Range In Space Combat

Your talking about the Theroy of Perpetual Motion. When something is fired into space it keeps moving until it hit something. That works fime with projectile or missile/torp weapons. But beam weapons dispate over distance. Anything other then seekers and torps should have a chance of missing.

Besides there is solar wind and other conditions in space that will really screw up trajectory.

Energy weapons would be subject to the inverse square law and reduce in power with range, and projectiles whilst they might drift for ever would have an effective range determined by the probability of their course intercepting the targets and the longer the flight time the less that chance.

Guided projectiles like Missiles or torps could make course corrections but would require fuel and being of limited size would not be able to do that for long. Then there is the question of sensor response time which would be several seconds at the ranges describes and the firing ships ability to calculate an intercept course with the probable location of the target several seconds from now when the target was trying to fly with maximum unpredictability to reduce this.

Why shouldent I agree with you on the (vanishingly) rare occasions you are right Badger

I didn't say I disagreed with your thoughts... You are correct to a degree.. I just wanted to point out that beam weapons do disipate at range.

Don't use double negatives.... it is confusing at this time of the day.... and the light doesn't get there because it disipated. Think of it like this when you shine a flashlight the beam can't be seen from the next state.

-Damn the torpedos, full steam ahead....

(Did you know the term torpedos was actually what we consider mines?)

To much mathematics for that...

time to kick some Badgers for turning this thread into a scientific endeavor

Few years ago i was thinking about similar question (of course not becose of Se5).
I asked, if i know how big ship is, its maximal acceleration, speed of sensors and weapons, reaction time and how fast is weapon's beam diverging, what is maximal range in which there is guaranted hit.

I wrote program to compute this (realy easy pascal work). I'm not sure whether it is correct but it looks so.

here it is:
http://alp.wz.cz/se5/range/MaxRange.exe
here is source code
http://alp.wz.cz/se5/range/MxRng.pas
and here is some "documentation"
http://alp.wz.cz/se5/range/maxrange.html

Unluckily, it is "localized" in Czech (it is not internationalized) so you will probubly don't understand.
So what what means:
l is length (distance between attacker and target) (in meters)
v1/v2 are speed of sensors/weapon (in m/s)
d0 is diameter (not radius) of weapon (in m)
k is how fast it disolves (in meters per meter)
a is acceleration of target (in m/s^2)
d is diameter of target (in m) (I assume target is sphere)
tv is reacion time (in s)

(U) means it is parameter of Attacker (Utocnik)
(O) means it is parameter of Defender (Obrance)

Fill all field except one you wish computed, select it by radio button and press big button (Pocitej (means Compute)).

PS: don't compute reaction time it is computed wrong.

PS2: you can use eg. 3e8 for 3*10^8 = 300 000 000

WOW

You are aware that this is a game, aren't you?

Energy weapons should not be subject to the inverse square law. I'll assume that by the time a race is capable of accurately shooting at 100 ls (or 100 km as the speeds seem to dictate) is also capable of accurately directing that energy. The energy isn't disappating in any random directions, it's all heading towards the target (let's assume the beam you see is a visual cue, not actual emissions). The beam will probably spread some, but the ships are rather big. Even if the beam spreads by 5 meters when it hits its target it will be doing full damage.

-----
Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!

But Just with your comment about the beam spreading by 5 meters, that's exactly what causes the inverse square law. Either it's total confined to a true beam or it's going to scatter and degrade in a cone shape.

This is the problem with a point of creation for this energy beam. It's why the beam has a range before it goes to 0 damage (before the energy is absorbed by the dust floating around).

SEV, more than a feeling.

Evasive maneuvers are not the only thing that govern accuracy. There is also the matter of precision. A projectile cannon firing several shots will fire in a cone effect. The cone may be very narrow, but there is some inaccuracy. Likewise with beams. They are a cone as well, and after a certain distance the energy is dispersed over such a wide area that it only makes the target warm and fuzzy, it doesn't hurt them. Seekers are highly variable. They can reach a certain "cruise velocity" and save their thrust until near the end of their journey for homing on their target, or they can continue to accelerate until they reach their target, relying on velocity to help prevent the target from evading and using the kinetic energy for an extra, hopefully armor piercing hit.

