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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 8, 2017 17:59:19 GMT
I am worried about the sensor being whipped into the armour of my missiles and puncturing a tank exactly, even if the mass is small it still moves your center of gravity, even worse the link is flexible , any deacceleration/maneuvering will make it pass to the front and will whip you around and there is a chance to slam it in the missile itself, introduce uncontrolled spins , all kinds of nasty stuff. Uness both objects are relatively stationary towards each other flexible links are a bad idea. Much more likely the missiles will act as a swarm share sensors , probably with comm lasers to limit the possibility of interception... . No need to drag around cans of sensors on a cable.
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Post by thorneel on Mar 8, 2017 18:11:40 GMT
Then make it a deployable sensor on a rigid broom. It only needs to peek beyond the armour anyway, so no need for much structural reinforcements. If manoeuvring causes problems and it is still alive, close it back or eject it.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 8, 2017 18:15:48 GMT
if radar (active or passive) can look through the armour of a missile then I would use radar
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Post by concretedonkey on Mar 8, 2017 18:34:05 GMT
if radar (active or passive) can look through the armour of a missile then I would use radar I think some armor compositions this will work, however I still don't see the point. Imagine a swarm of 50 or so missiles. How does the laser boat know which one is the sensor platform for this exact moment? Or if you have more beams than missiles, why not just concentrate fire and try to burn trough the swarm faster ? thorneel for the rigid boom I still don't see the point. It will still move your center of mass somewhere and the rigidity will make it more controllable but I don't use think the threat for the missile swarms are hyper concentrated beams, I'm finding them quite incapable of dealing with small fast targets like missile swarms, so the threat is unfocused wide beam that can bake you longer keeping the target inside. A lot of them. And they will harm your boom. And then you need to armor it so the mass will increase... You are all thinking of complicated solutions to a problem that is not that different from what missiles are already facing. I mean lasers blinding sensors is not that different then lasers baking the whole missile. Its just an escalation.
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Post by beta on Mar 8, 2017 19:53:14 GMT
A sensor that requires the gathering of light (or various wavelengths of EM energy) still has the weakness of requiring a lens or aperture open facing the target. This open aperture allows the sensor to be destroyed.
Adding discrete sensors to missiles would in fact make it easier to kill them. If a missile cannot see and cannot communicate, it cannot hit a maneuvering target.
Laser communications would be the likely method of talking between missiles. However, as with the sensors, these are fragile. You can do your best to shadow them from the enemy fire, but there are still ways to destroy them (nuke flash, wide formations, drones).
Radar can be jammed, however it is a constant back and forth between jammers and sensors. Home on Jam is an option, but there are methods of introducing error to a sensor (Repeater jamming). Also, you run into a major issue, doubly so due to our spacecraft having megawatts to gigawatts of available power. Your missile is run on battery or small nuclear reactor. The target can put out orders of magnitude stronger signals than you can, creating significant issues for anything but HoJ (radar related). HoJ can be defeated with jamming techniques and jam decoys.
Likely you would want a variety of sensors on your missiles to give the most options for a targeting solution for the longest period of time.
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Post by bigbombr on Mar 8, 2017 20:10:56 GMT
I think it would be a good idea to introduce sensors and comgear in the game and allow us to experiment a little to see what sticks. I think a combination of radar, IR and command guidance (though IR and radar probably on seperate platforms) would nicely balance out each others weaknesses.
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Post by ash19256 on Mar 8, 2017 20:20:05 GMT
A sensor that requires the gathering of light (or various wavelengths of EM energy) still has the weakness of requiring a lens or aperture open facing the target. This open aperture allows the sensor to be destroyed. Adding discrete sensors to missiles would in fact make it easier to kill them. If a missile cannot see and cannot communicate, it cannot hit a maneuvering target. Laser communications would be the likely method of talking between missiles. However, as with the sensors, these are fragile. You can do your best to shadow them from the enemy fire, but there are still ways to destroy them (nuke flash, wide formations, drones). Radar can be jammed, however it is a constant back and forth between jammers and sensors. Home on Jam is an option, but there are methods of introducing error to a sensor (Repeater jamming). Also, you run into a major issue, doubly so due to our spacecraft having megawatts to gigawatts of available power. Your missile is run on battery or small nuclear reactor. The target can put out orders of magnitude stronger signals than you can, creating significant issues for anything but HoJ (radar related). HoJ can be defeated with jamming techniques and jam decoys. Likely you would want a variety of sensors on your missiles to give the most options for a targeting solution for the longest period of time. Which, in turn, would kill off the already rather unrealistic micro drones and micro missiles, especially once power requirements for remote controls are also added ( qswitched , you probably already know the drill by now), because you need to at least put a small RTG into your missiles to keep them powered for the potentially week (or more) long flights from launcher to target, or using batteries, but accepting the fact that these missiles might not have the lifespan to remain fully active for the entire flight to the target, necessitating setting the missiles/drones to go into sleep mode for certain portions of it's flight, and opening up the possibility of the enemy dodging while the missile is inactive, forcing you to try and correct for the dodge once the missiles/drones go active again.
