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You don't need to see the hat anymore. You look left, dark. You look right, dark. You look ahead, bright. Run forward and slam the 'friend'. Now throw a nuclear CSM punch and blow a big hole in the evil alien hat and it's mind-controlled host.
I'm no military physisist, and that example didn't work for me. Why can't you track a big ECM source anyways?
You can depends on the missile's seeker/seekers though, you would have to make specfic provisions to have the sensors and processors that are necessary for it to work. But it doesn't necessarily always work out that well. I know we're trying to get away from real world analogies here, but most modern missiles are not equipped with this homing mode. Which is either a comment on the effectiveness of this homing mode, the cost, or the state of current technology, not sure which is the major factor personally. Anyhow not all jammers work on brute force power, many of them "seduce" the missile into seeking a false target. Some methods I've read about include messing with the active range gate, by returning radar/active pulses to the missile on the same freq as its seeker thereby confusing it by messing up its range calculations. So you would have a bearing on the target but you wouldn't have the range to it. I think some ECM has a mode to generate a lot of false returns so the missile does not which target is the true one. Therefore it may be getting closer to what it thinks is a target but what in actuality is just a sensor ghost.
BTW: MM's ECM stands for "Electromagnetic coutermeasures," according to the description, which may be different from what you were thinking "ECM" stands for (electronic CM, I believe).
Should be the same deal.
Heres how I accept the 100% missile hitrate in SE4:
In tactical a ship can find even a cloaked ship.
In tactical a fighter can find even a cloaked ship.
So a missile (similar to a fighter in size) can find even a cloaked ship.
So, any vehicle/missile can locate any other to within 1 square at tactical combat distances. Your beams cut through that square, but are thin and sometimes miss. The CSM fills the entire square with a nuclear fireball and thus hits. The plasma missle spreads fiery plasma & antimatter throughout the square and thus hits.
I'm not sure this works for a straight detonating nuke warhead. There's nothing in space which robs a nuke of a lot of its damage from the pressure of shockwaves. There's definately thermal bloom and EMP/radiation, but to get the most out of the bLast wouldn't it still have to almost directly hit the target, thereby reducing it to the same operating paramters as a direct fire kinetic/energy weapon? Granted it can make course corrections if it can find the correct target. Personally I got around that by changing the description and my frame of mind by changing the warhead on the CSM to be a nuclear pumped X-Ray laser warhead so its more like a guided round of buckshot.
An example of this is trying to shoot DU bullets at camoed people in a valley VS napalming the valley.
To change this example into SE4,
replace DU bullets with DUC
replace camo with ECM
replace napalm with nuclear CSM
replace valley with combat square.
See above.
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2) For an active seeker, the radiation must travel both ways, so the energy disapates at something like 2 times the distance while while point jamming only travels one leg, from the ship back to the missile.
Which provides a constant 4x bonus for ECM. Of, course, if the seeker is using passive sensors, then there's no bonus.
I am all for more moddability in SE, but I feel missiles are fine the way they are.
Depends, not very many long range missiles that home in on manueving targets use passive sensors. There are ways to decoy or jam even those sensors, although some of them are questionable as to whether they would fall into the Category of PD or ECM in SEIV terms.
I'd honestly perfer to be able to make my own missiles have the launchers designed to fire missiles of a certain size, that way you could match different seekers, warheads, and propulsion systems together. There's a pretty good technical game based background on missiles in some of GDWs Traveller The New Era stuff, if you have a hankering to read about it. Some good items are in Fire Fusion and Steel and in Brilliant Lances.
[This message has been edited by jc173 (edited 04 May 2001).]
[This message has been edited by jc173 (edited 04 May 2001).]