Re: More EW, the celebration continues!

From: "Laserlight" <laserlight@quixnet.net>
> First off, you don't need to worry about the time for the
> outbound signal.  If the signal reflects off the target at T0
> and is received by the FC at T1, all you're concerned about is
> how far the target moved between T0 and T1 (we will ignore the
> time for weapons fire to arrive since that's not relevant to
> whether a drone helps or not).

What's more, assuming you've made several measurements,
you can predict where the target is most likely to be at time T1.

Consider a "realistic" scenario:
Range to target is, say 
  1 light second,
  3x10^8 metres,
  300,000 km.

Time for processing is negligible - a few milliseconds at most.

Target is randomly evading, pulling 6g ( g = 10 m/sec rather than
9.8 here) in a direction normal to the direct path from firer to target.

Firer knows where the target _WAS_  1 second ago. Assuming
a laser that takes 1 sec to slew and get to full power, this means a
delay
of:
1 sec from reflection
1 sec for weapons prep
1 sec for laser to reach target.

At 6g, 3secs means about a 270 meter displacement from predicted
position.
If we assume 2 secs, it's 120 meters.

Assuming a 10 millisecond delay for processing, it will be on the order
of
272 metres. Assuming an illuminating  drone is a full 3000 km away from
the
firer, make that 274.

It's actually harder to do fire control using 127mm main guns in a naval
application at the current time, as flight times of shells are so large.
At
10,000 metres, a fast patrol boat has oodles of time to evade between
the time the gun ship fires and the time the shell lands.