Missile warning system

[FSKRipper]

And flying speed shouldnt have any effect as you are having a huge reflector above you that is reflecting every radar wave to every direction no matter your attitude or speed. Only way to stay "under the radar" is to fly behind cover that blocks the radar signals. But once your rotor comes to line of sight with any radar, it is like a Christmas tree in middle of night and couple big speakers playing rock'n'roll. Every radar will know that you are there.

 

A helicopter rotor blade tip is traveling almost speed of sound (and kept below it so it wouldn't get pieces by vibrations) and KA-50 has even 6 of those. A normal helicopter design with anti-torque rotor has same thing as well, just even generating more sound but as well own special signature.

 

Seeing a radar screen when helicopter pop-up behind cover is interesting visual as you can not miss it even if you would be half-blind operator.

 

Unless you use a Track Management System without the right filters set (speed). And even without filters the most modern radars even track flock of birds, trains, cars on coastal roads, and even fog clouds. Maybe I'm a bit vintage style but the best would possibly an old tube screen without this modern software Gimmicks.

[Fri13]

Unless you use a Track Management System without the right filters set (speed). And even without filters the most modern radars even track flock of birds, trains, cars on coastal roads, and even fog clouds. Maybe I'm a bit vintage style but the best would possibly an old tube screen without this modern software Gimmicks.

 

The blades are still traveling faster than birds, cars, trains etc. Take example KA-50 blades RPM, calculate the length of the blade and you get the speed of the rotor blade tip (that naturally is faster than the blade edge on hub side). Let say for argument that the blade tips are rotating at 600km/h speed in hover. You are still reflecting to every direction a huge amount of radar radiation. At the advancing side the blade comes toward radar at 600km/h and on the retrieving side it is going away 600km/h. The difference is 1200km/h. Now if the helicopter is moving forward 160km/h, now the advancing rotor is traveling toward radar at 760km/h speed etc.

 

The rotor blades are huge by surface area, the whole rotor disk diameter is multiple meters, round and reflecting every angle.

 

Think about why a fifth generation fighters needs to have the turbines fans blades hided so the wind needs to come "around the corner", because the reflection area to it just huge. Now, with helicopter it is multiple meters wide and very thick even.

All the adjustments, turns etc just change the reflection so it can be tracked how helicopter is flying before it even starts acting, but there is nothing that can really be done to delete the reflection amount of the helicopter blades as they are constantly moving and there is always a angle that is toward radar and traveling at high speed.

[FSKRipper]

Sure but I don't compared the RCS of a combat helo with 5th Gen fighter planes but with cars and even trains :music_whistling:

 

Also for target tracking your TMS will ignore how fast the moving parts of an object rotate. This stuff is used for further analysis like non cooperative target recognition which is not a standard function of ground based radars (if there is any out there?).

You will not always get a distinct stronger signal by these blades (especially when using rotating antennas with low rpm's) but more some kind of discriminated patterns of reflection which can be shown in spectrograms. They strongly depend on the radial velocity of the rotating parts of the aircraft/helicopter.

Former the front helicopter blade will produce a larger rcs than the back rotor blade (from the radar line of sight). The more the radar LOS is orthogonal to the rotordisc the stronger the signal, from the other side if the angle between radar LOS and the rotordisc is Zero, you will get the weakest possible signal.

When leaving the software out of this discussion all you will get is a simple dot on you screen, independent of how fast the blades travel. The speed of the "track" is generated by the movement of the dot on your screen relative to your position and not it's moving parts. For that reason even modern software is sometimes unable to discriminate between a swarm of birds (with moving wings) or a helicopter.

 

With the according hard/and software (and perfect circumstances in a perfect world) you will be able to recognize a specific plane or helicopter type by his blade flashing profile. This will be most effective if your radar looks orthogonal to the disc (front/aft of planes, up/down of helicopters). Can't speak for the most eastern and a whole bunch of western radars but most ground based systems I worked on during the millenium years were not able to do this kind of stuff.

 

Last but not least you can work with special materials and paintings. Remembering the Comanche prototype study they told about a front rcs 32 times smaller than of the Kiowa mast sight.

Edited November 9, 2015 by FSKRipper

[Raptor9]

I believe what Fri13 is alluding to is the Doppler strobe being thrown off by a rotating blade system. Since pulse-Doppler waves use relative speed (Doppler shift) to detect objects, you will always have a portion of the rotor system either coming or going at several hundred miles-per-hour at/away from the radar emitter (even at a hover).

 

The original design of the Comanche was designed to defeat straight pulse-radar systems, before the proliferation of modern pulse-Doppler radar systems. Doesn't matter how stealthy the Comanche fuselage was if the rotor system is showing a huge strobing effect on a pulse-Doppler radar display.

 

Now, having said all that, I doubt that radar systems and radar theory is modeled that extensively in DCS, lol. What is known in DCS, however, that the best defense of the Ka-50 is to physically put something between yourself and the sensors/weapons of the threat.

[GGTharos]

Depends on your radar set. F-15s have shown time and again that they don't have a problem with this, for the incidents we're aware of. Mig 29/su 27 will see a making strobe. Probably the upgraded variants no longer have this issue.

[Nerd1000]

And flying speed shouldnt have any effect as you are having a huge reflector above you that is reflecting every radar wave to every direction no matter your attitude or speed. Only way to stay "under the radar" is to fly behind cover that blocks the radar signals. But once your rotor comes to line of sight with any radar, it is like a Christmas tree in middle of night and couple big speakers playing rock'n'roll. Every radar will know that you are there.

 

A helicopter rotor blade tip is traveling almost speed of sound (and kept below it so it wouldn't get pieces by vibrations) and KA-50 has even 6 of those. A normal helicopter design with anti-torque rotor has same thing as well, just even generating more sound but as well own special signature.

 

Seeing a radar screen when helicopter pop-up behind cover is interesting visual as you can not miss it even if you would be half-blind operator.

 

I think DCS does this appropriately. I did some testing of the Ka-50 against a few radar SAMs (Tor, SA-3, SA-6), and they all fire on you even when you are flying at very low speed.

 

That said, you can still defeat them if you know where they are. The SA-3 is the easiest because you can without difficulty fly below the minimum engagement altitude of its missiles. Tor has short range against slow targets (seems to be less than 9km, making a vikhr shot from max range viable). SA-6 is a little more interesting because it has both long range and a minimum altitude of 10m, but I've found that you can dodge the missiles at shorter ranges if you see them coming- presumably the rather large SA-6 missile is going too slow to pull full G so early in its flight, allowing you to dodge it by flying sideways and reversing your direction at the right moment. Combined with terrain masking this makes an attack on a SA-6 site possible, but very, very dangerous.