Working on some stuff for a game and I need to know enough about

>>32224238

> 1) Missiles that attempt to counter stealth specifically

If you wanted to do this, make it "dual seeker". Have the missile be guided by radar on the way in, but switch on an IR seeker for terminal guidance. To my knowledge, there is no such missile in service right now that can shoot planes.

> 2) Missiles that are anti-EWAR/anti-C3 and related systems - particularly the interplay with the EWAR systems trying to jam them.

Numerous missiles have "home on jam" features, where they fly towards the most powerful jamming source. Missile that do this do not need to have the launcher provide guidance, or go active themselves. However, these missile have reduced range since they can't follow a ballistic trajectory like conventionally guided missiles. Flying in a straight line is actually very wasteful.

Russia and China have "home on radar" air to air missiles, which are Anti-Radiation-Missiles that are designed to go after AWACS. AGM-88 HARM can do the same, but it has less range due to being smaller.

> 3) Missiles that are "homing" - I know there are IR missiles and contrast missiles and such; are there any that have a sort of "pan-spectrum" approach that can lock on to pretty much anything?

No, each seeker head only uses a specific mechanism to find it's target. The closest one to being "pan-spectrum" is Brimstone, which has a milimeter-wave seeker as well as an imaging IR seeker. However, Brimstone is an anti-ground missile.

> how does jamming and countering jamming work

You can jam an IR missile by shooting an IR laser at it's seeker head, a technique called DIRCM (Directional Infra Red Counter Measures). Flares (or the sun) simply provide another heat source for the missile to home on. Modern IR missiles are basically immune to flares, since they have imaging IR seekers, so you need a plane-shaped flare (those don't exist yet).

cont.

>>32224238
Jamming is flooding the wavelength your enemy uses (for radar or communication or whatever) with assloads of electromagnetic noise, rendering meaningful signal detection on that wavelangth impossible. The counters to jamming are to use signal processing techniques to resolve the signal out of the noise, use a more powerful emitter to make the signal easier to resolve over the noise, or to hop frequencies to one that is outside the jammed spectrum.

The most recent public jamming and ECM techniques are fifty or sixty years old, and there is probably a significantly more subtle game going on in that field today, but that's the basics of it.

>1) Missiles that attempt to counter stealth specifically - is there anything out there that you would save for shooting at a F-117, for example?

This has nothing to do with the missile and everything to do with radar guiding it.

>2) Missiles that are anti-EWAR/anti-C3 and related systems - particularly the interplay with the EWAR systems trying to jam them.

You don't really use a special missile to go after most types of C3 systems. What your are probably thinking of are Anti Radiation missiles, which are mostly used against radar arrays, but could potentially go after some communications or jamming gear.


>3) Missiles that are "homing" - I know there are IR missiles and contrast missiles and such; are there any that have a sort of "pan-spectrum" approach that can lock on to pretty much anything?

The short answer hear is no.

a missile knows where it is by knowing where it isnt

>>32224238
>>32224895

Radar Jammers send out your own radar waves at the same frequency as radar you want to jam. This hides the "useful" return signal of the radar wave in a lot of noise. Inverse square law means only a small portion of the radar energy emitted hits your plane, and even a smaller portion is reflected right back at the antenna to be received, so a jammer signal almost always has much more strength than the useful return signal. A good analogy is using a red laser pointer to paint a spot on someone, then that someone shines a red flashlight in your eye. If you can't see the laser dot on that person, you've been jammed.

Radars can overcome jamming by outputting more energy, which results in a stronger signal to pick out from the noise (you use a bigger laser pointer to make the dot brighter). It can have very good signal processors and a coded wave to make it easier to pick out the signal (you put on a pair of polarized glasses that filters out the flashlight). Or it could switch frequencies, so there's a small period where the jammer is not broadcasting the right frequency (you switch to a green laser pointer, and put on glasses that only lets green light through. The flashlight doesn't blind until they put a green filter on it).

Modern AESA radars can claim to be "unjammable" (in actuality just very hard), because they can output multiple frequencies at once, and switch frequency with every pulse. This means it's very likely one frequency will return a clear picture.

