Can't Take My Eyes Off Of RCS
It is a reality that in the last decade signature control engineering has received growing attention from worldwide navies. Among these signatures, RCS (Radar Cross Section) is probably one of the most recognized ones, even to the uninitiated, due to its strong visible impact on the shaping of a ship’s superstructure.
If it is true that it is quite easy by surfing the web to find the latest developments in small or large vessels which emphasize the shaping of the superstructure, it is worth asking the question, often raised during IDS’s work, on the cost benefit analysis of very expensive cross-platform designing.
RCS control impacts the entire vessel such as the internal volumes and the equipment (antennas, weapons, etc.), and may also receive the disapproval from those in charge of maintaining the ship’s costs under control, especially when the core of those costs are not on the combat side.
Those who have the ambition or the unavoidable necessity to obtain the best solution, while compromising between performance optimization of the onboard warfare systems and design cost reduction, need to follow three specific steps: 1) start from the very early stage of the ship design; 2) use prediction tools which have been structured to support the pressing and persistent development loops; 3) keep one eye on the costs and one on the performance.
In order to support the right engineering decision making, being effective in ship design development means being able to dictate every change happening in the superstructure’s configuration. This can be achieved by providing engineers with a prompt and correct response, and, at the same time, tracking all the changes made to reach a successful conclusion to the full design process, thus reducing the costs.
IDS has designed and developed a modular Ship Electromagnetic Design Framework system for Radar Cross Section - Ship EDF-RCS, a single environment for all the different tasks required to perform RCS analysis. The Ship EDF-RCS framework, which is characterized by user-friendliness, has been specifically developed over the last 3 decades as a central gear of the design mechanism, after collecting customers’ and IDS engineers’ needs and requirements.