to track something I'd probably be able to figure it out, but it would not be intuitive at all. AWACS has a team of people (Surveillance section) with the primary job of identifying what that blip is. Most of that team is being replaced by a modern computer in the Block 40/45 upgrade, but there will be at least 2 people doing it even with the upgrade. The controllers actually CAN run the ID wickets...technically on AWACS the actual declaration of hostile will almost always rest with the Mission Crew Commander. The normal way it works is the Surveillance techs will have ID authority up to a certain point on the ID matrix (generally they can do everything except "hostile"), then when a track meets hostile criteria they'll ask the MCC. Controllers can do the same thing if Surveillance drops the ball, but it rarely happens because Surveillance is usually on the ball and the controllers are usually pretty busy. mlmp08 posted:Kind of, but it was still hit by a radar guided missile, rather than mass fire from AAA, so yeah. A radar found it. The SA-3 has an optical mode. It's actually easier to believe they got it with that. Godholio fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Jan 19, 2014 |
# ? Jan 19, 2014 06:22 |
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The wiki article said they had caught it basically when the bomb bay was open. Between them running the same routes and some Sigint knowing the radio frequencies the US was using they had a decent enough idea where it would be, blip the radar for as little time possible so you don't eat an ARM and if you said your prayers and sacrificed your goat that morning you might just get a return. You might get jack poo poo 15 times but we really aren't happy when they hit on #16.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 08:53 |
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There's an (extremely not user friendly, extremely complex) SA-2 simulator somewhere online, I think I initially downloaded it from a link posted in this thread a few years ago. The radar scopes (Assuming you can turn them on) are pretty confusing, I just assumed it was an air-search radar thing, not a Soviet thing. I've tracked commercial air traffic on a navigation radar a handful of time, this totally makes me an expert in all things stealth. (Although I've managed to find a goddamn fiberglass sailboat in a fog bank more than once, which ain't easy)
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 14:24 |
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The Serbs and the rest of the Russian-aligned world were beside themselves with joy that they managed to shoot down a F-117. They considered it quite an achievement.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 14:27 |
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Alaan posted:The wiki article said they had caught it basically when the bomb bay was open. Between them running the same routes and some Sigint knowing the radio frequencies the US was using they had a decent enough idea where it would be, blip the radar for as little time possible so you don't eat an ARM and if you said your prayers and sacrificed your goat that morning you might just get a return. You might get jack poo poo 15 times but we really aren't happy when they hit on #16. Example of a P-18 set: The F-117 is not invisible to radar, just has reduced radar signature; it's also widely believed that it's less stealthy with a larger return at lower frequencies. The popular story is that Zoltan turned on his targeting radar when he thought the F-117 was in range, immediately got a lock (about 15km range), fired an SA-3, and boom- history. Zoltan's (uncited?) wiki page says he picked the 4-flight of F-117s up at longer range with his P-18 and engaged his high frequency radar 3 times before getting a lock at about 13km range, and launched 2 missiles at the flight, one of which proximity-detonated close enough to Zelko's aircraft to down it. This radar set is supposedly the Serbian set that directed the SAM strike: And this is display the operators would have used for the engagement: grover fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jan 19, 2014 |
# ? Jan 19, 2014 14:56 |
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If Wargame: Airland Battle taught me anything, it's that SEAD is your friend.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 17:39 |
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grover posted:Serbian Col. Dani Zoltan said in interviews that he moved his SAM sites around constantly, never staying in the same place for more than a few hours. And that the F-117's path was predictable and he was able to set up his SAM battery directly in the (by that point, predicted) path of the F-117, which human spotters with land-line telephones to relay information about when it was approaching. He also knew from his observers that no EA-6 wild weasels had taken off that night from any of the airbases in Italy, and that he could operate his P-18 tracking RADAR (modified to the lowest possible frequency) with relative impunity. From the way he speaks of using it, I'm wondering if it wasn't set to such a low frequency that the US ECM systems didn't even look for or detect it? Even if they detected it, it's highly unlikely they would've turned back. If we're sending stealth bombers against something, it's probably important enough to press through it...like they had done for the past several days.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 17:49 |
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ArchangeI posted:Germany has pretty much the same Patriot/Stinger combination the US uses, no? I think the Rolands have been retired. So we could probably just latch onto whatever the US does to upgrade the Patriot. This is correct, plus the amusingly named Nächstbereichschutzsystem (the MANTIS) which is quite a nice system from what I understand. If anyone is interested, Patriot just got a pretty major upgrade programmed for the 2018 POM cycle. The current radar will get trashed in favor of 100% solid state system with an actively scanned (but still sectored) forward array coupled with some rear-facing passive arrays that will probably look a lot like Sentinel. In other words, it will put Patriot's radar into the 21st century instead of where it is currently which is maybe...the mid 1970s. Patriot's radar is getting seriously long in the tooth and it is way, way behind other top of the line sensors on other platforms in terms of performance so this upgrade is pretty important. The other big one will be the dissolution of the "firing battery" setup in favor of an echelon-free integrated and networked system, which is great, but old farts simply cannot wrap their heads around it. I'm not sure about the status of other Patriot operators with this stuff. Emirates and Qatar just paid big money for already-obsolete PAC-3 systems and Germany/Greece/Netherlands/ROK are all still mostly on PAC-2 stuff, so some serious upgrades could certainly be on the table if they want to shell out the money. From the US perspective we want to get as many people on the IAMD net as possible (WITHIN THE LIMITS OF FOREIGN DATA DISCLOSURE OF COURSE) so there will likely be some pushing from our end to upgrade the older stuff.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 18:33 |
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I've wondered this about SAM systems. Can't the radar be mounted on an unmanned truck or moved somewhere in the area so not everyone dies when a HARM comes flying in?
