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
Think about radar vs low observable aircraft (aka stealth) like this.
A radar is your eyes looking around the sky. If you want to look far or at a large portion of sky, you have to look all around and squint and you don’t get a lot of time to specifically focus on any single point. In that case, since you have a lot of sky to cover and you’re looking far, things that are pretty small are easy to miss, but you’ll see stuff that is bigger or reflective quite easy, even really far away. But instead if you want to just focus on a specific area or focus on stuff really close to you, you can train your eyes on it and focus really carefully there, and just look there the whole time, non-stop, and fast, so you don’t miss anything. These are essentially two different ways to operate a standard radar. A Low frequency, long distance, worse detection, or a high frequency, but shorter distance but much better detection
In the big sky look around, it can be very hard to see a low observable aircraft, its small and you’re not getting a lot of detail until its very very close, but if you focus in one area and concentrate there, you can probably make it out, at a bit longer distance, but still close.
However, there are almost certainly a myriad of other ways to defeat stealth/low observable technologies that are behind the curtain of secrecy.
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