discord wrote:bojangles: unless you have to ships, or a ship and a sensor probe....at which point it IS viable, not faster than C velocity sensors by any stretch....but still workable....hmm, unless it's a pure passive optical analysis....in which case it actually could be faster than RADAR, due to single trip of the light instead of back and forth double trip of radar.
Those probes and other ships would still have to deal with lightspeed lag when trying to build a range solution. As we both said, it's something a captain could keep in reserve in a pinch. Now, direct observation, plus a laser rangefinder....
discord wrote:and on smaller radar cross section....sure, nice and all, but if the choice is between smaller RCS and armor, I personally would opt for armor, especially on large ships....because no matter how small RCS you have, modern radars can detect a single bird in flight at obscene ranges....a 100+meters ship does not have a smaller RCS then a bird.
honestly, the US navy figured out that stealth ships do not work in the fucking 80's when they tried out a pure stealth ship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Shadow the result was 'yup, not a single radar return on the thing, we still knew where the bloody hell it was due to radar SHADOW what should be behind it was not.' and that was in the 80's our radars are slightly better now, especially in interpreting the data which is what this was about.
Getting something the size of a 100+ meter ship to have the RCS of a bird is ridiculous and I hope no naval designer was honestly aiming for that. You really are probably better off with active ECM and CIWS for ship defense rather than passive stealth. Reducing RCS is a good thing, but not if it breaks everything else (pretty sure you know what ship class I'm talking about).
As for seeing the radar shadow, I'm not sure if that would be possible with today's stealth. Modern stealth systems absorb radar signals and what isn't absorbed is deflected away from the source. The scanning ship/aircraft would see a reduced signature, but no hole or shadow. Now, if there was a detector on the other side of the target, it could very well see a hole in the source's radar beam.
discord wrote:ergo. two radars doing parallax range finding, will get both direction and range down well enough to shoot it, no problem.
True, but a bit redundant.
fredgiblet wrote:In the meantime the Russians are adding IRST to every fighter, which will drastically reduce the value of stealth even on the F-22 as it doesn't seem to have much if any concessions to IR stealth. The claimed capabilities of some of the IRST systems are very impressive, but just claimed for now. I think that we will find that stealth isn't as useful as we expect if we fight someone with a decent setup.
The US and various European powers are also developing and mounting IRST to aircraft. They're not really new, but likely a bit better than their predecessors from the 60s (yes, there's some sarcasm there). I am curious as to their accuracy and tracking capabilities. It's an arms race: armor vs. bullets; stealth vs. detection.