Time on Target Missile Strikes

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Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/8/2017 4:06:37 PM

Posts: 11
Joined: 12/29/2014
Status: offline

Hi everyone, I was suggested to start a ned thread so I apologize if this topic has already be discussed. (I searched for it but never found an answer).

My question and topic was, is there a strike planner for missile strikes? I would like to do a coordinated, time on target missile strike where I fire the missiles from either the same unit or from multiple units (Ship and Ohio) but the missiles all impact the targets at the same time. It would be great (and fun) to do a timed and surprise attack where you hit all the targets at the same time, even if the targets are spread out over a country (call it Iraq) and fired from either a single unit or multiple units.

I'm sure this is a complex task for the system to do so I understand if it is not yet implemented, but it would be a really cool feature and I think would add a lot of realism as it certainly does happen in real life and is in some cases, critical for battle timelines and operations.

Again, thank you for all of your help and comments and thank you for the developers, moderators, and others who keep this game not only alive, but growing, expanding and getting better. It is a blast to play.

Thank you for your help and comments.

Post #: 1

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/8/2017 5:23:26 PM

blkholsun

Posts: 58
Joined: 5/20/2017
Status: offline

Yes, that would be great. It is a huge hassle to guesstimate how to get all of your assets to converge simultaneously. It never works out quite right, and while it probably wouldn't work out 100% perfectly IRL either, I'm sure it would be far more accurate that what we're capable of doing "by hand". While this certainly adds some challenge to the game, in my opinion it isn't an example of a fun challenge but rather is a sort of drudgery. I would LOVE this option.

(in reply to mb)

Post #: 2

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/8/2017 6:38:37 PM

CCIP-subsim

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Joined: 11/10/2015
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At the moment both for weapons and for air strikes, ToT planning isn't really a thing. But I believe the new Mission Planner is supposed to include that for aircraft so, logically, I'm sure it could eventually be extended to missiles.

(in reply to blkholsun)

Post #: 3

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/10/2017 6:34:02 AM

Dan109

Posts: 175
Joined: 4/27/2017
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I was playing around with this, and I think I can write a script to do this. It would actually be easier for an airstrike versus a missile strike. For an airstrike, mission planner would be used in most cases for large strikes, so the total number of aircraft (and if 1/3 option is set) assigned is well known. LUA can modify the unit.course values, hijacking it to add atleast 4 sets of coordinates to make a loiter pattern. Once the last craft has launched and entered flight pattern, all of the aircraft would have their unit.course modified again to remove the flight pattern and have the only remaining courses be the original course plots from strike mission (retaining multi-axis approaches, etc).

For missiles, its a bit more difficult - well, atleast I don't use a strike mission when launching cruise missiles at a ship. Well, I would if striking an airbase. The point is, unlike an airstrike mission, a missile strike mission wont' have a nice structure in the mission data to see which missiles are queued up for launch You can check aircraft which are assigned to the mission, and check their unit.condition to see if it is not airborne, but a missile is not a unit, until it is launched. I imagine one could get a count from the WRA Doctrine.

I'd like to make a method that works with manual missile attacks as well. There are some new fields for the unit object in the current LUA-Beta documentation, but I'm not sure if they contain what I would need. I'd like to have access to the same data when you click on F1 manual attack - weapons deployed, weapons allocated, to a specific target.

The ultimate test I'm personally interested in would be say an Ohio SSGN attacking say another USN Fleet comprised of a carrier (high value target) and CGN and a few DDs. That's quite a lot of missile defense, and between the CG/DDs, they would most likely have enough missiles and TIME, to shoot down all 154 of the cruise missiles launched by the SSGN. But if all 154 showed up on their radar at the SAME time, wow, I really doubt they would have the time to shoot them all down. Well, heh, that's why it should be simulated. Right now, when an Ohio shoots all 154 CMs at a base, you get a string of missiles +100nm long....not ideal.

But if I knew exactly how many missiles were being launched, the launch rate, then a pre-defined loiter pattern specific to each missile could be pre-fixed to its course set by the LUA.

< Message edited by Dan109 -- 6/10/2017 6:47:50 AM >

(in reply to CCIP-subsim)

Post #: 4

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/10/2017 9:30:03 AM

Gunner98

Posts: 5508
Joined: 4/29/2005
From: The Great White North!
Status: offline

This one has been bounced around quite a bit in the past.

Here is a planner that skorplo667 posted about a year ago, resurrected by stilesw

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4220452&mpage=1&key=ToT%2CPlanner�

B

(in reply to Dan109)

Post #: 5

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/10/2017 10:14:49 AM

Dan109

Posts: 175
Joined: 4/27/2017
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Thx Butch - I'll take a look at it when in front of pc. Coordinating exact weapon strikes (jdam, CBU, Jassm, etc) should be quite doable as well. The only limitation I see is taking complete control of altitude and speed - the unit.course data only stores lat/long, not speed/altitude waypoints that you can do manually. I've got another post in mods section asking about that. If I can create a predetermined altitude based course plot, the I can add ability for aircraft to stay 'just' below radar horizon and shadow zone. Of course I want this script to work with AI as well - imagine the difficulty of scenarios when surprised by the AI, detecting squadrons of aircraft simultaneously, only 20nm away from target ;)

(in reply to Gunner98)

Post #: 6

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/10/2017 9:01:15 PM

Dan109

Posts: 175
Joined: 4/27/2017
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Haha - looks like I bit off more than I can chew. I thought the current Strike Mission Planner already took weapons loadout into consideration when plotted the course, but it does not appear to. Even aircraft with standoff weapons are plotted to go straight over the target at point blank range - but doctrines take care of the rest, for exactly when to fire standoff weapons. I could certainly make all aircraft in a strike loiter until all launched and proceed where ToT is the same, but standoff weapons will be fired much sooner than aircraft in the strike which have Free Fall weapons for example. If the standoff weapon is a subsonic cruise missile, it might be approximate, but if it is supersonic, it would certainly arrive well earlier than aircraft armed with short range free fall ordinance for example.

