ess (phil hunt) wrote:

:On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 05:26:01 GMT, Kevin Brooks wrote:
:
: I think there are two issues here. The first is when the sensor is
: attached to the weapon, as it is in a sensor in a missile. Here,
: there is no sensor/shooter cycle, unless you choose to have a human
: involved in the decision to fire.
:
:That is way beyond even our capabilities. You are talking autonomous combat
:systems.
:
:Yes. The progrsamming for this isn't particularly hard, once you've
:written software that can identify a vehicle (or other target) in a
icture. It's just a matter of aiming the missile towards the
:target.

This is rather like saying that nuclear weapons aren't hard, once
you've invented a nuclear weapon. If you really find this easy, do I
have a career for you!

:Weapons like this were in existance 20 years ago, for example the
:Exocet anti-ship missile.

Exocet does nothing at all like what you describe above. It flies
inertial with an active radar homing head. Yes, we've had that sort
of thing for quite some time. It works very well when it comes to
finding big radar reflectors like ships among all that flat water.
ATR systems (which is something different than what radar guided
weapons do) is a much tougher problem.

:I'm not bsure what problems you envisage
:with doing this; perhaps you could elaborate?

I could, but then I'd have to kill you....

:because you can't just fire them "in that direction, more or less", and hit
:anything--you have to have a pretty narrow determination of where the target
:is right at the time the weapon arrives.
:
:What you could do is have the missile, if it doesn't find a target
:to hang around in the area looking for one. (The British ALARM
:missile does this literally :-)).

ALARM is an ARM. Again, this is a much easier problem than ATR.

:Now if you want to send a flock of
:CM's out and about to go on a hunter-killer mission, you have some real
:problems to confront, like: (a) How do you prevent fratricide or targeting
:of the local version of the Sanford garbage truck (remember that not every
:enemy is going to be able to discount collateral damage like the insurgents
:we are no facing in Iraq do)?
:
:You can't prevent fratricide all the time, and most countries would
:have a higher tolerance from losses caused by friendly fire than
:most western countries do. The missile would know (at least
:approximately - within a few km) were it is, and therefore whether
:it is over land occupied by its own side.
:
iscriminating between military and civilian vehicles is a lot
:harder, I agree.

Discriminating vehicles from ground clutter is a lot harder, period.

:(b) Are you going to send it in low, where it
:MIGHT have a chance at surviving, but its field of view is extremely
:limited, so it is that much more likely to not find any target to hit, but
:which also requires oodles of (very accurate, and likely unavailable to most
:potential foes) digital topographic data to be uploaded and a complex
:navigation system)
:
:The topographic data would probably be available if the missile is
:flying over the territory of its own country.

You might want to look at the accuracy of DTED and how much data you
would have to load to your missile.

:Otherwise, there are other methods of nagivation: dead reckoning,

Requires good IMUs. Even then, your accuracy is going to degrade
rapidly over time as you fly about.

:celestial,

Harder to do for a missile, wouldn't you say? The only weapons I'm
aware of that even attempt this are ICBM warhead busses.

:a LORAN-like system could be set up.

And immediately put off the air by a strike from your opponent. It's
also not particularly accurate when compared to what you need for a
PGM.

:or up high where the view is better,
:
:It's possible that a mission might require some of the flight to be
:at high level and some at low level. I imagine the missiles could
:be programmed for a mission by sticking a computer with an Ethernet
:cable into a slot on the missile.

You imagine a lot of things. That's about as far as most of them
could go in the real world.

--
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
-- Charles Pinckney