Radios, Warfare, and You; a crash course to EWAR

A very bare-bones explanation of ELINT, Missiles and general EWAR principles that'll maybe help you understand what the game is telling you a bit better.

Radar Detection

The basic operation of the SEARCH Radar panel should be familiar to most people; A line goes around a circle and makes a beep when it sees something. But what is it seeing and how?

A strong radio wave is emitted as the device spins, and what it's 'seeing' is those radio waves bouncing back from the target. The time differential is used to determine the range. The fact that a radar involves sending out a signal will be important in a moment.

When an object is detected, you will see it as a horizontal line perpendicular to its direction from you. This represents the strength of the return. This is slightly fuzzy. In the real world, this is the proportion of sent radiation returned, which can be useful for determining the size of the detected object, but because some things are more mirror-like, a small panel box truck may have a larger return than, say, a rounded passenger airliner.

Does highfleet account for this? I don't know, but I suspect it doesn't. For now it's safe to assume that 'wider line means more or bigger objects.'

If you want to track things in real time, as it takes quite some while for the radar apparatus to spin, you can switch to 'sector mode' and have it quickly oscillate across a certain 60-degree region, giving you constant intel about a contact.

A toggle also exists to switch between air and ground mode.

Lastly the 'one' and 'infinity' buttons. The infinity button, while depressed, means the radar is permanently on. Pressing it will disable the system. Pressing '1' will complete the current cycle and then disable the system. Or if the system is off, pulse the system through one cycle. We will discuss why you want to manage this in the next section.

You also have a TRACKING radar. Instead of a special panel, this is just the point at which red icons appear in real time on your map. At this point, you have sufficient resolution to know their exact velocity and heading.

ELINT

Elint stands for "Electronic Intelligence." Which covers a rather dizzying array of practical fields, but for our purposes, only one: The detection of enemy radars.

Recall our discussion of how a radar functions. For visualization, imagine shining a flashlight and looking for anything reflective. You might have to get pretty close, but anyone you point it at, even further than you can, say, see the shine of their metal belt buckle, can see a light.

This is where your ELINT panel comes in. When a source of radio waves strong enough to be RADAR is detected, the panel will begin to light up. The string of circles lamps on the outside give an indication of the relative direction of the signal source. The smaller lamps that fill up are an indication of SIGNAL STRENGTH. This can translate to range in a vague way, but not necessarily. A strong radar far away and a weak one nearby may cause the same 'return.'

Consider more lamps meaning the enemy is more certain of your location.
(Edit: For the purposes of the game, this apparently does translate directly to range-to-signal source.)

Now consider that you are not the only one in the world with this device. Thus the continuous operation of your own RADAR may be triggering enemy detectors! You are, in essence, spinning a flashlight over your head, so it is good to practice some discipline in when and why you operate it. If you know the enemy is hunting you want to be able to see them, but electronic detection is a mutual affair!

You can pulse your radar and then change course to throw off enemy interception. Use strike groups with their own radars to avoid exposing your main fleet, and other tactics. Much like stealth games you may be more familiar with though, only turn your 'flashlight' on when you must, and when you're comfortable being seen.

Missiles

Tactical Missiles (the kind you fire from the map screen,) come in several flavors, but only two guidance types.
Most missiles are a combination of ARH and SARH. That is, "Active Radar Homing" and "Semi Active Radar Homing."

If an enemy is within the range of your tracking radar, that is, they're now a real-time red marker on your map, any missile you fire at them will be in SARH mode. The missile is 'watching' the return from your ships own radar, using its stronger energy and the displacement from itself to accurately triangulate the enemies speed and direction to intercept it. It will thus be very accurate.

If you do not have tracking resolution on the enemy, missiles will default to ARH mode. They will boot up their own, smaller onboard radar and use it to less accurately close with the enemy. This means you can fire at enemies you know the location of but can't 'see' but without the help of your ship's radar, your weapons will not be as accurate as they could be.

The other type, on missiles with a designation ending in P, is 'ARM' or "Anti-Radiation Missile." Instead of using radar to detect the enemy, these missiles instead simply point themselves at the strongest source of radio waves and dive at it. In essence they SEEK OUT enemy radar. This is another reason to keep your own radar off! With no radiation to seek, the missile will simply wander off, or even turn on another enemy target. (It's possible your own missiles will seek you in absence of any other radiation source! This may be a bug or not, but consider turning your radar off before firing.)

