Math breakdown: Anime homing missiles
blog.littlepolygon.com
blog.littlepolygon.com
They told me that the backfire from the exhaust of one missile might ignite the one behind it if we did stuff like that. That said, I've seen videos of ships firing missiles in relatively quick succession. Just not like the Itano Circus, however.
Basically the idea being that you fire a whole lot of them at the enemy trench somewhere over there, and on terminal approach they independently assign themselves to specific interesting looking targets.
My reaction was the same as when I first learned about how jpl was going to get the curiosity rover down to the surface of mars with a rocket crane. "There is no way something that complicated would actually work."
The longest-range version of the AIM-120 has a range of 160km, and missiles under development promise even longer ranges than that, so that kind of tells you what they prioritize.
One tangential thing to understand is that air to air missiles are proximity fuzed. They don't need to precisely impact their target, they just need to get close.
It’d be nice if there was a similar defense against saturation bombing.
I think this is mostly because longer range
sounds like a great thing when you don’t have
hundreds of missiles to defend against.
If you take human pilots out of the equation, obviously this changes things (your aircraft can be cheaper and you worry less about losing one) but not entirely. You still have to figure out how to deliver the missiles without getting shot down and while remote piloting is cool, it's still subject to jamming and such.
Minus the cool swirly anime effects, pilots certainly do have the option of firing multiple missiles at a given target. Fire one missile from beyond visual range, wait, and then fire another one. This is very common in DCS, which is obviously not reality but is a pretty decent simulation according to a lot of actual pilots. Not sure what actual fighter pilot doctrine is there and if that's a real world practice as well.
You need defensive missiles that are significantly cheaper and easier to produce to stop your larger adversary from raining death down everywhere.
It’s nice if you have a missile that you can use to intercept any incoming dumb missile anywhere in 300km, but not if your missiles cost 1M and theirs cost 100k.
I figure the problem is more that it’s hard to scale down missiles to the point the plume would make economic sense.
Unless you are seeking a penetration aid against defenses, I don't see much point. There are far cheaper ways to deliver mass on target if you simply want to spam the enemy.
Talking about anti-air of course. Lots of small missiles aren’t going to be effective against hardened ground targets.
But perhaps you need big missiles if you want them to
fly fast and have a lot of range.
See my other answer, though - air to air missiles ARE generally (always) proximity fuzed. They don't need to precisely impact the target, they just need to get close.
Data links also make a big difference. So the missile needs another fairly large antenna to receive guidance cues from other platforms.
happy Protoss Carrier noises
Reconnaissance satellites will be the first casualties in any future high-end conflict. Modern militaries have to plan around the expectation that their space-based platforms will be unavailable or severely degraded.
Radar ocean reconnaissance satellites can detect ships under any weather conditions but they are are large, heavy, expensive, and can provide only intermittent coverage. Smaller satellites with optical or IR sensors can potentially provide more coverage but are less effective at night or with clouds.
And sure, you need to wait for a clear day, but that doesn't seem like too big an obstacle. Also, while space-based platforms will be targets, it's unclear how effective counter measures are. Identifying targets is challenging and deploying replacements is worth the cost if you can eliminate a large portion of an adversary's naval power.
Carriers are certainly vulnerable to an extent, but detecting one with a satellite is only one step in the kill chain. Carrier strike groups already carry some limited anti-satellite weapons that can hit targets in LEO. There is an active arms race underway by the superpowers to boost those capabilities, and also (as you stated) to develop a prompt launch capability to replace satellite attrition losses within hours rather than scheduling launches years in advance.
launch 100 vehicles, slow flying, potentially with gliding capabilities, converging from all directions onto a target at the same time, ditching main wings and piston engine at the last minute, firing a rocket to gain speed, and overwhelm air defence by sheer numbers. Combine low-flying attack profiles with "dive-bomb from above". Large sensors can be mitigated with mesh-networking between vehicles and sensor fusion, maybe different kinds of sensors on different vehicles. Slow-flying means they can carry heavier warheads thanks to more lift and less drag.
If slowly circling at high altitude, you also tie up resources keeping track of them.
Quantity is its own quality, and all that...
this is all without even bringing "AI" into the mix, but if you could, you can give them "goals" instead of targets.
