M1A2 detects an aircraft

[stepbackjumper2]

An M1A2T's infrared camera detects a J-20 at a range of 78 nautical miles in CMO. This doesn't make sense to me.

Should ground-level infrared sensor systems only detect low-flying, slow-moving targets like helicopters or drones?

Any thoughts about this?

[Kushan04]

Should ground-level infrared sensor systems only detect low-flying, slow-moving targets like helicopters or drones?

Short answer, yes they can. Long answer, it depends. It 's going to depend on a lot things; target altitude, what other sensors are present, etc. If it was just the Abrams itself probably not. Chance of volume search alone detecting it is small. More then likely some other sensor detected it to some degree and that automatically queued the Abrams IR/TV sensors where to look. Without the save or entire message don't know for sure.

Now if the question is, should some other sensor be able to que the Abrams visual systems to do that? No, probably not. Command currently doesn't model that level of communications without multiple sides and/or using Lua. Any sensor that detects something is automatically going to send that information to every unit on the side.