| We are no longer in the 1960s. VHF radars now use AESA and have home-on-jam capabilities. Missiles have dual or even triple guidance systems. Cross section is not a number you can compute in a vacuum. The cross section is associated to the frequency of the wave. It's not viable to use AGM-158s for everything. When running these missions you are racing against time, you need to deliver the most munitions as fast as you can without missing faster than the enemy can strike your supply lines, bases, and carriers. "Somewhere withing a few dozen miles" is a wildly inaccurate characterization. VHF AESA radars are accurate to 350x100m, and this number is improving every year as radar processing techniques improve. Yes, the fighter can detect the radar from farther than the radar can detect the plane. This is true of every single radar system. The issue is that the fighter can only fire blind weapons unless it moves away. That's the issue with the AGM-158 and other standoff weapons - the radars it's targeting can pack up and leave in a minute. It will then hit an empty field. Meanwhile you're making your attacking fighter jets a lot less stealthy carrying it. And 350m accuracy is more than enough for a huge tactical advantage. The stealth jet has to use its radars to lock onto the other fighter jet, while the defending jet can launch munitions without turning on its radar at all or until it is way too late. They also can't pay to get the parts that easily. It's not how these kinds of projects work. The people that designed much of it are dead or retired and the production lines are closed. Planes have to get cannibalized sometimes. Opening the lines back up after they are closed can be extremely costly and technically difficult and can involve reverse engineering. Longer wavelengths are actually harder to absorb. I don't know where you got that they are easier to absorb? You need a lot more material to absorb a wave of longer wavelength of the same material. E=hv is the wrong equation, because the amplitude is not fixed - the power is fixed. Larger wavelengths means thicker elements that can carry much more power without running into cooling limitations. VHF isn't magic. Stealth isn't magic either. You can't avoid scattering and diffraction, these are physical limits. They limit VHF radar accuracy too because of the basic Rayleigh scattering equation, but you can fix this by making your aperture larger and applying some clever processing algorithms. If you're a plane, the only solution is to become bigger. Which is much more difficult. |