As a point of comparison, the latest Block IV Tomahawk missiles already do most of what you described. They cost about $2M each and weigh about 1.5 tons. Only the largest warships can potentially carry 100 such missiles.
Russia has used small, cheap cruise missiles like the Iranian Shahed-136 drones with some limited success against Ukraine. In a naval conflict such drones could have some value as harassment weapons against surface vessels operating in the littorals. But those drones are useless against moving ships over the horizon.
But sure, I'll go back to my cartoons again. /s
Some kind of smart bomblets could be very effective vs traditional military bases which use sandbag walls to limit how effective traditional munitions are. Smarter drones could be more useful when trying to clear a forest.
Anti ship missiles on the other hand need large warheads to be effective. But launching multiple is preferred due to CIWS/point defense weapon systems.
https://news.northropgrumman.com/news/releases/bat-submuniti...
Military UAV’s are also huge. I assume when people are thinking drones they are downscaling to the 1-10kg range not full sized aircraft with a 50 foot wingspan.
Only true if it can target a high value unit or concentration of units which value exceed the missile cost.
Anti-air is a different scenario than artillery. Startreak targets are fast evading and employ countermeasures that attempt to trick the missiles target acquisition. I'm out of my depth but I believe the justification for the 3 missiles was improving the odds of hitting the target as that add redundancy and kind of triple the resolution of the targeting systems where a single missile with better electronics might be less effective and more costly.
Example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder
They detonate near the target rather than impacting it directly. This greatly improves the chance of success. Jets are fragile, so this is almost always sufficient to take them out of commission.
It also places some demands on fire control and loading to achieve the high fire rate; I'm not sure manually-loaded howitzers are capable of that in general (e.g. the German PzH 2000 automates everything from loading shells and propellant to firing).
Saturation attack is indeed a tactic used. The idea is to time your attack for missiles to arrive on your target at the same time independantly of when they are launched and of their trajectories.
Also, a missile hit for anti-missile defense probably doesn't look like what you expect. There is no need to reach the incoming missile spot on. The goal is to explode in its vicinity preferably slightly in front of it. Incoming missiles are fast enough that impacting either debris or the explosion shockwave will disable them if they are close in a radius which is not that small.
Warning info hazard tvtropes :p
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/KV128_Stormsurge?file=K...
[Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wckZcVFLU24
4:54 anime girl as missile nose art
5:40 not kirin, but "ハタイコ" (hataiko?)
5:41 defo budweiser (also from the Valkyrie?)
bastardizing technical "terms" irritates me
The author that popularized it doesn't get attribution de-facto for every paintings that uses cubism
Slightly rotating your missile propulsion system with an auto-targeting system doesn't make it "Itano"
You don't say "Mr Smith's way of braking" because you saw him drift
There is something about the weeb culture that's very corrosive about culture in general
That's very concerning for this generation of technicians
There is something about the weeb culture
that's very corrosive about culture in general
That's very concerning for this generation of
technicians
Also we absolutely do identify art styles after their creators if the style is distinct enough, but doesn't necessarily establish a new branch, e.g. Escher, Warhol, Wes Anderson.
And if the article left you with an itch for a space mecha game with missile barrages, here's a suggestion: Strike Suit Zero[1], or its arcade version, Strike Suit Infinity[2].
It's cheap, short, with memorable gameplay and a lovely soundtrack[3].
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/209540/Strike_Suit_Zero/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/234160/Strike_Suit_Infini...
One reason a missile might spiral like that is in order to have a simplified seeker head and control assembly, you only seed to seek and control on one axis and you spin the whole missile to scan over two dimensions. the missile will always overshoot a little but correct once it rotates around the other way. while this makes for a far simpler seeker and control setup it wastes a lot of energy so you need a bigger engine for the equivalent range if you had a two dimensional seeker/control missile.
Another reason is to make the anti-missile solution much harder. It still wastes a lot of energy.
Check out Nebulous: Fleet Command https://youtu.be/Oe-71-3khyA specifically 1min in they show off the missile seeker customization and sprint phase programming. The game is like if you combined The Expanse with Homeworld.
In general I've found the devlogs interesting—same YouTube channel I linked above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhTNESwAzs4
Note that that trailer absolutely fails to convey the mysteries found in trying to design a functioning missile system.
They look really lively, I'll post a video on twitter or something.