>>32224238
>are there any that have a sort of "pan-spectrum" approach
There's one but for a different reason. The Verba MANPADS uses a triple seeker system. The unit is small so it has to use quantity over quality.

>>32224238
>Oh, and how does jamming and countering jamming work, roughly?

There are mainly two different types of jamming, noise and deception jamming.
Noise jamming is simpler, you emit white noise towards the guide radar trying to overpower the return from your aircraft.
You either do this in sweep, barrage or spot jamming modes where you emit over the entire threat frequency, a select few frequencies or a single one. The more frequencies you target, the less power each get making it easier to burn through your jamming.

Deception jamming is when you fuck with the return signal itself like copying the return signal and sending it back multiple times making it look like there are several targets. Another deception is to analyzing the pulse rate.of.the enemy radar and sending out a false return signal just before the real one bounces off you messing up the range data.

>>32225004
The Verba's primary new feature is its multispectral optical seeker, using three sensors - ultraviolet, near infrared, and mid-infrared - as opposed to the Igla-S' two.

Not the OP, but how does IFF play into all this?

>>32226196
IFF is something that you turn on when you're over friendly territory to avoid blue on blue.

>>32227261
And what if I don't want friendly missiles to shoot me down on accident during a chaotic fight?

Also, how do flares and things like that affect all this?

>>32224932
while at the same time knowing where it isn't by knowing where it is

>>32227261
>>32227354
Military IFF can be set to require an coded challenge. That is, someone transmits a code, the IFF beacon receives it, and if the code is accepted it broadcasts an IFF. Generally, though, you have an AWACS handling the identification and feeding data to aircraft.

Flares wouldn't affect IFF at all. They emit thermal and low band IR energy. IFF is radio and microwave bands. They have no relation on each other and the only way flares and chaff would interfere with it is if you released enough to literally blot out the sky.

>>32227600
Sorry, I wasn't asking about flares with relation to IFF, but how flares work with regard to all the things OP asked about and in general. For example, if your stealth plane spits out flares, does that make it even harder to hit? Can you drop chaff to stop jamming as well as to jam the enemy? Stuff like that.

>>32224238
I just hope whatever that game is, it will give justice to the superiority of Chinese missiles. Internet professionals know that China has the best missiles. But because of Political Correctness and Game Balance, they had to limit the true advantages of China and put it in same level as of America. Which is not true. China has long been known to be the best in missile technology and self defence weapons like Coast Guard ships.

>>32226196
Simplified explanation:

Say you're an aircraft, and another aircraft is approaching (the other aircraft is friendly but you don't know this yet).

Your radio set is filled with cryptographic keys, and any friendly aircraft in the area would have their own set of keys.

You transmit a message saying "Hey, unknown aircraft, solve this challenge!", and transmit an encrypted message to the other party with a mathematical challenge.

Then assuming everything goes well the other party says "Here is my response, and I have a challenge for you as well". They send an encrypted challenge that you have to decrypt and solve.

You solve the challenge the other party sends and send the result back to them. Now both of you know that the other party has the right cryptographic credentials and thus can be positively identified as a friendly aircraft. This is called a mutual challenge-response authentication protocol.

Of course, there are many ways this can go wrong, such as enemy jamming of the radio transmissions, or the other plane is friendly but doesn't have the right crypto keys, or maybe their radio is damaged, and so on....

>>32229505
5 Yuan has been deposited into your account :^)

Let's say you had a laser you were using as a weapon. Could an enemy missile use the laser to guide itself to you, even if you're using stealth tech?

>>32230236
Assuming it had a seeker that matched the frequency of the laser's radiation, sure.

Anything that's emitting stuff (thermal, visual) or reflecting stuff (radio, sonic echolocation) can be targeted, and a laser powerful enough to be used as a weapon would be really easy to target.

Not sure of any examples of anti-laser missiles in real usage though.

>>32230251
how does frequency matching work? Let's say I don't know what frequency the enemy laser is using. I launch my missile, and a couple of seconds later they shoot their laser in a 2-second long burst.

