You’d need a camera network spanning the entire battlefield. And it’d need telephoto lenses at the very least, because stealth fighters are high and small. And it’d need to stay connected after an initial missile exchange.
I don’t buy for a moment that nobody in the Pentagon has thought of this, and explained why it’s not a dealbreaker in a classified report.
Telephoto lenses have a low field of vision. You’d want very high resolution wide angle sensors. Or maybe a combination of the two, where the wide angle cameras spot interesting things for the narrow angle ones to look closer at.
The difference between the two would be like when they went from U2 spy planes to satellite imagery, going from thin strips of visibility to “here’s the hemisphere containing most of Russia”.
The trick being that wide angle and high resolution means very high expense, and probably a lot of power and ruggedness tradeoffs. For a satellite that’s fine, for this application I kind of think a cluster of narrow-view cameras would be way cheaper and more practical.
You’d need a camera network spanning the entire battlefield. And it’d need telephoto lenses at the very least, because stealth fighters are high and small. And it’d need to stay connected after an initial missile exchange.
I don’t buy for a moment that nobody in the Pentagon has thought of this, and explained why it’s not a dealbreaker in a classified report.
BVR and over the horizon radar has been around for decades.
We’re talking about stealth jets here, though…
They don’t give much of a conventional radar return. Which is why Musk even brought up his definitely-new definitely-original idea.
Telephoto lenses have a low field of vision. You’d want very high resolution wide angle sensors. Or maybe a combination of the two, where the wide angle cameras spot interesting things for the narrow angle ones to look closer at.
The difference between the two would be like when they went from U2 spy planes to satellite imagery, going from thin strips of visibility to “here’s the hemisphere containing most of Russia”.
The trick being that wide angle and high resolution means very high expense, and probably a lot of power and ruggedness tradeoffs. For a satellite that’s fine, for this application I kind of think a cluster of narrow-view cameras would be way cheaper and more practical.