Technically Badger is correct after a certain amount of distance something will lose lethal range.

However, sorry Badger, something in space doesn't lose speed, it stays consistent, (See Voyager data from Space.com)
so technically it could be said that the projectile would maintain its effect.

Beside this is something for scientist not us gamers..

Now let's all play nice

Not true. Focus is very important. To take an easily visualized example, the kinetic energy of a bullet damages a target only because it is focused onto a pretty small area. Take that same bullet's energy and spread it over a couple square feet, and it won't do anywhere near the damage. Or, poke me with your finger and 5 pounds of force, and I probably won't complain. Now, poke me with 5 pounds of force but with a needle...

The same holds true for a beam weapon. Think of what a magnifying glass can do with sunlight...it's taking the energy from several square inches and focusing it onto a small spot.

For thoses that were not aware of it yet, i did try to simulate thoses things in my mod. In my mod, weapons have different drop off, but also get penalities to fire at close by targets...

Due to the range ships can engage each others in space, weapons are set to fight other ships at long range. This mean weapons track slowly and are set to offer the best accuracy over a certain distance. This mean that a traget that get too close is harder to hit because the weapons are not set for faster tracking. Also inertia is a factor in space. Turn a turret one way, the ship will try to turn the other : it get worst as you try to do it faster. A ship with many turret turning at once in different motions and firing (recoil) at different interval might make it a mess to manage...

Part 1: actually incorrect. Artillery rounds take a rather long time to travel, and we can hit things with those. Its a bit difficult, but doable.

2. Can't be done as far as I can tell. What you can do is set the range based on the weapon's BASE to hit. That won't take ECM/Combat sensors and the like into account, though. Just write the damage formula such that it cuts off at the same time the to-hit formula hits a certain theshold (10% to-hit?)

Another poster was in disagreement with the concept of dissipation, wishing to dive into some detail: "Energy weapons should not be subject to the inverse square law." I responded with a couple of examples illustrating why your take was correct. My post is appropriately located (if one is using the threaded view, which I'm assuming you are).

My post was a reasonable response to someone's disagreement, it brought something new to the discussion (everyday example), I claimed no ground-breaking revelation, and I stepped on nobody's toes. Well, perhaps those last 5 words of the previous sentence are not entirely accurate, because, well, here you are.

I hesitate to bring this up, because I am aware that I have my own flaws when it comes to written communication, clarity, and conciseness. However, please accept a suggestion, made with no malice intended: when you feel the need to lash out at people when it appears that they don't take the time to read what you've posted, show some humility. It's not as if your posts are the easiest to wade through.

Alternatively you could view the tactical space combat display as an abstraction because the math is nasty.

volume of a frigate = say 400 kT, assume a density of water just because it's easier and the frigate is a sphere again because it's easy gives you a sphere radius of 45.7m. i think.

r = range , v = projectile velocity, R = target radius, V = target velocity. For a 100% hit rate with a perfect bullseye firing solution (the gun is pointing directly at the center of the target at the time of firing) r/v must be greater than R/V, If r/v is greater, you have to saturate the area you think the target will be in or get really lucky.
Lightspeed weapons with a 1m beam diameter firing at the center of a 45.7m radius sphere should always hit out to approx 1371km if it's moving at 10km/s or 653km if it's moving at 21km/s. Acceleration makes no odds as the target hasn't cleared the beam before the photons hit. Based on the engines generating a maximum speed.
The accuracy of the weapons depends entirely on their ability to physically track that bullseye point which is a whole new napkin.

To balance the weapons properly you need to create a formula to calculate research points per damage point over range and then you can tell the AI when to switch research from massdirvers to whatever based on that.
.......................
I thunk therefore i wuz.

