Unless I’m missing something in your plan i don’t think that would work well. If these radar stations aren’t surrounded by very serious defensive systems for hundreds of miles in every direction, then they’ll simply be blown up by dumb howitzer shells that only cost around 2000 dollars.
Howitzers are cheap, relatively long range, mobile, and accurate enough. If you don’t have strong enough defenses to prevent the howitzers from moving into range, then they’ll just blow up all your radar stations with cheap shells.
Locating the radar base station? No that’s the easiest part. Radar is like turning on a Hollywood style searchlight pointing up into the sky. The instant you turn it on its extremely obvious where the radar searchlight is coming from
Finding them isn’t the hard part you are right. Finding a spot that you can shoot them from without being exposed yourself is the hard part. The range on an unguided howitzer is much less than radar, and the guided ones are more than $20,000 and the accurate range is not much longer than the cheap radar.
Locating radar emissions is a passive process, it doesn’t reveal your own location. That’s why i said the radar array would have to have very strong defenses extending out 30 km in all 360 degree directions from each individual radar station. And if a group has that strong a level of military equipment already then i don’t see why they would need this huge redundant array of radar stations all concentrated in a small area.
And locating radar emissions is a passive process, it doesn’t reveal your own location
That depends very much so on the radar system. In practical terms, almost all the radar systems we’re discussing here are going to be both transmitter and receiver in one design. You can’t simply rely on passive radio energy to detect moving objects in a complex environment. You would want both passive and active beam forming in one instrument; not having both is just leaving some of the most valuable developments in modern radar on the table.
And the specific radar we’re discussing, is an active, pulsed LFM phased-array radar. It does both, because, obviously it needs to do both. Its wouldn’t be useful for its intended use if it cant do both.
Your information about passive radar detection is not up to date. There are tons of passive detection of radar systems that by design do zero emission. The radar array stations will need to emit in order to function, but the enemy can find those radar emitters without emitting any energy of their own
Okay so I was overly general with my first statement.
No one is saying passive radar systems don’t exist. We’ve been using them for decades and there have been massive improvements. But the actual radar system we’re discussing here isn’t. You simply aren’t going to get the same capabilities from a purely passive system than you will from an active + passive system where you can tightly control the frequencies and directions you are transmitting on, and have the information about what frequencies you transmitted on, when you transmitted them, and how (what array configuration) you transmitted them. The point is that the transmission itself is structured to reveal certain information. So when you get a response back (also, coming back to a phased system), you can learn far more about your target than you could in a purely passive system because you that prior information about what you transmitted.
Basically you deny enemy armor and other infantry support into the area you are working in, which means the infantry can’t operate effectively in that area.
I’m not understanding. Let’s say army A has a radar array of 500 relatively cheap radar stations. They clump them all into a 1 square km area. So now army Z drives some howitzers nearby (which aren’t detectable by ground based radar), waits till a radar station turns on, the passively locates the radar base station, and shoots a cheap shell at it which destroys it.
But if you say army A has the level of military equipment that can locate and destroy howitzers up to 30 km away in all directions, then what benefit does an array of concentrated radar stations provide?
I don’t know where you are getting this 1km cluster idea from.
The point of cheaper radar systems is that you don’t need to defend them as much, because destroying them requires equipment that’s more expensive than the radar station. They overlap, and the locating that they provide can both protect the stations themselves and other targets in their coverage area.
How are those tanks going to maneuver undetected without air support?
Unless I’m missing something in your plan i don’t think that would work well. If these radar stations aren’t surrounded by very serious defensive systems for hundreds of miles in every direction, then they’ll simply be blown up by dumb howitzer shells that only cost around 2000 dollars.
Howitzers are cheap, relatively long range, mobile, and accurate enough. If you don’t have strong enough defenses to prevent the howitzers from moving into range, then they’ll just blow up all your radar stations with cheap shells.
The locating them is the problem I think
Locating the radar base station? No that’s the easiest part. Radar is like turning on a Hollywood style searchlight pointing up into the sky. The instant you turn it on its extremely obvious where the radar searchlight is coming from
Yeah I should correct myself
Finding them isn’t the hard part you are right. Finding a spot that you can shoot them from without being exposed yourself is the hard part. The range on an unguided howitzer is much less than radar, and the guided ones are more than $20,000 and the accurate range is not much longer than the cheap radar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
Locating radar emissions is a passive process, it doesn’t reveal your own location. That’s why i said the radar array would have to have very strong defenses extending out 30 km in all 360 degree directions from each individual radar station. And if a group has that strong a level of military equipment already then i don’t see why they would need this huge redundant array of radar stations all concentrated in a small area.
That depends very much so on the radar system. In practical terms, almost all the radar systems we’re discussing here are going to be both transmitter and receiver in one design. You can’t simply rely on passive radio energy to detect moving objects in a complex environment. You would want both passive and active beam forming in one instrument; not having both is just leaving some of the most valuable developments in modern radar on the table.
And the specific radar we’re discussing, is an active, pulsed LFM phased-array radar. It does both, because, obviously it needs to do both. Its wouldn’t be useful for its intended use if it cant do both.
Your information about passive radar detection is not up to date. There are tons of passive detection of radar systems that by design do zero emission. The radar array stations will need to emit in order to function, but the enemy can find those radar emitters without emitting any energy of their own
https://daronmont.com.au/products/passive-radar
Okay so I was overly general with my first statement.
No one is saying passive radar systems don’t exist. We’ve been using them for decades and there have been massive improvements. But the actual radar system we’re discussing here isn’t. You simply aren’t going to get the same capabilities from a purely passive system than you will from an active + passive system where you can tightly control the frequencies and directions you are transmitting on, and have the information about what frequencies you transmitted on, when you transmitted them, and how (what array configuration) you transmitted them. The point is that the transmission itself is structured to reveal certain information. So when you get a response back (also, coming back to a phased system), you can learn far more about your target than you could in a purely passive system because you that prior information about what you transmitted.
Basically you deny enemy armor and other infantry support into the area you are working in, which means the infantry can’t operate effectively in that area.
I’m not understanding. Let’s say army A has a radar array of 500 relatively cheap radar stations. They clump them all into a 1 square km area. So now army Z drives some howitzers nearby (which aren’t detectable by ground based radar), waits till a radar station turns on, the passively locates the radar base station, and shoots a cheap shell at it which destroys it.
But if you say army A has the level of military equipment that can locate and destroy howitzers up to 30 km away in all directions, then what benefit does an array of concentrated radar stations provide?
I don’t know where you are getting this 1km cluster idea from.
The point of cheaper radar systems is that you don’t need to defend them as much, because destroying them requires equipment that’s more expensive than the radar station. They overlap, and the locating that they provide can both protect the stations themselves and other targets in their coverage area.
How are those tanks going to maneuver undetected without air support?
That’s the topic of the thread your replying in. Quote:
A quad copter with 500g of payload would be just as effective
The drone operator would be in the radar station’s LOS, even if this thing couldn’t detect a drone, which it can…
I guess I’m not sure the point.
I don’t know, what’s the point of the more expensive stations these are comparable to?