We've been plotting (haha) a new piece of functionality for the contacts board - a course plot display which would show the position of contacts on the board relative to the ship (as a simple schematic map).
The idea came out of the hunt sims I've been doing where I took to sketching out contacts on my tablet to get a feel for the course they might have been describing.
There have been some updates to EMDAR that reflect new research data on EM dissipation. It turns out we have been over-estimating how much EM dissipates over distance, meaning EM emissions are easier to detect at lower output levels than previously thought. Which will make an EMDAR tech's life easier, but a quartermaster's life harder.
Previously only EM output above 60 SEMs were thought likely to be consistently detectable at ranges of over 3000GUs. Now, even EM output at 20 SEMs is consistently detectable (via extrapolation) at up to 7000GUs.
A couple of new EMDAR evolutions (training exercises) have been published, just in time to try out in the new sim facility!
Needle in a Haystack is pretty basic. The target isn't moving and is outputting constant EM, but it gives you a feel for how to pick target bearing from the waterfall display. With only your ship moving, it's easier to correlate the waterfall drift with heading changes. Check it out here.
This is a first look at a firing solution calculator prototype. This will be used to calculate the ideal combination of range and speed for a torpedo launch in order to hit its target (a “prosecution”).
The Royal Navy has confirmed plans to trial direct-energy weapons for use on ships and helos for anti-drone and anti-missile applications. There are obvious parellels with requirements for countermeasure systems on Endeavour.
There's been debate here about whether a close-in defence "phalanx" system should be based on kinetic-energy or direct-energy (or both).
This is a proposed firing solution for torpedos for our MVP. Being an MVP it is a much more simplified version that what the final will be. The primary aim of the MVP is for us to see how it performs in the hunter killer simulations and gather data on user interaction with the system. A lot of the numbers of the system have not been decided left and will be left out of this while they are tweaked. This post is less about the math and more about the method.
For now firing is design to happen at Impulse speed.
A simulated exercise assessment has been posted which provides a first look at how EMDAR works in practise.
An exercise assessment documents how the participants progressed through a simulated mission, including snapshots of the relevant consoles they were using. In the near future, these assessments will also include video.
The launch system planned for torpedoes is railgun based, which relies on a magnetic field to amplify initial velocity from an explosive launch. This should give us launch velocities of at least 10K km/sec, depending on the length of the railgun.
So this is a post I have wanted to do for a while, basically for the MVP we have to simplify the weapons system to see what works and what does not. We can build up from there in each iteration.
I have boiled down my weapons system into core points: