[WAD] Airborne radar can't detect ground units

[anxiousbob]

Was going through the strike tutorials to get back into the swing of things in CMO, however seem to have a bit of a snag. I ran the 2nd tutorial scenario several times and the intent, I believe, is to have some Tornados fly out and find vehicles in the set mission area. Their radars were on, but they never detected the vehicles in any of the times I ran the scenario. I added an E-8 JSTARS to the same mission, but it was also unable to detect anything on radar. The terrain type the vehicles are in is barren, so it seems like a bug.

The Tornados also did not descend from 36000 feet while assigned to a patrol mission, even overrides were put in, but I see that's already been reported.

[LORDPrometheus]

The altitude may well be the reason for the issue detecting the vehicles. The tornado's radar is not bad but it is not amazing so unless it is reasonably close vehicles will easily blend into the background.

[anxiousbob]

I did eventually get them to drop to 2000 feet by unassigning them, but even then, no radar detections. The Tornados were only able to pick up the vehicles with MK1 eyeball. Additionally, I would really expect an E-8 to be able to detect vehicles out in the open in barren terrain. I was wondering whether other people had experienced this difficulty with land units.

[guanotwozero]

I find similar - I had to manually set the mission area to 200ft.

Using Tacview I flew right over the top of targets - still couldn't detect any.

[Dimitris]

One of the improvements we added to the new versions of the DB3000 & CWDB is that ground vehicles now much higher RCS values, making them (realistically) easier to detect with suitable ground-search radars.

Please try updating the scenario to the current DB3000 and see if it resolves the issue. Let us know either way.

Thanks!

[anxiousbob]

It appears in DB3000 480 that there are ground search attributes that some radars have, and it's just that the Tornado doesn't. I wish I had CMANO installed still so I could check how this worked there, but I just assumed that radars with surface search capability would be able to detect things on land at least some of the time. Maybe I'm just remembering wrong, it's been some time since I fired up CMANO.

[Dimitris]

I think we had a discussion about this specific system a while ago. Tornado's radar is not really suitable for searching ground mobile targets.