>>32224989
Fascinating stuff, thanks anon

>>32227942
Depends. Stealth planes minimize radar cross sections. They do try to cut down thermal emissions, but that's harder than radar because flying at high speeds generates frictional heating and engines have to produce hot gasses. Stealth aircraft are generally more vulnerable to thermal than radar detection, especially at high speed, but that's offset by thermal imagers being shorter ranged than radar because of their generally lower resolution and passive nature.

But back to your question, missiles with passive IR seekers would be the most likely thing to get a hit on current stealth technology. Which means flares might be helpful. Not chaff, though, since that interferes with radar guidance and any radar guided missile either won't achieve lock or will catch the craft from a direction where their geometry doesn't work or with an open bomb bay (what happened to the F-117 in Serbia). However, unless you're dealing with early generation seekers, flares won't do much. Modern missiles tend to have very good discrimination programs and flares just defeat the simplest of algorithms.

>>32227942
>if your stealth plane spits out flares, does that make it even harder to hit?
Flares are last-resort decoys to, well, decoy an enemy missile that is already in flight. If you are stealthy already, chances are that dropping flares might actually attract attention to you in the first place.
>Can you drop chaff to stop jamming as well as to jam the enemy?
Chaff are basically alloy confetti cut to a specific length in order to reflect radar of certain wavelengths (lamda*2^-n afaik). Dropping those creates a radar return which hopefully is more attractive to an incoming missile than your actual aircraft (as opposed to fake targets created by deception jamming as explained here >>32225348). You see how jamming and chaffs are different.

A possible tactic (practical feasibility aside) would be to jam, drop chaff, then stop jamming, thus reducing your radar energy output and making the chaff target more inviting.

However, since chaff are literally metal confetti and do not have their own propulsion, they basically just kinda float and/or fall down, they only present a credible target for a few seconds before the enemy pilot or a clever radar recognizes them to be decoys and manually retargets to your plane.

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117KB, 435x750px

>>32229505
>Internet professionals

>>32230289
>>32230292
we hivemind now

>>32230278
>>32230251
>>32230236
Lasers generally fire too fast for a missile to seek on them. A two second pulse means even traveling at mach 2 the missile will have gone just about a mile in that time. And it's difficult to maneuver that quickly.

You also run into the problem that lasers keep most of their energy in a tight beam. There's some atmospheric scatter, but that gives you a line rather than a single target. Oh, and if the laser actually hits anything, that's going to scatter a whole lot noise on the laser's band.

On the subject of frequency matching, that's not hard with basic digital signal processing. The problem is most lasers are in IR, which tends to be a band that's heavily jammed by natural sources. The hard part is going to be distinguishing a thin line of atmospheric scattering from a warm background.

No, your best bet is just to fire an IR seeker at the laser's source. Given current inefficiencies in lasers, it's going to be pretty toasty.

>>32230278
Caveat: I'm not an optics guys so I'm just inferring this from what little I do know and some basic principles:

If you didn't know what spectrum the laser is, you'd have to have multiple sensors for different frequency bands in order to try and lock on with at least one sensor.

You make a optical sensor sensitive to a given band of radiation (let's say infrared) by adding layers of filtering stuff to the lens that block other frequencies of ligth (visible and UV).

You would have to hope that the missile is agile enough to be able to turn to face the laser emitter during the time the laser is active. High intensity laser weapons might also damage the sensors (there are hand held laser pointers powerful enough to blind a person just from having them look at the beam, let alone having the point cross their eye. I'd imagine a laser weapon powerful enough to engage airborne targets would do the same thing).

It might be better to use a plane with a sensor suite to locate the laser source and then guide it in using radar or something.

>>32230336
Well to be fair, your laser is probably gonna have a damn short range, so it's quite possible that would be enough time for the missile to get there, or get close enough for some other sensor to kick in.

>>32230337
personally I'd imagine it as a contrast sensor - your missile sees the environment, which is probably 0-40 C, and then it sees a hot-ass line of air, and follows that...doesn't have to have the beam shining directly into its sensors.

I'm just guessing, I have no particular knowledge here.

>>32224238
>Missiles that attempt to counter stealth specifically - is there anything out there that you would save for shooting at a F-117, for example?