I'll try to elaborate more what my program computes:
I was thinking this way:
You cannot react on being fired upon by laser weapon. (When you see the flash, its not only already too late, you are already being vaporized)
So ship MUST take evasive actions before it detects fire. So I assume all ships moves randomly around their "possition" using some kind of all direction engines (eg lot of thrusters all around ship (oposed to main engines which propels ship forward and use of which affect ships "grand scale" possition)).
Oponent does not know in which direction ship will move, so he must fire at center of target (it is sphere).
Velocity at point attackers sensors bounced from target is not important, becose attacker knows it and can compensate for it.
So all target have is his acceleration (a).
Then sensor particles must reach attacker and then weapon particles must reach target. This gives attacker time (t) to get away.
He can move distance 1/2 * a * t*t from point in which he would be if he didn't use evasive manuevers.

I compute distance where target can get completely away from weapon's cone. (or any missing variable)

Additional variables (veapon radius and divergency) but not so important are size of weapon cone when it get to target (non zero intersection of target and weapon i consider hit).

And becose it requires some time to direct weapons and compute firing solution, there is reaction time (so it adds to travel time of sensors and weapon).

Important. I assume 100% precision of sensors and weapons.
And distance is distance of guaranted hit.

So its worth firing if target is further than this. So this is NOT maximal efficient range, its only range for guaranted hit.

Guess:
If you make "target" bigger, so target covers only eg. 10% of "target" it can give hint how far wold be 10% chance to hit.

Let's all take a moment to breath people...

Inhale - Exhale - Now repeat after me... This is a game, I enjoy it. This is a game, I enjoy it.

Some people want more than "just a game". I like when game have more dept than just "do x and y in order to win".

This is a game, I enjoy it...

This is a game, I enjoy it...

This is a game, I enjoy it...

This is a game, I enjoy it...

And I totally agree with you. But when people start fighting and getting upset over a game it drives them a way. I'm the first to want a total immersion into the games I play, but in the end when all is said and done, it is still just a game.

Thnak you for the positive feedback

Good Grendel... Pikcachu20 throws Grendel a cookie

Yes its a game but the best fun is to be had from a game which one takes seriously but remains aware its still a game

Woof! Woof! Banana!

See now that makes sense....

Try google transltion tools... I use it all the time and it does help... (Note: this is not me being sarcasitc.)

-Pikcachu20 shocks all

- that being the time at which even an already-moving target still doesn't have time to get out of the way.

Wouldn't that be minimum range if the target can't get out of the way?

Well based on the principle that things in motion stay in motion and that things in space can't manouver aka like in B5,

You would be correct in saying Maxium effective range. I somehow lost the effective in your post. Sorry I concede to your point.

I honor you with this picture

I retract my prior post

Badger Wrote- that being the time at which even an already-moving target still doesn't have time to get out of the way.

I consider that an effective "maximum range" for beam weapons.

The way this is written it implies that a target could be from here to the sun and as long as it hits it is maximun range.

-Come here and i'll make mittens out of you, now get off the computer and give me 50 push-ups

This thread is getting way too long -LOL

Badger: In short.
I mean almost what you say, but i use target acceleration, not speed.
If Attacker know speed of Target (100% accurately), he can predict acurately where he will be when weapon get to target. (And speed relative to what should be used anyway?)

Therefore only what matters is acceleration of target.

Example of results:
speed of sensors and weapon 1c (3e8 m), target size 200m target acceleration 100g (1000 m/ss), zero width, zero divergency. Result range: approx 300 000 km =~ 1 ls.

I think, that ANY speed target have and attacker know about is is not problem for attacker.
What matters is speed target gains after that.
IF we are in space where there is something like max speed for ships and they reach it wery quickly, then yes, speed is what matters.
IF we are in space where ships never reaches their max speed so if they want to gat as far as possible from predicted point, they need to accelerate continuously from this point, then what matters is acceleration.