The main problem is not having access to the characteristics of the weapons loaded on the aircraft - at best you can look at their DBID, but we certainly don't have access to the database. It might be possible to take any given scenario, and hijack it to create dummy sides, craft, weapons, and targets on the other side of the world to self learn all available weapons that are defined in the scenario, and write their characteristics to key values, to be used later....but that's a lot of work that I could easily foresee running into other problems even if that data was later available in the script. I'll have to think about that more.

Even though I thought ship/sub based cruise missiles would be the hardest thing, it might be the easiest thing. When sub/surface originated cruise missiles are launched at a specific target, they seem to have the same exact terminal phase and off-axis lat/long course plotted. But we don't atm have access to the exact target of the missile object (I think that is a future LUA ability), so it might be PF-Ugly to figure that out with what's available today. Finding a group of missiles that have the same exact terminal phase and off-axis coordinates and adding loiter plots to coordinate their ToT should be doable, but then it can get complex if you launch missiles at individual targets which would all have different courses plotted - which targets would one always want to coordinate ToT? Then of course you have to worry about missile fuel - a Tomahawk unless fired at near max range should have plenty of fuel to loiter for a while, but what about air launched CMs which would nearly always be launched at max standoff range - they don't have the fuel to be able to loiter to coordinate with much else.

Quite a challenge, and I now understand maybe why the future Advanced Strike Planner is taking so long

I'll continue to play around with this though, and get a script to coordinate sub/sea launched Tomahawk TACTOMs. it will be fun to even align them into formation - when zoomed in as they approach terminal phase (after that they activate their active sensors and are not allowed to be controlled I believe), seeing wave after wave of TACOMs in V-Wedge formation separated by X meters would be pretty cool - although that might cause a problem with one SAM being able to knock out several CMs if they are "too" close together.

That XLS Based Strike Planner is very impressive, but yeah, completely relies on knowing ahead of time, all of the weapon characteristics which aren't available in LUA. Anyways, I'm still having fun trying....and failing...

(in reply to Dan109)

Post #: 7

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/10/2017 10:41:01 PM

kevinkins

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I bet the Pro version has some form of time on target - as it should. That said, it's a fascinating problem to solve for regular players. Imagine the power it would give a player with the algorithm? The coordination of arms (like precision missiles) are state secrets - as they should be. The developers have to careful. This sim is so good, they must walk on egg shells all the time re: the Pro version.

Kevin

(in reply to Dan109)

Post #: 8

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/10/2017 11:36:45 PM

Gunner98

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From: The Great White North!
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They also need to be careful not to do too much of the player's job. Part of the challenge is figuring it out - and then getting it wrong

. Needs to be a nice balance where the player makes the decision and the strike planner does the mechanics - tricky.

B

(in reply to kevinkins)

Post #: 9

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/12/2017 12:19:06 PM

Cik

Posts: 671
Joined: 10/5/2016
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quote:

ORIGINAL: kevinkin

I bet the Pro version has some form of time on target - as it should. That said, it's a fascinating problem to solve for regular players. Imagine the power it would give a player with the algorithm? The coordination of arms (like precision missiles) are state secrets - as they should be. The developers have to careful. This sim is so good, they must walk on egg shells all the time re: the Pro version.

Kevin

there's nothing terribly secret about it IMO. falcon (flight sim) has TOT / WTOT values in it and those are just based on some """"simple"""" math about weapon trajectories and velocities. any TOT function already has the "fuzziness" of non-classified stuff built in so it's probably not a big deal.

getting weapons to hit at exactly the same moment is difficult but that doesn't really need to happen. as long as it's within ~10 seconds it's OK; usually you just want to ballpark it so you minimize enemy reaction time to incoming weapons, and also to make sure that all of your weapons hit the self-defense range of a high-level SAM at exactly the same moment to maximize PK.

falcon gets it down to a second or so on it's GBU/HARM/etc. and works great. not exactly the same as in command granted, as in command there are far more weapons and weapon varieties. but still possible in the long-term IMO.

(in reply to kevinkins)

Post #: 10

RE: Time on Target Missile Strikes - 6/12/2017 12:38:37 PM

Gunner98

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Joined: 4/29/2005
From: The Great White North!
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quote:

exactly the same moment is difficult

Although this is the most difficult to achieve, it is not always desirable. The advantage of ToT planning is a predictable terminal effect so you can peel back the layers of the onion:

Decoys arriving just as the ARMs are in range
AAA taken out moments before the missiles enter its kill envelope to strike the target
Radars taken out before they can queue a SAM

That sort of thing

A ToT planner will allow you to put the right weapon on the right target at the right time to achieve the desired effect.

B

(in reply to Cik)

Post #: 11