Quote:
Originally Posted by mapuc
I wonder and it's pure speculation.
If some high ranked officer has said the same to the Prime Minister as Kapitan told me.
Once fired there's no code to disable it.
To be honest I truly thought it was possible to use some code to disable a missile like the Exocet when fired.
I thank thi for enlighten me Mr Kapitan and not to forget Jimbuna.
Markus
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Very few missiles come with an in flight self destruct function, to my knowledge I believe only the Aster 15 / 30 (Sea Viper) and the SM2 3 and 6 have this but I may be wrong.
I know that sea dart if you broke lock the missile was basically an unguided rocket (HMS Coventry 1982 proved that)
Missiles like Harpoon use a guidance track and it will hit a certain point before the seeker becomes active similar set up with the Exocet, basically once it is fired that's it there's no return, Fire and forget missiles are just that
once fired forget about them.
Exocet and Harpoon have their own internal target radar and navigation systems and require no external sensors for target acquisition unlike sea dart which relied on the ship board radars to guide them, if the ships radars broke lock the missile goes dumb and will miss the target.
That was the big problem back in 82 both sea dart and sea wolf relied heavily on ship board sensors to guide missiles to targets, if you look at what the soviets were fielding at the same time you would be shocked to learn they were a good 20+ years ahead of us.
The P700 (SS-N-19 shipwreck) for example would be volley fired in a batch 20/24 missiles, one missile would climb to 20,000ft and provide range and targeting data for all the missiles using a data link system.
The missiles were also capable of target discrimination as well, and just prior to the terminal phase the missile leading (one at 20,000ft) would assign each surviving missile a target they then go into their high supersonic state for the final terminal phase before impact.
You can program a P700 to go after smaller ships and ignore big ones if say you wanted to take out the picket line to create a gap for aircraft or vice versa to ignore picket ships and go for the large carriers or amphibs.
Neither Exocet or Harpoon can do this, it will hit what ever it see's, a frigate a destroyer, or container ship as we found out in the Falkland's with Atlantic conveyor, it also proves these missiles can be spoofed by soft kill systems such as chaff.