I'm sorry, but I genuinely *DON'T* recommend anyone plays STFC. The grinding is abysmal, lots of bugs that just don't get fixed and the monetization of the game is ridiculous and has no sense behind it and their support team takes weeks to respond to any kind of issue. Plus, the game locks you to a server after a certain level, after you actually have a chance to learn about it, and a bad server and literally kill any chance you have to make progress. Oh, and promo codes like this one have about a 50% chance to just not work on a new account, with support refusing to do anything about it or fix the issue. Don't play this game. Support Spacedock, but don't play STFC
“Cue the Spaceballs clip“ Damn man, that was the perfect combination of timing, delivery, and the clip used. I had to pause the video because I was laughing so hard.
Some earlier Star Wars novels handwave the dogfights by explaining that everyone's electronic warfare is too good and homing missiles are basically useless, except for all the ones that aren't.
Modern Star Wars goes even harder on this, ironically. The canon explanation as to why TIE Fighter targeting is so weird is literally that the ECM of the other fighter fights against the TIEs targeting system. Thrawn also says the reason ships have such exposed bridges is because all sensors can easily be jammed or spoofed, so you need to actually see normally
The ones that work are super expensive, massive thrust capacity, droid brained missiles. Everything else is basically visual range supported or dummy so as to avoid it being turned off or turned against the user. If it is cheaper to fly a dozen fighters close and launch bombs with the same strike efficiency, then why not do that.
so a few things to note about a more realistic space combat scenario: 1) there is always signal noise in space, there are very clever ways to filter it out, but if the return signal to noise ratio is too low, the sensor will not find it 2) tracking a target and searching for a target are two completely different tasks. a track will almost always be more stable and less likely to deceive than a search cycle 3) searching in 3D space takes a lot longer than people realize 4) Tracking things farther away takes far more energy, and far larger sensors than people realize 5) EWAR will always be a major part of space combat from this point forward
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So Sir Isaac Newton maybe the deadliest SOB in space, but Shannon and co. are not far behind :)
Based on a lot of Habitual Line Crosser videos and other sources, I'm given to understand that phased array systems are "track while scan." The system is constantly switching between wide area scans and high fidelity tracks on known contacts.
I imagine it works like that one comment on a Highfleet vid. Radar (or sensor) active is like shining a light in the dark. In this case, your shining a light through the void in space and so everyone has an idea where you are and what your doing but so do you. Passive radar (or 'stealth' mode) would be you turning off your light and trying to find where the nearest source of light is. It could be the one your looking for or otherwise. In most cases, you looking for a transponder signal that identifies the target, or a 'moving mass' that matches a specific profile. Then we have jamming which is either pulling out the floodlights and blinding everyone or generating an obvious signal to the point it becomes dubious in its authenticity. As you said, space is far more vast than anyone could perceive and the fact is that we don't have the exact solution pinned down yet to feasibly manage a comm system in general across Sol. At the same time, this lack of capability to actually track and latch on to different targets much less reliably search for one is its own form of 'natural EWAR'. What I'm trying to say, is that you can keep the lights on in the dark, if only because the signal is difficult to make out from the other ghosts.
@@TheNapster153 It's also important to note that it's always easier to sense an active system from much further away than that active system can get signal returns. For instance, an F-15 might see a MiG-23 at 60 miles, but that MiG-23's RWR will detect the F-15's radar many miles further than that.
I remember in Bablyon 5, John Sheridan mention during the war, no Earthforce ship could lock on to any Minbari ship given it had some form of 'stealth' capability. In a later episode, a renegade Minbari cruiser intentionally turned off its stealth as it wanted to fight with humans in a bid to die in battle.
Ahh, yes, Minbari stealth tech. Also known as the only reason the Minbari only suffered single digit ship losses. Because without it a Nova and Shoalin are pretty evenly matched, and Earthforce had *a lot* of Novas.
