| Historically short range tactical missile systems have been Command-Line-of-Sight systems requiring gunner input to guide the missile to target. With technological progression over the past three decades, guidance control has been shifted to on board autonomous guidance taking gunner control out of the loop and eliminating the collection of gunner input data in the event of a failure. Autonomously guided missile failure investigations commonly attempt to recreate flight failures via flight simulation software; however, with more complicated systems, multiple variables exist that can create identical failure modes. One of the more difficult failure modes to prove and the most commonly overlooked is airframe damage. This thesis recreates the flight characteristics of a short range fire-and-forget tactical missile system via a 6 degree-of-freedom model and predicts failure results for the system if a lifting surface is damaged or missing. |
