Yellow Palace
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The concept for the Typhon Combat System hinged on the development of an active electronically-scanned phased array radar which could be employed aboard ship. Difficulties with the SPG-59 led to the demise of the project. Without it, you need separate target illumination radars, and you've got Aegis. Or you make your search radar into an illuminator, and you've got Patriot, and can easily be saturated, though it does prove that track-via-missile works very well, and that C-band is appropriate for search, tracking and fire control purposes.
I'm not sure anyone has successfully developed a phased array radar using a Luneberg lens; the Type 984 did use one, but was fundamentally a traditional radar with an unusual focussing arrangement. For that matter, I'm not sure anyone has even tried, other than the SPG-59.
Planar phased arrays, though, are commonplace. And, in fact, the US Army was testing an AESA - the Multifunction Array Radar for Nike-X - contemporaneously with SPG-59, though operating in L band for ballistic missile defence. A planar array would probably need more computing power, a dangerous proposition in the early 1960s, but would dispense with the enormous dielectric sphere. I suspect this would also allow a larger array than the ~5 foot diameter sphere of SPG-59, which limited antenna gain and therefore drove up power requirements.
My guess, based on the number of elements, is that you'd get a ~18.5 foot array for cruisers, and a ~10.5 foot array for DLGs, with about four times the gain of the SPG-59 (I can't find the dome diameter, but believe it was ~5 feet for the DLG radar) and therefore a quarter of the power required. Granted, the thing would still have been based on valve technology, and the necessary computers would be power hogs themselves, but it at least corresponds in general outlines to systems successfully developed.,
That being the case - what if the USN had chosen to develop a C-band planar phased array for the SPG-59? Could this have been a simpler system to develop, allowing the Typhon Combat System to enter service circa 1970?
I'm not sure anyone has successfully developed a phased array radar using a Luneberg lens; the Type 984 did use one, but was fundamentally a traditional radar with an unusual focussing arrangement. For that matter, I'm not sure anyone has even tried, other than the SPG-59.
Planar phased arrays, though, are commonplace. And, in fact, the US Army was testing an AESA - the Multifunction Array Radar for Nike-X - contemporaneously with SPG-59, though operating in L band for ballistic missile defence. A planar array would probably need more computing power, a dangerous proposition in the early 1960s, but would dispense with the enormous dielectric sphere. I suspect this would also allow a larger array than the ~5 foot diameter sphere of SPG-59, which limited antenna gain and therefore drove up power requirements.
My guess, based on the number of elements, is that you'd get a ~18.5 foot array for cruisers, and a ~10.5 foot array for DLGs, with about four times the gain of the SPG-59 (I can't find the dome diameter, but believe it was ~5 feet for the DLG radar) and therefore a quarter of the power required. Granted, the thing would still have been based on valve technology, and the necessary computers would be power hogs themselves, but it at least corresponds in general outlines to systems successfully developed.,
That being the case - what if the USN had chosen to develop a C-band planar phased array for the SPG-59? Could this have been a simpler system to develop, allowing the Typhon Combat System to enter service circa 1970?
