Why stealth through small radar dot, when we could have stealth through making the dot so large it's impossible to know where it's coming from? Are they stupid?
Radar works like this; imagine you're playing hide and seek in the woods after dark. You have a flashlight and you think it's a good idea to shine it around looking for your buddies, and if you see them with the flashlight that's the radar dot. Making the dot big is like having all your buddies who are supposed to be hiding also having REALLY BIG flashlights, so bright that you can't see what you're looking at very well.
In warfare the hide and seek game also includes a gun, and even a really bright light still more or less tells you exactly where it's coming from allowing you to shoot at the light until it goes out. Not great for the survivability of the hiders!
The smart hider might set up their jamming light somewhere else so the seeker shoots at nothing, however the lights are still very expensive and they make cheap rockets designed to home in directly on radar and blow it up. The least expensive way overall for the hider to avoid the seeker is for the hider to wear all black clothing and be small.
hider to wear all black clothing and be small.
Now I'm imagining a chibi style anthropomorphic plane wearing all black clothes trying to be sneaky.
You did this to me.
The shy goth plane is making me feel things
Ghibli Dust-sprite Plane.
Bounce bounce bounce.
however the lights are still very expensive and they make cheap rockets designed to home in directly on radar and blow it up
why do you hate momma MIC and daddy pentagon and our economy and good paying working class jobs
Here's the idea: A plane that carries a radar emitter so strong that it blows out the receivers on enemy radar towers/SAM sites/ARAD missiles. It's tethered to another plane that carries a nuclear reactor to power it. And another one carrying a cooling system.
(Note: I'm not talking about a radar jammer. Jamming is a chickenshit solution that stops being useful when the jammer stops working. I'm talking about physically destroying the receivers by overloading them.)
What you're talking about is essentially an EMP. They don't generally emit continuously. Instead you just set off a single strong pulse which induces such high currents in receiving antennas that they melt or otherwise damage connected circuitry.
At these levels of power, any amount of conductive material tends to start acting as an antenna. If you set up a continuous transmitter you're going to have trouble not damaging your own delivery and power mechanisms.
The most common way to generate one is to set off a nuclear bomb that has been finetuned to release most of its energy as electromagnetic radiation.
The receivers just aren't that delicate, and by the time you're in range to try something fancy and expensive you're also in range to just throw something that explodes at the radar. Believe it or not explosives are insanely inexpensive for governments, especially compared to a death laser like you're envisioning.
Not to mention your death laser is also throwing out huge amounts of the same radio waves that could lead a radiation tracking missile right up your nose.
The power decreases by the radius squared. A 100mhz pulse transmitted with 1 peta watt of power over 320 km with 30 dbi of antenna gain will have 5.5 mega watts of received power. I'm pretty sure plasma generation will happen at those power levels which will stop transmission all together. Physics gets weird at high power levels.
Because in this scenario, you would also either fry all of your own equipment, or you use a directed version of your system, which means your Intel is good enough to know where all the radar sites are at, and it that case a single plane with a few missiles can take the sites out.
If anyone suddenly found themselves wondering if it's home in or hone in, from the grammerist.com
"Home in and hone in are different since home in is to direct attention, while hone in is to perfect a skill. The two phrases seem the same because of how they are used in sentences."
It also says hone in is used informally for home in and generally accepted even though it's not really correct usage. "Home in" exists because of the homing pigeons.
So like maybe I'm dumb, but instead of like electronic warfare, couldn't you disperse maybe some really probably toxic, radar reflecting material or vapor on a radar site?
Like radar sweeps aren't exactly undetectable and they also give their location don't they?
We do that, it's called bombs. We bomb the radar when we can, which makes it not work. If you can get close enough to disperse something, you're close enough to drop a bomb which has the advantage of preventing the radar from working again later.
Radar sweeps do give away their location, and radiation seeking missiles exist whose only job is to lock on to where radar is coming from and make it blow up even if the radar tries to turn off.
As someone else mentioned chaff can also be effective but it's mostly used against missiles with little radars in the nose, to confuse that little radar and make the missile miss.
What IS sometimes done is an electronic warfare plane will fly off to where the strike team isn't and go make a lot of radio noise, so when the strike team comes along the radar is busy looking in the wrong spot. This is how Ukraine sank the Moskva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva , a decoy made noise over at 6 o clock while cruise missiles came in from 9 o clock. Absolutely textbook maneuver!
I mean, that's what chaff is.
EA-18G: rolls up with a 10M candlepower spotlight and a pocket full of Class 4 lasers
EA-18G Growler be like: The enemy cant see me if their retinas are evaporated!
Ex electronic warfare commander here, this is possible with jamming, but to be able to achieve this you'd need a massive power source. It's also possible to create many small ghost blobs, it requires less power but still a lot. But modern radar systems have jamming protection, so it might not always work.
They will just think it is Independence Day
WELCOME TO ERF
The 1980s answer was they also have humans on the ground reporting the plane in the sky. Once they know where you are generally, they can narrow with heat and laser acquisition.
In 2025, I don't know where the tech is.
The large dot could conceivably be unscrambled with code to provide the accurate location of the object.
Not really we do this be already and have since like 1946.
How about instead of one really big dot, you just send lots and lots of tiny dots! How many are there? I don't know!
Drone swarm with flat fronts all around the jet, randomly repositioning so that actual target is never in the same place on the signature?
Maybe if the jet was moving at walking speed
It's called jamming mate, and it sorta works.
Give em the raspberry!
Fun fact: during WWII, the British figured out a way to jam German radar by dropping bales of metal-coated plastic strips (called "chaff" or "Window"), but they held off on using it for more than a year because they didn't want the Germans to figure out the secret and start using the same trick on their radar. Meanwhile, the Germans had also figured out this technique, but they also held out on using it because they didn't want the British to get it.
The Battle of the Beams is a highly interesting and often overlooked detail of WW2.