The question of missile guidance has come up once or twice recently on the forum. In addition, as I have recently rewritten all of missile movement and targeting and I am now rewriting the automated missile defence code pretty much from scratch and I am finding the current guidance a little restrictive, I am now considering changing it.
At the moment, the guidance operates on a model similar to that of semi-active laser homing, where the fire control (or laser in modern warfare) paints the target and the missile homes in on that paint. If you move the fire control (or laser designator) to a new target, the missile changes target too. While this works OK for long range anti-ship combat, I think it is possibly a little too powerful in its ability to attack one target by sending waves opf missiles until the target is eliminated and then switching any remaining missiles to a new target. Planning and executing a long-range attack is perhaps too easy because of this flexibility. It causes some problems with realistic anti-missile combat because when the parent fire control needs to engage a new target, any missiles in flight will switch targets too.
I am therefore considering changing to a model where a missile salvo is launched at a specific target and will continue to home on that target as long as it is illuminated by any active sensor. In effect, the target is locked into each missile at the point of launch. The advantage of this model (from a combat perspective) is that this would free the parent fire control to engage new targets without affecting missiles in flight. The disadvantage is that you could no longer switch targets mid-fight. You would have to assign targets on launch and try to estimate the necessary weight-of-fire. In this model, those missiles with onboard sensors would attempt to find a new target by themselves if their designated target was no longer available. Those without onboard guidance would self-destruct.
This has a few programming and gameplay advantages too. From a programming perspective, the target would always be stored with the missile and I would not have to find the associated fire control and retrieve the target from it. In gameplay terms, this will likely result in more damaged ships rather than destroying ships one by one and then leaving one damaged when missiles ran out. It will also require much more careful consideration of target allocation.
One potential issue is ECM vs ECCM. At the moment, ECCM is associated with a particular fire control system and missiles benefit from that ECM. If missiles are not linked to a particular fire control, they would gain no direct benefit and would therefore suffer against ECM protected targets. There are several options to resolve this:
1) Accept this disadvantage.
2) Assume that the fire control imparts any associated ECCM benefit to the missile at the point of launching
3) Disassociate ECCM systems from fire controls and direct them against specific enemy ships to reduce their ECM
4) Make onboard EW for missiles much cheaper and less mass-intensive
5) Bring forward the whole planned EW rewrite
I am interested to hear comments and suggestions on this proposal
Steve
I have had quite a bit of missile combat experience lately in the 6P campaign. In addition, with the recent release of Weber's "Storm from the Shadows", I decided to re-read the entire Honor Harrington series, and that has given me quite a bit to think about.
The basic premise of Weber's HH stories is that on-board fire control systems control the missiles up to their terminal run, and that defenses have a significant advantage because of the light-speed delay involved in controlling offensive missiles light minutes away from the launching ships. In the Weber-verse, the various navies have accepted the disadvantage of light-speed delay because no missile can pack in enough computing power and ECCM to defeat full-size, full-power computers and ECM on board ships. I think this is a reasonable premise. After all, if you can put a powerful computer in a missile that masses 1 ton, then you can put a ferociously powerful computer on a twenty thousand ton battleship (or 9 million ton waller). Of course, in the Weber-verse, fire control systems aren't merely painting the target, they are actively guiding their missiles to the target, and directing their evasion and pen-aides, at least to a certain extent.
As for your specific points:
1. Given the constraints you have laid out, this may be a reasonable option, but it does make ECM a very attractive option. Hmmm...this would make ships designed as beam-engagement ships only a little more survivable, possibly, making this a more viable option.
2. While this would be workable, I don't know that it is reasonable. After all, flight times for missiles can range up to several hours. Assuming that a "snap-shot" of the target provided by ECCM at the moment of launch would still provde any benefit an hour later is more than a little dubious to me.
3. This sounds reasonable, but might add complexity. A possibility, though. Would it be possible to provide the benefits of ECCM fleet-wide?
4. While this is certainly possible, and obviously desireable, as I noted above, there is no way that missile-borne ECCM/ECM and computers can approach the power of ship-borne installations. Therefore, while this option could realistically be possible, and would be used, such installations shouldn't be able to approach the effectiveness of same-tech ship-borne installations.
5. I don't know what you are thinking for this, so I can't comment.
As far as my own experiences lately go, I think it is fairly easy to launch massed missile attacks in Aurora. In my experience, it is easy to launch a massed missile attack, and hard to very hard to defend against such an attack. As you point out, this is largely because the current Aurora model, based on painting the target, favors this by granting the attacker flexibility.
The HH/Weber-verse model is substantially different. In this system, the quality of the fire control lock is a significant determinant of the to-hit percentage, and is based on range, quality of the FC, ECM, and the characteristics of the target (visibility, ECM, manueverability). The characteristics of the missile itself also would affect the to-hit percentage, but in a lesser manner. Under this model, FC's, not missiles, would be the primary determinant of the to-hit percentage, and in the HH universe, the FC's also have a number of "channels" which determines the number of missiles that they can control. If they are controlling less the to-hit percentage goes up, if they are controlling more (at least during the final attack run) then the to-hit percentage goes down.
I'll give this some more thought, now that you are looking at this situation. I'm going to be leaving on vacation in a couple of days, so I'll be out of touch for a while. I'm going to try to get the next installment of the 6P campaign up before I go, but I'm running out of time. We'll see.
Kurt