Notching.. vertical?

[Nickkerkwijk]

Hi, i've been thinking about this for a while now and never found an answer. I kinda know how notching a radar works in Dcs, it is a very effective method of defeating a radar guided missile. But is the vertical notch a thing? If you get fired on by lets say a s300 and you are flying at angels 30, is it possible to notch the radar/missile by diving straight down at 90 degrees so the track radar does not see you flying towards or away from it?

 

I know you can drive the missile in to the ground that way and defeat it, but will it notch the radar?

 

[KittyVCAW-1]

Go test it and tell us. 

[Nickkerkwijk]

3 minutes ago, KittyVCAW-1 said:

Go test it and tell 

Thanks for the contribution, but i was hoping someone with the right knowledge could explain it to me.

Edited December 12, 2020 by Nickkerkwijk

[randomTOTEN]

The reason "notching" exists is because the radar needs a method to separate aircraft from ground clutter.

If you fly over the top of a SAM which is pointing at the sky, it doesn't detect any ground, and knows it will not expect to detect the ground, thus has no need to filter it's signal.

[Dragon1-1]

First of all, a vertical dive is a very risky maneuver in most aircraft. You won't be doing that for very long, and while it should work in theory, that's usually not how or why you're diving for the deck. It'll bring you to the ground in a few moments, and assuming you can pull out, you'll usually be able to terrain mask. In fact, that's the surest way to defeat a missile. A SAM can't kill you if it can't see you, notch or no notch.

[KittyVCAW-1]

 

On 12/12/2020 at 12:41 PM, Nickkerkwijk said:

Hi, i've been thinking about this for a while now and never found an answer. I kinda know how notching a radar works in Dcs, it is a very effective method of defeating a radar guided missile. But is the vertical notch a thing? If you get fired on by lets say a s300 and you are flying at angels 30, is it possible to notch the radar/missile by diving straight down at 90 degrees so the track radar does not see you flying towards or away from it?

 

I know you can drive the missile in to the ground that way and defeat it, but will it notch the radar?

 

Well it seems you have all the knowledge needed and all that remained was to put an insignificant amount of effort into a test and let us all know, and your welcome.

[Fri13]

On 12/12/2020 at 7:41 PM, Nickkerkwijk said:

Hi, i've been thinking about this for a while now and never found an answer. I kinda know how notching a radar works in Dcs, it is a very effective method of defeating a radar guided missile. But is the vertical notch a thing? If you get fired on by lets say a s300 and you are flying at angels 30, is it possible to notch the radar/missile by diving straight down at 90 degrees so the track radar does not see you flying towards or away from it?

 

I know you can drive the missile in to the ground that way and defeat it, but will it notch the radar?

 

In DCS that works, but not in reality. 

 

You can not really notch a ground radar at all such a manner as they use various other methods to track you with weapon grade solution than just doppler shift. 

And SAM systems knows their locations and it is very well known that you, target as a fighter, will not fly through a terrain. Why you can not fool a missile to impact the ground by trying to fly at you in pure intercept.

 

The SAM systems as S-200 and even S-75 Dvina has multiple different intercept algorithms. Typical is that missile flies straight up at the high altitude, and when at your altitude the missile will turn toward you in horizontal level and you can not even dive to gain speed as the missile will have that same capability increase speed to come after you. Depending the target altitude, distance, heading and speed, missiles are launched in different manners. Nothing of that is modeled in the DCS.

 

In reality it comes to three main things:

1) Maneuvering at the correct missile distance to you, to kinematically defeat the missile. The missile will have much higher speed than you, but you are far more maneuverable than a high speed missile, so timing is critical to perform proper maneuver (again, depending missile profile and your situation relative to it) to successfully do it. That is lots of eyeballing the missile coming at you. Too soon and you are dead, too late and you are dead.

 

2) Passive counter-measurements. Chaff-and-Flare. In DCS it is unrealistic how they behave, way too effective and way little effective. You need to as well time carefully the release of CM as too soon makes them assist missile hit you, and too late and its no use or even causing explosion near you. You need to as well use them in proper timing and angle relative to the missile and the tracking radar, that makes it totally own ballgame to begin with. Combine it with proper maneuvers and you get CM to be effective as just releasing few of them does no good. 

