Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Dimitris

Takes?

ORIGINAL: AndrewJ

I have no real-life experience with this, but it would seem to me that a BOL launch should not be dog-legging under normal circumstances. The intention is to send the weapon directly towards the target, so that even though the range is unknown, the weapon seeker will still be able to pass over the target and initiate an engagement. A dog-leg would require a range estimate, and range is the piece of hard information that is usually missing in a BOL shot. A wrong range estimate makes it very unlikely for the doglegged BOL shot to hit.

Also, a dogleg shot takes longer to get to the target. In some cases (torpedo counterfire, for example) it's crucial for the weapon to get to the enemy as soon as possible, to force them to turn away and evade. A direct path BOL shot is more efficient for this.

I don't think the weapon seeker needs to turn on immediately after weapons release. 'Proceed along bearing X, and turn on your seeker at distance Y' is perfectly normal behaviour for most weapons. Anti-ship missiles with active radar certainly worked this way for many decades.

So my personal preference would be for BOL shots to default to a straight-line course directly along the chosen bearing, with seeker activation at a designated point. The player would retain the capability to add waypoints if they wanted to, with the normal course setting tools, but if they do not it would be a straight-line shot.

(Actually, I wish this was the default behaviour for missile shots in general. The computer will currently assign random doglegs to any missile shot that has the capability, which means I have to go in and undo them every single time. There is rarely any advantage to those random doglegs. Since they are not calculated to produce a TOT shot, they spread out the weapon arrival times, giving more chances for the target to shoot down the incoming missiles, and more chances that the missiles will fly near other defences on the way to the target. The AI's dogleg shots are sometimes helpful for disguising the location of distant SSGNs, but in most cases I welcome the extra time it gives me to defend against the spread-out salvo.)

So my personal preference would be for BOL shots to default to a straight-line course directly along the chosen bearing, with seeker activation at a designated point. The player would retain the capability to add waypoints if they wanted to, with the normal course setting tools, but if they do not it would be a straight-line shot.

(Actually, I wish this was the default behaviour for missile shots in general. The computer will currently assign random doglegs to any missile shot that has the capability, which means I have to go in and undo them every single time. There is rarely any advantage to those random doglegs. Since they are not calculated to produce a TOT shot, they spread out the weapon arrival times, giving more chances for the target to shoot down the incoming missiles, and more chances that the missiles will fly near other defences on the way to the target. The AI's dogleg shots are sometimes helpful for disguising the location of distant SSGNs, but in most cases I welcome the extra time it gives me to defend against the spread-out salvo.)