@@hanzzel6086actually, the Nova had a very short range with its heavy plasma guns, while a Sharlin could turn it to scrap with its antimatter beam from a long distance. So it wasn’t just the stealth tech. The first human ship that could stand toe-to-toe with the Sharlin is the Warlock. I’m guessing the Excalibur is also up there
@@artembentsionov A significant part of that short range was having to manually aim them using the Mark-1 eyeball. While the Shoalin was longer ranged, without it's "stealth" a Nova actually stood s chance of getting in range. Admittedly, it would probably take at least two (or three) in order to reliably get one into range reasonably intact, but I'm pretty sure Earthforce had (at least at the start) those numbers. And the Minbari were already horrified by the unsustainable levels of causalitys they where taking (because they basically couldn't afford any, because they hadn't actually built a warship in a millenia), so, yeah a very different and quicker end to that war.
@@hanzzel6086 No the range issue was mostly Plasma vs Fusion Beams. Plasma does not have a very long range at all, the Minbari "slicer beams" on the other hand did. The Minbari also had the bad habit of waiting till the EA ships fired before killing them. In a serious war without stealth tech, the EA would have lost even harder than they did. At no point in the Earth Minbari war did the Minbari take the humans seriously. If they ever decided to... I shudder to think. Remember they have been in space thousands of years longer and have anti-matter as a by product of their power generation and a backup obsolete tech while the EA is not even up to using anti-matter at all yet. That is a MASSIVE difference in power, by several magnitudes. At their first meeting the main Minbari ship was hit by dozens of Plasma, pulse cannon and laser hits and only lost a small number of people, conversely a single slicer beam hit kills or cripples any and all EA ships.
I think the Battletech universe encapsulates the issues best: Yes, EW exists but it's a higher tier of rulesets for more advanced players, while more casual players are free to ignore them.
@vonneely1977 - While I like where you are going - I'm going to argue - for the best Space Battle using Electronic Counter Measures (ECW) and even ECCM (Counter-Counter) you want to check out Star Fleet Battles, they dive very deep into that. Battletech is amazing and a heavy-heavy rules battle game - but if you dig that you are in heaven - and you will be in that with SFB.
I've always loved the dummy balloons in Gundam. Having established a universe where line-of-sight is integral to warfare, making pre-fabricated dummies that instantly inflate in a vacuum that match the silhouette of your ships, Mobile Suits, and sometimes just space debris is such a simple but effective concept that requires no real technological advancement in the setting to work. I never knew navies in the real world were doing something fairly similar with ships using deployable decoys.
Perum had a video talking about what items were doing more than their fair share in the Russian invasion of Ukraine (both sides). On the Russian side their EW vehicles (Krasukha?) were ranked top of the list as they kept Ukrainian drones from getting near enough to target artillery on other Russian formations. Thought you might like that ranking.
Electronic Warfare is also used in EVE Online and is even spelled out as a thing some ships specialize in. You got the hood ol fashion Electronic Counter Measures (ECM, or "jams") which jam enemy ships but require specialized jammers as each faction uses different kind of targeting, RADAR won't be affected by a Gravimetric jammer. That also includes Burst Jammers. Multispectrum jammers that hit everyone around them. Pisses the space cops off. Weapon disruption (Tracking and Guidance Disruption) disrupt the guns and missiles ability to hit. Remote Sensor Dampening ("damps") reduces a players ability to target multiple ships at once. and Target Painting which is basically pointing a laser to help everyone shoot it. There is also Electronic Counter-Counter Measures that boosts your ships sensors and amplify tracking but unfortunately there are no mirrors to reflect target painting...
since chaff would move along the vector of the vessel it's launched from, its effectiveness in space would likely depend on how long it takes to disperse, and how the vessel that launched it moves around the cloud. if your particles are big enough and moving fast enough, chaff might also double as flak, which may be either good or very bad depending on how much you use and whether you want that orbit to be safe to access after the fight.
