Am I hallucinating or do AESA radars not maintain datalink on targets outside of your scan zone?

They should be keeping constant track of a target inside the radars FOV, regardless of what scan scope/scale you are currently using shouldn’t they? But when you are using TWS the radar just completely forgets any radar contact that is not inside the scan zone after a few seconds. I thought they mentioned implementing this for PESA/AESA radars. Did that just never happen?

Something like this

well, those are both objectively superior radars to AESA ingame right now, so not great comparison.

but you are right, AESA should be able to do this seamlessly but PESA has to switch back to the TWS contact really quick then switch back to do this iirc

They might have better/more T:R modules but the two AESA we have in game are as new or newer in the case of the EL/M-2052, so should have very similar feature sets.

that one is still less advanced than the APG-81, sure its newer, but iirc is first israeli prodcution fighter AESA, so is more of a 1st gen AESA, even then it is outright weaker than most 1st gen AESA\

they picked that and the rafale to be first AESA in game for a reason

Even so, the " continuously update known contacts inside the radars FOV even if it is not in the current scan zone" feature seems to be a common addition to every single AESA I have seen discussed or promoted.

1 Like

yeah, it is one of the most WT relevant features of AESA radars.

1 Like

wait, nevermind, if it isnt in scan zone why would radar be updating it?

And as of yet doesn’t seem to be implimented. I thought there was a post by Gaijin discussing the speed at which ESA radars update/scan and they said while the main scan pattern may not be significantly faster than mechanical radars, they would be able to nearly instantly update any contacts you have fired a missile at.

Because the beam is temporarily re-steered at the last known position of any detected contacts for a fraction of a second to keep its position/speed/alt/heading constantly updated as long as it is within the FOV of the radar set, even if the radar operator is scanning a total different area of the sky.

1 Like

ah ok

it will be once we get better AESA radars

That’s up to gaijiggles tbh, since we cannot and will never find any primary source documentation on modern ESA radar scan speeds, they are free to buff or nerf any future radars sets without anyone being able to prove them wrong.

would the APG-81 video not work? funny thing is, since its from 2006, its for a prototype APG-81 so production probably even better

Knowing Gaijin, probably not lol.

yeah, very frustrating they do stuff like that sometimes

2 Likes

Yes, and this was reported for RBE2 radar on the Rafale using a primary source. But as it is, a lot of AESA features won’t be prioritized for implementation until more countries receive AESA radars.

Spoiler

Fully target tracks independent of search volume

What we have right now, is the radar updates the TWS target every time it switches bars, but the target has to be within the scan zone. Constant updates. in or outside the scan zones are not a thing.

Yeah thats kinda what I figured based on the behavior I observed.