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My first job out of college was working for a lab that did stuff for Air Defense. We did stuff like missiles that shot down other missiles for the Navy. Anyway,

by iamwil 4y ago

My first job out of college was working for a lab that did stuff for Air Defense. We did stuff like missiles that shot down other missiles for the Navy. Anyway, in my naivety, I asked the more senior engineers why we don't shoot missile plumes. Lots of cheap missiles in the hopes that one hits. (I didn't mention the idea was from watching anime.) 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.

brmgb 4y ago
> That said, I've seen videos of ships firing missiles in relatively quick succession. Just not like the Itano Circus, however. 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.
auxfil 4y ago
Thank you for calling it by it’s proper name and not “Anime Homing Missiles”
bhhaskin 4y ago
It makes far more sense to do something like that in space instead of in the atmosphere. You could spread the missiles out a little before ignition. But you would also need some kind of swarm logic and tracking to make sure they don't bump into each other.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Ostensibly the Generation 2 Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb munitions will do something like this - i.e. they're capable of independently acquiring targets, and then de-conflict the target acquisitions to ensure they don't all track on the same one. 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.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Must’ve been a fun job training them what a valid target is :/
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Probably pretty easy. Anything that's not flat terrain, kinda irregular in shape, and a fixed distance from another target, e.g. 3 meters or something, to ensure a reasonable spread.
  - somat 4y ago
    Sort of like the CBU-97, it's mission profile is ridiculously insane. First 10 sub munitions are ejected out. A parachute slows the downward movement of the sub munition carrier. A rocket then spins it up to a high speed where it starts flinging shaped charge skeet at vehicles in range. these skeet then detonate once they detect they are above the vehicle. 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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon
supercheetah 4y ago
It's not a bad idea. It's just a practical reality of their interaction with each other that causes a problem that's hard to workaround.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  The challenge with "lots of smaller missiles" is really range, I think. You want to hit the target from as far away as possible. That takes fuel, which puts limits on how small you can go. 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.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I think this is mostly because longer range sounds like a great thing when you don’t have hundreds of missiles to defend against. It’d be nice if there was a similar defense against saturation bombing.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      I think this is mostly because longer range sounds like a great thing when you don’t have hundreds of missiles to defend against. You're optimizing for the wrong thing. Today's missiles are extremely lethal and good at finding their targets. The challenge is getting close enough to launch them without getting killed by other aircraft or ground-to-air defenses. Ground to air defenses are getting cheaper and more lethal all the time. 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.
cjbgkagh 4y ago
The UK Starstreak anti-aircraft missile has 3 submunition darts to improve hit probability. There is nothing wrong with the idea per se, you can design around backfire. The Metal Storm gun has multiple munitions stacked in the same tube. I figure the problem is more that it’s hard to scale down missiles to the point the plume would make economic sense.
- bob1029 4y ago
  One well-guided missile can be infinitely more effective than 1000 poorly-guided missiles. 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.
  - lobocinza 4y ago
    > One well-guided missile can be infinitely more effective than 1000 poorly-guided missiles. 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.
  - chongli 4y ago
    The question I have is: can you scale down the well-guided missile? I thought guidance is mostly an issue of fast chips and well designed software. But perhaps you need big missiles if you want them to fly fast and have a lot of range. Talking about anti-air of course. Lots of small missiles aren’t going to be effective against hardened ground targets.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      But perhaps you need big missiles if you want them to fly fast and have a lot of range. I'm just a layperson but this has always been my understanding. Modern air combat is all about firing from beyond visual range, so I think they optimize pretty strongly for that. 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.
User23 4y ago
The MX sort of did that on the reentry side.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
im3w1l 4y ago
After seeing videos of n-copters dropping grenades on soldiers in the Ukraine-Russia war, I do think there is evidence of a move to small and cheap technology.
JohnBooty 4y ago
For many air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles, we cheat and improve the hit probability another way: proximity fuses. Example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder 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.
winter_blue 4y ago
Doesn’t a howitzer shoot multiple middles at once? (Or are they shot in quick succession?)
- ygra 4y ago
  Quick succession. Due to the projectiles taking a while to arrive on target (especially for high-arcing trajectories) this gives you the effect of multiple projectiles arriving simultaneously on target: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery#Multiple_round_simultaneous_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery#Multiple_round_simul... 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).

