Austria-Bohemia-Hungary wrote:The Corparation wrote:>Fixed MAD systems.
You do realize that MAD arrays have ranges in only the hundreds of meters right? Not exactly good for ocean surveillance.
No corp. He's pointing systems that have a hard time distinguishing 10,000 tons of submarine from a km away against background natural magnetism skywards in the hope that he'll see an F-22 before the F-22 drops a cluster of SDB's. He also thinks submarines use MAD to detect eachother and MPA (on a 10,000 ton metal tube no less) instead of y'know... sonar... or ESM...
It isn't that they have trouble distinguishing the submarines. It's quite easy to distinguish them, since submarines are massive, fairly obvious things, and detectors don't need to be really sensitive to detect them. Most MADs in service with the USN are from WW2 or around abouts anyway, and use fluxgate detectors that are not very sensitive or Hi-Tech. There are new generations of MADs that were being made in the 1980s based on cryogenic SQUIDs and molten potassium detectors later on (the '90s) but these never made it to the field. Partly because the Cold War ended and submarine threats evaporated and partly because no one wants to fly in a rickety ass P-3 with some cryogenic tanks or molten metal flowing around them.
Ferromagnetically guided weapons were a threat in the 1980's (or possibly the 1940's, it's unclear) according to MGVoYN's patron saint, R.E. Simpkin, in his book Antitank, and I suspect had the Nazi powers had the capability to make 1980s semiconductors and cryonics fit inside a missile they would have been an actual threat to combat warships (at least until degaussing took place).
Anyway the thing he quotes is obviously talking about radars seeing radars, not MADs seeing MADs, nor about a submarine with a MAD detecting an airplane. I suppose, were the submarine's own magnetic field and the Earth field filtered out, you could detect an airplane by the magnetic energies of its internal mechanisms such as the engines, but since the plane is broadly made of aluminum or some non-ferromagnetic metal, it may not be as detectable as a submarine made mostly of steel. Then again, both titanium and aluminum are paramagnetic, but the plane is still an order of magnitude or two smaller in mass than the submarine, and more importantly the medium it flies through is not particularly conductive (haHAA) to magnetic detection. Water is.