On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 04:40:40 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:
In article ,
(phil hunt) wrote:

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.

A few hundred meters. Except that in a high/high/high precision strike
mission, the closest the planes get to you is nine miles straight up.

And how are planes going to detect a camoflaged passive sensor at 9
miles? It's a lot harder that a guy on the ground detecting a plane
9 miles up -- the contrast with the sky is obvious.

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

As Phil busily reinvents the WWII Ground Observer Corps...

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

And by the time they figure that out,

Ever heard of electronics? Electronic messages are transmitted very
quickly, and computers can process billions of instructions per
second.

the first guy's lost it. The best
you could hope for is a whole string of guys saying "I saw a plane a
minute or so back."

Are you stupid, or are you deliberately not understanding?

Run a half-dozen planes through at a time, and
suddenly half of your planes get through with no effective ID.

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.

So, for a country the size of, say, Iraq,

In Iraq, a lot of the country is unpopulated desert. This is true of
most countries. Obviously some areas would be more heavily defended
than others -- around the national capital, for example.

you'd need an observer every
ten miles (each being responsible for about 30 square miles - you have
to have some overlap), linked together with a modern computer/comm
network. You'd have 6000 observer stations,

I've no idea where you get this number from.

each with at least four
observers on duty at all times, hoping for clear weather. And only
working in daylight.

IR works at night.

Manpower alone would take up about 24,000 people
on duty... with support crews, tech, extra coverage, you're looking at
30,000 to 50,000 people. For a system that only works part of the time,
at best.

Say 50,000. Using Iraq as an example, again, the population of that
country is roughly 25 million, so we're talking about 0.2% of
them, most of who would be reservists. By way of contrast, during
WW2 the UK with roughly twice that population employed 1 million in
the RAF.

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

You keep putting restrictions on the usefulness of your system...

Placing each launcher separately does not restrict the usefulness of
the system; it enhances it by making it more survivable.

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

No, you pretty much killed the whole thing with the manpower
requirements for the optical part.

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

Everyone does, sorta. Nobody *relies* on it any more, though, because
it's really not that effective for anything other than "hey, look, a
plane," or "did you hear something?"

You are wrong. The British army uses it to shoot down aircraft, not
just to spot them. Google Starstreak if you don't beleive me.

Other missile systems that use some of the ideas I'vre been
discussing are the Swedish RBS 23 BAMSE, which can use IR sensors,
the US Avenger, the French Mistral, and indeed all IR missiles.

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