by iamwil 4y ago

brmgb 4y ago

> That said, I've seen videos of ships firing missiles in relatively quick succession. Just not like the Itano Circus, however. 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.

auxfil 4y ago

Thank you for calling it by it’s proper name and not “Anime Homing Missiles”

bhhaskin 4y ago

It makes far more sense to do something like that in space instead of in the atmosphere. You could spread the missiles out a little before ignition. But you would also need some kind of swarm logic and tracking to make sure they don't bump into each other.

XorNot 4y ago
Ostensibly the Generation 2 Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb munitions will do something like this - i.e. they're capable of independently acquiring targets, and then de-conflict the target acquisitions to ensure they don't all track on the same one. 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.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Must’ve been a fun job training them what a valid target is :/
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Probably pretty easy. Anything that's not flat terrain, kinda irregular in shape, and a fixed distance from another target, e.g. 3 meters or something, to ensure a reasonable spread.
- somat 4y ago
  Sort of like the CBU-97, it's mission profile is ridiculously insane. First 10 sub munitions are ejected out. A parachute slows the downward movement of the sub munition carrier. A rocket then spins it up to a high speed where it starts flinging shaped charge skeet at vehicles in range. these skeet then detonate once they detect they are above the vehicle. 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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon

supercheetah 4y ago

It's not a bad idea. It's just a practical reality of their interaction with each other that causes a problem that's hard to workaround.

JohnBooty 4y ago
The challenge with "lots of smaller missiles" is really range, I think. You want to hit the target from as far away as possible. That takes fuel, which puts limits on how small you can go. 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.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I think this is mostly because longer range sounds like a great thing when you don’t have hundreds of missiles to defend against. It’d be nice if there was a similar defense against saturation bombing.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    I think this is mostly because longer range sounds like a great thing when you don’t have hundreds of missiles to defend against. You're optimizing for the wrong thing. Today's missiles are extremely lethal and good at finding their targets. The challenge is getting close enough to launch them without getting killed by other aircraft or ground-to-air defenses. Ground to air defenses are getting cheaper and more lethal all the time. 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.

cjbgkagh 4y ago

The UK Starstreak anti-aircraft missile has 3 submunition darts to improve hit probability. There is nothing wrong with the idea per se, you can design around backfire. The Metal Storm gun has multiple munitions stacked in the same tube. I figure the problem is more that it’s hard to scale down missiles to the point the plume would make economic sense.

bob1029 4y ago
One well-guided missile can be infinitely more effective than 1000 poorly-guided missiles. 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.
- lobocinza 4y ago
  > One well-guided missile can be infinitely more effective than 1000 poorly-guided missiles. 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.
- chongli 4y ago
  The question I have is: can you scale down the well-guided missile? I thought guidance is mostly an issue of fast chips and well designed software. But perhaps you need big missiles if you want them to fly fast and have a lot of range. Talking about anti-air of course. Lots of small missiles aren’t going to be effective against hardened ground targets.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    But perhaps you need big missiles if you want them to fly fast and have a lot of range. I'm just a layperson but this has always been my understanding. Modern air combat is all about firing from beyond visual range, so I think they optimize pretty strongly for that. 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.

User23 4y ago

The MX sort of did that on the reentry side.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

im3w1l 4y ago

After seeing videos of n-copters dropping grenades on soldiers in the Ukraine-Russia war, I do think there is evidence of a move to small and cheap technology.

JohnBooty 4y ago

For many air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles, we cheat and improve the hit probability another way: proximity fuses. Example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder 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.

winter_blue 4y ago

Doesn’t a howitzer shoot multiple middles at once? (Or are they shot in quick succession?)

ygra 4y ago
Quick succession. Due to the projectiles taking a while to arrive on target (especially for high-arcing trajectories) this gives you the effect of multiple projectiles arriving simultaneously on target: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery#Multiple_round_simultaneous_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery#Multiple_round_simul... 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).