The system has not performed "a lock on the target", at least not in the way that the language leads you to believe. The tool is making a prediction, that within a certain level of confidence, and given the present parameters, that firing the missile will result in the neutralization of the target.<p>There's growing number of ways, both active and passive, that targets can be tracked or future positions predicted. One of the answers on that page hints at this, the other answer is misleading and often not how it's done in many modern systems.<p>Source: engineered parts of these systems before.
Related anecdote - I worked with a coder a while back who was a naval aviator before he went back to school, flying carrier-based transports. I asked him once about whether he would have wanted to fly fighters instead, and he said that just flying transports was already a huge amount of work, as far as flight plans, training, practice, and such. Flying fighters apparently involved doing all of that same work, plus a bunch more for weapons, tactics, etc, so those guys never had any free time. Apparently, flying fighters wasn't nearly as fun as it sounds.
So why don't they include two radars, one for sweeps and one for tracking? I know, I know, weight, power, etc. At the same time, isn't that the obvious answer?
Hmmm, I was kind of hoping for an explanation of how the control system determines how to modify the highly directional antenna's orientation to continue to maximally "illuminate" the target once it's been selected from a general scan.<p>Can anyone describe the solution to this?<p>Example idea: Once selected for "lock," the antenna scans in small circles and migrates its central point toward the point on the scanned circle that provides the strongest return, allowing for variation due to noise sources.
After playing something like Falcon BMS you'll have all these radars memorized. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3pmXvnc0k&hd=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3pmXvnc0k&hd=1</a><p>It acutally makes the sim quite fun to play, although you do have to get past that learning curve. I think for me it was the learning part that was kind of fun too
Another interesting aspect is the Lock-On detection of the enemy aircraft. Aircraft are able to identify when they're being tracked by other aircraft or homing missles. [1]<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_warning_receiver" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_warning_receiver</a>
Upon reading of RWR and its delights, at least one part of me, the techno-dweeb, goes "weeeh!" ..<p>Another part, more of a hippy tree-hugger, goes "wish we were using this to figure out where to drop the water/medicine/books instead of <i>BOOMB</i> devices" ..<p>I mean, seriously. Tell us where to drop the books, and <i>BOOM</i> there it is: how it should be.
Good response, worth the read. Heck the response alone could justify their own article.<p>As an aside: I hate quora' site design so much I have blacklisted it using Google Personal Blocklist. Somehow I dislike it more than Experts Exchange (which is also blacklisted), it is just super cluttered with nonsense, rolls into the comments section without warning and rarely offers good content (see Experts Exchange again).<p>That being said Yahoo! Answers also rarely has good content but at least with Yahoo! Answers you can determine that with a glance. You visit the page and you can see the answer (or lack of answer). So Yahoo! Answers remains in my search results, Quora and Expert Exchange have been vanished indefinitely.<p>PS - Quora also likes to spawn pop ups whenever you click anywhere on the page for no real reason (just asks for your Quora login details). For someone who randomly highlights blocks of text while reading this is pure hell...
This was a great read until I reached the truncated bottom of the post.<p>God I hate Quora. There's the `share=1` flag but still, the end of the article is truncated and you're asked to login.<p>Quora wouldn't piss me off so much if they were not so annoying about me logging in and linking a social account, if they didn't post crap from my friend's facebook account who do have an account, send me spam about whatever people I know might have done (or not done) on their platform.<p>This is trying to gather users by pissing them off. Likely I'd have created an account since if it weren't for their aggressive behavior.
Off Topic: Man! Reading this answer so makes me want to play those FlightSim games of the yesteryears like Apache Havoc, Commanche, Jane's F/A 18 Hornet etc etc. Does anyone have any suggestions for a modern Flight Sim game? Thanks!
<i></i>Meta Note<i></i><p>I'm not sure if its the software or the OP who added the "?share=1" parameter but thank you for including it in the link.<p>The flag makes reading quora possible. If HN doesn't add this parameter by default I think it would be a worth while upgrade to the site.<p>Lots of great content is locked in quora otherwise.
Interesting(I didn't read the whole article because I'm not logging into Quora). I wonder what the state of the art is? Certainly we have tech now to get all the info on all the aircrafts? I would think that software could be employed to fill in the gaps and extrapolate the info at the least. What with 3d video tracking and the like at the levels they are at today.