>>21594855I don't consider myself a trekkie but I've seen TOS movies, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and Picard. I consider myself someone with a Master's of Electrical Engineering, an academic interest in astronomy (IE I don't own a telescope), and a decent photographer.
Basically, there's a reason why there's no direct comparison between "sensors" and current day technology. It just doesn't work.
Look at some of the rumors coming out of the military - UFOs coming out of the ocean didn't appear until the most recent upgrades. Why? The craft were moving at Mach 20+ and between doppler shift and pulse length, older radar simply couldn't detect them. But the newer radars designed for hypersonic missiles could see them.
Then there's space based radar. One of the main things that separated Arecibo from other "radio telescopes" was that it was capable of high power (gigawatt) radar pulses. The range was limited by the rotation of the earth and the speed of light - but even then, since the antenna could be moved over the dish, it could detect objects as far out as Jupiter. Funny that we let it collapse.
