Missiles: Do they ever miss???

[Puke]

I think the Nerfman is right on the ball, technically. although i think everyone should take a deep breath before continuing the discussion. seekers, if anything like modern weapons, should probably be jamable. since most all sci-fi games are basically 1900-modern day naval combat in space, it stands to reason they should act like modern weapons.

on the other hand, it is kind of hard to predict how things will operate in the far future, and we have certainly seen several reversals in military paradigms through history.

as for Rock Paper Scisors, if ECM did affect seekers, it would make them pretty useless in the game. but who is to say the would not be useless anyway? maybe they become obsolete? but if they are being deployed, it stands to reason that those people deploying them found a way arround countermeasures.

in ww2, we were working on cat-bombs, or cat guided bombs which operated on the principal that a cat would always land on its feet and would avoid water, we thought it would be a good way to make sure our bombs hit ships in water. maybe in se4 they perfected a space-borne Version of this technology that lets seekers always hit a ship in space. (no, i did not just make that up)

[This message has been edited by Puke (edited 04 May 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

I see that with active ECM, the jamming will rise at the same rate as the missile's sensors, ruining the missile's tracking system.
I currently think that passive ECM like decoys and stealth would me much easier to detect close up. Thus, effective ECM for ships would be in the active forms.

Despite any ECM;
I think CSMs could get the 100% accuracy without knowing where exactly the enemy ship is, by bLasting the entire tactical square.
Meanwhile, beams cut through only a tiny fraction of the square, and so have a decent chance of missing. Incinerator & Wave motion gun beams are really thick, so they get a big to-hit bonus since they cover more of the square as they go through.

[jc173]

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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?

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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.

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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).]

[Suicide Junkie]

Nerfman: thanks for the links... I'll take a look around there. I am already convinced that ECM would be effective against the targetting systems, but what do you think about the saturation attack to get 100% accuracy with reduced damage?

I apologise for any agressive Posts, this forum should be for gaining knowledge foremost.

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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.

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Thanks. I still don't see how you could get a false ping appear to come from the side. That would leave a flickering line of sensor ghosts connecting you and the missile

What if your missile sends out random patterns of sensor pulses, then listens, and only follows the recieved signal that matches the timing and frequency spacing of the transmission.
To get an ECM sensor ghost of the right "color" you'd have to guess lucky and hit the missile with the correct pattern of sensor returns.

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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?

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I figured that was why the CSM only does 75 damage. Most of the nuke is wasted. I was going to make CSMs not target planets, and have a specific nuke missile to hit planets with that would be more effective.
75 damage is only enough to destroy a missile launcher and an engine or two.

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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.

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Sounds like you want drone launchers with kamikaze warheads aboard

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 04 May 2001).]

[nerfman]

Well, some are right in that this discussion is getting a little heated. Sorry myself to all for getting too worked up, but I do like a little argument now and then. For anyone who seriously would like to see some of the current systems in order to gain a little more understanding, check out the following

AN/SLQ-32 Overview, shipboard tacital ECM and ESM. Neat package and there is a lot of material http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/s.../an-slq-32.htm

summary of all US Navy ship systems. Maybe this will inspire some new components http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/s...aps/index.html

Same as above but for aircraft. Check out the list of countermeasures. There's a lot of good reading of you can handle the terse nature of some of the dsicussions. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/index.html

Once more, I'll try to be more informative and save the combat for the Rage and Phong. Hope somebody learned something. nerf

[jc173]

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Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
Thanks. I still don't see how you could get a false ping appear to come from the side. That would leave a flickering line of sensor ghosts connecting you and the missile

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Got me, I'm pretty bad with EM physics, I've just read it's supposed to be possible, the actual methods used are probably classified. So I probably won't be telling you how anytime soon <G>

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What if your missile sends out random patterns of sensor pulses, then listens, and only follows the recieved signal that matches the timing and frequency spacing of the transmission.
To get an ECM sensor ghost of the right "color" you'd have to guess lucky and hit the missile with the correct pattern of sensor returns.

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Probably possible although the return time will depend on the range to the target? But once you get an intial return the rest of the patern should follow at pretty much the same interval as you sent them out. Its likely you would have to some encode the patterns into all missiles in flight at once so their signals didn't mutually intefere with each other.

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I figured that was why the CSM only does 75 damage. Most of the nuke is wasted. I was going to make CSMs not target planets, and have a specific nuke missile to hit planets with that would be more effective.
75 damage is only enough to destroy a missile launcher and an engine or two.

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Sounds like you want drone launchers with kamikaze warheads aboard

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Heh pretty much. I think that for the most part a lot of missile upgrades for ships etc don't require an entire overhaul of the launcher itself maybe some targetting system upgrades. Also I think that you should be somewhat limited in the number of missiles you can carry. Of course that would require that be treated like units or as a different type of supply so I'm not sure that it would work out all that well the way SE IV is currently set up. Might be too much detail for some people's tastes too.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Glad to see we're back to getting along here. I've been on too many other message Boards that turned into constant flame wars to want to see that here.

Anyway, as for creating false images "to the side", that could probably be accomplished by altering the phase of the signal. And as for following a "line of false sensor images", well, what if the "real" image is in the middle of the line? The missile can't just be programmed to seek the Last image (assuming it could figure out that there were multiple images). So even a line of images may be sufficient...

I may have to just look up some of nerfman's links. Back in my college days, I got a scholarship from the "Association of Old Crows" (Army EW association, IIRC). I'm sure they'd be shocked to hear I haven't kept up with EW technology .