System level considerations

Platform

Aerostats

The radar stations move to a different place every day, i.e. the dark patches are somewhere else every night. Since dozends of platworms would be needed per radar section this would lead to a major effeort manually redistributing them everyday. Summary of cons:

• Effort setup and redistribute aerostats
• Cost of the gas filling can become prohibitive
• Likely there is not enough gas available/ deployable to the aerostats.
• Aerostats are easy targets

Gliders

Pros

• Can be easily distributedonce air borne
• large flight range
• Low self-noise
• Good detection range

COns:

• Not trivial to start dozends of them
• Need a large enough patch to land them
• Effort to collect and recharge the landed gliders
• Can potentially move towards/with the target
• more effort to set up than copter drones

Quadcopters

Pros

• easy to deploy
• precise landing even on small patches
• little effort to recharge

Cons

• Limited sensing range while on ground
• Limited flight range
• Self-noise while flying

Suppose the sensors are operating on the ground but they are mounted on a quadcopter which during daylight and while there is no attack wave swarm out and find suitable placed to land (with help of GPS). It waits in place. It might not have perfect vision/hearing but maybe enough to figure out something is going on. When an air raid has been detected in generally then the drone rises to improve its vision since the resting location is known we could use that as a basis for localization. In the morning the copters fly to their base station for recharging.