 

3) Electronic counter-measurements. That is your best bet at the moment, with the maneuvering. That is basically non-existing in DCS. You are not to just fool the tracking radar or the missile own seeker head, but to fool the missile fuze from triggering near you by making it incapable detect your aircraft OR detonate it too soon at safer distance. The missile never needs to hit you, at 30 000 ft the missile can just be anywhere 50-800 meters from your location to effectively destroy you, depending missile and your relative position and heading from it.

This was example the first only effective method against S-75, that took a lots of time and effort from CIA in 1966 to spoof the fuzing signal in missile just before explosion and then get that data captured by the drone and transmit it successfully back to station between the milliseconds it took to destroy the drone. After the ELINT was successful, the ECM became very effective as US troops managed to jam the missile detonations in Vietnam with very high success rate. Until it was changed again.

This is one reason why laser fuzes are used as there is no ECM against it, but it doesn't work so great in clouds or such environments that will lower the distance the laser beam can effectively reflect from the aircraft back to missile. 

 

The SAM systems radars limitation is really the terrain clutter. It can be effectively filtered out, but it will limit the altitude you can detect something slow speed, so example 20-50 meters above terrain can become such level that older radar doesn't see much if at all there in LOS ranges, even at low frequency radars with capability see behind the horizon curve or terrain shapes like hills and such. Why typically drones has been a challenge as drone flies at low altitude, at low speed, with small RCS and can approach the target area simply getting unnoticed, and that is why new SAM systems or radars has features just to detect such targets as well. 

 

 There are lots of features in modern A-A missiles that are not there, how missiles can interpret the target data, why notching is not "a magic thing" like in DCS.

If we would get even few more capabilities to SAM systems, the virtual fighter pilots would start to respect SAM systems far more than they should, instead just consider them as jokers. 

[Dragon1-1]

The problem with all these things can be boiled down to one thing: it's all pretty tightly classified. You can get good info on Vietnam-era SA-2 and SA-3, because they're old and nobody either US or Russia cares about really uses them anymore. Systems from the two decades ago (nevermind modern ones), like S-300, Buk and Tor are far more sophisticated than that. Simulating an ECM environment that even approaches realistic results is something that is very difficult to do and would be mostly based on guesswork. 

[Fri13]

12 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

The problem with all these things can be boiled down to one thing: it's all pretty tightly classified. You can get good info on Vietnam-era SA-2 and SA-3, because they're old and nobody either US or Russia cares about really uses them anymore. Systems from the two decades ago (nevermind modern ones), like S-300, Buk and Tor are far more sophisticated than that. Simulating an ECM environment that even approaches realistic results is something that is very difficult to do and would be mostly based on guesswork. 

 

That is classical mistake in thinking.

 

DCS does not simulate systems at all such a level. It doesn't need to, because it is a simulator and not emulator.

Example, to get a First Person Shooter behave expected realistic manner, one doesn't need to model air, moisture, wind, gravity etc at all for the bullet trajectories. It is enough to give a simple basic bullet ballistic trajectory.  If the game is more advanced, it adds slight modifier for the wind effect, so based wind direction you need to adjust aiming point. Then new feature is to add basic modifier based target altitude relative to weapon, so shooting upwards or downwards has different effect to trajectory. Now if someone wants to go extra step further more advanced, they add functions like weapon canting when leaning. Not many (if any) really do that, while the previous ones are in the top-end shooter games, and none is modeling anything in physics, but just uses a basic tables of values for angles and wind to change bullet trajectory. 

  Is it enough? It is enough for 90% of  the target audience, even more depending the game type. 

 

Now take that, and apply it to Electronic Warfare in the DCS.

We basically have just a five factors to play:

 

1) Noise jamming

2) Flare

3) Chaff

4) Kinematic / maneuvering

5) Notching

 

That's it it (if we exclude the sun and moon being targeted by the IR missile seekers). 

And what those really are?