Jamming

Jamming is easily misunderstood as a 'stealth' capability, due to it being used this way in other games, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Consider it this way.

In our prior example of a radar being like a flashlight, the enemy can see you if tehy can see your light. Their own weapons will be tracking the reflection of their lights. If you don't want them to find you, you can turn your light off, but what can you do if they already have?

Since their weapons systems are looking for the reflection of their 'light source,' what you can do is turn on the strongest light you can. Now any missiles heading your way can only see light wherever they look. With no way to differentiate targets, they'll miss! huzzah!

But there are two problems. In order to confuse the enemy missiles, you are essentially setting off a flashbang that never stops, as long as your jammer is on. There is no way that enemy ELINT can miss this. An active jammer announces your location to EVERYONE. That said, it will also stop them getting a good read on you with any of their actual RADAR. The Jammer is to confuse people who already know where you are, not for hiding!

The other problem is our friend from the prior section, the ARM. He's not blinded by the jammer. Quite the contrary, the jammer is the biggest bullseye he's ever seen. If the enemy has launched an AR missile at you, an active jammer will draw it in like a magnet! This can be used to protect more valuable ships as an absolute last ditch resort, but ideally we turn our RADAR off and not try to jam ARMs.

Conclusion

I won't really go into SIGINT or the IR widget here, yet. Maybe later but they're out of scope for this mini-guide.

I just saw a lot of confusion about the radar-related aspects of the game and wanted to help clear them up.

In closing; imagine Highfleet as a stealth game. Played in near pitch blackness on an infinite flat plane. You have control of a flashlight, and a device that shows you where you see enemy flashlights. Using these things together, your objective is to see, and not be seen, for as long as possible.

Hopefully that helps people who came in without knowing the technicalities of these systems!

[Zeky]

here is an extra tip to understand missile warfare, the AI cheats, or more like it has to cheat to be functional (like in 4X games where the AI starts with the map fully explored so its pathfinding can work), once spot one of your strike groups, the enemy will know the location of all your strike groups, so you can expect that even your strike groups that were undetected will be targeted, decoys wont work and hit and run tactics also don't work.
Also since the enemy knows your location after spotting any of your ship groups, they will also send missiles with their arming/homming distance so it arms at your ship group exact location, putting a jammer in front to protect your ships wont work. But Strike Groups will also target the closest ship group, you can use light ships that can dodge missiles to be detected first to save ship groups with heavier ships.

[Zuao]

Would allso like to add that Jammers are cummulative. Meaning you can create a juicy bullseye using a light, fast, missile-and plane killing specialist. However, don't know how much of a spoiler this is, but enemies will get to within 400m to fire a missile at you. If you know where they're coming form (thanks to intel), positioning your interceptor between the enemy and your fleet will give you the best of both worlds. radar lock on jamming and a juicy radar target for ARM.

Two jammers will suffice, as far as I've experimented. Your interception weapon of choice is up to preference. I personally prefer to use Sprints and 4x 2a37s

[Silverbeard]

Sombrero Giles:
The most important aspect of an intercepted message is the enemy squadron's heading. It'll usually say something like 'travelling the route Umma Selin Markeb'. That means the squadron is going through those three cities. This will allow you to know where to go if you want to intercept or avoid them. Some messages may also have current position and bearing headings that will tell you where they are at the exact moment of message interception.

[Chort Slapper Supreme]

Excellent guide, I really appreciate you... shining a light... on this. Now if only I could figure out what the hell any messages, encrypted or not, mean when I intercept them.

[TruthWizard]

I feel like this will help me quite a bit lol. Thank you for this

[matt1934]

Something to note: An active jammer will also screw your ability to track anything with your radar. If you tried to use a radar and a jammer at the same time all you get is static on your radar

[Durendal.exe]

@calacorm Cool, added a note to that effect after that statement.

[calacorm]

Correction : You said in ELINT section "Consider more lamps meaning the enemy is more certain of your location." This is false, it represents how close the radar is to you (for the purpose of this game that is all we care about). Anything before danger close means they cant track you on radar yet. Once it is danger close it is reasonable to assume the Strike Group is tracking you on radar and coming for you and withing 700km.

[Graveyard Doctor]

@Laevateinn could you post an image of this tracking ship? I'm very new to this game and trying to figure out how to effectively use the intelligence gathering equipment. As of now the stuff on the Sevastepool is ineffective because of the size of the ship.

[ns Kfc]

yea this really helped