Comment by Tistel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tistel | Hacker News Reader

I have heard a couple of podcasts that had some very credible US pilots talking about this. I think detecting life on other planets or aliens here would be great (so long as they are not trying to kill me yada yada). But, the most down to earth explanation is signal/sensor warfare testing.

Bare with me for a moment. The web is part of the sensor array of a spider. There are species of insects that tap on spider's webs to send a false positive signal to the spider on the web that a tasty prey has become trapped. The spider goes over to where on the web the vibrations indicated the prey is trapped and bang the spider gets killed by the assassin bug. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11628322

There is some evidence these signal warfare systems are being developed: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29505/the-navys-secret...

I think these are newest iterations of the Wild Weasel style of counter weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel

they could make drones go a fuel wasting wild goose chases etc. Or make the other sides drone defend the eastern front while you fly in from the west etc.

more signal warfare stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nulka

When I was in the Navy (1977 ~ 1981), our A-6E was equipped with an ECM suite that was designed to intercept and process pulse signals, automatically select the optimum countermeasures technique, and then apply the technique. One of these countermeasures was to send a return signal back to the radar, "telling the radar that the aircraft had accelerated (beyond the speed of light) and was now on the opposite horizon. The effect of this was reported to be a snapping off of the radar mast or tipping over of the mobile trailer the radar was in due to the torque of the radar dish moving to the new location.

That's hilarious! Somebody probably had a lot of fun coming up with and testing that idea.

There was several different programs the ECM would use and this is the only one I can remember at the moment.

When I went to the ECM school on the system, the first part of the class was listening to pilots being chased by surface to air missiles. The class was in a little building and it was Top Secret classified at the time. We could take notes, but they were locked up in a safe and we couldn't take them back to the squadron.

Counter measure techniques for radar are highly classified. They take a long time to develop and once you use them they aren't useful for very long. The enemy adapts.

On one hand, I feel like this tic-tac is the result of one of these techniques. On the other hand, they wouldn't test this out in the open where a Chinese or Russian satellite can listen to these countermeasure pulses.

I wonder what protections modern military radar systems use against such attacks. I find it plausible that they were played to see how well their detection works.

It might be the one upside to the cpc commies stealing (or were they fed it? (evil moustache twirl)) US tech. The US will know how “their” best tech works and might be able to cause ghost images to appear the pilots/AI.

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