 

1) Our ECM is nothing more than noise jamming, that just denies the range information as multiplier. Like if your radar lock range is 55 km, then ECM can have modifier of 0.85 for that radar (in the radar specs) and that makes the new lock range 46.75 km. Nothing fancy, nothing complex etc. Same thing is done for the detection range as is with lock range. Below that modifier range nothing changes as you get lock and you can launch missiles. 

 

2) Flare is just a few second lasting object in the sky that has modifier as virtual dice. When the IR missile seeker has a flare in its field of view, it will roll a virtual dice X times a second with just probability that does the seeker lock on the flare or not. Like make it a 6 eye dice where you need 5-6 to missile lock on that flare, and roll the dice once every second and you have what flare does. 

 

3) Chaff is just like a flare, but it is for radar missiles. You do not see chaff on radar, it doesn't affect anything else than just missiles and behaves exactly same way. Roll a dice that does radar missile lock on the chaff or not. Chaff has just a few seconds lifetime like flare, and after that it is gone. No realism that it affects all radars for hours/days depending weather. 

 

4) Missile flight modeling and aircraft flight modeling is the key here. Nothing odd there, where you just need to outmaneuver the missile or just get out of its reach by getting missile consuming its energy.

 

5) Get a proper angle and altitude and you have notched the radar. Mission complete.

 

If we would change three of the five, it would heavily make DCS more realistic.

 

3) Chaff to be more realistic, lasting hours, modeling its spread, make its effects to radar to block the "visibility through it" and similar things. There is lots of material about chaff effects to radars. Anything really gets just better than current one. 

 

5) Notching is a achilles heel in many ways, it can be improved just by playing around with existing scripts for the radars there are. Many SAM systems would need notching to be removed, add new additional targeting methods etc, but all are in SAM systems and not in the aircrafts itself. And that is part of the Combined Arms and DCS Core how to improve that.

 

1) Jamming itself is the part that is most complex, but there is lots of good material how electronic interference happens and how ECM systems works. Even the today's systems are well known by their principles that can be implemented in DCS, without knowing NOTHING about the real things. The real problem is time it takes to work with all radars and all ECM systems, and get them work together in various combinations. Like SAM radar system from 1990 will be far more effective against fighters from 1980 with their ECM.

 

And this as well requires that people (and ED) starts to accept that weapons, pods and such needs to be separated from the aircraft modules. There are cases where weapons has been upgraded or modifier in future time, that doesn't require changes to the aircraft. There similar way ECM, ECCM etc pods that are backward compatible, with upgraded new logics as standalone units. SAM systems use new radars, new missiles etc that just get taken in use. And there it is even simpler to do as there is no such information anyways used that what version of missile does change the specific SAM systems inside the control room.

 

Anything new in ECM/ECCM parts would improve DCS in leaps. Even just implementing some 50-60's functionalities as what we have now is even simpler than what WW2 had. And I take small improvement over no-improvement any day. 

 

[Dragon1-1]

6 minutes ago, Fri13 said:

DCS does not simulate systems at all such a level. It doesn't need to, because it is a simulator and not emulator.

Which is why I didn't say impossible. Everything you said is correct, but largely irrelevant, because it doesn't change the fact modeling proper EW is a huge challenge, even with the data that we have. For modern systems, it would also involve a lot of guesswork, because most specifics are classified and EW is not an exact science, anyway, with a lot of factors to be modeled and/or convincingly faked.

 

Some 3rd party approached ED and wanted to make such a thing at some point, but we haven't heard from them since. Either way, this is not something you code up in an afternoon, when such a module appears, chances are it'd end up costing money. Which is fine by me, as long as it's not too much for what it does.

[Fri13]

1 minute ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Which is why I didn't say impossible. Everything you said is correct, but largely irrelevant, because it doesn't change the fact modeling proper EW is a huge challenge, even with the data that we have.

 

I didn't say it is very easy that it can come on next path. On the contrary what I stated was that it is major task to be done. But it needs to be done.

It is not impossible, and completely relevant and required. As what we have now is irrelevant because it takes away over half of the modern combat. We are basically flying modern aircrafts in a WW2 manner when it comes to electronic warfare!