Of course, bad controllers that can be exploited by the player to make missiles miss are usually fun, as are slight variations of PID parameters in the same missile salvo, to disperse them organically.
https://www.tumblr.com/giantsquidology-blog/144615245984/flu...
This is key. And then if you're like me, you might after all become interested in actually understanding, and something new opens up.
Children of a Dead Earth allowed some simulations around this concept.
You have a very kind, knowledgeable, and effective way of explaining.
I'd like to point out how much I appreciate how you introduce technical specifics and elaborate concisely enough that those who know and those who don't can share an article without feeling talked past or down to.
One persons opinion. With your communication style a high bar I've been pursuing for some time, I just want to share a sincere appreciation for it!
1. Instead of bothering to compute tangent frame sweeping along the path, just use a fixed frame that's tangent to a line drawn from the start to the end point. (And then pick a random fixed rotation angle.)
2. Just use value noise instead of simplex noise. Or, hell, just stack a couple of sine waves with randomly chosen phase and frequency.
I don’t really see the point of doing this for one target per missile (other than aesthetics which is a perfectly valid reason!)
But, if multiple were heading at a single target, I guess they’d be harder to dodge? Multiple trajectories and all that.
This kind of mid-flight course change is a characteristic of real missiles in other cases , though:
* almost anytime a submarine or ship launches, the missile goes straight up for a little bit to clear the ship before sharply turning
* if you shoot a guided missile straight up unguided to clear terrain (eg a hill) before turning on guidance you’ll see this
* cruise missiles in the gulf wars famously did this by following the street grid - even turning at street light
* if you launch a torpedo in a random direction then activate guidance later it can disguise where you are, since the torpedo is coming from a different direction
Sorry to mislead!
That's fascinating! Do you have more info on this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile) https://youtu.be/YZZV464z9g8
I think I'd create separate launch animation that smoothly morphs into this flight animation.
It seems like it could be done, e.g. pre-program all of the missiles with randomized paths that didn't intersect, and sweep the entire potential flight path area with radar or similar and exclude volumes with obstructions. That really is an awful lot of complexity that could make things go wrong, though.
I've only seen one good game capture the essence of the animes while being a fair and good game. It's an old game called virtual on. It's a fast paced mecha game with rocket boosted dashing along lines of commitment. That line of commitment means that when you dash with your mecha it forces the mecha into a single permanent dash in a single direction for about 3 seconds. This restriction actually makes you feel like you're pulling off incredible dodges of anime homing missiles. The graphics are old but it's the only game I've ever seen pull off the same feeling as an anime.
See video:
https://youtu.be/SoUGqhPQFI0?t=279
It's old, but for it's time it was incredible. Also the controls involve dual joysticks at the arcade to really get the feeling that you're controlling a vehicle.
As for the effect itself, I wonder if it would make sense to try this with a boid algorithm so they move as a "flock". Most attempts at anime=missiles I've seen either just look too chaotic or the missiles while initially launched at wide angles gradually consolidate into a tightly-packed blob.
Or maybe you're not. But impossible to doge homing missiles doesn't feel very game like or realistic and works only against static targets.
So I'm a mechslut. Today I bought Mechwarrior 5, installed it played for an hour and uninstalled it out of boredom and disgust. When inspired, Mech games can be SO COOL but I think it's just too easy to go with the cheap arcade mode and plain physics.
VonBiome for more battlefields, YetAnotherMechLab, YetAnotherMechlabMechs, YetAnotherWeapon and YetAnotherWeaponClan for mechlab and additional weapons. XenoAI MissionYAML and CoyotesMission to improve mission variety and difficulty.
1) They were not built for simulation. The TT rules are good for just that.
2) The companies coding then haven't been great at it.
3) Pirhana games has terrible leadership and coding skills.
Honestly MW5 had a ton of potential, but eclipsed by terrible coding. Like the spawn effects are bad, and they had to do spawns because they couldn't figure out how to disable scripts for inactive units, or how to make things efficient, or whatever. Basically yeah.
Also I'm thinking LRM-20s with that effect. Cheff's kiss.
I've run up against the issue of unexpected twisting of splines at work more than once.
I thought I recognized your handle! You wrote the "A Primer on Bézier Curves" article. Thanks for providing that amazing resource, it's been invaluable during my learning process.