A Theoretical Treatment of Noise and Non - Linearities in a Beam - Riding System

The effectiveness of a beam-riding missile is greatly influenced by the mutual effect of noise and non-linearities. The former is mostly due to radar jitter, while the principal non-linearity is that introduced by limiting the lateral acceleration of the missile to a safe value. For the beam-riding system discussed in this paper the degree of saturation is such that the linear analysis is inadequate, and account must be taken of the non-linearity. With certain assumptions, the system can be described analytically: further approximations lead to optimum values of the disposable parameters for obtaining the minimum miss distance. The analysis shows that, while optimum values of the parameters can be specified for a restricted class of target trajectories, a more detailed study of likely target manoeuvres is necessary before an overall optimum can be defined.