 

1 minute ago, Dragon1-1 said:

For modern systems, it would also involve a lot of guesswork, because most specifics are classified and EW is not an exact science, anyway, with a lot of factors to be modeled and/or convincingly faked.

 

Again, not required. No need to emulate things when you can simulate the effects.

Every missile has only one purpose after launching, it is not impact to the target, it is to fly near the target and then explode - causing fragments to do the destruction and not the kinematic impact or explosive force. That is not either modeled in DCS, yet people go talk about how advanced the missiles are in DCS, while their destruction power is negligent for what they should be.

  And one to model a fragmentation effects, doesn't need to perform physics simulation for each and every single possible fragments, it can be with acceptable estimation that X count of fragments of Y and Z sized/weighed will fly toward aircraft fuselage and impact at it in various random patterns using simple algorithms. and then checking against the upcoming advanced damage modeling that what parts do they hit and damage.

 

Our radars are similar way very much guesswork. There is no ray tracing performed and then tried to model probabilities for detection based the received signal and signal-noise-ratio etc. Many things are counted for, but lot is just left out. This cause problems where we simply detect or not the target, and we do not have situations where targets just blips on scope at longer distances and various angles, by weather etc.

  ECM effects really are more of a taking known public information and applying the effects. It is not perfect, but if someone wants to get perfection or 100% realism, they will need to wait forever and reject basically everything DCS already is. It requires acceptance from hard core believers for realism, and that is a fact. Now we have one ECM that is like 10% realistic. But we could get 10 different kind ECM methods and effects that are all half realistic if not even little more. 

 

It requires time and decision to make so, but it is doable. But why it has not been done so far is that DCS doesn't support such a functionality and have capability do so, why it must be waiting a new upgraded engine again, that was reason for the IADS module poll by ED that would people like to pay for such. 

 

1 minute ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Some 3rd party approached ED and wanted to make such a thing at some point, but we haven't heard from them since. Either way, this is not something you code up in an afternoon, when such a module appears, chances are it'd end up costing money. Which is fine by me, as long as it's not too much for what it does.

 

It was ED poll for such thing to query the consumer side. I have not said it is a next update thing, but a 1-2 year at least. And it must be CORE of the DCS, not a separate module. Because it is affecting every single radar unit or unit that is detectable by a radar, or even by any guidance system. It is as much a F/A-18C as it is a E-2 or it is ZSU-23-2 or S-300SP or IGLA manpad!

 

We are getting a new FLIR, that hopefully is more realistic that means the engagement ranges will drop maybe 1/3-1/10 of the current ones. No more maverick launches at max ranges, no more TGP tracking targets from 40 nmi, no more many many things, because ground units becomes basically invisible to FLIR, the TV systems can not achieve a lock, they lose locks and pilot needs to maintain target designation manually etc. 

 

That same thing is required for the radars and such. It just force closer engagement ranges, more challenges to get something launched, requirements to fly properly in formation and so on. 

It will move the DCS more from a "textbook case" toward realism where everything is a challenge, where one can not win a war in a day. But many would be against that idea as they want explosions and the experience of the success, not the frustration from not finding targets, getting their missiles wasted etc. 

And that leads to one thing, DCS needs to praise the current mode more of a "GAME MODE" and start to prepare a SIMULATOR MODE for those who want to see all faults, problems, challenges etc simulated properly.

 

Alone air-quake servers in online community are challenged for the new weather engine, because when you come to situation that you will lose a visual easily from the target, people get annoyed as they can not just "play the game". In reality spotting anything past 3-5 km is a challenge, but in DCS it is to 15-30 km easy thing. And if new weather engine allows to shrink it to more realistic 3-5 km ranges and make it so that if you take eyes off the target once and you don't find target anymore, it will annoy even more people who just want to see things go "down".

 

And if BVR combat would change so radically that it becomes challenge, lots of people would be against such an idea just by the principle that they can't enjoy from "modern air combat".  

[Northstar98]

I agree with basically everything Fri13 says about the current state of EW in DCS where basically everything is very simplified.

