OOlite 1.73.4 - enemy missiles have a hard time hitting me

[Griff]

Enemy hard-hat missiles in v1.73.4 can't seem to hit me if i go quite slowly and change direction lots (such as when scooping up a cloud of cargo pods), they go too fast or turn too slowly or something, they just keep diving at me and missing and having to do a U-turn. Occasionaly they will hit but most of the time they just buzz around annoyingly until they run out of fuel and die, also they seem to have an awful lot of fuel - they live for ages, shouldn't it be a trade off for ecm proof missiles to have only a short range, 30 seconds worth of fuel or something, less than a standard missile?

[Screet]

Enemy hard-hat missiles in v1.73.4 can't seem to hit me if i go quite slowly and change direction lots (such as when scooping up a cloud of cargo pods), they go too fast or turn too slowly or something, they just keep diving at me and missing and having to do a U-turn. Occasionaly they will hit but most of the time they just buzz around annoyingly until they run out of fuel and die, also they seem to have an awful lot of fuel - they live for ages, shouldn't it be a trade off for ecm proof missiles to have only a short range, 30 seconds worth of fuel or something, less than a standard missile?

Please no short range enforcement. Having such for cheaper cost might be something (isn't there the hardhead missile rack already?), but if all such missiles are short range, I doubt it would do the game any good.

However, I today had a similar observation with OSE: A constitution did fire several dozens of missiles at a spearhead. They circled around the ship (although L did increase their aiming already in the past) and after quite some time one did hit the ship. It stood still for a few seconds which I used to laser it - then it suddenly "jumped" to another position on the screen and was hit by another missile, just the time when the game did close itself without any log entries However, there were dozens of missiles circling that ship - and while it did stand still, none did hit it! Only after it moved a little bit, it was hit by another missile. The spearhead is very tiny, but that simply is not the experience I would expect. Furthermore, several missiles seemed to be close enough so that they should have done their work if they would have exploded via proximity (unless the missile type somehow required physical contact).

Due to the crash I could not check what type of missiles those were - since I do guess that those might have to do something with the strange crashes L did report and which I do have since I re-enabled parts of the OSE additional ships for each system. Without that, I did not have a single crash! Furthermore, it only adds ships...and the populator does that on it's own, doesn't it? So my guess is that it's either some special ship AI assignment or some special weaponry given there which does cause the crash problems.

Ohh...and I have been chased by some nukes today. I did not really notice that the AMS did not get them until I did wonder why there were so many cyan blips directly around my ship I also was trying to scoop...and used an occasional injector activation to stay away once I noticed those missiles. I'm not sure if they survived too long, but they also were circling my Caduceus without hitting it. Under normal conditions, those should have hit me because I simply did not pay enough attention to them

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[Cmdr Wyvern]

I've noticed military missiles sometimes doing the circling harassment dance instead of detonating. That's strange behavior for mil' missiles, they're supposed to cut that nonsense down to a minimum.

Nukes are also supposed to be fairly steadfast, but - and it's a big but - nukes are pretty useless vs ships more agile than a Python. A nuke isn't a dogfighting weapon per se; It's merely a crude sledgehammer to whack large, slow and well armored cruisers with. Smaller ships outfly nukes with ease.

[Screet]

I've noticed military missiles sometimes doing the circling harassment dance instead of detonating. That's strange behavior for mil' missiles, they're supposed to cut that nonsense down to a minimum.

Well, it fits the mass-suicide acts I've recently seen from their pilots...and those missiles are not required against thargoids if their fleets shoot themselves up (as I witnessed today - there was not even a non-thargoid around!).

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[Griff]

I've tried tweaking some of their settings, upped the max_flight_pitch from 8 to 10 and added a bit more max_flight_speed to them (changed it to 850 from 750) as they didn't seem to be able to catch me in my cobraIII with my foot down, even though the cobby's top speed is 350 and a missile's is 750, they all just bunched up behind me as i flew along in a straight line almost as if they were all to polite to charge ahead of the others, they kept dropping back, speeding up, then dropping back again!

[Lestradae]

I've tried tweaking some of their settings, upped the max_flight_pitch from 8 to 10 and added a bit more max_flight_speed to them ... they didn't seem to be able to catch me in my cobraIII with my foot down, even though the cobby's top speed is 350 and a missile's is 750

I have been and am experimenting with this quite a bit for OSE, as ships there can be even faster, and I have had to set the speed of missiles somewhere between 900 and 2700 to have success. With that kind of speed, you can barely escape, but need to be on injectors and fly evasive maneuvers all the time. If you don't, they'll hit.

