AgLA06 said:
ABATTBQ11 said:
lb3 said:
Ag In Ok said:
Agreed. Unguided as well. It's like chaff with a motor and some degree of flight stability. Along the lines of the DIY RC planes. If the radar cross section is equal and it has some type of energy emitter (mimicking commo) how easy would it be to mask a wolf within a heard of dumb sheep?
Cheap radar reflectors can be made out of 3 pieces of sheet metal fashioned at 90 degree angles to each other:
The hard part is matching a real plane's profile pretty closely. It needs to be fast-ish, have a similar cross section, generate heat, and block UV. Modern seekers are pretty good at staying locked on by using multiple sensors and determining the difference between a aircraft and countermeasures based on multiple attributes. A flare doesn't cast a UV shadow like a plane, nor does it move as fast. Modern seekers can look for these things to tell the difference.
Even chaff has had to up its game because aircraft are flying faster than it, and many seekers use doppler to tell the difference between it and a plane.
We're not talking about planes. We're talking about decoy drones.
What started this conversation was the Ukraine pilots stating with Russia's built up air defense system in the east, attack drones were useless so they needed modern fighters.
They're pretty much the same at this point. An MQ-9 is similar in size and performance to a King Air, and they're really not that much smaller dimensionally than an F-16. There are certainly differences, but it's by no means small or slow. Any decoy is going to need to match the profile of a full sized plane pretty hard to be taken as a drone or a plane. Otherwise, it's going to be seen as a decoy.
Attack drones are becoming useless because they're slow and have no real countermeasures. They don't have a pilot with his head on a swivel to see missile launches from the ground and (try to) evade them. That's part of why the Ukrainian pilots want more modern aircraft: countermeasures and human pilots onboard.
The issue is the susceptibility of even our aircraft to modern seeker heads. This is not 1991 or even 2003. The build-up of SAMs in the east would wreak havoc on F-15's and F-16's without a lot of electronic countermeasures we're simply not going to give them for obvious opsec reasons.
That's why I think what they really need are effective decoys and radiation seeking missiles to hit whatever radar is used to track them. The focus needs to be ok eliminating air defense assets in the cheapest and fastest way possible.