 

When it comes to jamming though and RADARs, I don't think we're going to get anywhere without overhauling how RADARs work in DCS (obviously without compromising performance), the Tomcat and Viggen lead the way here as these aircraft do in fact use raycasting, though it's mainly for better depictions of clutter above anything else.

 

As for SAMs, it would be better if missiles could get updated FDM, as well as having their guidance methods updated.

 

Right now, if EW were to receive a significant update I'd concentrate on early-to-mid Cold War stuff as increasingly modern stuff is much more of a headache.  

[Harker]

On 12/14/2020 at 12:18 PM, Fri13 said:

I didn't say it is very easy that it can come on next path. On the contrary what I stated was that it is major task to be done. But it needs to be done.

It is not impossible, and completely relevant and required. As what we have now is irrelevant because it takes away over half of the modern combat. We are basically flying modern aircrafts in a WW2 manner when it comes to electronic warfare! ........

Pretty much agree with everything. EW needs to receive a lot of attention. We're neglecting a massive part of any combat scenario from the early 50s and later, a part that's become more and more important as time went by.

The only major issue I see is that ED will need to perform ray-casting or ray-tracing calculations themselves, verify them against the current detection ranges without ECM and atmospheric effects and start applying the effects after that. The hard part is validating whatever numbers you produce against real data, because you likely won't find any unclassified real data to refer to or find SMEs willing to talk. So they won't know if they over/under-model ECM or not, for example. But shifting the detection algorithm and process towards that structure, utilizing separate code blocks, would already be a really good step in the right direction, allowing them to experiment with numbers and tweak as needed, without requiring big code re-writes.

5 hours ago, Northstar98 said:

Right now, if EW were to receive a significant update I'd concentrate on early-to-mid Cold War stuff as increasingly modern stuff is much more of a headache.  

Even Cold War era ECM and ECCM would be a massive upgrade. Imagine having jammers use different techniques, based on the radar wave and vice versa, radars or missiles using ECCM against whatever they think the jammer is using. Even a simplified version of something like that would be game-changing.

[Fri13]

3 hours ago, Harker said:

Even Cold War era ECM and ECCM would be a massive upgrade. Imagine having jammers use different techniques, based on the radar wave and vice versa, radars or missiles using ECCM against whatever they think the jammer is using. Even a simplified version of something like that would be game-changing.

 

If we have now 1% of the capabilities of both sides, then it is just improvement if we could get up to 20% of the capabilities on both. If we get both CM and CCM even 50% correct, it would still be multifold times better and more realistic than we have now. 

 

Like, we are talking now about notching where we can go either horizontal or vertical even, but regardless how common and major tactic that is in DCS, it is just wrong many ways.

Why I take anytime 50 new tactics and requirements over 1 that is flawed by half already.

 

We are getting some time in the near future a MiG-23, that has one of the important capabilities using IRST like already Su-27S and MiG-29's in the game. Yet we do not have the proper functionalities in those utilizing both systems capable assist each other in heavy ECM environments, in notching scenarios etc where radar loses a track and IRST can keep tracking target and yet get a missiles guided in. 

 

The SAM systems are similarly in unrealistic situation, you can notch them, you always get a lock warning and SAM systems that has a TV/FLIR tracking capability are just ignored because limited logic in them. We have the hard coded detection ranges and engagement ranges that once you fly in-out of that range you can trigger them to be launched and lose the missile (example have a missile flying toward you already at 300 meter range at Mach 1.3 and you just visit 1 meter outside unit programmed maximum 4000 m engagement range and missile is self-destructed as game logic dictates the missile can't reach you).

We seriously need far more accurate and complex radar systems, Counter Measurements, Counter-Counter Measurements and so on. One wouldn't just do in the future "I just pull vertical and missile will fly past me as I am invisible to it as I am in a notch". 

  

We are getting a major new feature, a weather engine and new clouds and all. That should be changing radically the combat where one needs to seriously count in the weather conditions for the mission in the air, as well on the ground, and think very hard a proper tactic how to engage units in either side. As low visibility, bad weather, heavy turbulence etc are serious challenges in many cases. 

 

But maybe one day we get more believable system when the DCS gets a proper ground units logic to each and individual and we get further away from the LUA scripting with basic functions.