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ORIGINAL: witpqs
Please clarfy - 5nm after launch or prior to (the last 'known') target location? Same question with the 15 seconds of movement - after launch or before target?

Thanks in advance.

Seeker activation point is supposed to be 5nm or 15 seconds before impact.

Cheers,
JP

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Thanks VCDH and jpkoester1 - together your answers gaveme the whole picture.

VCDH,

The only drawback that I see to what you propose is that weapons that lack BOL capability would now have it (to effect the work-around). Would this be a short term solution with a fix pending (at an undetermined time)?

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Just a couple of more words on where this particular bug came from.

Each missile in the database has a Bearing Only Launc flag that can either be enabled or disabled. If it is enabled this means that the missile can fly part of the way without guidance and can then illuminate the target during the final phase of its flight. This is important for the BOL launch option.

BOL capable weapons in Harpoon 3 activate their sensors about 5nm or 15 seconds before the calculated impact no matter if they are fired in BOL mode or through the normal attack dialog. This means that the sensors of these weapons don't need to have detection of their target when they are fired.

Now in previous versions of the game (3.6.3 and previous) non-BOL capable missiles also activated their sensors 5nm or 15 seconds before impact and did need to have detection of their target when they were fired. The only difference was that they could not be launched in BOL attack mode. However, they still behaved like BOL missiles once they were launched. This behaviour was determined to be unrealistic (think for example sidewinder missile which needs lockon before it can be fired) and so in 3.7 these "guide themselves all the way" missiles turned on their sensors immediately after launch (although they still could be fired without their own sensors locking onto their target). As becomes clear in this thread this had the very undesirable sideeffect of missiles finding and locking on to the "wrong" target immediately after launch.

Now for the current build we are testing a fix that will check wether the missile has detection of its target BEFORE it is fired (if it doesn't I assume you will get the Target not illuminated message but I have yet to test it). However, because the missile does not yet exist in the game at that point in time an invisible "dummy missile" is now created to check for sensor lockon. For the player with weapons tight setting this is no problem (the calculation only has to be made when the attack toolbar button is pressed), however, for the AI this means that during each evaluation cycle the missile needs to be created to check for the potential to fire it. This puts some drain on processor power and we will need to evaluate if the increased realism is worth the performance impact.

Hope this explains some of the background of this bug.

Thanks for listening,
JP

Yes, it does. Thanks much for the explanations guys.