BVR IR-guided missiles; generally they're less reliable against typical targets (because engaging from BVR distances means they have to withstand a lot of heat, which IR sensors are sensitive / vulnerable to) but they'll have a better chance of locking onto a stealthy aircraft than a radar-guided missile. In real life such missiles (not including short range air-to-air missiles like the AIM-9, ASRAAM, etc) are uncommon because of the cooling requirements, etc, but in a game that shouldn't matter.

>Missiles that are anti-EWAR/anti-C3 and related systems - particularly the interplay with the EWAR systems trying to jam them.

Quite a few missiles have HOJ - Home On Jam; for the US there aren't really any specific anti-AWACS missiles; the US just has overwhelming air superiority to deal with that, but Russia has the K-100 and R-37 (although neither have entered service yet) and China has a yet-to-be-publicly-designated VLRAAM in development. They're basically just extra-big air-to-air missiles.

>Missiles that are "homing" - I know there are IR missiles and contrast missiles and such; are there any that have a sort of "pan-spectrum" approach that can lock on to pretty much anything?

Some missiles like the SM-3 have infrared and radar sensors, but there's no such thing as a pan-spectrum sensor. No missile uses visual spectrum and I'm not sure if any operate in radar frequencies below X-band (the missile's seekers that is); some may use C-band, but it's highly unlikely that any operate in S-band and I'm quite certain that none operate in frequencies any lower than that.

>>32230358
Why does so much of this stuff seem to rely on IR as opposed to ultraviolet, radio, and whatever else?
Can you make missiles that home in on magnetic signatures, or motion? It seems like motion would be good as secondary system, since I'd imagine it would be hard to fool without stopping, and if you can force them to stop that's good too.

>>32230399
UV is quite limited; missile rocket motors emit some UV, but most of the time a missile is in the air it's just gliding. This is why pretty much all modern missile launch detectors have either moved onto IR or are dual IR/UV sensors.

Radar is kinda not-technically-but-is-anyway radio, but relying on passive RF guidance is troublesome as enemy's can quite easily go radio-silent, whereas they can't turn off their IR emissions (unless it's really long range and they're turning off an afterburner, etc) or turn off their radar signature (stealth aircraft can kinda do this by using bomb bays, etc though).

The only other areas in the EM spectrum are X-ray and gamma rays, which don't travel through the atmosphere well, aren't normally emitted by aircraft or missiles and are somewhat harder to generate.

You could hypothetically make missiles home in on magnetic signatures, but not at any realistic range with today's technologies; aircraft are largely made out of non-magnetic metals as well (titanium and aluminium), which makes it even harder.

Motion requires a medium to detect; sound / air waves are useless due to the sound barrier and how hard it'd be to detect faint, distant sounds from a jet or missile. Using radar to detect discrepancies in air (detecting the turbulence caused by aircraft passing through the atmosphere) is possible and has been done, but it essentially requires the enemy to fly between your radar stations, which is problematic if the enemy is destroying your network from the outside-in.

If you're talking about detecting the actual motion of the aircraft via radar or infrared, that's a big part of how IR and radar sensors work already - IR sensors monitor motion and signatures to ignore things like flares, radar uses doppler shift (relative motion) to perform a velocity search and to ignore things like chaff.

>>32230510
I actually was thinking pure visual - basically, take snapshots and then compare the most recent one to older ones. So the dark blob that was over there is now a dark blob right here and the missile can use that change to guide it.

>>32230637
The visual spectrum is too relatively short ranged - the atmosphere distorts it, absorbs it, changes hues, etc. Any method of detection in the visual spectrum is made easier in the infrared spectrum. The reason the US has all of its jets a shade of grey is also to minimise their visual signature.

>>32230672
>>32230637
Here's an example of a plane in the visual spectrum at long range - if the target prevents themselves from creating contrails then they're nearly invisible without doing anything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlKmAUS5Js

>>32230399
The thing is, due to blackbody radiation (the property of matter where stuff is constantly radiating off some of it's heat - normally this is in the infrared range but you can see blackbody radiation in action by applying a lot of heat to something e.g. heating a piece of metal until it glows red hot) IR lets us see how hot things are (thermal camera).