My approch works for second one.

And the wheels on the bus go round and round....

Well, one thing that everyone in this thread is forgetting is that it's not just the target that is evading, but the ship firing is probably evading too. A manouvring ship isn't going that have perfect aim nor have an easy time leading it's target. This would shorten the range ships can trade shots by a lot...

badger: But how big these minute changes of speed are is governed by acceleration.
(it looks like we are runing in circle, wery small, but still runing in circle)

FH:
If they know exactly movement of enemy, they can know their own. I mean, bigger error is saying that attacker knows exactly position and speed of target than that he knows his own.
And imo it depends on weapon used.
Some kind of laser (esp if aimed not mechanicaly) will be shot so soon after measuring target speed and position, that attackers movement is irelevant. But for weapons aimed mechanicaly (so in bigger than zero time) it can be source of inacuracy.
(So eg. laser PD could be not affected by this, but big weapons should)

Well first of all, an attacker will know about it's own combat movement, so it doesn't have to predict that, it can accurate compensate for it's own movement. (in response to FH)

Secondly, I believe that Alpedar is correct on the acceleration being more important, because that is the unpredictable value. While speed is what determines how far a ship can move with a certain amount of time (and thus determines the likelyness of a hit), keep in mind that a ship won't just be flying in one constant direction in order to maximize its effective coverage. Instead, the ship will be doing evasive manuevers as has been mentioned before. So in order for a ship to effectively avoid anything, it needs to be wobbling while moving. (yes, Badger said all that, just repeating for the rest to make sense)

In order to constantly change course to do the maneuver suggested, a ship must constantly decelerate and accelerate in another (supposedly random) direction. Even though the original speed partially acounts for this acceleration (due to Newtonian Physics), it is known before hand by the attacker, and is easily compensated for (exactly the same case as sitting bases/planets). Thus, the only factor that really have an effect is your ability to decelerate and accelerate in another direction (which might be completely differing mechanisms due, again, to Newtonian Physics). This acceleration can be from the engines (if you are taking about thrusters with directional exhaust) or more likely from maneuvering thrusters.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is: Combat speed, IMO, is a generalized speed that indicated how fast a ship takes to get from point A to point B. Where as, maneuvering acceleration determines how effective your combat maneuvers are while in the process of moving from point A to point B. Since you are constantly shifting course (thus decelerating and accelerating) to do your crazy maneuvers, it is virtually impossible for a ship to be moving 10 km/s (average) during a maneuver (does not account for directional speed, which does not play into the picture) as has been pointed to in an earlier calculation. It would be pretty unrealistic to expect a ship to wobble by as much as 10 km/s. That would make the target area a circle that has a radius of 10km, +10 more every second, making each 'space' (10 light second) a circle with an effective target area at a range of 1 to be 31400 km^2 (assuming your projectile move at light speed).

Luckily, while the above is not entirely impossible (if you have some amazing sci-fi thrusters on a tiny ship with low mass), it's not really feasable when you're talking about massive ships that weighs in at a couple hundred Kilotons (IMO, you'd be lucky to wobble a couple of m/s). Since acceleration depends on mass, the bigger the ship, the less manueverable they become (which is why smaller ships get defensive bonuses). As much as I would like to give you some real numbers to work with, in order to calculate anything we need to be able to accurately measure/make up the acceleration of the various sci-fi engines/thrusters that are in the game (and I'm not up for that task). With that, along with the ship mass, we can generate acceleration, from there we get average manuevering speed, target area, and finally effective range.

Basically, in order to set up an accurate targeting system, you have to start keeping track of a bunch of variables like the defender ship mass, their maneuvering capabilities, etc... all of which influences your accuracy. And if you just don't know, then you have to set up algorithms to accurately guess these values. It's certainly not an easy task, and is something that a lot of people devote their entire lives into (because one mistake can mean many deaths). In this instance, it is actually rocket science.

