LuftWolf and Amizaur's Realism Mod Poll #10: The SLAM-Poon

[LuftWolf]

Ok guys, the long and the short of it, is that I CAN get the SLAM-ER to hit ships, using waypoints. So more or less, the a version of the Harpoon CAN be added to the P-3 for ASuW.

However, there are some problems with this.

1) I can't get it to have true waypoint and RunToEnable capability... in other words, at this point, the missile goes active as soon as its fired. It will follow its set waypoints as long as it doesn't home on anything, but if it encounteres anything along its flight path, it will start homing on it.

2) I have no idea what impact this might have on its Strike capability... at this point, it may have to be removed entirely.

My goal is to get the missile to enable on what is originally the destruct waypoint, because then it could still be used for strike (just enable the missile a short bit before the target so the radar seeker itself can home for the kill) and would more or less have full Harpoon capability then, other than a Destruct waypoint, but this is not such a big deal if it has three Fly-To waypoints on the way to the target. I think it would be nice if the SLAM-ER could be made into a version of the upgraded Harpoon, since after all, that's I think what it is supposed to be...

So, this thread really is not a poll per se, since I already know the overwhelming opinion is to have the Harpoon on the P-3, but what I do what to know from you guys is at what cost you would want the ASuW capability added.

So, throw around some ideas, if you want, especially under what circumstances you WOULD NOT want me to make the change, meaning there is too much lost in gameplay terms to add the single capability of ASuW to the SLAM-ER.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

So, throw around some ideas, if you want, especially under what circumstances you WOULD NOT want me to make the change, meaning there is too much lost in gameplay terms to add the single capability of ASuW to the SLAM-ER.

Sounds pretty good. Perhaps you can set it to use infrared instead of radar guidance? That will keep it SLAM - which has an IIR seeker.

And you might want to keep the seeker's FOV small (a few degrees). That will prevent it from homing too easily on other things, and will also simulate the difficulty involved when you use the real thing for AS attack - the FOV probably isn't all that big, and is even smaller if you want magnification so you can see anything with the limited res IIR seeker for a designation.

And just for the question - what point is it to have it "enable" on the destruct waypoint if the darn thing activates a seeker as soon as it is launched.

[LuftWolf]

IR seeker on the SLAM-ER is the whole reason why it was a non-functioning weapon in the first place from DW 1.0 up to 1.03... too reactive with the environment, so that's out.

In terms of the rest of your post, that's the details that I'm trying to work out...

BTW, I think I have this one by the stones the way I want to... the Terminal Homing commands required to make it follow waypoints were interfering with it ability to enable, so I did a little bit of variable swapping (Runout for RTE) and get it to enable a little bit before the final waypoint, and its working...

I just have my test build for this now with all kinds of junk in it... so I'm going to script it from the bottom up and hopefully get it to work again just right.

I want all the feedback I can get on this.

Right now, what we are going to be looking at is an Advanced Harpoon for the P-3, basically a SLAM-ER that retains the Harpoon's ASuW capability (or a Harpoon with land attack capability depending on how you feel when you look at it): land attack capability on waypoints with terrain following capability is retained from the SLAM-ER, in all other respects it will act like a Harpoon (with radar guidance) with three fly-to waypoints before enabling, but it will not have a seeker size option, nor will it have a destruct range option.

What do you guys think about this?

Happy Easter, btw!

[Yskonyn]

I can imagine that if it goes active upon firing it could cause a lot of unwanted trouble in a high activity environment...

I'd rather have no weapon at all then.

Happy Easter!

[LuftWolf]

I'm pretty sure I've resolved that problem.

I'm going to script something from the ground up the way I think it should be and let you know how it goes.

Cheers,
David

[LuftWolf]

Well, the long and the short of it at 9:34 EST on Easter Sunday is that its working... I had to do a bunch of extra things to get around a problem that essentially amounts to "these missile don't like time compression" only to find the only way around it is to NOT use time compression during missile testing (because it totally fudges all the range calculations and if something is a bit off with these SLAM-ER hacks, the missile is going into the sea), and I'll leave it at that for now.

So I'm going to do ANOTHER build from the bottom up, without all the unnecessary work arounds and test without time compression.

