Re: Tank vision systems

On  3-Feb-00 at 17:46, Los (los@cris.com) wrote:
 
> BTW just curious, all this talk of "all knowing" sensors. What have
the
> ECM guys, counter reconnaissance guys, counter sensor people
> (Scientists, Research, Materials Technicians, as well as military men
> who concern themselves with such matters)  been doing for 200 years?
Did
> they pretty much give up?

Big guys take out the satellites, that is kind of expected so you are
dealing with stored info.  As to the rest, if you can stop optical 
sensors on the tank then the driver isn't going to see any better.
I'm not talking unimaginable tech on the sensor end.  You take a solid
state camera, just like the ones people are using for web-cams, harden'
them and embed them in the tank surface.  When your "pupil" is 2 meters
long a little signal processing gets you the resolution I'm talking
about.
Smoke would stop the visible spectrum (which also takes out your Mark I
eyeball), but if it doesn't block IR the current cameras are sensative
to IR (they put a filter in the camera to block this so the pictures
don't look odd).  It doesn't take much to add UV into it, and by the
time you've done all this and add a little pattern recognition you
have something far superior to the Mark I.

 All this all knowing capability and not one
> power is doing anything to keep the other side from looking in their
> knickers? Bullshit.  I'd like to porpose that that in 21XXs if you
have
> all that wazoo stuff and you fight a technologically inferior foe then
> sure you are perhaps all knowing and seeing to some extent. But if the
> NSL is fighting the FSE or the NAC is fighting the ESU in a heads up
all
> out modern war, then it's back to the same paucity of information that
> you have in every war since both sides will have the means and
> technology to defeat

How do you defeat passive sensors that rely on the environment? 
Anything
that takes out the sensors takes out the electronics in the tank which
takes out the tank.

> Look no farther than the NTC or the JRTC. There is an immense amount
of
> sensor data and  real-time information available today. At the JRTC
> where there is for part of the battle a real qualitative advantage in
> sensor and information, the blue force commander attains to some
extent
> an edge over the OPFOR. Still even though for most of the battle it's
> pretty much just small cells of guys running around like guerillas we
> stumble around with varying degrees of  difficulty, depending on who'
> the BC is and who is the unit.. That's with GSR, ground and air
sensors,
> intercept and a whole slew of other digital battlefield assets.

It really sounds like information overload, the same problem they have
on airplanes, too many dials, alarms, etc etc.	That's where the
computers
come in, they look at all those dials and alarms, simplify them, and
highlight possible problems.  We are just learning to deal with the
fact that you can give a human too much information, I would expect
that by the 2100s this would be a dead science and pure engineering.
I would also expect that by the 2100s your computers would be "smart"
enough to sort it down into terms we understand.  IE, we are programmed
to see movement, certain danger colors, temperature...	If the
information
is presented in a way we are designed to deal with it will be much more
immediately useful.

> I don't know what specific countermeasures there will be in 2180s
> (though we could probably figure some out fairly easy), though I know
> active and passive counter measures as well as operational techniques
> will continue to figure prominently in denying the enemy the knowledge
> he needs. It's a basic tenant of war. ALl this will keep war in the
> realm of uncertainty and chaos.

If you can describe a countermeasure that keeps the tank from seeing
but doesn't stop a mark I eyeball I would be interested in hearing
it.  (And heavy weapons stop the eyeball also :)

Roger