Thinking clearly about Radar in FSCAI28 Aug 2019
Dutch Owen
Captains interested in FSCAI Combat,
As I've said a couple of times here and there one of the major features of modern air combat that's missing in FSCAI at the present time is a through simulation of radar. Right now, targeting is done entirely visually - if an A.I. can't see you it won't target you. If you get out of visual range before you are engaged the AI will drop you as a target (you can duck into a cloud to get away for instance).
Obviously, this has to be remedied so we need to put radar into the simulation. But radar makes things quite complicated and has serious implications outside of just the FSCAI program itself.
One concept we should keep in mind is balance. Generally as far as possible we don't want to give the AI pilots any capability that the user can't have (if he has the right aircraft and equipment) and also we don't want to give the user an unfair potential advantage over any AI adversary no matter what his FSCAI equipment can do.
Right now, without radar for the AI, that advantage of user over AI exists - many airplanes the user can fly have some form of radar, and Tacpack has radar-guided missiles like the AIM-120 that can strike well beyond visual range.
So let's think about how to give the AI pilots some useful radar capabilities.
Right now ground-based guns (only guns, not missiles) can be tagged as 'radar guided'. What this does in practical terms is that the gunners can target an aircraft regardless of visibility if the aircraft is within their radar range, and they can shoot at the aircraft so long as it remains painted on their gun radar even if they can't see it. The 'gun radar' isn't explicitly defined, it's assumed to have a visibility cone of 360 degrees and the range as being the same as the weapon range.
I see us giving the advantages of radar to AI aircraft in stages, starting with the easiest and going on to the more difficult areas later.
Step 1. Extend targeting capability of aircraft equipped with radar.The important attributes of a radar set are its range and visibility cone. Since airborne radar capability varies widely its obvious we have to define radar sets as "weapons" to FSCAI, but weapons that don't shoot they just have special targeting capabilities. We already allow a weapon type of "RADAR" and there are couple of experimental sets already in the database (the RP-21 and RP-22 radars typically found on the MiG-21). It should be a simple matter to do an additional check in the targeting functions to see if the aircraft has a radar set attached to it, and if it does, can that radar detect an enemy aircraft within its range and visibility cone? If so, treat the target as visible to the AI pilot whether we can see it or not.
Step 2. Extend targeting capability to ground based radars.It is possible to define a radar set with a range and visibility cone and attach it to a ground unit. (Bear in mind ground units already can have radar-guided guns.) But here we are talking about giving long-range detection capability to certain ground units. What would they do with that capability? What they do in the real world is pass on that information to friendly interceptors who can then approach the target deemed "best" by the ground radar. Once close the aircraft's own targeting capabilities would take over (whether that's an eyeball or a radar in the airplane).
Here's our basic problem with that. How do we define an "friendly interceptor?" My first idea is to use the "role code" placed on the aircraft's vehicle definition in FSCAI. Role codes are A=Attack, F=Fighter, FB=Fighter/Bomber, LB=Level Bomber, DB=Dive Bomber, T=Transport. I would say that only type "F" qualifies as an interceptor. The ground radar, on seeing an enemy aircraft within range and within its cone, could then look for friendly "F"-role aircraft airborne within intercept range of the enemy, and if any were found they would be vectored towards the enemy aircraft by the ground radar station. Think of this as a "pre-targeting" function. It's really GCI - Ground Controlled Intercept - for AI.
So now the problem of balance rears its head. User aircraft don't have GCI. They might have an unrealistic 360-degree radar set but that's about it. How important is this balance issue? Ultimately it would be solved by including GCI as a capability of FSCAI, but that's a major effort and not going to happen tomorrow.
Step 3. Allow AI-controlled units (ground or air or sea) to launch radar-guided missiles.As far as coding goes this capability already exists. From a pure simulation point of view the code that guides a heat-seeking missile to a flying target is not different from code that guides a "radar-guided" missile. And that problem is already solved, as the many times I've gone down in flames to a missile attests. The only real difference in how FSCAI would handle an incoming radar-guided missile as opposed to a heat-seeking one is that 1) chaff, not flare, is used to spoof it, 2) another avialable countermeasure is a radar jammer and 3) Radar guided missiles can be detected where heat-seekers generally can't.
So now you see the balance problems. Radar-guided missiles are long-ranged and deadly over heat-seekers - but because they are guided by radar signals they can be detected by radar warning receivers in aircraft that can warn the pilot when he is being painted by a radar, roughly its direction and signal strength, when he's locked on by it, and when a missile is launched. This information is critical to survival in modern air combat!
Although a few user aircraft have a radar warning receiver it is either a non-functioning dummy device or tied in with Tacpack to show warnings about Tacpack-only radar sites and missiles. Most don't have anything at all. Nothing of course supports FSCAI missiles because we haven't even established an interface they could use. One thing we could do right now without much effort would be to play an audio tone to give some form of warning - a slow beep when a radar is painting you, a faster one when you are locked on, and a fast and loud one when a missile is launched. That wouldn't be hard to program at all.
So, is it fair to give AI the capability to launch radar-guided missiles at user aircraft that, while the user can detect them in a primitive way (using audio tones from FSCAI) can't see the direction and distance of the threat?
Or do you think we should wait on radar-guided missiles in FSCAI until we develop an interface and a 2D popup gauge that can be installed in a user aircraft to give it accurate, realistic radar warning capabilities?
Step 4. Stealth capabilities of aircraft.Once we have all the first three steps the last is to implement a "radar resistance" factor into aircraft definitions by some means (perhaps another "device"?) Since the late 1980s some aircraft have been carefully designed to reduce their detectability by enemy radars. The most modern generation of fighters increasingly depend on this feature for their advantage over the enemy. Modern air combat is a radar war with long-range kills. Stealth aircraft like the F-35 and others have a distinct advantage in this radar and computer based air combat. But while it's not techically difficult to implement stealth in FSCAI we have to get the first three stages done before it has much meaning.
Thanks for your input, all ideas and thoughts on this are welcome,
Dutch
Original Radar discussion