It is rumored the French OTH-Radar Nostradamus
can clearly see all current stealth airplanes.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1631867
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jp-Molinie/publication/...
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1631867
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jp-Molinie/publication/...
Stealth is still 80% of shaping. Specular reflection can be reflected away from the radar receiver. In the resonant scattering region, where the signal amplitude matches the object sizes, you remove radar return by removing all parts that are a similar size to the wavelength, like the tail. Coatings and Absorbers reduce radar even return more but only after the shaping works.
If you can get radar into an angle that the shape was designed for, or transceiver and receiver are in separate locations stealth advantage decreases dramatically.
Chinese are probably the first to deploy long-range air-to-air missiles that have dual sensors. Both radar and IR. (Stunner missile has that already, but it's ground-to-air missile). Traditionally IR is used only in short-range missiles. You direct the missile to approximate position and then it uses IR and radar together to remove stealth.
So what happens when the dual seekers give different results? If there were three seekers then you could ignore one, but with only two you cannot check one against another. What if the radar says turn left but the IR says turn right? Having two seekers may make the target's life easier: defeat either seeker and you defeat both.
Small errors count. A few degrees off and your missile doesn't get to the target. Any averaging will probably result in a miss. In such cases a single sensor would be better, or two different sensors on two different missiles.
This comes up in all manner of flight systems. Take altitude. If one sensor says you are at 1000feet and another says 10,000, the one thing everyone should agree is that you aren't at 5500. One of the sensors is wrong and needs to be ignored, but how do you pick between the two?
What did the sensors say one minute ago? There's no reason this has to be Markovian.
For example, the Kalman Filter tells you the weight to apply to each new sample and the last estimate to make a new estimate. These weights are optimal if the measurement errors have a Gaussian distribution with zero mean. In many practical systems they are usably good even when that assumption does not perfectly hold.
In your example the new measurement that was less consistent with the last fused estimate would be downweighted by a KF.
And when deployed against a jamming target that it well aware of gaussian distributions and how to game them? When deployed against a jammer that is very good at pretending to not be a jammer? An aware jammer will feed you good results, just enough to convince your gaussian distribution (capture) and them move it off of onto a false path (seduction) resulting in you following a false signal (miss) or cause you to fall back into search mode (delay=miss). The game is different when the thing you are trying to measure is actively trying to deceive you.
The dual-mode terminal guidance on the Chinese missile may be a response to the fact that the US has very good countermeasures for IR terminal guidance. IR guidance is cheap but it may not be reliable against some advanced targets.
In contrast, the AIM-120D has bidirectional data link, so it can feed it's RADAR picture back to the launch platform.
The fact that Radar + IR is a spoken of as somewhat novel either tells me the defense industry parasites are way behind or the public intel is just several decades behind.
But given the speeds I can see the problem being more difficult that I think.
It's not about been totally hidden (sans a cloaking device that is never going to happen) it's about been less detectable after all.
If the distance the stealth platform can see you from is greater than the distance you can reliably detect them from you are already dead - the missile simply hasn't arrived yet.
Everyone is probably already arming space to the teeth. I guess it's better than mutually assured destruction?
Put a few hundred missiles in orbit, give them enough spare fuel to travel a decent distance on their own, and you have a pretty substantial worldwide strike capability.
Apparently it’s hard to fully shield weapons grade material
The ICBM can hit anywhere (instead of just where the orbit track happens to pass), in less time (or at most the same time, since deorbiting takes around half an orbit) with a better mass fraction (since it doesn't have to reach orbit and then deorbit afterwards) while being more accurate (you know exactly where the launch platform is, while satellites are harder to locate) and less vulnerable (you can harden an ICBM silo far more effectively than a satellite).
Really, it's hard to think of something that satellite anti-ground weaponry does better.
There is a lot of icbm detection. Unplanned rocket launches could lead to global nuclear annihilation. What happens if something seems to deorbit above the US? How much early warning and procedure is there?
Especially if you want to deliver conventional munitions to a non-nuclear power, a system like this seems better than an ICBM.
If you want to hit something with a conventional warhead in a non-peer state without warning, why not use a stealthy cruise missile instead?
I am not advocating weapons in space btw. Just pointing out what the advantages are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
Possible, though problematic.
There might already be stealth sats in orbit.
A curious case was the Zuma satelite [1].
Classified payload. Ostensibly failed to detach from the payload adapter, as claimed by anonymous sources... Lot's of speculation that this was a media charade to sow confusion about a stealth sat.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect....
Just because it's physically challenging to avoid having some blackbody emissions or whatever doesn't mean you can't evade modern sensors in practice.
Wikipedia isn't a reliable source for this stuff. Look at the basic physics involved.
To me, this seems to imply you could make a useful system today with orders of magnitude less transmit power.
An army consisting exclusively of F-35 vs old generation jets could decimate all enemy jets without losing a single F-35.
It's the same with modern tank vs old tanks. Those old tanks can't penetrate the armor of modern tanks.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/07/f-22-fighter-...
> while the planes own the skies at modern long-range air combat
In fact I would say if such an encounter were ever to happen, due to rule of engagements, a dogfight would be more likely than a BVR engagement (and likely to end without a single shot fired).
The F-35 can see and shoot down the F-16 with radar-guided missiles in BVR well before the latter is even aware the F-35 is in the area.
Dogfighting is minimally relevant to modern air combat for nuclear-armed nations. Things would have to be going extraordinarily badly in a war for the brass to start deciding to send their exceedingly expensive fifth-gen stealth fighters into dogfight coin tosses.