I suggest missile speeds in that range, therefore.



L

[Screet]

I have been and am experimenting with this quite a bit for OSE, as ships there can be even faster, and I have had to set the speed of missiles somewhere between 900 and 2700 to have success. With that kind of speed, you can barely escape, but need to be on injectors and fly evasive maneuvers all the time. If you don't, they'll hit.

I suggest missile speeds in that range, therefore.

What you write is true, but the strange observations he made I also had WITH these OSE tuned missiles! Thus, there really appears to be something strange with the missile code now...

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[Lestradae]

there really appears to be something strange with the missile code now

It sounds to me that they are overshooting. Perhaps something in the code could be changed that they simply explode/do their thing if they are close enough to run in circles?

[DaddyHoggy]

there really appears to be something strange with the missile code now

It sounds to me that they are overshooting. Perhaps something in the code could be changed that they simply explode/do their thing if they are close enough to run in circles?

Can I just point out as somebody who used to help develop anti-missile defences - that the clue is in the name - MISS-ile, i.e. a MISSile does not need to hit its target to explode and do damage to the intended target, therefore these projectile weapons in Oolite are either HITiles or they have incorrect behaviour.

Just to bring a little RL(tm) spin to the whole debate...

[JensAyton]

The real question is whether missiles’ turn radius is significantly bigger than their blast radius. A “realistic” answer would be yes, in which case exploding when they’re in loop mode wouldn’t help. If anyone wants to rewrite the course plotting logic to take turn radius into account, feel free. :-)

[DaddyHoggy]

All the missiles I used to work on protection against used Proportional Navigation to solve their intercept course.

To give you some loose figures from RL(tm)

Fast Jet (Target): Velocity c. 250m/s, 9G turn (pilot limited not airframe)
Hitile: Velocity c. 750m/s, 30G turn

In RL(tm) - Fast Jets never "turn inside" a hit/missile

I don't know how these figures stack up against Oolite ships and missiles - or indeed what algorithm the missiles use to fly an intercept.

Note: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/11235455/Mo ... e-Guidance

Sections 1 and 2 - I 'fess that we used to employ some proper mathematicians for this kind of stuff - I used to just pick through the code of our models - it used to make my head hurt and eyes bleed if I'm honest

[Screet]

Fast Jet (Target): Velocity c. 250m/s, 9G turn (pilot limited not airframe)

Some F16s did break at much less when they had a full payload

Sections 1 and 2 - I 'fess that we used to employ some proper mathematicians for this kind of stuff - I used to just pick through the code of our models - it used to make my head hurt and eyes bleed if I'm honest

Wow! That must have been a real high-G evasive your brain did attempt to avoid that

I think you're right that the code should do much better. I've had a swarm of missiles circle my Caduceus again and not one did hit it. They definitely were in a range where they should have exploded on proximity anyway...

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[DaddyHoggy]

Actually to make your eyes bleed you need to perform a high negative G turn so that all the blood rushes too, rather than away from your head - red out (rather than black out) followed by leakage (if you're not careful).

Not nice.

[Screet]

Question to developers:

Are missiles using ShipEntity.m?

If so, do I read the code properly that missiles can go into collision avoidance mode and behaviours like fly_to_target_six/twelve and also will not adjust their speed when getting close to the target (thus making it more difficult to hit it)?

If not, please, where are missiles being handled?

EDIT: ShipEntity does respond to isMissile, thus I assume it really is handling the missiles and suffers from the above mentioned. I just adjusted my local copy and am testing with a different handling for missiles - first result was that a hardened missile instantly went for my ship and did hit directly instead of circling me...might have been luck though.

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[Micha]

I had weird missile behaviour last night (Hardhead missiles) in 1.73.5 (maintenance-branch build).

A couple of missiles were fired at me, but instead of closing in on me they flew in formation with the ships which had fired them, at ~20km distance (I was flying away from the group).

When I finally turned around to take on the ships, the missiles suddenly closed in once I got within about 15km.

However, they then continued to just circle me. One was .05km behind my ship (I'd managed to get a target lock), and slowly drifted backwards, with me flying in a straight line away from it. It's AI was 'interceptAI'.

So yes, the current missile logic/AI is broken.