eli5 why is military aircraft and weapon targeting footage always so grainy and colourless when we have such high res cameras?
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They’re filming from extremely far away. If you took a 5,000 megapixel image of the grand canyon it would look super sharp from a distance. If you tried to zoom in on a person miles away that would still look distorted. Air makes things blurry over long distances too, especially if there’s dust or fog in the air.
Some of it could be security. Letting others know how high res we have could be risky. Better to downgrade and release the grainy footage. Keeps others guessing.
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First of all, it’s high magnification, the cameras are zoomed in all the way. That target that looks so big in the grainy video, it can actually be some 5-30 miles away, and you’re looking at it through maximum zoom. So if you grab your phone camera and try to zoom in to say an insect on a distant wall, see what happens to the quality of your video.
And then, transmitting video isn’t a primary concern for the helicopter, tank, or soldier taking that video, so there’s probably lots of compression so the video doesn’t create lag on the military wifi or whatever they’re using. You’re seeing live footage, they don’t want lag when they’re in the middle of combat operations, so transmitting the video is minimized in a major way.
Because those cameras aren’t meant to take sweet, hi-res photos for people on Reddit to think are cool, they’re infrared cameras meant to acquire targets and confirm that the weapon hit where it was supposed to. There are plenty of extremely high quality satellite photos of the same thing that you and I will never see because they are classified.
F-15 Mechanic here! I can’t speak to how good the camera actually is, but in terms of what’s actually displayed on the monitors, it’s pretty low res because
A. You don’t need super high grade footage because most of the time you’re aiming for a building or a vehicle that’s being laser targeted. It’s less about being a clear image and more about being a steady, reliable image that you can zoom into 10000 times.
B. The screens themselves are like, 500×500 resolution. So maybe the cameras are good but the displays and recordings are awful.
Most of the time it’s not in visible spectrum in the first place, so “color” isn’t really a factor.
When I deployed with the Marines as a Corpsman I was attached to a UAV unit. Super grainy footage, but the UAV was so high in the sky, the people on the ground couldn’t hear it. So a large distance contributes to the bad quality. Even with that old technology, the camera could zoom in and you could see someone peeing on the side of the road. IMO, absolutely terrifying technology. Death from above and you would have no idea you’re being stalked.
Any thing that is shown to the American public will also be shown to your enemies. Why give them all your secrets?
Pls tell me if I’m wrong but I thought it was common practice to dumb down footage to give the impression that your kit and camera aren’t great in the field to fool the enemy into thinking they can operate in the field more?
A false sense of security so to speak.
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