the bluetooth example doesn’t match a terminal phase sarh-seeker behaviour.
a very simple example would be putting two very small mirrors on a wall some meters away as targets. if you quickly illuminate them alternating with a red and a green laser you can always engage a red target and a green one and the red one will always be the red one. but you have to move your lasers fast (-> esa)
if you do the same with two flashlights both targets will be blinking red and green. so which one is the red target and which one is the green one? if your illuminating beam is not sharp enough to highlight a single target you have no control on which target the sam will engage.

how many tests have been done with the sm-2 against sea skimmers in a ir-only mode terminal phase? why should i rely on the ir-seeker only if i can get a fusion of the main seeker (sarh) and the fallback ir-seeker? from my point of view in the ashm-scenario the ir-seeker is only a fallback solution for supporting the sarh-seeker in heavy ecm-environments.

Besides for the pure reason that technological advances make it possible, the active SM-6 might be motivated by exactly the problem of illumination hand-over.

and for a hand-over you need another ship with high power illuminators. but if there is another aegis ship it would more likely use it’s own sams first (if they have any left). and of course with arh you can overcome the radar horizon and the limitations of fc-channels.

On moving the ship into a favourable firing/illumination position: Not in a fast moving task force, where you have to hold station. That is exactly one of the issues a AAW/ASW-combo escort has.

i think as soon as it becomes really clear that you have to start shooting very soon at an inbound target you want to maneuver your ship to unmask as much sensors and weapon systems as possible. in most cases even in a task force there will be enough room for this because you loose a lot of firepower if 50 % of your illuminators and all your ciws are masked. (and the question here is how to maneuver a tico to get all 4 illuminators unmasked. in most directions at least one off them is masked.)

On the pK of salvo shots: I think a 2-missile salvo is more the regular case than just a single bird up. In contrast to AAA with missiles you can’t wait to see the results of the flak. So you fire a salvo, in a CEC-enabled task force not neccessarily from the same ship (to counter the effects of ECM, reflection specifics, magazine balancing, &c).

imho this highly depends on the scenario.
– number of incoming targets
– engagement windows/time for a second/third interception (->target speed)
– number of fire control channels
– reliability of your last layer (ciws)
– ….
e.g. for a tico shooting two sams at a single target nearly at once would be (in most cases) the best way because they can share one spg-62, moving the mechanical driven illuminators need time, the tico has a lot of vl-cells, …

for a f-124 on the other side with apar and only 32 mk-41 cells it would be more likely to start shooting one sam on each target and after this some spare rounds which can catch up the targets which have been missed by the first volley. and with 42 ready to fire ram’s there is a inner layer with much fire power to deal with the leakers.

(both examples are based on the presumption that there are a high number of targets inbound. if there is only a single supersonic seaskimmer inbound, most of them will shoot two sams as soon as poosible because nobody want to ante it’s life to show the proof that the ciws can catch a supersonic leaker.)

EDIT: Another question: What influence has relative target speed on illumination time?

another important question but who can answer it? the same can be applied to the mid course updates. from my point of view i would work with a decreasing update cycle time during midcourse phase. after a sam has been launched they often start to follow a “optimized” flightpath to get as much kinetic power for the endgame. so in this first flightphase data-updates won’t change much on the flightpath. on the other hand soon before changing to the terminal phase a high update rate via midcourse datachannels may improve the pk more. (in terminal phase icwi may also be able to work with adaptiv update rates maybe starting with 10 or 25% time usage and ending with 50% or more).

Oh man, that was AGES ago (like late 80s) I read about that so the source is probably a book out in the shed.

sorry but i like to know where such information are from. sometimes it helps to rate them.

The only time the Standards need illumination is in the final few seconds of flight (they have the IR sensor onboard as well remember) so each of the four illuminators will only be involved for a few seconds of each individual engagement. The time-sharing I was referring to is (apparently) enabled by the fact that target illumination isn’t like a laser beam but more of a narrow cone. Obviously that limits the possiblities on how far apart your targets can be for any particular illuminator but as long as you can send more than one stream of data from it it should work fine.

i have some problems with this “time-sharing” issue for multiple targets:
– it’s hard to say how close targets have to be to be illuminated by a single spg-62.
– how will a sam decide which target to engage if all of them are reflecting the same signals?

so far i assume: one illuminator -> one target -> multiple sam’s simultaneously in terminal phase on that target (if required)

The Burke graph: If you assume 1 sec in between, you have continous fire.

The terminal phase is easy. Illumination time divided by number of illuminators is max fire rate.

i think you are wrong here. the first sets of graphs shows a burke with a launch rate of 1 sec and stil no continous fire. during the scenario the flight time for the sams decreases. launching a sam each sec does not mean an impact each second.

Why?. You already have Mk41 with twice the firing rate of Sylver….1sec over 2secs?. Even if you just put the Sylver to parity with Mk41 that would seem to change the results a fair degree!.

the burkes have two separate vls. imho it’s no problem to shoot from both simultaneously or lets say alternating, so the “default” launch rate is divided by two for the burkes. for the apar equipped ships i take the 2 sec for an mk-41 because there is only a single mk-41 complex.