Everyone’s talking about how the F-35 Lightning II has a RCS the size of a Golfball but I don’t know what it means or how significant it is.
In: 5
Radar works by bouncing light off an object and the light needs to bounce just perfectly enough to do a 180 turn and go back to the radars “eye” which sees the light which means it sees the object.
Just like your eye can see a distant thing and get a feel for the objects size radar can do the same thing. It can tell understand how far away an object is, how quickly the object is moving, AND roughly how big the object is.
So how do you fight this? Well easiest are 2 things – 1 – make your plane such a funky shape that it’s almost impossible for light to do that 180 turn around back to the eye, that would make it invisible to the radar. and 2 – coat your airplane in a material that’s the radar equivalent of black paint, it absorbs the light instead of reflecting it and again the radar eye can’t see it.
So nothing’s perfect, but an F-35 is a big friggen metal object, roughly 50x15x35 feet and you *know* a good radar operator would get worried if the radar says there is a tractor trailer sized hunk of metal moving in the sky at Mach 1, I mean, what else could that possible be other than an airplane. But the F-35 has the right shape and coating that only a tiny bit of the light gets back to it eyes, roughly the same amount of light that a golfball sized hunk of metal would reflect. So the radar operator doesn’t see a flying tractor trailer, they see a flying golfball. I mean, it could be bird, or maybe even just a cloud or something. So they ignore it.
Latest Answers