this is my version of a ship-to-ship missile. It uses a combination of reaction thrusters for initial acceleration and then gravitics for sustained and maneuver burns. It is divided into section,
Avionics: sensors and guidence. these are fairly compact and primitive compared to shipboard systems which leads to them being jammed and spoofed by Electronic warfare attacks.
Warhead: a heavy duty duty HEAT charge with a liner made up of high density pre formed projectiles that scatter out on detonation allowing for a close in 'miss" to inflict soe damage to lighter vessels and small craft.
Core Section: this houses a high-efficiency battery to power the avionics, and gravitic drives as well as the needed computers and software storage. a compact M-drive is placed at the rear which uses gravitcs and a compact Metallic hydrogen fueled reaction drive to generate the missiles high acceleration. The gravitics rotate and pitch the missile pointing the reaction drives which generate the bulk of straight line thrust. Instead of burning fuel the missile has slugs of Meta-Stable Metalic hydrogen which it can trigger to violently decay back into normal hydrogen releasing a great deal of heat and producing a high volume of hydrogen plasma in the process. theReaction drive injects a pellet into the "combustion chamber" when needed and can be switch on and off very rapidly to allow it to deliver precise amounts of thrust for high-speed maneuvering.
The vanes deployed fro the midline of the core section are grave plates by altering the "thrust" generated by each plate the flight controls can precisely alter the missile's flight path. grav plates ar mounted on both sides of the vanes allowing the to be far more precise than a single sided vane alone.
the dark section near the nose of each missile are grav plates for additional control of the missiles attitude in flight.
Targeting:
When prepped for firing the missile is fed the targets location and sensor profile. the missile compares this signature to what its own sensors are picking up and locks on. If the information is not sufficiently accurate, or the missile is not given the proper information to calculate an optimum flight path ( lock on fails, or gunner rolls low) the missiles is less likely to properly acquire its target and may not be as accurate on its terminal attack run as it should be.
At long ranges the missile depends on passive sensors to track its target, once it closes range it activates active sensors and begins to analyze the data returns to identify critical systems and vulnerabilities of known ships and systems. If the missiles software n identify a vulnerable/critical system it can inflict superior damage to the target assuming it can breach the targets armor.( inflict critical damage to a system) Otherwise, the missile attacks the center of the ship's radar or lidar signature which often leads to less than optimal results(low damage)
At short ranges the missiles software does not have time to properly process targeting and guidance data and cannot take full advantage of its high ability to precisely match velocity and movements of its target. This leads to missile armed ships tending to stay outside of close range to allow their missiles to properly process data analyze sensor returns and accelerate to optimum attack velocity.
here is a shot of A torpedo and Ship-to-ship Missile ( in both storage mode and flight mode) for rough comparison. I need to tweak the scales a bit but for a rough idea of the comparative size this should work. The smaller missiles are vehicle mounted TAC Missiles.