Oh, that makes me think it'd be pretty effective in space. Cos in atmosphere chaff decelerates very rapidly after release, and doppler radars can distinguish a fast plane from a slow cloud of chaff unless the plane is moving perpendicular (no doppler shift) to the radar beam. But in space the cloud will just keep going forever and can prolly stay together for a decent time if you release it gently.
You could keep the cloud of chaff together if it is magnetic and the dispenser can generate a large magnetic field to then keep the chaff together and have it move around in certain ways to help increase its effectiveness.
Two good examples from Star Wars: in a New Hope Han Solo jams the comms of the two Tie Fighters that intercept the Falcon when it emerges from hyperspace over Alderan. The second a bit more arguable example is from Andor when Luthan Rael uses those dart things as a somewhat literal example of destruction of enemy EW assets.
Take the A-Wing as Example 3 for free. The sting in its tail was that it had a sensor jammer that bigger ships could burn through, but could blind and mute enemy fighters.
The example Andor is fantastic as it is also a metaphor for Luthan's strategy against the Empire, turning its strength against itself, forcing them to overreact to attack until it blows back on them.
@@PetersonZF welcome to multiple writers with different visions all trying to write stories in the same universe some are great (andor) Some... not so much (Ahsoka)
The expanse books go into a lot more detail about EW and particularly Naomi's remarkable skill at it that I think it's a shame more of that didn't make it into the TV series (I would guess they couldn't figure out how to make it visually interesting)
@@yourfriend8052 Yeah, a Donnager-class battleship already has great coverage, but when it deploys a pair of Corvettes-class to screen it, it might as well be immune to missiles.
I can't believe Nebulous fleet command wasn't mentioned once in this video! EW is a huge part of that game, with you being able to put radar jammers and countermeasures on your ship to disrupt your enemy's detection capabilities and to defeat enemy missiles.
I cannot believe I completely forgot about Nebulous when we were making this video, it was the original inspiration for doing a video on this topic in the first place! - hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana It's funny because when you mentioned using stealth in conjunction with EW to increase the noise and make stealth easier, I was immediately reminded of one of my builds in that game which does exactly that.
Or even funnier, a battleship that masquerade as a Destroyer, and a destroyer that emits signature of a battleship 😂 Ah yes, my autistic stealth battleship that have speed of a space turtle... sadly the OSP autism mine spam was useless in newer updates...
Several of the Gundam series have the Mobile Suit power plants double as electromagnetic jammers, usually by emitting some sort of macguffin particle or wave (e.g. Minovsky Particles in UC, GN Particles in 00, Ahab Particles & Ahab Waves in IBO) that prevents the employment of long-range guided munitions.
Not just preventing the use of long range guided munition, but also targeting and wireless communication, difficulting coordination and effectively making remote controlled weapons like drones useless
I like that it Minovsky interference was an accidental byproduct of the reactor while also being the thing that made close range space combat viable in the canon.
The thing with electronic warfare, is that when your side is winning you don't/barely notice it exists, but when the enemy is winning you likely only notice after it's resulted in you get blown up or shot.
The game Nebulous Fleet Command made me really appreciate EWAR. It isn't very flashy, but it's absolutely critical to being effective and staying alive. You don't quite get it until you see a swarm of incoming missiles suddenly veer away from your ship confused by your jammers!
One of the more creative uses of electronic warfare I know of comes from the Blue Planet mod for Freespace. The main factions use plasma beams for their main guns, but there's a new faction which doesn't have access to them. They lose a lot of ships to beam fire until they realize they can use a pinpoint radio beam to throw off the beam's targeting sensors. The game does some pretty neat stuff with it: the jamming is less effective against "slash beams", which fire in an arc; TAG missiles, which have a radio beacon rather than a warhead, can allow beam lock even through jamming; and the jamming system was improvised from a class of science ship and can't be integrated into any other ship without extensive retrofitting that they don't have the time for, leaving them with a huge tactical liability. The same faction used modified escape pods as sensor decoys early in the war, although that only worked for a few weeks.
