- it's no good to just estimate future position and aim at that, I have to translate the target velocity into the rocket's frame, but that aside for a moment:
I'm using the SA-2 as a guideline, which had around 5 seconds boost time and 22 seconds "sustaining time", and maximum velocity of around Mach 3.5 or so. For me that ended using 500,000 newtons for 5 seconds as a first stage booster followed by a sustaining thrust of 75000 newtons against a 2300 kg rocket, with air friction modeled as it was before, diameter of the rocket 700 mm. This probably will outperform the the actual SA-2 and in that test shot above it overshoots the target at about Mach 3.8 and was still under some acceleration.
Once I get guidance pinned down again I'll try test intercepts against a ship assumed to have taken off at 1g and the SAM fired as that ship passes through 25,000 meters - which is around the maximum intercept altitude of the real SA-2 but still well within the atmosphere. I'm guessing that an SA-2 would not be able to intercept the ship but it'll be interesting to see how it works out in my model.
The rockets might have 10 to 100 g initial net acceleration but they won't maintain that net acceleration very long as air friction will eventually equal motor thrust.
-------- Original Message --------
On 2/9/2018 3:51 AM, Caleuche wrote:
1g acceleration actually feels quite sluggish at this scale, compared
to missile performance. If I can find performance information for the
Russian S-400 SAM/anti-ballsitic-missile system, I'll put that
together too and see if the ship can be threatened from a much further
distance.
Depending on how broad your view of TL6 is, you could see missiles with
between 20g and 100g accelerations, or more, with burn times of 10-30
seconds depending on the size and thrust of the missile. The take away,
for me, is that if the Free Trader is within the atmosphere, and within
the range of a non-manpad SAM, it isn't going to outrun it.