Originally posted by Furious:
My opine:
So you could sneek up to a base, but at very close range you would still be detected and have a dot on the dar. This of course neglects radar shadows and atmospheric anomolies.
[ 11-06-2001: Message edited by: Furious ]
Not all *that* close, either, according to your chart. For an antenna on the ground, an attacker at around 50 feet, 7 or 8 miles away, would be above the radar horizon. That's most of a sector right there. If the radar were atop the tower, say 25 feet, you could see anything within 12.5 miles, if it were 150 feet or higher, and your 50-foot target is visible from 12 miles or so. Thirty-six miles would be the range for 500-foot-high targets with this tower-mounted radar. Let's not even think what it would be like if the radar were on a nearby hill.
Considering that transportable (3000-lb, fits in a gooney) radar sets used by the US in WWII had a range of 150 miles (I cite Eric Bergerud, _Fire in the Sky_, page 463,) I don't think our current bar dar is all that unreasonable. Dot dar may be more so, but viewed as an abstraction of the guidance one would get from a ground controller, it's not altogether ridiculous.
Yeah, it eliminates the element of surprise, but it seems to me that surprise in the air war in WWII had more to do with lax vigilance, than with equipment shortcomings. The incoming Pearl Harbor raid was detected by radar, but misinterpreted. Bodenplatte happened on New Years' Day and was a failure anyway. I just don't think surprise happened as a result of radar being lacking.
Hell, hblair's excerpt about the Ploesti raid points out that the treetop raid *did not* avoid German radar, and the bombers got creamed as a result.
While I think the datalink aspect is a bit fanciful, it helps make up for aspects of reality that would be hard to model (like being vectored in on bogies by a controller, for example.)
[ 11-28-2001: Message edited by: Runny ]