My suggestion: abstract it out and stick with a guestimated effective range. Throw in a few quirks here and there to represent the various forces and save yourself the aggravation and time for playing the game (like adding a maneuvering jet component that gives increasing defensive bonuses with research). If you really want the range modifiable, instead of making combat sensors add just hit%, make them add range too (same for everything that gives bonus to hit).

The reason is, even if you are able to set up a nice range system, you'll end up using abritrary values for balancing gameplay reasons. Real life isn't fair, but a fun game should be.

Agree with all arguing for abstraction.

The math of space combat is hard and the varied weapon systems make it harder.
Creating a weapon mod that's fun and fair and feels right is a lot better than creating a perfect simulation.
.......................
I thunk therefore i wuz.

That was not what i was refering to. When you do manouvring, you throw off your aim. Inertia will affect affect the projectile you try to shoot, and keeping beams on target long enough to cause enough damage is more difficult (all depend on your firing arcs and what you use to aim thoses beams). You may know where you are and where the enemy will be, but your manouvring may make it impossible to take the shot at the appropriate time, or force you to let a less accurate shot loose.

Another issues people don't have scratched is how much fuel you are willing to spend doing manouvring. A ship in space can travel great distance using little energy. But all the manouvring may make a ship spend enormous amounts of it in very short amount of time. Unless you have a near limitless source of energy, i doubt it's a practical thing to do unless you have tankers that can refuel you after combat...

Personnaly, i think space combat is much more likely to be like LOGH (Legend of Galactic Heroes, the anime) with large fleets in formations shooting each others with minimal manouvring. Most of their ships use spinal weapons since they are meant to fight in formations at an enemy also in formation. Only fighters can actually zip around and dodge attacks...

Basically space combat will resort to the old ship of the line tatics then

it could do I have also seen fairly convincing arguments that it will be closer to WWI/II submarine warfare with ships spending a lot of time relativly stealty hunting each other via pasive emisions. No one will be able to see that well since activationg ones active sensors will paint them as targets for every one else.

That is an interesting concept. I guess stealth in space would be just as important as on terra ferma

All depend how easy it is to hide in "plain sight". Under water, it's fairly easy to hide because you can't see far and what you can detect is limited. But space don't have such limitation, and there is more than one way to detect enemy vessels. Submarine style warfare is viable where visibility is low and sensors struggle to pick things up. And when i say visibility, machine can reconise images too, it's not limited to human sight.

Edit : Submarine style warfare is also more suited when just a handful of vessels are trying to catch each others offguard. If you were trying to defend a planet for exemple, you would not really care about being detected, you would try your best to not let an enemy ship get close enough to launch attacks at the planet. Same for a convoy or a fleet, there is little point in trying to hide unless you attempt a suprise attack or try to hide your true numbers... But once the fighting start, forget about hiding...

Actually Space is similiar, if not even more complex, Solar interference with senors / radiation / objects. I think it could be pretty easy to hide fleets.

Just take WW2 naval battles. At the time they had no way to know where an enemy fleet was unless they had a plane, a ship or a sub spotting it. Radar was in it's infancy and there was no satellites to see it from above. But it's not like they could be next to each others unknowingly...

Yes, you can hide near asteroids or planets, use solar flare to hide your approach or simply be too far for the enemy sensors to pick you up (or comming form an angle they aren't scanning actively). But while you travel between planets, there is very little to mask your approach, it's just a matter of time before you are spotted. The issue is just how soon you are detected and from how far you can attack or be attacked from. This is different from submarine warfare where two subs can almost thouch each others without knowing...

The simulation placed a lot of emphasis on spotting enemies as well as techniques to make yourself harder to spot as well as maundering to get in a good position on a target you were not truly sure of. Space is Very Big and ships are relatively Very Tinny.

