ORIGINAL: Demetrious
ORIGINAL: gosnold
I think there is an RCS issue on most if not all ground units. Their RCS is much smaller than their size. For instance a Topol TEL has a 2dBsqm RCS from all angles. That's only 1.6 square meters for a 16-wheel truck, and it's also smaller than the RCS of the missile it is carrying!
It results in ground vehicles that are virtually impossible to detect with radar. I had an RQ-180 and a B-2 orbit over a S-400 and their radars did not pick up anything.
I noticed that after the last update as well - GMTI still works fine, but against stationary targets they're utterly useless. This might be intended behavior; I'll have to research ground-search radars to figure it out first. (SAR can produce a FLIR-like picture, which is great, but that just boils down to "FLIR that works through clouds." For fast area search I'd expect a different mode that counts on vehicles and their boxy surfaces being better RF reflectors than the average tree, bush and hillside. More research needed, etc.)
I think you can have large coverage with SAR if the radar is designed for it, it's what satellites do for instance. I would not be surprised if reconnaissance assets like the RQ-180 could do it too. I think the B2 is designed to hunt TELs so it must also have the capability.
