Missile Defense is NP-Complete

General Discussion
1

For those of you planning out your point-defense systems, here’s an interesting read about the “Weapon-Target Assignment Problem” that turned up today (note: it uses AMMs from the current Mideast conflict as an illustrative example).

As far as Aurora is concerned, this means that:

  • If you’re the attacker, it’s better to have many small missiles than a few large missiles (unless you have good ECM, in which case you can make your large missiles deploy decoys)
  • If you’re the defender, then it is critically important to make sure that your missile detection is up to snuff. Decoys are useful here since they aren’t affected by your tracking speed.
2

Yes but no. Originally missile combat was fairly binary a you either swamp the target’s point defense or you did no damage. So yes, ‘optimal’ design was size 1-2 missiles fired in overwhelming swarms. Now ECM, decoys, and target randomization allows for leakers to hit, and there’s value to using larger missiles to allow for more penaids and a larger strike.

3

Missiles are in a much better place vs vb6 in my mind. It seems like a variety of strategies are possible including large missiles, or swarms of small ones.

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