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Post by vegemeister on Mar 8, 2017 23:49:38 GMT
Which, in turn, would kill off the already rather unrealistic micro drones and micro missiles, especially once power requirements for remote controls are also added ( qswitched , you probably already know the drill by now), because you need to at least put a small RTG into your missiles to keep them powered for the potentially week (or more) long flights from launcher to target, or using batteries, but accepting the fact that these missiles might not have the lifespan to remain fully active for the entire flight to the target, necessitating setting the missiles/drones to go into sleep mode for certain portions of it's flight, and opening up the possibility of the enemy dodging while the missile is inactive, forcing you to try and correct for the dodge once the missiles/drones go active again. Design your missiles with low power radio receivers like a cell phone. Keep observing the target with the big scopes on your capship and sensor drones, and if it changes course, wake up the missiles. You could probably do even better than cell phones, because you can afford a little latency in communicating with the missiles. Have them power up their receivers for 5 seconds every 30 seconds, and you've cut power requirements by 83 %.
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Post by ash19256 on Mar 9, 2017 15:27:13 GMT
Which, in turn, would kill off the already rather unrealistic micro drones and micro missiles, especially once power requirements for remote controls are also added ( qswitched , you probably already know the drill by now), because you need to at least put a small RTG into your missiles to keep them powered for the potentially week (or more) long flights from launcher to target, or using batteries, but accepting the fact that these missiles might not have the lifespan to remain fully active for the entire flight to the target, necessitating setting the missiles/drones to go into sleep mode for certain portions of it's flight, and opening up the possibility of the enemy dodging while the missile is inactive, forcing you to try and correct for the dodge once the missiles/drones go active again. Design your missiles with low power radio receivers like a cell phone. Keep observing the target with the big scopes on your capship and sensor drones, and if it changes course, wake up the missiles. You could probably do even better than cell phones, because you can afford a little latency in communicating with the missiles. Have them power up their receivers for 5 seconds every 30 seconds, and you've cut power requirements by 83 %. Except, once electronic warfare gets properly added in, the enemy could jam your little cell phone type receiver, rendering it impossible to wake the missiles up ahead of their pre-programmed wake up time.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 9, 2017 15:47:17 GMT
Design your missiles with low power radio receivers like a cell phone. Keep observing the target with the big scopes on your capship and sensor drones, and if it changes course, wake up the missiles. You could probably do even better than cell phones, because you can afford a little latency in communicating with the missiles. Have them power up their receivers for 5 seconds every 30 seconds, and you've cut power requirements by 83 %. Except, once electronic warfare gets properly added in, the enemy could jam your little cell phone type receiver, rendering it impossible to wake the missiles up ahead of their pre-programmed wake up time. or worse, they could hack you're missiles
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Post by ross128 on Mar 9, 2017 16:26:20 GMT
Well, since the missile will be listening for signals in the band they're trying to jam anyway, they could just detect the jamming and kick into home-on-jam mode.
As a bonus, that's a passive sensor mode (the target is helpfully painting itself) so it saves power by not needing to run its own radar, meaning it actually has a longer autonomous range against a jamming target.
And of course, the way you avoid "hacking the missiles" is you make the missile too simple (and fast) for hacking to do any good. If all the missile understands is "there is a ship-shaped object or strong radio source in front of me, go toward it", it simply won't be capable of accepting any fancy commands like "turn around and go back".
And of course, that's ignoring general security measures. Which don't have to be impossible to defeat, they just have to take long enough that hacking the entire swarm is impractical. If intrusion does end up being so ascendant over security that there is no meaningful defense against it, engagements with weapons would be unlikely to happen at all because you could just hack the enemy ship and disable their life support.
More likely though, security will more or less keep up and hacked missiles are not really going to be anything to worry about in the short time frame between launch and impact.
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Post by argonbalt on Mar 9, 2017 22:10:08 GMT
im all for the inclusion of IR, sensors, but full EW is like a whole game in and of itself. it would almost mandate a singular ship class SEW&C type position. Namely im against it because it mandates a NON-physics based form of warfare that might be a little too divergent for this game.
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Post by vegemeister on Mar 10, 2017 1:29:04 GMT
Design your missiles with low power radio receivers like a cell phone. Keep observing the target with the big scopes on your capship and sensor drones, and if it changes course, wake up the missiles. You could probably do even better than cell phones, because you can afford a little latency in communicating with the missiles. Have them power up their receivers for 5 seconds every 30 seconds, and you've cut power requirements by 83 %. Except, once electronic warfare gets properly added in, the enemy could jam your little cell phone type receiver, rendering it impossible to wake the missiles up ahead of their pre-programmed wake up time. The reciever can use a directional antenna, and its small size doesn't matter, because the signal is coming from a capital ship. Also I only have to tell the missile 6 state vector elements and an epoch time, and I have quite a while to tell it. So the signal to noise ratio can be very poor. Also whisker lasers. Except, once electronic warfare gets properly added in, the enemy could jam your little cell phone type receiver, rendering it impossible to wake the missiles up ahead of their pre-programmed wake up time. or worse, they could hack you're missiles Since the missiles have very recently been on my ship, key distribution isn't a problem. So encryption can be one-time pad, which is provably secure. The only way to hack the missiles is to hack the capital ship.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 10, 2017 1:40:43 GMT
which is also possible vegemeister (hacking the capitals)
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Post by vegemeister on Mar 10, 2017 1:43:30 GMT
which is also possible vegemeister (hacking the capitals) If you've hacked the capitals you've already won, so the missiles are irrelevant.
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