It looks like TC+missiles are bad combo in general... all kinds of things might be messed up because the game can't calculate the ranges properly (they are moving too fast to calculate with TC on), so I'm going to say here now that I don't recommend using TC with missile in the air.

Ok, maybe another build of LWAMI is around the corner after all... this one seems worth doing 3.03 for.

Any other things people want to see in a new LWAMI build that you don't think will take forever and a day to do?

[Bill Nichols]

Sounds very promising

[LuftWolf]

Yes, I just confirmed it using DebugViewer... using TC when missiles are in the air and the doctrine requires an xyrng calculation will cause a progressive under calculation of range traveled in the order of 30% each cycle... so of course that caused all kinds of problems in this situation where I have a tolerance of less of a 1nm between the missile doing what it is supposed to and threshing around like a fish in the water.

This should be very straightforward to do properly at this point.

Ok, so the idea for this is an air-launched Harpoon variant with Extended Response capabilities.

The new SLAM-ER will:

1) Maintain the range and speed enhancements of the stock SLAM-ER over the Harpoon. The SLAM-ER has a 280km (Harpoon is about 118km) range and a speed of 548kts (Harpoon is about 510kts).

2) Have a warhead equal to the Harpoon (enough to just kill the OHP with two missiles) and due to the wide wing span have a cruising and homing altitude of 30ft (equal to the SS-N-27 subsonic stage and lower than the 50ft of other seaskimming missiles in the game, including the Harpoon) and a radar cross section of the TASM (have to lose something guys).

3) Retain the terrain following capability of the original SLAM-ER and can cruise on three waypoints, with the last waypoint being the enable point.

Any suggestions on changes to this?

Cheers,
David

[LuftWolf]

Oh crap... I've been bad...

It has nothing to do with the time compression, but rather how the runtoenable is calculated... that's a design problem but compounded by the darn interface... so I need to find another way of doing a couple things...

I'll keep you guys posted.

[LuftWolf]

Ok, well, I'm just calculating the RTE based on time in the air (I can do that here since the speed is constant and this doctrine is only for the SLAM-ER... it should work fine 99.5% of the time if I build in a small tolerance, but not so big that it makes targeting too difficult) and the whole things works perfectly together for ASuW.

I need to do some testing on the Strike capability but now it works like a radar guided Strike missile with waypoint and terrain follow capability, as opposed to a TLAM which is blind and falls on the waypoint every time.

Also, I need to make sure the fine tuning of the missile RTE calculations are good, but basically, I think it can be said that the Harpoon is now on the player P-3C.

[LuftWolf]

Ok guys, I need to do some range-dependant error correction for my RunToEnable calculation method since it produces slightly inconsistent enable points on the final waypoint based on total range travelled... since the enable point needs to be fairly precise in order for this missile to be used correctly.

This is going to take a bit of time... so I'm going to take a break and watch some baseball, and hopefully finish this tonight or so for LWAMI 3.03.

So, what else needs to be corrected for LWAMI 3.03?

Now is your chance.

Cheers,
David

[Deathblow]

Does the SLAM-ER ever get used in any mission or scenario? If not then sounds like the changes would be welcome, otherwise it might leave some missions unplayable.

[Mau]

Yes,

I just want to know if we will lose the Slam-ER.
Are we going to be able to choose between Slam-ER andéor Harpoon for the P-3?

[LuftWolf]

The SLAM-ER will function differently than a TLAM, but will still be capable of ground attack.

Keep in mind, this missile has been broken in stock DW since 1.0 and up to 1.02, so there are essentially zero missions that use the P-3C in a ground attack role requiring the SLAM-ER.

No, I cannot change weapons because that is hardcoded in the interface for playable platforms, I can only change their parameters, and no I can't make dubs. It's either all the way changed or not changed at all.

If I could simply swap weapons in and out, well, then this would be a whole different experience modding this game (think new playable platforms...).

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

Any other things people want to see in a new LWAMI build that you don't think will take forever and a day to do?

As I kept bugging you about, just do something fast on the missiles and FCRs in the DB. You don't need to get them perfect. Just concentrate on the most obviously wrong and go with what's already in your brain or whatever's close at hand - anything you can input would be eons more realistic than the present state. Don't bother taking more than a 60-90 minutes on this - fast, rough at present.

At least we'd see if people even notice the difference.