Of course every so often a captain would think he was in a good position and set of his active sensors and hope he could get a good targeting solution on his victim before they or any one else he did not know about saw him with passive sensors and fired on him. A target with active sensors running could be seen by every one. Many a captain did well by this, many another discovered that his enemy was some where else only when struck by incoming fire from another (unexpected) direction. There was a heavy use of drones both as scouts, decoys and as weapon carriers. My favourite being the suicide active sensor drone the use of which was to get an active lock on an ship and transmit it by laser com back to its controller. Not quite as accurate as lighting up yourself but safer if there computers and gunnery crews proved better than yours.

it made a good sim but not for huge numbers of ships

Wow, by the way peopel are disscusing theroy in this thread you would think it is real. Truth is in a real space setting no one knows for certain what would happen. All the Star Trek / B5 / BC ideas could be 100% inaccurate or dead on. Truth be told we can only guess and dream. That's what I like about this bunch dreamers and educated guessers

You just forgot to name the simulation you talk about... You are right, ships are tiny compared to the largeness of planets and stars. But space is mostly empty, we are capable of detecting asteroids a few meters large. As i said, it's only a matter of time. But before you argue, by time i mean anything from a few seconds to years, all depend how much efforts are put to detect what is coming and how long it takes before action are taken.

Most games and novels about space combat are mostly about small number of ships. Also few consider conservation of energy or engeneering limits that can make things difficult or impossible to do. Most of them have stories set in the far future were inertia, fuel, or even relativity is no longer an issue...

Edit : Btw, LOGH is set in the far future, in a war between two huge empire spanning thousands of planets each. They fight with fleets of many thousands ships, with large ones reaching over 50000 ships! Of course, most of thoses ships are small sized, but space battles are epics since they can last hours to days in the story before one side is destroyed or retreat.

Who is the author of those books as I would love to research this a little.

This is a japanese novel writen by Yoshiki Tanaka. I'm not sure if a translation of the whole thing exist, but the 110 episodes are availiable as torrents on the net. I only seen the first 26 btw, i'm actually downloading the rest (been years since i seen one). It's old though, it was made in the 80'...

I really doubt that it will be like submarine warfare, due mainly to the methods of detection and the medium where the battles take place. One of the flaws of this is the "active" and "passive" sensor argument. This is only possible because submarines uses sonar as their method of detection, and that is completely out of the picture because we're in space. So unless you're broadcasting in radio waves, "hello, are you there?" messages and expect the enemy to reply, "yes, I'm over here!" there isn't much chance for an active/passive stealth effect like what you're describing. Right now everything in space is done by observation (sight), and that makes pretty much everything to be either as clear as day (if you have good coverage) or virtually impossible to detect (if you can fool sight, with say... a good projection).

Even if we get past the problems of sight based detection, we have to keep in mind how those sensors will work. If we are talking about any type of sub-light sensors, then automatically every projectile/beam weapon (like lasers) is pretty much useless due to distance. By the time your sensor picks up anything in a relatively large battlefield, your lasers will be aiming at empty space due to time lag by the sensors. As such, any unpredictable shift in movement (aka maneuvering), even if it was just a tiny wobble by the enemy will make pretty much any type of non-seeking weapon useless. You might as well be firing blind and pray to your favorite diety.

It's truely difficult to imagine a battle in a large scale battlefield using anything but auto tracking missles in an environment where there is an arbitrary limit to your sensors, such as light-speed. So until we get that problem solved, large battles will be dominated with ships launching seekers at one another and wait. Any type of projectile or energy weapon will be used primarily as point-defense to prevent the enemy from doing the same to you. They might also be the way these ships deal with close-range fighters, whether or not those are viable or not is difficult to say, though I suspect that they will turn into longrange missileboats as well (just look at how fighters are being used today).

