Like, the radar fires through the nosecone and tries to bounce off something like a plane and come back, but why doesn’t the return just get scattered or absorbed by the nosecone when it comes back? And why is it that the radar return can somehow get through but the enemies radar can’t get through and detect the radar of the plane?
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Radar doesn’t “get through”
Radar works like shining a spotlight into the dark and seeing if anything reflects back. If there’s a white ball in a black room and you shine a flashlight around, eventually you’ll hit the ball with the light and it’ll reflect into your eyeball and you’ll see it.
One way stealth aircraft work is it’ll reflect the radar off into a different direction, which is like if you shined your flashlight at a mirror pointed away from you: the light would hit the mirror and bounce a different direction and not back into your eye, so you wouldn’t see it. The problem isn’t that your light can’t “penetrate” the mirror, it’s that the light has to make a round trip from your flashlight to your eye to see it. As I understand it, this is how the F35 works.
Now imagine you were wearing a suit made of angled mirrors, that covered your whole body except your eyes. If someone shines a flashlight at you in the dark, light bounces off in all directions but doesn’t go back to the person holding the flashlight. But if you shine a light at something, and it bounces back, it just needs to make it into your eye for you to see it.
So I guess to recap, radar detection requires that you send out a radar signal, it bounces off something, and then returns to you. The F35 is built such that the person sending the radar signal doesn’t get it bounced back.
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