quote:
Originally posted by Will:
I don't think that the ECM as it is now in the game should affect seekers. As I imagine it now, ECM is basically a component that jams a ships scanners (like having a ground base jam the frequency used by enemy radar, making it fairly useless, and forcing fire by eye). The the analogy of a machine gun seems to be a favorite for having ECM affect seekers instead of direct-fire; my rebuttal is that this would be a machine gun firing at a moving target miles away, assisted by a tracking system.
I agree with ECM jamming working on direct fire weapons because you're basically jamming what those weapons are using for targeting, but at the same time for a seeker to be able to seek something it has to use a sensor also, otherwise it would be pretty much the same as a dumb/no guidance rocket or a straight running torpedo.
Another thing is that missile jammers (at least currently) don't work that well, and have to work on one missile at a time. That said, the suggestion of Trachmyr is a realistic way to have "Anti-Missile ECM". Since all of you seem so hooked on realism (tell me, how realistic is it for people from a tiny world to move to a huge world, and NOT be crushed? or how one can make a RingWorld with only 20000kT of material? It's not realistic, could possibly be explained in terms of future technology if you streched it... the game isn't supposed to be real), how realistic is it for this missile jammer to effect 100 missiles the same as 1?
Depends on the jammer and seeker and which type of sensors and what modes they're operating in. But if the jammer is working on the basis of active range gate pull off or spurious target generation for radar jammers it should be jam affect most radar seekers that enter its effective cone.