Which we already are in development of, as evidence by our first turn...
But, to put it onto perspective, radar-guidance relies upon signals being bounced off of the target, ideally from a known location. You could potentially hope that enough random signals are bouncing off of any given object, andthat will probably work I suppose, but it is just background levels, so your instruments would need to be sensitive... So your signal needs to go to them, then get back to you, then your projectile needs to reach them. Missiles I suppose can work around this, but signal dispersion over large distances is also an issue. That beam of radio you shoot at them is a pretty big deal at a couple of hundred kilometres, but give it a thousand and it is getting pretty dispersed, on account of being an arc, and thus any given size becomes less of the total area that the arc covers as the arc gets larger, lthus meaning less of a concentrated signal, and thus less power.
Lasers have the same problem. The laser goes to them, then goes back to you the missiles, then the missile needs to chase at its own speed, the time differential stacks up, especially if you replace missiles with lasers.
infra-red just looks for hot things to glow. You can hide by sitting in front of a star, but otherwise it is fairly difficult to throw off, especially if it is tuned to favour a known heat-output. But mostly it only needs to come to your and then you go to them, it skips the bit where you have to get a signal to them first in order to have it bounce off.
For reference, my calculations indicate(I do not know this stuff off-hand... and somehow wikipaedia doesn't have the radius of Earth where I looked...)
Radius of Earth:
a little over two hundredths of a second.
Earth geostationary orbit:
A little over a tenth of a second.
Earth to moon:
1.3 seconds.
Sun to Earth:
Over 8 minutes
If you are tryiing to use radar over interplanetary ranges, then you are adding minutes, if it works at all.
Satellites will lose seconds, which could throw you off enough for them to evade somehow. Not realyl a deal with missiles, but with projectile weapons it is a problem, and it makes the missiles chase where the target was rather than where it is, which reduces efficiency.
Orbital craft could be all sorts of distances, but if it is coordinating with specific ground targets, don't be surprised if you are lose a tenth of a second or two.
IIf you are skimming the atmosphere, then yes, it is down to hundredths of a second, so you probably won't miss much, but it is still a hundredth of a second tht your enemy might use to beat you to the draw...
But mostly I want to revise heat tracking into night-vision and antipersonnel turrets, which radar tends to do poorly at...
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Topic: Planetary Arms Race - Amaok, Strategy Phase 2212 (Read 35231 times)