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With today's guided missiles it should be possible to program missile to recognize and target specific part of a warship like where it`s VLS missile launchers are located to cause massive secondary explosions and destroy the ship instantly with just one missile.

With today's guided missiles it should be possible to program missile to recognize and target specific part of a warship like where it`s VLS missile launchers are located to cause massive secondary explosions and destroy the ship instantly with just one missile.

Wouldn't that require technical data for every model of ship in existence, which, I think, would be rather data-intensive for a missile. And wouldn't it be confused by a new one? I'm not certain, but just how good are the processors on a missile?

Base Delta Zero wrote:

With today's guided missiles it should be possible to program missile to recognize and target specific part of a warship like where it`s VLS missile launchers are located to cause massive secondary explosions and destroy the ship instantly with just one missile.

Wouldn't that require technical data for every model of ship in existence, which, I think, would be rather data-intensive for a missile. And wouldn't it be confused by a new one? I'm not certain, but just how good are the processors on a missile?

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be feasible to do any kind of detailed analysis of the target ship's layout. An optical seeker would be affected by poor visibility, a short-wave imaging radar would be jammable/decoyable, have impractical power requirements and raise the missile's signature. Both types would have an acquisition time sharply limited by horizon for sea-skimmers and range/closure rate for supersonic divers. The kind of feature extraction algorithms you could use to generate a 3D model of the target ship are unreliable and barely practical on the processors you'd find on a missile anyway. In short I can't see the significant cost increase (including development costs) and reliability decrease being worth the small chance of doing more damage than you would've otherwise. This may change in the future when better and cheaper sensors and processors are available.

I imagine it would be practical to program in a simple offset from the center of the target ship; the missile would attempt to hit a point n metres forward or backwards along the target's track, measured from the center of the blip. This technique is already used during missile testing (with bigger deflections) when test rounds aren't supposed to hit the target. I don't know enough about the relevant systems to be able to say if trying to target VLS cells that way would be a viable tactic.

Why bother targeting the VLS or the bridge? A single missile hit will cripple or sink most warships

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Why bother targeting the VLS or the bridge? A single missile hit will cripple or sink most warships

As HMS Sheffield, HMS Coventry, and USS Stark (almost) demonstrate.

Patrick Degan wrote:

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Why bother targeting the VLS or the bridge? A single missile hit will cripple or sink most warships

As HMS Sheffield, HMS Coventry, and USS Stark (almost) demonstrate.

Did`t knew that. If a single missile can sink or put out of commission your average warship then it`s currently not worth to equip missile with unreliable 3D recognition software an hope it hits some specific part of the targeted ship. I can imagine it could be more cost effective to program missile to try to evade point defense fire on final stages of it`s attack run, something like random zig zag flight when closing on target.

Sky Captain wrote:I can imagine it could be more cost effective to program missile to try to evade point defense fire on final stages of it`s attack run, something like random zig zag flight when closing on target.

Most modern missiles already do this. We had an extensive debate on AShM vs point defense effectiveness in the HAB recently; it's an ongoing arms race, though as with ABM I get the impression the defense is progressing faster than the offense right now.