Spent a large part of my USAF career maintaining EW systems for the Wild Weasel squadrons, and later getting deep into the theories / implementation. Great video / content!
Bodacious Space Pirates is one of the few anime I've seen that engaged in electronic warfare. This was a fairly normal thing for space pirates to do and an early battle featured one ship trying to take over another ship remotely, with the two sides fighting for control while the attacking ship worked to get closer. EW was important to pirates as they needed to be able to capture their targets without destroying them.
The book series Honor Harrington (Honorverse) is really focused on EW, and describes it very well and why it is so important in-universe. - For example a multi-stage EW-component of a missile attack. 1) The missiles approach, usually in swarms of several hundred or thousands (the largest barrage to the point I'm at was several hundred thousand) 2) Then, at the border of point-defense range one type of EW-missile gives a massive short burst of static to make the weapons systems lose lock 3) Then another type of missile scatters into eight parts to mimic fake missiles, causing many of the PD-systems to re-acquire on false targets 4) Missile impact usually using directed bomb-pumped x-ray lasers
And the brute force solution of triggering a wall of conventional nuclear explosions like a WW 2 flak barrage to destroy or at least damage the incoming wave of smarter munitions (sorry I can't remember the specific book that was in).
The EW game gets even scarier when (spoilers past here) the Manties start using FTL comms. Battles over such big distances give the defender the advantage of faster response to enemy EW efforts for their attack missiles. A communication loop of a minute or more makes adjusting EW and ECCM profiles effectively impossible. It's a great 'oh, f--k me' moment when the other side realizes what's going on. Especially the one that think all the tech advances they're using a 'neobarb fairy tales'.
Spoilers for book 7 or 9 I guess: Im pretty sure the biggest barrage was 6000 BPX-RLs from a havy superdreadnought fleets missile nascelles or what ever theyre called against a desperate and completly outmatched manti in a system with some random station. Dont remember much I only listened to the audio books
Communication jammers are basically THE deciding factor in the Legend of the Galactic Heroes universe too ! Because you can't easily communicate with thousands of ships the commanders of both sides need to keep those rigid formations even in space, a very interesting concept because they need to anticipate what the enemy will even before the battle happens.
Easy enough to program in various formations, given clocks and computers of the advance tech. We think far too linear with future tech. They don't need strict formations, only strict communications before the battle. @@eps200
In the The Expanse books, electronic warfare plays a somewhat important role, with jamming and laser dazzling being employed. This was mostly Naomi's job on the MCRN Tachi, but the TV show glossed over it, probably because of either screen time considerations or because they thought viewers would have a hard time understanding it. Also, a torpedo getting blown up by PDC fire looks way cooler than a torpedo becoming stupid and vanishing into the void because it lost its target lock due to jamming.
I have my associates in cyber security and one of the topics I really took a shine to was EW even before I knew its name. I remember a very old Kipkay video tutorialing puting IR LED's into a pair of work glasses to jam parazzi cameras. I paird it with retroreflective garb to demonstrate how to sircumvent advaced AI tracking cameras because you show up as a big blob. some of them have gotten smarter since then and only use visible light but others not so much.
Great vid! (Old head USAF B-52 crew dog here). EW back in the day was meant to buy time and not necessarily to defeat enemy defenses. If the EW equipment confused the enemy system/system operator long enough to either enable us to exit the enemy's engagement envelope OR pop off a weapon, then that was win.
Star Trek is pretty big into EWAR as well. Every instance of communications, sensors, scanners, and targetting come to mind. It kind of just falls into it's place of a fight or conflict that all has to be managed to bring the whole set piece together.
Oh, this reminds me of my homeverse's missile tactic. If you're using torch missiles and for some reason try to get a direct hit on the target, you can have the missile turn around and start retro-burning shortly before impact to dazzle or damage sensors, mitigate or completely stop point-defence fire and maybe do some extra damage to the target's protection before the actual warhead hits.
