Terminal guidance question

Dilandu wrote:<snip>
So why no one is trying to soft-kill the missile at terminal stage? By confusing her rangefinders, for example? If the missile would made a slightest mistake in calculating the target exact position, it would miss the target completely.

<SPOILERS>
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

<SPOILER WARNING>
In the last couple of books, GA forces have fired off Dazzlers close to their own ships just shy of the incoming attack terminal stage to confuse incoming attack birds. It covers the period just as the missile completes it's evasion maneuvers and settles down to release the laserheads, it is specifically timed to disrupt that final targeting picture. I believe this is the period you are discussing.

Theemile wrote:

Dilandu wrote:<snip>
So why no one is trying to soft-kill the missile at terminal stage? By confusing her rangefinders, for example? If the missile would made a slightest mistake in calculating the target exact position, it would miss the target completely.

<SPOILERS>
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

<SPOILER WARNING>
In the last couple of books, GA forces have fired off Dazzlers close to their own ships just shy of the incoming attack terminal stage to confuse incoming attack birds. It covers the period just as the missile completes it's evasion maneuvers and settles down to release the laserheads, it is specifically timed to disrupt that final targeting picture. I believe this is the period you are discussing.

Maybe I need to reread already because I though they were timing it from just before the missiles outran the light speed links from the control ships. Jam the links a bit early, dazzle the missiles' sensors, and turn on additional free flying decoys before the missiles' sensors recover.

The missiles don't receive their expected final updates from the launch platforms, they lose their target lock, and the decoys come online late enough that the launch platforms don't get send any updates to help the missiles discriminate real targets from fake ones.

But that would be way before the final pre-detonation milliseconds where the missile was trying to finalize lasing rod aim points. This is still trying to trick missile into attacking an entirely fake target rather than trying to get them to miss once they've selected a real ship to attack.

Dilandu wrote:

dsrseraphin wrote:Once the missile acquires its terminal lock, its no longer bothering with e-m detection; it has mapped the grav gradients of the target, makes a final course correction to optimize the attack profile, begins orientation rotation of the rods (most likely by rod package release to allow for maximal rod maneuver), then detonates the pump bomb at the optimal time along the trajectory. This literally takes micro seconds. (c = 300,000 km/sec: then .8 c covers .24 km in 1 micro sec or 12 km in 50 micro secs).

For that, the missile must knew the target exact position (and I'm not sure that target at relativistic velocities even HAVE exact position!) with the very high level of precision, using only missile own sensors while her systems reaction time are slowed by time dilation. There are SO many things that could go wrong...

And again, how exactly the missile pinpointed the ship? I recall that in Infodumps it was stated that ship could shift its position inside the wedge (at least a bit), so the exact characteristics of the wedge would not give the exact location of the ship. So the missile must use some kind of sensors, that might be spoofed a bit (and "a bit" here means "clear miss")

If the missile's target is moving at under .5 c then the target is at a relative standstill in comparison to the missile. Furthermore (and this is really really important) the target is a ship whose acceleration capabilities are much much less than the missile's, so it can't make radical course change like a missile can; therefore the predicted trajectory cone is narrower for the targeted ship than for the counter-targeted missile. Besides a ship is a big fracking target.

The missile can lose and reacquire a ship; whereas, a ship is unlikely to doge a missile by maneuver alone. So once a missile begins its terminal run it has a very very good idea of where its target is (otherwise it does not begin the terminal run) and where it can be in the next few milliseconds. Spoofing a missile is actually best done (but is hardest to achieve) while it's on its terminal run right before it acquires its terminal lock, so that it never achieves an optimal targeting solution and has no time to adjust; its destruction is not necessary.

Once the missile gets within 1/3 light sec, the engagement favors the missile: the range is 100,000 km, the ship is kms long and it will be in a twenty something degree cone, since closing on the target will be done in under 500 milliseconds change in the ship's orientation can be predicted and accounted for, and finally the ship underway is a blazing grav beacon. Note, for the missile, optimum targeting does not mean impact on the ship but achieving a favorable line into the volume between the target's wedge from its trajectory.

As for the locus of the ship within the volume between the wedge - a) it is a limited volume of which the ship takes up a significant portion of; and b) the missile carries multiple rods of which no two will be purposefully aimed into the exact same space.

Once the RMN improved missile control to raise the number of missiles to successfully achieve the point where they could begin to make a terminal run the mojo was now on the Manties side.

The name of the game is get your missiles close enough to make the terminal run; once you do that the odds are in your {the attacker} favor.

One last thing, I did think of a plausible warhead for a 3rd layer mortar screen - a grav implosion shell (a fission powered runaway grav generator); it not only makes a temporary barrier, it bends space enough to warp the attack beams off target.

-David S.

<spoiler>
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
v
case in point - in UH a Solly task force threw 6000(?) missiles at a light hull undersized junction picket, about .1 percent got an optimal solution. On the other hand the picket threw a ~800 missile barrage and achieved a 10 percent optimal solution. Guess who won the exchange.