I thought I spotted an article somewhere where a guy introduced some ECM and ECCM measures into his game. Anyone know where I might have seen that or have some ideas on the subject?
Electronic Warfare (Ground/Sea/Interface Military or Space Skill). Character can operate equipment designed to disrupt, confuse, locate, or otherwise work against sensors, communications, or other electronic equipment.
Did it look something like this? I don't remember writing this, and I can't remember where this came from.
Electronic Warfare (Ground/Sea/Interface Military or Space Skill). Character can operate equipment designed to disrupt, confuse, locate, or otherwise work against sensors, communications, or other electronic equipment.
The character with electronic warfare skill, and the appropriate equipment, can perform the following functions:
• Deception: Changing the nature of the signal sent to a sensor.
• False Target Generation: Spoofing a targeting system to track phantom contacts. (ghosting, false echoes)
• White Noise Return Generation: Spoofing a a targeting system to indicate nothing is there. The opposite of false target generation.
• Jamming: Degrading communications or sensor signals, either through brute signal strength, or subtle techniques such as squelch capture and preamble jamming.
• Meaconing: Sending false navigation signals to a receiver.
Successful meaconing can cause aircraft to be lured into ambushes or hot landing zones, pilots to drop ordnance on false targets, artillery units to receive bad coordinates, etc.
• Intrusion: Entering an unfriendly communications net to eavesdrop, cause disruptions, pass false information, gain intelligence, etc.
• Identification: Recognizing the make/model (an individual specimen in some case) of signal emitters by their unique signature.
• Locating: Acquiring either a line of bearing (direction) or a position (fix) on an signal emitter.
Two or more intersecting bearing lines are needed for a fix. The more bearing lines, the more accurately the signal is pinpointed (triangulation).
• Capturing: Successfully sending false codes, targeting data, operating instructions, spoofing warhead proximity sensors, etc.
• Signal Security: Analyzing or hacking friendly emitters to determine possible weaknesses or breaches in security.
Seems a natural element to the combat in 2300 but oddly missing from space combat entirely.
The nature of space combat somewhat rules out eavesdropping on communications and jamming them. Ship-ship communications and control of remote objects is done with tight-beam laser or microwave links that are nearly impossible to intercept or jam. Not impossible, but nearly so. Submunition det codes can't be intercepted but can be captured in advance (by spies) and transmitted. Ditto for missile/drone command codes.
Things like jamming against active sensor detection, white noise on active sensor locks, or spoofing the range gates of TTAs are elements that seems to be missing. False target generation could be used to generate "black globes". So many rules to write.
