RCS in DCS

[Exorcet]

So relatively recently the F-16/18 received radar tuning which introduced things like lock delay and look down penalty. ED announced a white paper to explain these things that we're still waiting on. There is another piece of the whole radar puzzle that I'm wondering about though, which is RCS.

DCS uses a simple single RCS value for aircraft. Hopefully this will be updated one day, but that is likely a big project. In the shorter term however, how feasible is a review of the current RCS values? This is desirable mostly because the existing values seem to be a bit low, possibly because they only account for clean aircraft which is the exception in a combat situation. This could account for some of the feelings expressed that teen series aircraft radars are under performing, and turning the RCS values up a bit would be a nice temporary fix until we can get advanced RCS modeling.

[draconus]

I doubt ED would do anything temporary but I'm all for RCS remodeling, esp. considering storage and target aspect. Maybe @Chizh can enlighten us on the plans.

The changes would make edge detections and tracks less reliable without resorting to RNG to make it somewhat realistic.

[falcon_120]

Wondering about this topic as well. Specially curious since Razbam and Deka introduced in some of the latest patches RCS dependcy on stores and aspects. I have no idea what exactly they have implemented or to what degree but several question arises:


How is this affecting other modules? How did they manage to simulate that without an internal discussion with ED first? . Again this is a thing that should be somehow centralized in ED for an homogeneous simulation. At least at an software architecture level, to make sure the way of implementing that could be scalable in the future if ED decides to implement the functionality themselves.

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[bies]

13 hours ago, Exorcet said:

This is desirable mostly because the existing values seem to be a bit low, possibly because they only account for clean aircraft which is the exception in a combat situation. This could account for some of the feelings expressed that teen series aircraft radars are under performing, and turning the RCS values up a bit would be a nice temporary fix until we can get advanced RCS modeling.

Last time i've heard an interview with F-22 USAF pilot. He stated F-16, due to its small size and crosssection and blended wing-body shape is notoriously hard to detect from the front when intake is masked by the nose - even for cutting edge F-22 radar, incomparably more advanced and sensitive than our 35-15 years old conventional mechanical small antenna F-16 and F/A-18 radars.

This is obviously classified technology, but older mechanical small size antenna radars were far from perfect detection devices we have right now. With ED implementing more and more phanomena influencing radar operation our radars will have even more limitations then there have right now.

[falcon_120]

Last time i've heard an interview with F-22 USAF pilot. He stated F-16, due to its small size and crosssection and blended wing-body shape is notoriously hard to detect from the front when intake is masked by the nose - even for cutting edge F-22 radar, incomparably more advanced and sensitive than our 35-15 years old conventional mechanical small antenna F-16 and F/A-18 radars.
This is obviously classified technology, but older mechanical small size antenna radars were far from perfect detection devices we have right now. With ED implementing more and more phanomena influencing radar operation our radars will have even more limitations then there have right now.

it's a double edge sword, it would be like you state for a pylon free, clean f16, on the other hand a fully loaded aircraft, with fuel pylons, bombs, missiles hanging from the wings (like normally most players are flying in any server) could be detected much farther away. But yeah, it would be an additional step to a more realistic EW environment.

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[Exorcet]

3 hours ago, bies said:

Last time i've heard an interview with F-22 USAF pilot. He stated F-16, due to its small size and crosssection and blended wing-body shape is notoriously hard to detect from the front when intake is masked by the nose - even for cutting edge F-22 radar, incomparably more advanced and sensitive than our 35-15 years old conventional mechanical small antenna F-16 and F/A-18 radars.

This is obviously classified technology, but older mechanical small size antenna radars were far from perfect detection devices we have right now. With ED implementing more and more phanomena influencing radar operation our radars will have even more limitations then there have right now.

3D RCS is definitely something I want to see and to be able to take advantage of. Approaching an enemy while concealing your fans would provide a big advantage and add more depth to air to air combat. Also like @falcon_120 mentioned, it also makes weapon choice more important as well. Just to pick an extreme example, with better RCS modeling not only would 10 AMRAAM Hornets be heavy and slow, they would also glow like the Sun on radars.

[Northstar98]

Yeah the RCS situation is IMO a major limitation, being the spherical cow in a vacuum type deal, assuming clean, frontal aspect. I would absolutely love to see RCS account for things like aspect and configuration, with values in a look-up table (absolutely not under the impression that real time RCS calculations is something feasible in the slightest).

Fortunately 3rd parties (namely RAZBAM and Deka) are making steps into improving this, but personally, it would be better if there was a more universal solution that can be applied for all radars, rather than having radars with wildly different fidelity.