I cannot believe I completely forgot about Nebulous when we were making this video, it was the original inspiration for doing a video on this topic in the first place! - hoojiwana from Spacedock
I just remember watching an interview with a maker of N:FC and him mentioning that they got it close enough to realism that there was at least one small naval group using it informally as training, specifically for coordinating missile launches I believe.
One of the sci-fi which puts the most focus on EW I can think of is Heavy Gear. Where all of the mechs have some EW equipment as a defensive layer and then most mech squads and companies will have a few dedicated EW platforms for more powerful/specilised/offensive work.
I played a bunch of heavy gear 2 back in the day, and it was always a good question as to how much ECM and ECCM to put on your mech... The ECM package would usually screw your radar up when it was on full power, so it had to be used carefully to be stealthy but still have info on your enemy. Btw, this is the PC game, not the tabletop.
I find an interesting wrinkle in the evolution of electronic warfare exists in the lore of the Universal Century Gundam series. Early particle researchers working on the reactors that made space flight and even mobile suit construction possible discovered an unintended (at first) side effect; the reactors emit a radiation that, while harmless to humans, is VERY unhealthy for traditional radar and radio signals, and even visible light. This "Minosvski Particle" caused the massive step backwards in EW evolution that brought back close-combat with fighters and suits, as well as space battleships launching, effectively, cannon broadsides at one another at ranges which would be laughably small in other space combat series. It's the entire justification for big robots flying at one another in space, and I believe it's as fair a reason as any to justify them, when in storytelling perspetives, they stand as a metaphor for old infantry combat in general, as much as a revival of it. War gets a lot harder when you have to actually be up close with your target, that's part of the point of the series.
I'm glad somebody mentioned this. They kind of brought it back, to a degree, in Gundam OO, where the GN Particles could interrupt conventional radar (It was quickly overcome part way through the first half, but it still applies). I'm honestly shocked that nobody in Iron-Blooded Orphans thought to mask the identity of the Ahab reactors before they introduced the Vidar in the second half, too.
As I recall, the creator realized, in the late 70s no less, that if technology continued then eventually we'd reach a state where the human element was removed from warfare entirely. Hence, he made the Minovsky particles to counteract that. Reading about that was what inspired me to come up with something in my own setting, with the same purpose of preventing AI from taking over everything in war. In my own sci-fi setting, electronics warfare is so advanced it has a habit of making electronic targeting useless, thus necessitating living beings who can make decisions over whether their computer readings are correct or not, or do things manually if they just can't get the systems to work. When one side DOESN'T have that... well, speaking of Gundam, Gundam Wing had its Mobile Dolls, which could pretty much curb-stomp any pilot that isn't a main character in a stupidly advanced prototype.
@@EbonyManta Not to mention, without the need to rely on human pilots, Mobile Dolls could usher in a never-ending age of war, with as many forces as you had resources to build. That, If I remember right, was part of the plot too; if war didn't have a reason to end, it never would, so the colonists and the Gundam pilots in Wing were trying to remove OZ, who were making reasons NOT to end war (no human involvment in the fighting being one of them with the MD program) so they could direct and profit by the struggles. I really want to watch the whole series again. I've got the DVDs, I could do so :)
In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, there are a few distance shots of the battle of the resurrection ship, showing both the battlestars and the baseships. In one of these, you can clearly see a missile headed toward Pegasus - and then suddenly flying off in a random direction. I appreciate the discretion they used at that moment - you can see that the missile was countered (either by a Raptor or Pegasus), but they resisted the urge to have someone scream over comms "missile jammed/countered!" and just let the visual explain itself to those paying attention.
One of THE BEST examples I've seen of this, is in the anime Mouretsu Kaizoku (Bodacious Space Pirates). Almost all ships have EW Suites designed to protect, counter, and attack other ship's systems, and are pivotal in battles, as the EW specialists have to balance between preventing system intrusion while disrupting enemy ships with their own intrusion, causing ship weapon accuracy to dynamically shift over the course of battle. They also depict it visually in a simple enough way for the viewer to understand what is happening. There is even a point where one opponent gets hacked too fast, so they turn off all methods of intrusion and fly blind, relying purely on visual means to track their target.
