Excuse my mental handicap but, why don't planes drop radar reflectors as active radar homing countermeasure, like they drop flares for infrared homing?
Excuse my mental handicap but, why don't planes drop radar reflectors as active radar homing countermeasure, like they drop flares for infrared h...
>itt anon learns about chaff
so does chaff rain down thousands of sharp, pointy metal fibers all over the ground?
It used to be strips of metal foil. These days it's metallized fiberglass.
AND NANOBOTS!
They have done, since the point in WWII that radar was invented. Early versions were codenamed 'window', but we just know it as chaff now.
I talked to a guy (a long time ago) who sat in the back of aircraft tossing out chaff in WW II. He was an elinter and so was I so we chatted about it for a few mins.
I would have like to have had a longer conversation with him but I was pulling escort duty for some electricians and he was getting badged in for something else. He was a high level something or other so we'd normally never cross paths.
You are posting flares, which are supposed to be fired before lock-on while thr thing you talk about already exists in 2 forms, chaff and the F-35-style radar homing bait that is dropped behind it on a rope.
>radar homing bait that is dropped behind it on a rope
Never heard of this before, neat. Makes sense, does it work well?
>does it work well?
The F-35 has not been in active combat that we know of and only people flying it and testing it know how well the towed decoy works.
Existing towed decoys for other planes have seen plenty of combat and work great (against certain threats)
Anon, with everything happening in the middle east I'm willing to bet my left testicle that at least the israelian F 35 have seen active combat.
I wish we could see what's going on in the syrian sky where we have Russia, Israel, Syria, and possibly Iran flying planes and drones.
I'm positive that these armies are testing ideas and material in this unsung war.
>I wish we could see what's going on
You need to cool it with the antisemitism.
Chaff. Also it's better to just have an EWAR system, there's also active decoys like britecloud and F35s have a deployable towed jammer.
As other anons have pointed out it's called chaff, and it used to be a thing, but it's mostly obsolete because you've got access to more dependable homing systems then radar, like following the heat source.
The thing to keep in mind is: Radar doesn't give you feedback like vision does. When you see something, you know exactly where the target is, and with a relatively simple homing system you can figure out exactly how far away it is and how fast it's moving.
Radar behaves a lot more like you're listening to an echo. You get all kinds of secondary reflected signals and your data sucks pretty bad, so you'll have to spend considerable effort to try to deduct useful information from it.
Now radar also has its perks, so it continues to be used, but for line of sight homing other approaches are more successful, therefore chaff is not used as a defensive counter measure, but rather to frick with general radio signals on a broader field.
>but it's mostly obsolete because you've got access to more dependable homing systems then radar, like following the heat source
BVR fighting is still about the radar.
Chaff is "obsolete" in the sense that doppler filtering can detect that the chaff cloud loses speed almost instantly due to drag while aircraft retain their forward velocity. The best use case for chaff is while you're notching the radar source as flying perpendicular gives no doppler shift (frequency doesn't increase or decrease on the return). There's modern jamming techniques which involve bouncing false returns off the chaff cloud but there's less publicly available information on those.
Yes, you can filter out static targets, but ask yourself this;
When a police car or ambulance drives past you, can you only hear the distorted audio when you're hearing it in line of sight, or do you hear the distorted audio even around a corner, even though the building it is reflected on is evidently not moving?
Kind of a weird analogy, because while you can use sound and radar for comparisons, radar is very directional and granular. Sound will come at you from any direction and reflect off all surfaces present, while radar specifically scans a direction in the sky and runs through the edges of its FOV. You will hear an ambulance even if you're not looking for it or turning your ears on a specific direction, radar will not see what's not inside its scan FOV.
If you're chasing an opponent's tail, and he's pumping chaff, the doppler shift on your radar return will show your closure rate to another fast target, while the chaff will lose speed quickly and hang in the air, which will possibly fool the radar for a few cycles but quickly fall under rejection threshold. Unlike a building, chaff does not physically block your "sight" as the dispensers shoot the chaff away from centerline.
Chaff and flares are usually deployed together, or at least they used to be.
Better anti-radar measures exist though. Low RCS coatings and angles (stealth)
Towed decoys
ECM pods like the AN/ALQ-99 or AN/ALQ-131
Built in ECM jamming capes like on the F-35 and F-22
I've heard that soviet planes used data / audio tape to save costs.
>I've heard that soviet planes used data / audio tape to save costs.
Nothing particularly wrong with that, metal strip is metal strip.
seriously what the frick
why don't the military use
>towed decoys
>jamming pods
>canisters of little metal fibers
>active radar spoofing
>noise jamming
>radar beaming maneuvers
>terrain masking
>deployable decoys
>radar absorbent materials
it's like they're not even trying to win wars. surely the PL-15 will devastate the USAF
Top tip: you don't see chaff dumps during airshows because chaff is a massive fricking FOD hazard. It also leaves huge amounts of litter on the ground or at sea in a way flares really don't. Plus it's nowhere near as cool-looking as flares giving you that massive burning angel behind the plane -- it's a big cloud of shitty glitter fluttering down. Looks like a sick gay clown sharted behind your plane.
Towed decoy/jammers have been a thing for a while.
Now Leonardo has shown off BriteCloud at trade shows but to my knowledge nobody has purchased let alone combat tested it. Instead of installing racks full of chaff in an aircraft, you'd load the chutes with smaller dispensable jammers.
During the Feb 2022 Blyat Storm the Iskanders seemed to shit out round cannisters that initially were reported as remnants of cluster munitions but turned out that the missiles themselves deploy jammers on the way down to increase the chance of air defense to miss. No idea how effective they were, especially since Ukraine was moving air defense around to evade the day 1 strikes.
The future of air-to-air missile guidance is passive sonar. Screenshot this.