
Missile Guidance Systems - stansmith
http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/august22014/index.html
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vonmoltke
While I acknowledge the author's opening statement, I still need to add a few
details and refinements. :P

In addition to what the author describes for LOS guidance, there are a couple
other, related guidance mechanisms. One is known as semi-active radar
guidance. This scheme, used in early radar-guided air-to-air missiles, has the
launcher illuminate the target with a special fire control waveform. The
missile has a receiver in the nose that uses the reflection of this signal to
correct its course. This arrangement still requires cooperation between the
missile and the launcher, but the launcher does not need to track or
communicate with the missile. The general scheme is known as bistatic radar.

The second, known as semi active radar homing with terminal guidance, is
related. Most of the interception runs as described above. However, when the
missile enters the terminal phase it switches to an onboard, short range
seeker. This seeker is either a short range radar or some sort of IR device.
At this point the launcher is out of the control loop.

Also, the section about proximity fuzing: cruise missiles _are_ intended to
physically hit their target with a high explosive warhead. In fact, the
missile launch pictured in that section is an RGM-84 Harpoon, which is such a
missile. Also a nit, but most anti-tank missiles (which I assume is what the
author is talking about in the last paragraph of the section) aren't kinetic
penetrators. They use special high explosive (HEAT) warheads.

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squeakynick
Thanks for commenting (I'm the post author here).

I agree, it's a fascinating subject. I wanted to give a high level perspective
and there were some liberties taken.

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ChuckMcM
So on a rather non-lethal note, I built a pair of robots for a predator/prey
sorts of experiments[1]. I had written code that used an R/C servo to locate a
beacon, and then navigate to the beacon. It worked quite well, but when I put
the beacon on the 'prey' robot it rarely worked at all. The challenge was the
added complexity of no fixed reference point. I found a great book[2] which
described a number of approaches to the problem and ended up using a pretty
simple pursuit model. The trick for me was tracking both the bearing to the
target and the bearing on loss of acquisition (so keeping track of "how" it
left the field of view) I ran out of CPU and memory before it got too
interesting but now I should revisit it as I've got 10x the CPU and memory to
play with.

[1] One thing about robots is once you get them doing the easy stuff you want
them to do harder stuff.

[2]
[http://books.google.com/books?id=Ag9TAAAAMAAJ](http://books.google.com/books?id=Ag9TAAAAMAAJ)

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angersock
What is a missle but a miserable pile of Kalman filters?

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gigonaut
reminds me of this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ)

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sosuke
That was awesome, I'd love to hear some more manuals like that, perhaps
something for programming.

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martiuk
I would suggest a read of this:
[http://www.moddb.com/mods/wicmw/downloads/flexible-
intercept...](http://www.moddb.com/mods/wicmw/downloads/flexible-interceptor-
flint-20-presentation)

The creator of the mod did an excellent job at implementing more realistic
missile guidance system for the mod.

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altharaz
It's very interesting to see how advanced the technology inside of them is.

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wuskar
It doesn't mention the fact that one day all missiles will come home.

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lordbusiness
Misnamed - this was more about general principles than the how missile
guidance systems work.

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dang
We changed the title (from "How missile guidance systems work") to be that of
the document.