Machinery, especially aircraft and missiles, tend to be quite hot, especially in comparison to the background. So being able to see targets distinctly in IR makes for good target seeking.

For motion in visible light range you have to deal with optical stealth countermeasures and atmospheric conditions, magnetic would probably be too short range for air combat, I would imagine it would be quite usual for an aircraft to be radiating UV, and while radio seeking is a thing (e.g. HAARM missiles) there are some problems with that (e.g. that the aircraft would be under emissions control and thus only radiating radar for extremely brief bursts, not enough to get a solid lock on).

However, no matter how hard you try to stealth it, an aircraft will always be radiating some IR due to the engines and other systems generating heat.

My question is why is there "no brainer" type missiles out there?

For example, a big issue is the horizan gap on ships. (Sure, CEC removes this, but only the us currently has CEC so its kind of moot, but i digress)

Basically, once you hit the horizon (15-20 km or so), the ship WILL pick you up unless you are incredibly stealthy.

So basically, why not put a ALQ-99 on a tomahawk. Size aside, the pod is only 900 pounds, that's the payload weight of the 'hawk.

The idea is the flight of F-18's or whatever will escort the jammer tomahawks, and fire their harpoons/SLAM's/JASSM below the horizon once in range and bug out.

Once the strike package goes terminal OTH, the 3 or so tomhawks begin going vertical and blasting the targets with jamming frequencys giving the strike missiles a much higher chance of getting to target.

Even if it just degrades the ships functions, it would be worth it.

I am a simple man, but such a thing would seem to be incredibly cheap (compared to a new type of system), yet very effective. Throw in a few MALD-J's if you want to.

>>32230867

Or another 'no brainer' type of missile (although this one has a ton of engineering challenges, unlike the above) is essentially a very long range ASROC.

The idea is get a tomahawk like missile, and throw a torpedo on it. once the missile crosses over the horizon it drops the torp into the water, the torp goes to kill the ship.

Now, the issue with this idea is very problematic, and will lead to a big R&D cost unlike the above.

1) the RUM-139 VL ASROC carries the MK-54 MAKO. it only weighs 600 pounds, but its meant to kill slow subs by dropping right on top of it, not ships. It goes 40 knots, but its range is only 12 km (mk 54 uses the propulsion of the mk-46...they may have got a few kilometers more, but not to much). This means it will need to be dropped far into post horizon range, and thus would miss any ship aware of its presence (which you have to assume). It would not even have to run away, just perpendicular at 30 knots to get away.

More bad news, the payload section of the tomahawk is 5-6 feet. the MAKO is more than 8 feet.

The only good news is that the mako only uses a little more than half of the payload weight.

Now, we got about another 5 feet of physical growth in the mk 41 VLS for lengthening the missile, but thats it.

So what would need to happen is a way to double (preferably triple) to the range of the mako, without losing speed or significantly increasing length, and finding a way to put it in a tomahawk like missile.

meh, maybe this is not the thread for it.

>>32231051
Or buy a Medvedka-2 and put a nuclear depth charge innit.

>>32230510

> X-ray and gamma rays, which don't travel through the atmosphere well

Other way around, they travel through stuff too well, so much so that they don't reflect off of things to give a return signal, and instead travel through them.

>>32231105
Nuclear opens a whole bag of worms.

>>32231139
They do penetrate very well, but the atmosphere, despite being thin, does have quite a lot of atoms for absorbing those particles. To be fair, there are certain layers of gases (eg ozone) that more specifically catch certain frequencies better, but to give an idea of the atmosphere's density, at 30,000ft, a cubic meter of atmosphere only contains about 25,000x fewer atoms than a cubic meter of lead. In other words, energy being fired horizontally through 25km of atmosphere encounters as many atoms as being fired through a meter of solid lead.

Obviously things like frequency transmittance means that it's a hell of a lot easier to shoot a laser through 25km of air than through a meter of lead, but if you're trying to fire x-rays 200km at an enemy aircraft (for a 400km return trip) at an altitude where ozone or whatever exists in reasonable density (30,000ft+), you're going to have quite a hard time.

Wow, great thread. Never thought that I could learn so much from /k/