I've been writing a Star Wars fanfic set in the Sequel Trilogy, and the hero ship is a variant New Republic cruiser covered in sensors and radio equipment. It was originally intended as a command ship that can see everything on the battlefield and effectively order other ships around, but it proved to be a crucial guerilla warfare craft for its ability to jam the First Order's hyperspace tracking technology and turn it against the FO by passively tracking their radar-emitting ships. It also proved useful as a mobile headquarters and broadcaster for a galaxy-wide propaganda war. EW can be great fun for storytelling if the author invests in it.
Gundam (in the UC at least) sorta uses electronic jamming as a basis for the justification of a lot of rule of cool stuff, including the titular mobile suits themselves since the magical pseudosciencey minovsky particle, which seems to be produced in copious amounts by any combat vehicle sorta disables any longer range radar or tracking or even radio, forcing the close quarters combat mobile suits are specially designed for. aside from the awesome mecha themselves though it also gives rise to a lot of cute little things like how the system they use for long range communication sorta looks like Morse code and how most ships still have at least some big guns
I really liked in Zeta and after where you could send signals through contact with a ship or mobile suit. You had magnetic lines that could be fired at another machine to have direct communication and even instances where two opposing pilots could banter and spout opposing ideologies while locked in close combat.
Nebulous Fleet Command has some excellent EW mechanics. A powerful jammer can overwhelm enemy sensors and hide your ships, enabling you to move in relative stealth, although the enemy will absolutely know they are being jammed. Jamming is also effective at both decreasing the accuracy of enemy missile salvos, and also at screening your own missiles by hiding their signature from enemy fire control radars. Some expensive missiles even carry their own radar jammers and chaff decoys to overwhelm enemy fire control radar and screen for the missile salvos.
One example that might be used here was in the German Serie Perry Rhodan. During the third cycle, the heroes encounter a race of sentient robot called the Posbis. Aside of their powerful "transformer canon", their main advantage over the heroes was a device that dephased their ships four hours into the future. In short, even if you knew where they were, you still could not hit them, aside of a lucky shot here and there; while they could hit you with impunity.
@@RorikH they tried but due to the nature warfare, usually they hit you before you had a chance to fire back. The heroes won because they realized they were caught in a crossfire of a more ancient war and managed to convince the biological part of those hybrid robot that were on the same side. ( which was true).
With how spaceships are, I can't imagine Bio or Chem being all that useful in an outright attack on ships. Some kinda poison food or disease that would slowly work it's way through the crew with a long incubation period and a quick kill would probably work. Space stations would probably be better targets for pure Bio or Chem attacks, the larger the station the better the results (Zeon's chem attacks on multiple human space colonies (starting with Side 2) in preparation of operation British)
In the Expeditionary Force series, there are a handful of scenes from the POV of some heavily upgraded missiles where they talk to each other (literally) and sacrifice some missiles to blind enemy sensors so the remaining missiles can reach the target, or have one missile blasting out active sensors to provide guidance to stealth missiles so they can get through enemy point defense. A huge part of the series combat is centered on electronic warfare, including hacking enemy ships. IT's an excellent series and well worth the read. One faction in the Lost Fleet series uses computer worms planted in enemy ships to erase any evidence of them being there, giving them the appearance of being very good at stealth.
@Spacedock there is an Anime series "Bodacious Space Pirates" that brings EW front and center repeatedly in the plot and is much better than you might initially expect. Particularly Episodes 3-5 center around a battle that is 95% fought using electronic warfare going as far as utilizing social engineering as part of their EW efforts. Their are a lot of very well thought out concrete tactics and potential consequences of using EW in a battel discussed and or implemented in this series. for example there is a discussion where they talk about possibility that if you loose at EW an enemy ship might just open all of your ships external airlocks, and it doesn't matter how good your armor and weapons' are if that happens.
