On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 20:09:18 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:
But with the number of
missiles around Baghdad in GWI and II, it easily qualifies.

Don't understand you.

Lots of missiles and radar = "heavily defended."

But weren't a lot of them old and obsolescent?

And since you're claiming that stealth isn't that important,

I don't recall ever making that claim -- perhaps you could vremind
me where I did.

By trying to show that it's not that effective,

I'm not trying to show it isn't effective, I'm trying to find out
how effective or otherwise it might be.

and imagining odd ways
of detecting a plane with non-radar techniques that won't work.

You seem to have already decided they won't work. I'm sorry you seem
to have a closed mind on this issue.

With pure visual, planes are pretty hard to find at anything like a safe
distance.

What do you mean by "safe distance"?

Far enough away so they won't kill you.

If you are manning a passive sensor, the planes won't know where you
are unless they are virtually on top of you, say a few hundred
meters away. By which time the planes are already dead.

If you're in a plane, you're not going to be using image
magnification to find the other guy, unless you know right where he's
coming from in the first place.

I more had in mind an observer on the ground.

"Hey, a plane just flew over!"

"Great, where is it?"

"Uhhh... it went west..."

Er, no. An observer with modern IR and visual electron systems,
linked to a computer network.

If we are using visual sensors, we could have several point towards
it and use parallax to get the exact position.

Each of which would then have to find the very tiny object. That's
covered below.

Once the first has, the second knows approximately where to look.

You also lose them for 1/2 of the day (pure optical sensors are not too
good at night), on cloudy days, if there's smoke in the way, if the
sun's behind the target... and you need a *lot* of them. With the
curvature of the Earth in the equation, you're going to need a linked
ground observer station every 20 miles or so - at *best*.

I was assuming they'd be closer than that.

Once the position is got, the defenses can fire a missile to
intercept, using ground-controlled mid-course guidance, and active
radar (or IR) terminal homing.

All of which are vulnerable to spoofing or jamming. Oops.

How would it be vulnerable to spoofing, given that the missile and
ground station could use modern cryptographic techniques to verify
each others identity?

Identifying is fairly easy. Either use IFF or the known positions of
friendly aircraft to know whether it's hostile. If you know it's
hostile, use the size of sensor returns to guess more or less what
it is (cruise missile/ small fighter/ big fighter/ AEW), though the
precise nature isn't very important, since in all cases the response
would be the same.

So the other guys pop up a plane or two and get you to actively ID them,
or you target them with a long-range radar (that doesn't work because
they're too stealthy), because some guy saw something the couldn't
really identify... and then they kill you between reloads, because the
other "Wild Weasel" plane is at 50,000 feet, above the clouds, unseen by
your ground observers, watching where the missiles came from. Later
that night, they kill your launchers.

What if each launcher only contains one missile? Or the launchers
are mobile, and move after every launch?

Note that there's no need for the launchers, radars, and other
sensors to be particularly close to each other.

I imagine also that there's no need for the radar transmitters and
receivers to be located together either -- perhaps people with more
knowledge than me can verify this. Also, radio astronomers use
multiple dishes to creatre the effect of one big dish -- I wonder if
this would work with networked radars.

Narrowing down the field of view enough to make visual ID makes for
a lot less coverage per sweep. If you know where the target is, it
gets fairly easy, but you have to look in the right direction
first, and hope there's no clouds or haze in the way.

Yes.

...and *that's* why people don't use visual acquisition and targeting.
A system with a useful "uptime" of a couple of hours a day is a loser in
so many respects...

People *do* use visual acquisition and tracking. The British army
for example.

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