Proximity fuse for weapons

[MadRat]

I did a search and couldn't find but a scant mention of proximity fusing for weapons. It would be nice to have a way for the weapons to burnblow when they reach within the distance of their explosion. A proximity could either be a defined distance to target, or it could be simply equal to the weapons explosion radius.

1. It would make missiles much more accurate as far as modelling the behavior relative to their real life counterparts.
2. It would allow one to define the three types of missile warheads use by engineers today:

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     a. Direct Hit
     b. Near Hit
     c. Near Miss

3. It should be relatively easy to implement; it just has to check distance to target each refresh of its position

[MadRat]

Btw-

Direct Hit: It either hits the target or it doesn't explode

Near Hit: It uses the radius of its explosion to tag the target

Near Miss: It uses effects of its explosion to affect the target (i.e. shrapnel)

[Argh]

That is actually very easy to do already. Simply give a weapon a large enough CollisionSize (or a large enough S3O radius, if using S3O) and you now have a weapon that can detect hits at whatever radius you want.

The trouble comes when explosions come into play. Even "instant" explosions aren't truly instant- I've been having trouble having them reach their target in one frame. Otherwise, we could just raise the radii and use EdgeEffectiveness to simulate proximity fuses. It's not quite that clean in Spring at this time.

One thing I should note, however... you do not want huge numbers of projectiles flying around with giant (larger than 16) CollisionSizes. Why? Because each one is being checked by volume each frame for collision events, and the computational load grows very, very quickly! Just FYI.

[MadRat]

I can see that being a real problem. But yeah, your workaround does offer a fairly workable kludge for the moment.

[KDR_11k]

A problem is that a larger collision size would react to everything instead of just the target.

[Argh]

Yeah, but so does a RL proximity-fused weapon. Which is why nobody uses them against ground targets IRL.

[FLOZi]

Which is why nobody uses them against ground targets IRL.

What?

[Argh]

Sorry, I forgot they are used in modern artillery and mortars I was thinking of somebody trying to use them in machinegun bullets or something silly like that... duh...

[FLOZi]

I was gunna say, might want to ask some ww2 vets what they think of VT fuzes