Missiles: Do they ever miss???

[nerfman]

Will:

"Another thing is that missile jammers (at least currently) don't work that well, and have to work on one missile at a time."

What missile jammer is that? Saying current ECM technology can only jam on missile at a time is pretty much dead wrong.

Seekers will home in four basic ways:
Passive Homing - Seeker listens for energy, like an IR signature and then follows it unitl it hits. These are best jammed w/ decoys like chaff or even turning your radar off/kicking freqs (if it is an ARM seeker).
Active Homing - each seeker has its own mini radar and finds the target by using it. Good except that if all the missiles are tuned to the same freq, their radars jam each other and they go splash. This can limit the number of missiles you can fire due to possible freq bandwidth limitations. These can be tough to jam for the same reason since you will need to radiate on different bands simultaniously.
Semi-Active Homing - A third party "paints" the target w/ energy like CW radar waves or laser and the seeker chases the energy reflected off the target. Hard to jam, but since all the missiles are looking for energy the same freq there is the chance to inact one counter measure against them all. Destructive interference or having a decoy re-emit the homing freq can be efective.
Command - The seeker is basically being remote controlled like a TOW missile or wire guided torpedo. Jam up the platform that is guiding and you jam the missile.

The above are simplified a bit, but are basically how modern seeker work.

Of course these can be mixed and matched. For instance, our Aegis ships fire SM-2's that are command guidance w/ terminal semi-active homing.

Different types of guidance are sometimes easier or harder to jam. There are ECM devices that can effect more than one seeker. The SRBOC/SLQ-32 offers soft kill protection for more than one missile at a time. An EA-6B can Jam many platforms at once.

BTW if you don't like our "complaints" then post on one of the Star Trek threads or something. We are simply trying to point out a few areas were the game design could be greatly enriched. And Last unless you are like an EWC in the navy or something, don't be trying to tell me what current electronic warfare capabilities are. Hope yall enjoyed the lecture. Later

[This message has been edited by nerfman (edited 02 May 2001).]