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
So at 300 miles can you see a bumblebee with your eyes?
I’m going to guess no, as I have not seen any scientific paper on your inhuman eyes. In the same way a practical radar can not get a strong enough reflection off of a object of that size at any sort of long range. A bumblebee going 300mph will instantly get flagged by something like patriot, but it can’t see something that small at anything above close range. Like probably inside AGM-88 HARM range.
The sort of radars that can are **huge** like literally thousands of sq. feet, and require there own dedicated power plant that puts out enough electricity to power a small city. This means that such radars are not movable, ridiculously expensive and can be seen by satellites.
This is what one of them looks like. Notice the cherry picker for scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAVE_PAWS#/media/File:PAVE_PAWS_Radar_Clear_AFS_Alaska.jpg
Here is a “mobile” version
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-based_X-band_Radar#/media/File:US_Navy_060109-N-3019M-012_The_heavy_lift_vessel_MV_Blue_Marlin_enters_Pearl_Harbor,_Hawaii_with_the_Sea_Based_X-Band_Radar_(SBX)_aboard.jpg
As such you can only cover limited areas with these and only protect critical targets. The enemy will also always know where these are so they can easily avoid them, and if they are even sort of close to the front line they will be targeted and destroyed.
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