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Post by RA2lover on Oct 1, 2016 23:52:20 GMT
What i mean is - your conventional gimbal-steered missile ends up losing a significant amount of delta-v while turning so it can thrust at a direction where it can compensate for turning radius properly. A missile with proper RCS thrusters wouldn't have that issue, though the game's limitation on minimum throat size(which leads to a limitation on minimum thruster size as pretty much everything else is based on it) prevents this from being done in a reasonably compact package.
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Post by breadmenace on Oct 2, 2016 19:07:20 GMT
With regards to RCS thrusters on missiles, there's real-life precedent for more than just thrust vectoring--PAC-3 kinetic interceptors employ large numbers of very small solid motors to achieve skin-to-skin contact with their target in the terminal phase, for example. Being able to rotate and translate without a gimballed rear motor could be useful. LOS rate rejection should suffice against the flares used in the game (unless they're SERIOUSLY overpowering and blind the sensor).
IR missiles not having a visible forward seeker head is a little off, and adding it would probably do a lot to make lasers a more effective point defense tool. You could get away without one and deal with command guidance for engagements where you have a sensor platform close enough to the missiles to provide adequate sensor resolution, though that brings up questions about datalink tx/rx bandwidth and latency (questions which I think would be interesting, mind you!).
I'd like to have more options re: seeker heads in general. We already know that missiles could benefit from better guidance, but I'd also be willing to pay for multi-mode guidance. Terminal radar + IR homing can reject flares even if you don't have an IIR seeker at the cost of increased mass and power usage.
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Post by nivik on Oct 3, 2016 21:42:17 GMT
ROFL. In any case, although proportional navigation is much better than your generic pure pursuit homing(which is so terribad it shouldn't be used at all), it's still not optimized for spacecraft. For one, it assumes your missile has a constant lateral acceleration to its velocity vector, meaning you're losing a lot of delta-v while doing correction turns. A thing i haven't seen taken advantage of here are nuclear decoys - a ship with a big, inefficient reactor whose only task is powering its massive cooling system. I really hope we can eventually write our own guidance and point defense algorithms. If I can mod in logic, you bet I'm gonna. I love missile guidance and point defense algorithms. Here's a fairly math-dense paper which goes over proportional navigation (PN), augmented proportional navigation (APN), and extended proportional navigation (EPN): www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/td/td2901/palumbo_homing.pdfThis paper specifically includes a simulation of an exoatmospheric target with 8.5g peak acceleration, and compares the performance of those three guidance laws in that and other scenarios. EPN in particular uses relative acceleration and relative jerk to project the amount by which the missile will miss the target if it took no action, then determines how much it needs to accelerate normal to its current course in order to correct for that error, and changes its heading slightly to minimize the ZEM. I think there's a lot of opportunity for improvement in the missile guidance for CDE; my question isn't whether we could hit ships reliably. My question is if we could hit drones reliably.
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