There's a game called Nebulous: Fleet Command that features electronic warfare heavily, in pretty much all aspects mentioned here except for pure stealth tech. Getting good radar tracks on the enemy can be the deciding factor in a fight, and missiles use a variety of seeker heads to avoid jamming and verify trargets against countermeasures. The solo dev used to be an intelligence officer in the US navy, so it's incredibly accurate, I highly recommend checking it out if you're into this sort of stuff.
In a sci-fi setting I'm building, everyone takes EW to heart. They're heavy on mosaic warfare and everything that looks like a wing or blade on a ship is a transmitter or receiver. Ships daisy-chain comms lines and datalinks together to get through noise that blankets the whole battlefield, and the bigger a ship is, the better its sensors and the more of the battlefield it can influence. And of course, such oversized directionalized emitters can be used as powerful weapons to burn through enemy networks once you've figured out who to blind first. They're so big on fighters partly because you can see and influence a huge section of space for relatively cheap with wings of them on the same network.
Reminds me of "A Fire upon the Deep", though a somewhat more aggressive flavour of electronic warfare. Or Giant's Star It seems more broadly literature is more likely to go into that direction.
I just want to commend you on a very good and well presented video. I am a retired US Air Force Electronic Warfare Officer with over 30 years served. Your explanation of the basic concepts was outstanding. Due to the sensitive and otherwise highly classified nature of the subject I have struggled to explain my job to others. I think for now on I will just show your video. Thank You.
Robotech (macross saga) used EW regularly. I'll talk about one use of each side. The humans had their planes hide in an asteroid belt (more of a stealth option here) and the aliens failed to scan them. The aliens had a specific battle pod that jammed the Battleship while it flew ahead of an attack force. It worked so well it jammed things that were supposed to show up (and were innocent 'white noise') so the Battleship had a small precious window to scamble fighters to fight "whatever was coming" as they fought that battle blind.
For the infrared jamming present on IRCM systems, it's typically messing with the control systems guiding the missile, and not just luring it away. Many ATGMs are semi-actively guided by the vehicle which fired it tracking the IR signature of the missile and providing it commands based on that IR signature. The IRCM systems fool the vehicle's sensor into tracking the wrong IR source
"Mouretsu Pirates" (or "Bodacious Space Pirates" in English) is a sci-fi anime about pirates where electronic warfare plays a massive part in the storyline.
Wing Commander 5 had some missions where you have "wild weasel" load outs, heavy in anti-radiation ordnance, to soften big targets. There's also a mission in the HBS Battletech PC game where you have an EW mech, and your (under-gunned) quartet has to take out a facility by sneaking around. The EW prevents attacks from indirect fire weapons (like the heavy missile turrets around the target) unless something (like the opposing forces wandering the streets) has a direct line of sight.
Hopefully they use the original Unofficial Motto of the earliest Wild Weasel crews "YGBSM" attributed to Jack Donovan. This was the natural response of an educated man, a veteran EWO on B-52s and the like, upon learning that he was to fly back seat to a self-absorbed fighter pilot while acting as flypaper for enemy SAMs.
The ECM/ECCM arms race between the Manticoran and Havenite forces in the Honorverse went into some details of the Electronic Warfare- as well as other angles, like the Keyhole and Apollo systems, (deployed sensor platforms and missile system which had a sensor relay platform "missile" with the damaging missiles in the swarm)
Glad you mentioned the Defence Onion, because it also applies to hacking. Apparently no one on Caprica was familiar with that concept LOL. System backdoors can be mitigated by firewalls. See also, Colonial Fleet could simply have turned their radios off. Backdoor no longer accessible. Of course they'd be less effective without comms, but sure beats being a sitting duck.
