RE: Battle blimps

At 9:21 PM +1000 4/18/02, Beth.Fulton@csiro.au wrote:
>G'day,
>
>One other thought that just hit me. Are modern weapons limited by
"lowest
>possible speeds" like some of the WWII anti-air stuff. I remember
reading
>once that the Swordfish (I think I've got the name right) did well
against
>anti-air in WWII as it went to slow for the weapons to track it ;)
>
>Taking advantage of that via battle blimps or other innovations based
on
>"lower tech" warfare could be fun ;)

Well, depending on how the blimps return was tailored, it could 
appear to be weather on a lot of radar systems. Radar uses Range and 
speed gates for determining whether to toss some return out in the 
signal processing. A helecopter hovering could theoretically 
disappear due to the ground signal processing if the rotors were 
stealthy. If it sits at low speeds, it'd appear like it were part of 
the terrain to a look down radar set.

EW has this whole group of different kind of jamming modes that all 
have to do with fooling the radar receivers when they get the pulse 
back.

For example, if one can send a strong radar pulse back at the 
receiver while it is off axis from you, you can make your aircraft 
appear to be off to the side by a great degree. Another method 
involves sending out a radar pulse stronger so that the range gate is 
fooled into excluding the later smaller ping thus making the target 
appear closer. There's more to that than I state, but those are the 
basic ideas.

EW guys could have a field day if they were able to get at a large 
airship that was stealthy.

-- 
--
Ryan Gill			  rmgill@mindspring.com
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