I think Victor is talking about two missile being independently guided and not as you mention it with wooble thing , the beam needs to be lased hence it cant afford to wobble without breaking the link
Sorry... what?
You don't think the beam riding missile flys down a beam a cm across or something do you?
That would make it pretty impossible for the missile to "gather itself in the beam".
For the first hundred metres or so of missile flight it might be several metres away from the centre of the beam.
Needless to say a beam of laser light starting at 2cm across that diverges at an average of 1mm per metre... which is quite normal, would result in a beam 20mm + (1 x 7,000), which would basically make the beam 7m and 2cm wide at 7km range.
The beam for the Kornet-EM HE missile would be over 10m at 10km... and that is a good thing.
If the beam was 1cm across all the way to the target the missile would be very unlikely to even find the beam to ride.
The reality is totally different and the beam will be enormous.
In fact it is probably better to think of it as four beams or one beam divided into four different "colours". This beam is not visible... it is either in IR or a UV frequency.
Lets say the top left quarter is red, the top right is blue, bottom left is green, and bottom right is yellow. When the missile looks back it will see the colour from the part of the beam it is in, so if it looks back and sees yellow it doens't need a datalink or anything... it knows it is low and to the right of the target, so it climbs and turns left a little and it keeps doing that till the colour changes... it might turn blue which tells it it is still to the right of the target and now it is high so it keeps turning left and stops climbing and starts to descend... eventually it will see all four colours and know it is on target and will fly straight and level if the target is stationary.
For a moving target however it will try to keep as closely centred on the target as possible till impact.
To independently guide two missiles you would need two independent lasers to guide them.
Now I have described the beams as colours and obviously they are not colours we can see, they are invisible radiation in non visible light spectrums.
The tanks don't have two laser beam channels as far as I know and it is only because of the long range that would allow multiple shots as it would take at least 6-8 seconds to load another missile to fire, but it takes a missile 14-17seconds to reach max range targets so there would be time to launch another missile but that missile would ride the beam for the other missile till the first missile hits the target. Once the first missile has hit the target then the gunner needs to decide whether to hit that same target again or to move the target crosshair and select another target that the beam can be moved to and the second missile will turn and follow and hit the new target.
Several beams can be used at one time using different frequencies... remember the sensor in the missile will be far more sensitive than a human eye and it will detect the precise frequency of laser light that hits it.
Otherwise the twin launcher on the Tigr with two guidance systems would be pretty pointless.
Also arming several tanks in a unit with missiles would be pretty pointless too as it would mean only one tank could fire at once.
There would be the same issue with the AT-6 Shturm and AT-9 ATAKA radio command missiles which uses coded command links to allow multiple aircraft to fire the same type of missile at different targets.
To make the most of the manouver capability of some of these missiles the newer models might have much more complex beams... perhaps still in quarters, but with a narrow area of "close" and an outer area of "far" where the inner part of the beam is split into four specific frequencies as above, but around the outside there is another frequency overlayed so if the missile sees red and an orange, then it knows it is more than a few metres off target so it will know it is not just high and to the left of the target, it will know it is more than a few metres off the line of sight to the target so the missile itself will turn much harder to the right and down than it would have if it saw the red but not the orange.
This would not be so important for stationary targets but would be very useful against aerial targets like UAVs or helicopters.
Home
Latest images
Register
Log in
