"Bouncy castle? Heck, no! I want some of these!" Topic

Cool concept from the Russians: inflatable decoys!

link

"Dear Santa: This year I have been extra good. May I please have an inflatable life-sized Su-27, T-72, and Scud launcher…?"

Unfortunately, the Russians are some 65 years behind the game…

Damon.

Naw they still have 50000 mbts in cold storage.They also taught the iraqis to do maskirovka….bombing of silouhettes on airfields…..later in Yugoslavia Nato claimed to have killed 100,s of tanks ,it ended up being less than 50.

We had deception units with similar stuff back in the day.

Some even had heat panels to give a proper signature.

Cool stuff. A yard full of soviet tanks would be very cool.

I need a Sukhoi for the front lawn…..

A yard full of soviet tanks would be very cool.

Reminds me of the field tests at CLASSIFIED Base in CLASSIFIED. It was like a freaking May Day Parade in the middle of the state of CLASSIFIED

Supposedly the Serbs plugged in microwaves near their SAM decoys, having discovered that this would radiate at a parallel intensity to certain radars. But that's the Serbs themselves bragging about how clever they were, so take it with a grain of salt.

I'm sure there was some exaggeration by them, but to be fair, the post-war bomb assessment was very critical of the claims by NATO.

Apparently, the actual damage done to real weapons systems was rather miniscule.

They did manage to detect and down a Stealth Fighter too, so should not be underestimated.

A WWII idea that seems to have stuck around … Of course Sun Tzu said something about Warfare being a matter of deception …

"They did manage to detect and down a Stealth Fighter too, so should not be underestimated."

As I understand it they were greatly aided but the NATO strike planers who routinely used the same ingress & egress routes time after time.

jdg

Surprised they didn't learn their lessons from Vietnam.

Then again, perhaps they didn't bone up on their history, e.g. something about "…those uninformed about history are doomed to repeat it…".

I was under the impression the older radar sets worked better than expected, since they were long-wave sets. Apparently, the Stealth is designed to work better against newer, shorter waved radar.

Nothing new really.

M4 Sherman (inflatable)…

or WWI (albeit not inflatable)

Cool, 1-2-1 scale mini's… What painting service can I use?

Inflatable decoys are great if pegged down securely -I recall a wet and windy morning chasing a 'Rapier' missile unit across a field….

I used to spend quite a bit of time looking for inflatable T-64s and BMPs and they were truly incredible works of art – the light and shade painted on create to wheels, etc, was incredibly realistic. They also had heaters and a fiendish array of pipework to create a realistic IR signature, though I never saw that in action. However, the illusion was sometimes ruined by gun-barrels waving lazily in a breeze.

I was under the impression the older radar sets worked better than expected, since they were long-wave sets. Apparently, the Stealth is designed to work better against newer, shorter waved radar.

That more or less sums up the overall concept of signature suppression…
On the other side, explains the need for frequency agility.

Hmmm, I could use an inflatable Lamborghini, Porsche, or Grav Tank to impress the neighbors.

…or at least impress the inflatable missus!

My inflateable missus is always impressed, give her one love bite and she goes down.

Ah yes, immortal Billy Connolly:

"I want my bloody money back!"
"Why sir? What seems to be the problem?"
"She went down on me!"
"If I'd known that, I'd have charged you another fiver, Sir."