Don't get me wrong, I like a cool light show and ship of the line tactics as much as the next guy, but those methods just seems way off from pretty much every conventional way of thinking. Fleets lining up and shooting blindly at one another and hoping that you hit makes very little sense when you can launch missiles that will pretty much always hit their target unless intercepted. Not to mention that your missile ships never have to be in direct sight of the enemy ships to blow them away (where as lining up in a formation is just asking to be pelted with formation fire). Essentially, in order to win a large battle with many ships, you just need to barrage your enemy with so many missiles that their point defense cannot hope to cover. Just the same, you might see picket ships design to guard missile boats who does damage, almost like how frigates and destroyers are used to guards today's battleship and carriers.

Ship of the Line Tactics, WW2 Submarine Warfare, those are things of the past. We have evolved beyond those because they have flaws (ok, so we still use subs, but certainly not the way they are used back in the day - they are mostly used as stealthy missile platforms). If you look at the modern trends, we are constantly moving towards missiles and drones as our weapon of choice, mainly because these choices don't put our people into the line of fire. Even if there was a major revolution with our sensors and tracking capabilities (making guns a more viable option), it would be hard to get people to change their minds about sending costly ships and their crews into the line of fire.

There's still active/passive. Radar, for example. Works well for detection, but it can be detected from much farther away. IR and visual are passive, by contrast.

The problem with missiles is they can be spoofed, jammed, and otherwise messed with. SE aside, they -will- quite frequently on any sort of evading target..

How space fighting will look like depends on technology involved. All versions are possible, but every in different technological situation.

So question is not what of it is THE right, but wich you/we like most.

Btw. Imo best is if game like this go through all of them.
(eg. what was long range bacame short range later, becose there are much higher range weapons, then defense aginst them is discovered and everyone must go even closer than in begining ... (but something like that is good for story, but maybe not for game balance)).

And you have the problem that missiles take up space and add mass to a ship. Also missiles are more complicated devices than plain projectiles, requiring more infrastructure and making resupplying thoses ships more tricky. How many missiles are practical to carry by a warship? How many of thoses missiles end up wasted or get destroyed along the ship that was carrying them?

There wisent a name to it as such it was loosely based on the ship to ship combat system in a RPG called Traveller 2300 but it had been thoroughly done over by a couple of Physicists and an Astronautics engineer. It took ages to play think Starfleet battles not Starfire and the rules where run by feeding values into a spreadsheet model and the occasional roll of dice. As a game it was fun but then I am a SFB player so I don’t mind that level of complexity and liked the movement and manuver was three dimensional and needed a computer to do the calculations.

We have technologies today that are designed to absorb and scatter radio waves, making radar pretty useless (used on stealth planes). While they are not perfect by any means, it's not too difficult to imagine that those methods (RADAR as we know it) won't be of much use in a battlefield situation in the near future. Not to mention that radar is worse when you're considering the distances of the objects in question. Not only would you have to send the signal out, you would have to listen for it to return. If the object were to fly straight for you to get a lock, then it's fine, but any maneuvering and your weapons are pretty useless.

As for jamming, that is one of the more misunderstood concepts. It's not the missile that is vulnerable to jamming, but the Radar used to guide missiles. In essence, if we stop using radar, we also eliminate the jamming problem with those guided missiles (unless you can also jam the new sensor). Jamming is something that affects sensors... and as such it affects everything, not just missiles.

As for the missile reliability, if you take a look at the patriot air defense system, and the various missiles under the same umbrella designed to shoot down incoming missiles, you will find that we've managed to design many missiles that are capable of hitting not only evading targets, but extremely fast flying ones as well (usually other seeking missiles). They've been tested (and in use) for many years. Where as every other attempt at shooting down missiles using projectile weapons have resulted in disastrous failures (well, the metal storm project looks semi-promissing, but that's only because it shoots a wall of bullets).

All that aside, the main problem with missiles is their payload, even if they "miss", they can still detonate and hurt you (think of a nuke that just miss your town, will you still be dead?). Think about it, if we could so easily jam/spoof and otherwise mess with ICBMs, why would we bother worrying about them at all?