Hell, even an A-10 is a surprisingly effective dogfighter against modern fighters. The fighters have speed but the Warthog has an extremely tight turning radius and far better low-speed maneuverability, both of which allow it to stay inside the opponent’s “bubble” (the area inside which a turning jet can’t ever manage to point its nose). If the A-10 can keep it to a one-circle fight it will win handily. A fighter will often have to rely on a “boom and zoom” tactic (where it disengages, gains distance, and turns back around for a guns pass) but that can be quite low probability of kill and still be relatively risky if the A-10 has friendlies in the area feeling it location information.
But just like the situation already being discussed, this is for all practical purposes completely irrelevant. A flight of F-16s would engage and destroy a flight of A-10s from miles away with AMRAAMs and it would never have a chance to transition to an up-close dogfight.
what's stopping the f-16 from turning around and going cold as soon as it hears a lock or senses enemy radar?
Either way, if the enemy turns and flees, from your perspective you’ve won the engagement. Whatever their purpose in the area was (SEAD, strike, air superiority, etc.) has been subverted.
Maybe ... in the air ... if the numbers are the same ... if all of those F-35s are able to fly ... if the other side doesn't have a significant SAM capability ... if if if. In a realworld battle between armies the air-to-air capacity of fighters is a small part of the battle. Most will try to defeat the other's aircraft using ground assets, missiles/manpad. Ideally you take out aircraft in their hangars. A single well-placed artillery shell can take out a dozen F-35s in a hangar. A single frogfoot can destroy any F-35 that is low on fuel/ammo/speed after engaging a couple flankers. Realworld combat is messy. A pack of crows can take down an eagle.
During the Sri Lankan civil war about 10 years ago, the Tiger rebels had acquired Zlin Z 43s, modified them to carry several bombs [1], and were bombing targets left and right, including the country’s capital.
The populace was increasingly pondering why the country’s well-trained air force, with modern fighter jets with years of scrambling experience [2] could never seem to shoot these slower planes down. In fact, there were no confirmed kills during the conflict.
It was later revealed that the rebels knew the capabilities of the enemy Chengdu J7 and MiG 29 interceptors, and had modified their own aircraft engines with anti-IR capabilities [3]. Complex IR jamming equipment was suspected, but the country’s PM later said that the rebels had simply redirected the exhaust fumes from the back of the aircraft to the front, throwing “unlockable” heat signatures [4].
By the end of the war, the rebels had actually “won” the war in the skies by destroying over 30 aircraft and losing 2, despite ultimately losing.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zl%C3%ADn_Z_43
[2] The government’s prized jet fighters were stationed in the capital, about 400 km from the main conflict zone. In 2000, the rebels launched a devastating offensive and the government held on by a thread due to their ability to scramble ground attack craft to battles in 7 minutes. It’s said that had they lost that battle, all hopes of winning the war would have been lost.
[3] http://www.sundaytimes.lk/081102/Columns/sitreport.html
[4] https://www.dailynews.lk/2020/01/18/local/208783/slaf-most-e...
Another approach is to passively listen for reflections of cell tower or FM radio signals. Stealth aircraft do not reflect much radio energy straight back at the source, but they do reflect it in other directions.
VHF is inherently too inaccurate for a lock either. It just scales with how big the radar is.
I don’t know much about stealth though so I could be completely wrong.
In any case, you are right that OTH skywave radars like the Nostradamus usually have a pretty good chance to detect stealthy planes. However due to the frequency bands involved such detections are typically more of the "there is something in this cubic kilometre" type and not of fire-control quality. You need much more accurate systems to actually guide a missile. Still, it is pretty cool. There are also "passive" systems which use the reflections of waves from normal civilian radio stations and a phenomenal amount of signal processing to determine the position of thousands of targets simultaneously, although I'm not aware of any in active service yet. Like fusion power, this type of "multistatic" radar seems to be perpetually 30 years away from practical use.
Source: Used to be a weapons engineer for the Dutch Navy, at one point specializing in advanced radar systems.
I believe it was possible to pickup the Russian Duga system.
These are still a source of interference on the amateur bands. You can find more info on that at https://www.iaru-r1.org/spectrum/monitoring-system/iarums-r1...
It must obviously be more complicated than that but that should be doable nowadays?
Or, for that matter, hull? These aircraft have many layers of material between the traditional tensioned skin of the aircraft and the outside air.
Stealth coated airplanes are supposedly flying very slow on missions to avoid infrared detection.
It will probably still not do anything against astronomy grade infrared sensors.
Radar is a huge field and HN's simplistic view is humorous.
These aircraft don't just fly around and let you take your sweet time killing them.
If you manage to lock one you have to deal with this as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception
Some of these are quite sophisticated, example:
>Digital radio frequency memory, or DRFM jamming, or Repeater jamming is a repeater technique that manipulates received radar energy and retransmits it to change the return the radar sees. This technique can change the range the radar detects by changing the delay in transmission of pulses, the velocity the radar detects by changing the Doppler shift of the transmitted signal, or the angle to the plane by using AM techniques to transmit into the sidelobes of the radar. Electronics, radio equipment, and antenna can cause DRFM jamming causing false targets, the signal must be timed after the received radar signal. By analysing received signal strength from side and backlobes and thus getting radar antennae radiation pattern, false targets can be created to directions other than one where the jammer is coming from. If each radar pulse is uniquely coded it is not possible to create targets in directions other than the direction of the jammer
"Find the F35 and you're dead" is just wrong and simplistic. Head to head anti-air fights aren't what's gonna happen. The F-35 in every mission it's supposed to do is going to go heads up against multiple different detection platforms.
This is so incredibly wrong.
I bet that there are people on this platform who have never had a conscious thought about radars, also there are ones who design radars for a living. And the whole gamut in between.