Encounter Program

The purpose of this project was to develop a computer program that can be used by Fuze Engineers and Systems Analysts to help visualize the geometry and detection conditions of an endgame encounter of a STANDARD Missile and the target it is attempting to destroy.

In the fall of 1998, I was enrolled in University of California - Chico Class CSCI 231, Computer Graphics, and simultaneously embarked on a new career path as a member of the System Analyst Team of the STANDARD Missile Project Office at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, California. As my interest in Computer graphics grew, my brief experiences working in system analysis had shown me that there was a large deficiency in methods of evaluating the endgame encounters.

Watching my fellow engineers attempt to draw the three dimensional endgame encounters on a white board and then argue over the actual conditions of the interceptions was very confusing. Selecting this project fulfilled three major objectives. It provided an opportunity to do an original work for my Master’s Project, it filled a need in the system analyst area, and it provided me a quick track into a deeper understanding of the geometry and mechanics of missile/target endgame encounters.

Clicking on this image will take you to a full size image of the GUI for The Encounter Program The full size image is 51 Kb is size and 986 X 673 pixels. So you may have to scroll a bit to get it to fit on your screen

Some of the features offered by the Encounter Program are:

• Full 3-D Modeling of missile, target, detection cones, sea surface.
• Independant selection of fore and aft beam leading and trailing edges
• Interceptor and detection cones rendered during display routines allows for on the fly manipulation of missile position and orientation, beam angles and range cutoffs.
• Targets rendered as stick models to recreate the detection process used in the actual fuze simulation.
• Encounter program currently contains 71 different target files, with the capacity to add more if needed.
• Program can also display GTD (Geometric theory of Defraction) targets.

The display capabilites of The Encounter Program allows the user to:

• Display allows user to select which cones and edges to display
• adds or removes VMT, Axis, and a 5' scale.
• select which target axis to view the encounter from
• position and display a sea surfacr indicator.
• Select target aim point
• Zoom display in or out
• Move the missile along the VMT vector
• Will accept multiple encounter inputs from 6DOF files, and allows user to step through all the encounters in the set

Ok, the graphics aren't up to Industrial Light and Magic standards. This was my first programming attempt with the OpenGL extensions to C. This program is not designed to be a work of art or for entertainment purposes. It's a working tool. I could have texture mapped a sea surface onto the plane that represents sea surface. But what would it have added to the program. We are interested in seeing the orientation of the target to the detection cones and the missile. Not how pretty pictures are.

There is a lot of upgrades I would like to add to this program. But right now it is a good functional analysis tool. However it has the potential to grow into a full graphical simulation of an endgame encounter. But that's plans for the future and all depends on Project Funding.