Originally Posted by Geehovah
Gravelbelly, I missed your apology for the slur on my character
You did indeed - I carelessly assumed you were part of the ill-informed "A-S was an afterthought bolt-on" brigade, and not (clearly) far more aware of the ins and outs of the project management than myself. I apologise unreservedly.
I'll also admit that I hadn't appreciated the full complexity of trials planning until a decade into my career, when I got to work on a cute little demonstrator project that flew in TIARA. We had two trials engineers, who spent well over a year negotiating and planning the flight profiles that would be required to test the capability we were attempting to demonstrate - using one aircraft, for one subsystem, for one specific area of interest.
I'm quite happy to acknowledge that air to ground wasn't "main effort"... the A-S modes were scheduled for last, because as you point out there was no point in delivering them any earlier.
This XI Sqn article gives some idea of the A-S modes available in the radar; it should be obvious that that kind of processing has to have been a primary driver in the original design of the radar.
My defence is only this - that while A-S may have been a primary driver of the radar, it was not necessarily a primary driver of the aircraft. I've obviously confused the two...