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).]

[Marty Ward]

If missiles were affected by the range (accuracy) modifier then you could tweak them to your liking. I don't know how hard it would be to change.

[dmm]

I would like to see missiles have a reasonable chance of missing (10%~20%) and be affected by ECM, BUT a missile that missed would keep trying until it ran out of fuel. So there would be an advantage to firing missiles from closer range. Also, maybe missile ECM should be different, forcing the defender to add yet another component to his ship.

However, having fooled with PDC for some time, I am not as unhappy with never-missing missiles as I once was.

[Suicide Junkie]

Since we are talking space combat distances here, and the distance from earth to moon is a half- light second and we see in SE4 that ships attack from at least that range, I see it this way.

Beams have to predict where their target will be one second from now. (150,000 KM at about range 4) If your enemy looks fuzzy due to ECM, you'll have a tougher time predicting which way he's facing and which way he'll go.

Seekers fly in the general direction of the enemy, so they can get hundreds of thousands of times closer than the ship's sensors before they have to make their final attack (at 1 KM from target) & explode.

At 100,000 times closer, your sensor power is up 10,000,000,000 times (r^2)
That's why missiles can see right through ECM & stealth.

[dmm]

quote:

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Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
At 100,000 times closer, your sensor power is up 10,000,000,000 times (r^2)
That's why missiles can see right through ECM & stealth.

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Good argument. But won't the ECM power also be higher by the same factor?

Your point about homing in on a fuzzy target that keeps getting closer and closer, as opposed to shooting at a fuzzy target from a distance, is still a good one. You may convince me yet. However, shouldn't ECM lower the missile's effective range or effective speed? The ECM would cause it to follow a less-precise homing course.

Also, you're assuming that the ECM merely makes the target "fuzzy," as opposed to making "bogeys." Maybe there ought to be different kinds of ECM. Normal kinds would be the fuzzy variety and would not affect missiles. The more advanced kinds would be the bogey variety and would affect everything.

[jc173]

quote:

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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.

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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.

[jc173]

quote:

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Originally posted by dmm:
Also, you're assuming that the ECM merely makes the target "fuzzy," as opposed to making "bogeys." Maybe there ought to be different kinds of ECM. Normal kinds would be the fuzzy variety and would not affect missiles. The more advanced kinds would be the bogey variety and would affect everything.

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Sounds sort of like the difference between a defenseive jammer and an offensive barrage jammer?

[Aussie Gamer]

I got a reply from God, Arron, and he says that it would be unfair to have ECM effect missiles as they are slow and can be dodge by ships.

If you are like me and think that this is wrong please e-mail Arron and ask him to have missiles effected by ECM and combat sensors.

If the change is effected we could have smart missiles, as the data allows for attack modifiers to be changed, with say a +30% chance to hit at higher tech levels.

One thing that I also thought about was that the defence modifier for the size of the ship/ fighter makes absolutely no difference to a missile, that seems a bit unfair as well.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Good argument. But won't the ECM power also be higher by the same factor?7

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That's only if the ECM works by "reaching out to touch someone"
If the ECM works by creating false bogeys, or masking the ship to look like background radiation, the effect would break down as you get close, and be better far away.

Cloaks can be detected during tactical, combat, when the ships are close.
So similarily, decoys could be seen through from close up.

The 10 billion times sensor boost of the missile more than makes up for the advanced sensors on any ship.

OTOH, if the ECM is reaching out to jam sensors with active interference, couldn't the missile be programmed to seek that source of interference?
Also, if the ship is sending out active ECM, there is a whole lotta garbage singnals coming in. There is also a very weak real signal from the ship. As your missile gets closer, the interference builds at the same rate as your sensor power, but so does the real ship's signal.
With the exact same software that is used to find the cloaked ship against the noisy background of space, you find the ship amidst the noisy background of interference.


Overall, consider the CSM. Unmodded, it claims to have a nuclear warhead. You don't need a direct hit with a nuke to hurt somebody

[Marty Ward]

At least we know the reason behind the design idea.