How does stealth work? Why can’t we just tune radars to look for very fast ‘bumblebees’?

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I was watching a youtube video about the b2 this morning. It mentions that while it’s not completely invisible to radar, it only has a cross section about the size of a bee. It says that radars have to fine tune their displays to only show larger objects or else it would be too cluttered.

I guess my question is, why can’t they tune their displays to only show objects moving faster than ~ 300 mph?

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You also want to think about how a system can be intentionally circumvented once you know its detection thresholds. If you’re looking for 300+ mph bees, well, people will make tiny rockets that look like 300+ mph bees for like $5k a pop and fly them around just to stress you out, until you turn the sensitivity down. Being able to engineer false-alarms is one of the best ways to protect your real intentions.

This is used often in cyber security, to saturate systems or operators with alerts to the point that it’s unmanageable and the detection has to be dialed back.

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