Missiles: Do they ever miss???

[nerfman]

Sorry captain

I just argue strongly, no offense meant, and also get a little riled up when people try to BS me in an otherwise intellectual conversation. Its annoying at people who talk about Aaron this and Aaron that like they are are his mother or something. You can disagree with me and even trade barbs, that's no big. I also don't like Star Trek if you can't tell, but the panzie thing was just a poke. If I offended your any other future Star Fleet officers, please accept my humblest apologies. (Oh, and both my degrees are in physics, so you know I don't really think anything about Quantum is anything less than spectacular). Later

Sorry had to go out for a sec. Seriously, look at it from my point. I posted some pretty hefty Messages, not to sound great, but because I thought I could really contribute something. I actually looked up some stuff in some in old texts and tried to be informative, at first at least. Despite all this effort, a few people pull some agruments off the top of their head to rebuff this without even putting any effort into it. That gets me a little testy. Later

[This message has been edited by nerfman (edited 03 May 2001).]

[This message has been edited by nerfman (edited 03 May 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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1) A missile seeker doesn't have the same power reserves as an entire ship with an huge power grid to draw off. A ship has a lot more energy availiable to jam incoming seekers with. Your resolsution may increase as you say, but the intensity of the jaming can still be more, and getting closer to this powerful jamming makes it worse. Just imagine trying to grab a fiends hat off his head in a dark room. Your eyes get adjusted then bam, your buddy shines a flashlight in your face from across the room in an attempt to jam you. Are you trying to tell me that as you walk closer to the light it will be easier to see your friend's hat behind it??

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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?

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).


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.

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.

quote:

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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.


[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 03 May 2001).]

[nerfman]

"He's not talking about *distance*, he's talking about image size."

Actually, if that is what he means, then the technical term is solid angle, which is basically the two dimensional angular area that something occupies, kind of like the envelope of different angles that you can point and still hit. When something is real close, there are a lot of different angles you can point and still hit, but as it gets farther, you have to steady your aim because the image is smaller.

That will change like the difference in square distances. But two points here:

1) When talking about jamming - the energy it takes to detect or jam a target is more important which is why being CLOSER makes missiles easier to jam.

2) So what if the missiles sees the ship as "bigger." Real missiles don't do damage by pointing at ships like a gun. You are right in that missiles would have an easier time pointing at a target if they were closer, but who cares. Missiles do damage by getting close to a ship and then exploding. Most missiles today don't even point at the target while they fly. They point to where its going to be. They need sensors to tell them what the targets velocity and momentum are so they can predict where to meet the target. The sensors they use to do this are what is jammed.

And missiles wouldn't be anything different if this were enacted. They would be missiles. To me, the defining point is range and the ability to be outran or shot down. Based on current EW practices in the real world, it simply seems odd that a race w/ superior EW capability not be given an advatage in a missile duel.

I would like to see it modable thats all. With so much else that is modable, it is just surprising that such is not.

[nerfman]

You're right. I was stupid to even suggest such nonesense. Sorry to put my peice in on this discussion.

[jc173]

quote:

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Originally posted by nerfman:
"2) So what if the missiles sees the ship as "bigger." Real missiles don't do damage by pointing at ships like a gun. You are right in that missiles would have an easier time pointing at a target if they were closer, but who cares. Missiles do damage by getting close to a ship and then exploding. Most missiles today don't even point at the target while they fly. They point to where its going to be. They need sensors to tell them what the targets velocity and momentum are so they can predict where to meet the target. The sensors they use to do this are what is jammed.

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When Traveller updated to the New Era they changed the typical missiles from being armed with Nuke or HE warheads to warheads with nuclear pumped X-Ray laser warheads. They gave a pretty convincing explanation for the change, granted I'm not a physics expert. Part of the reason was that as a missile got closer to a ship it became a lot easier for PD and energy weapons to achieve a hard kill on the missile. So maybe a missile doesn't have to achieve the same proximity with that sort of warhead? Just a thought.

[Suicide Junkie]

Nerfman, WTF are you talking about???

I know you have a point about the missiles & ECM but I just don't get it.

Please don't give up on me. I'm just trying to tell you how I see these things.
If I've been kinda harsh, I'll pass the blame onto my boss, who has been agressive lately.

I was serious when I said I've got no military experience beyond playing videogames, and I've only taken a few physics courses in my life.

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

[Nitram Draw]

If missile accuracy was moddable you would have more variety available, more fun/challange. Researching higher levels could give you more accurate missiles in addition or in place of higher damage, speed etc. There could even be 2 different tech trees for the same basic missile, one the was more accurate and one like it is now but none that does both.

[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]

quote:

---

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.

quote:

---

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).]