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 18:57 |
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Godholio posted:My experience with civilian radars is pretty limited, I've only been on-scope at three locations that relied on civilian radars (one of those was a shared ARSR-4 at Tyndall AFB, but the scope was actually an AWACS emulator). That said, yes, there can be significant differences. A civilian controller would have little trouble sitting at an AWACS scope and figuring out what he's looking at. The handful of Russian scopes I've seen were not only very different from US hardware, they were also mostly different from each other. They weren't all top-down, they weren't even all the same orientation. If I were trying to track something I'd probably be able to figure it out, but it would not be intuitive at all. Cool, thanks, that makes a lot of sense.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 18:59 |
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Minto Took posted:I've wondered this about SAM systems. Can't the radar be mounted on an unmanned truck or moved somewhere in the area so not everyone dies when a HARM comes flying in? The RADAR itself is not necessarily adjacent to the control system. If its an anti-radiation missile it will eat the transmitter but the crew will probably be alive. You need to actually find the controllers and drop a bomb on them or something.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 19:23 |
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Alaan posted:The RADAR itself is not necessarily adjacent to the control system. If its an anti-radiation missile it will eat the transmitter but the crew will probably be alive. You need to actually find the controllers and drop a bomb on them or something. ARMs are only part of SEAD.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 20:19 |
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Hence the you still need to find the controllers and drop a bomb on them or something bit. Spreading out your transmitters from your control stations helps keep your trained and hard to replace operators alive, but a determined enemy with good intel is going to probably still gently caress you up.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 20:36 |
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Alaan posted:Hence the you still need to find the controllers and drop a bomb on them or something bit. Spreading out your transmitters from your control stations helps keep your trained and hard to replace operators alive, but a determined enemy with good intel is going to probably still gently caress you up. SEAD=suppression of enemy air defenses. DEAD=destruction of enemy air defenses. DEAD is a subset of SEAD, which also includes jamming and other cool ways of getting the enemy to shut their radars off (like shooing HARMs at them). It's not hard to pinpoint a radar transmitter. They're throwing out tons of energy in your direction and there's a fair chance your aircraft has a system that can ID it reasonably well. From there it's simple triangulation. Once that radar transmitter is down (destroyed, jammed to the point of ineffectiveness, or shut down to avoid inbound HARMs), all the missile batteries that rely upon it are useless.
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# ? Jan 19, 2014 20:47 |
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Snowdens Secret posted:I believe when the F-117 was shot down over ex-Yugoslavia that there was some hufflepuff about the Serbs using a setup with the radar transmitter and multiple recievers in distinctly different locations, to specifically catch oblique reflections. This turned into an urban legend eventually saying a low-tech force could catch a stealth plane with ease with something like an array of cell phone towers. IIRC there is some science to this (single transmitter, multiple recievers, not the cell phone thing) but the math gets really ugly really fast and only really works if you know where the plane is already. Is there any validity to the rumour that the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade wasn't in fact an accident, but was due to the fact that the embassy was holding some intel that had been gleaned from this? Also, I guess I'm late to the grandfather in WW2 part of the thread, but my Great-Uncle was a Wing Commander of Mosquito bombers in the RAAF, and got to participate in these 2 famous raids: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Jericho http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Carthage As others have mentioned about their grandparents, he never flew a plane again after the war, and if I remember correctly he also refused to even set foot in a plane again for the rest of his life once he made it back to Australia.
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# ? Jan 20, 2014 03:20 |
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FrozenVent posted:There's an (extremely not user friendly, extremely complex) SA-2 simulator somewhere online, I think I initially downloaded it from a link posted in this thread a few years ago. The radar scopes (Assuming you can turn them on) are pretty confusing, I just assumed it was an air-search radar thing, not a Soviet thing.
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# ? Jan 20, 2014 05:06 |
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Hoopy Frood posted:Is there any validity to the rumour that the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade wasn't in fact an accident, but was due to the fact that the embassy was holding some intel that had been gleaned from this? If so, it'll be decades before anyone fesses up (ie, info becomes declassified). I wouldn't at all be surprised if the target was intentional, but I'd be shocked and awed if that was the reason...it'd be a hell of a thing if we had that kind of information and actually acted on it fast enough to destroy it before it was sent up the Chinese chain of command.
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# ? Jan 20, 2014 06:50 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 18:20 |
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Jumping on the "what grandpa did in the war" bandwagon: My maternal grandfather was a REMF. Landed at Normandy a couple days after D-Day, spent much of the war in Antwerp as either a lab technician, medic or MP. Most of his work as a medic was giving out penicillin shots to GIs who picked up a dose of clap from the local working girls, as Antwerp was behind the lines (although during the Battle of the Bulge there was plenty of worry about a breakthrough.) But one day he was walking around off duty, and passed a movie theater. He considered catching a film but remembered that this theater was preferred by British troops, whose combination of infrequent bathing and wool uniforms meant they smelled bad, and he didn't want to spend the evening smelling Brits, so he decided against it. He walked around the corner and got knocked flat on his rear end by an explosion he felt but never heard--he's not sure what hit the theater, but suspected it was a V-1. He spent the rest of the night helping patch up injured British soldiers and dragging them out of the rubble. A bird colonel who was also nearby helping the wounded wrote him a pass so he wouldn't be considered AWOL for returning to his duty station late. He got to check out some weird captured German weapons, including a SMG that shot around corners (I assume it's the Stg44 "Krummlauf.") My mom tells me he also visited at least one concentration camp while in Europe, but he didn't like talking about that. Here he is, being all REMFy in Antwerp:
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# ? Jan 20, 2014 07:25 |