[FIXED] [507] No ARM damage...

[Windom Earle]

I'm firing four KSR-5MP (AS-6 Kingfish B Mod 3) ARM at PS-66/T [MPR] radar.
In the message log I see: three missiles has impacted this target, one has malfunctioned.
OK. Now I'm switching to OPFOR (benefits of playing in Scenario Editor [:)]) and what I see?
0 (zero) % damage!

I've tried it several times - same result.
Maybe I'm dumb and doing something wrong... Or maybe I should just nuke that radar? [:D]

[mikmykWS]

Sorry than happened but thanks for the report. Logged to look at!

Mike

[AndrewJ]

I'm having a similar problem with the Kingfish ARM. (Facing the Bear, Build 507)

What I initially noticed was that the missiles were missing by enormous amounts: an average of nearly 11 km![X(]



The missiles appear to track normally towards the target, but the little circular white 'explosion' icon appears many kilometers away from the target. Since these were all missing, I have no idea whether they would have caused damage or not.

However, if you click on an incoming missile and use F1 to designate the radar target and set up a targeting vector, then the missiles impact directly.



In this case, none of the missiles do any damage to the target.

If you run a test with a stream of missiles with the F1 tweak they seem to all initially impact for no damage, until eventually one of them causes the sensor to be destroyed, but without damage to the target, after which normal hits and misses seem to begin.



This behaviour of non-damaging impacts followed by loss of the sensor and reversion to normal hitting shows up in other ARMs too.


Running a test scenario with a variety of missiles shows the following:

AS-5 ARM: large miss (2 - 10 km), or click on missile and F1 for no-damage impacts changing to normal hits.

AS-6 ARM: large miss (2 - 10 km), or click on missile and F1 for no-damage impacts changing to normal hits.

AS-9 ARM: seems to work properly?

AS-12 ARM: no-damage impacts changing to normal hits.

Shrike - seems to work properly?

Standard - no-damage impacts changing to normal hits. (I also saw it having large miss distances in earlier play last month, but it's not doing it now.)

HARM - seems to work properly?


I have included saves of the 'big miss' and 'always hit' situations in the scenario, and some streams of missiles in a test scenario.

[AndrewJ]

One thing that struck me last night was that it seemed like the 'large miss distance' behaviour of the AS-5 and AS-6 ARMs was varying with launch distance. The closer I launched to the target, the smaller the miss distance seemed to get. So I ran some more trials, firing at short, medium, and long range to see what I got.



The variation in miss distances is directly proportional to launch range, which suggests that whatever is causing the wild misses is happening at the moment of launch, not later on in the engagement logic. Is it possible that for some reason these particular ARMs are using 'unguided rocket' logic (i.e., miss proportional to range) instead of their proper guidance logic? (It doesn't seem like the ARMs are prematurely using their "loss of radar signal" behaviour, because missiles that are left over after the radar is destroyed fly off into the distance without hitting anything, while these ones do explode.)

During the testing there were several occasions where the ARMs did damage or destroy the target when they randomly happened to burst very close to the target, so it looks like the warhead logic is functioning correctly in these cases (unlike the no-damage impacts for other ARM situations).

One question: what sort of distribution are you using for the miss distances? It certainly doesn't look like a normal distribution. Is it really just a flat distribution within set limits?

[mikmykWS]

Great work Andy. Thank you!

Mike

[AndrewJ]

Out of curiosity, what is the hit rate of the AS-6 Kingfish B Mod 3 supposed to be against a stationary undefended radar emplacement? Is it just the "Surface PoH" value of 85%, as seen in the database viewer, or would there be other modifiers or values? Even if the software isn't working quite right at the moment, I could at least roll dice at impact time to continue playing the mission and see how my master plan works out!

(Ditto AS-12)

[mikmykWS]

Thanks for reporting guys. I've added this to our list of things to look at.

Mike

[Dimitris]

Checking this under B564 and it appears to have been fixed. Misses are significantly nearer and the radar usually gets destroyed with the first few impacts (airbursts, actually).