In scifi settings EW is expanded to include all sensors a species may use, not just electromagnetic ones. The Honor Harrington series is rife with EW examples, which include spoofing FTL gravitic sensors. In universe avoiding detection is very difficult, so there is focus on getting the enemy to misidentify ships so as to cause tactical missteps, generate surprise and secure advantage.
One great example of EW was in the Battle of Chintaka in Deep Space Nine. The used their own systems to trick the weapon platforms into reading the power station as an enemy combatant.
Battle of Yavin: the briefing warns of the immense jamming, and during the battle the TIE fighters successfully approach the Rebel fighters without being noticed until they're already in gun range.
A relate sci-fi trope would be drive signatures. where ships drives or reactors have a, depending on the setting, a more or less unique fingerprint by which they can be identified. This makes it desirebable to change the drive signature in one way or the other. Or to use decoys if the signature are less specific and/or not know to the enemy.
One of the best uses of EW/ECW (Electronic Warfare/ Electronic Counter Warfare) is in the anime Bodacious Space Pirates. I know, I know, some of you are gonna cringe over this one. But if you actually pay attention to the anime, the way that they use EW/ECW in space combat is vary dynamic. All battles always begin engage with EW/ECW ,even if just mentioned, before any ships get in to firing range. So before the first shots are fired there is already a mass of battle going on just trying to hacking / prevent the hacking of the spaceship's main computer (MC) systems. Because if you hack into a spaceship's MC, then you have control over things like weapons, engines, navigation, sensors, and even more importantly life support. Yes hacking your foes MC and then venting them in to space is a legitimate space tatic. While not done it is mentioned/ implies it has and can happen.
EW is mentioned in Star Wars often enough. for example, in Return of the Jedi, Calrissian realizes they are being jammed when they are unable to detect the status of the Death Star's shielding (immediately before the famous "it's a trap" scene).
An interesting take on scifi EW comes in the form of Eldar holofield and cameleoline tech. Both obviously have visual-based elements, a cameleoline cloak is basically an active-camo cape for a soldier to hide under meanwhile holofields are, well, hologram emitters that hide the ship and project an image of it in a different location. The EW aspect comes in when we consider that in 40k, auspex (equivalent to radar/sonar) is widely used across imperial forces, from navy sensors and weapon targeting to handheld infantry versions to vehicle-mounted arrays. Holofield emitters contain targeter-confusing and auspex-baffling technologies, meaning you're essentially firing blind and looking for auspex "ghosts" (partial/glitchy returns, which only appear intermittently if at all), meanwhile on the infantry level, cameleoline has nanotech weaved into the physical cloak itself which distorts all but the most powerful auspex returns making it almost impossible to find the wearer simply through scanning. In both cases you're forced to either try and eyeball it (hard enough in an infantry fight, basically impossible in a starship battle), or make educated guesses AND know what you're looking out for, OR know exactly where the eldar are hiding and focus all detection efforts on that area.
There are bits of an Eve online trailer in there, but EW in the game (and in generally really) is not terribly exciting visually so it's a bit difficult to include other footage of. - hoojiwana from Spacedock
There is a Polish book series called "Algorytm wojny" where EW often plays a crucial role during ship combat. EW blocks on ships can either be used to guide your own missles, or to try and jam the enemy missles. This combined with stealth, mind games and artifical inteligence makes the setting really engaging in my opinion.
The Honor Harrington book series makes great use of EW in space fleet battles. For a time, long range missile exchanges dominated, overshadowing much shorter range beam fire. EW was king with vast arrays of decoys and such giving the hi tech advantage. The lower tech side eventually countered with the "Triple Ripple", a barrage of crude nuclear warheads with no target at all beyond X volume of space. Not enough to damage heavily shielded ships, sure, but all the external/remote fancy electronic doodads in that volume ate sht. This turned the subsequent battle into a low tech analog slugging match.
I was kinda expecting "NEBULOUS: Fleet Command". A selling point is that it was created by people from the navy, and considering the immense focus on radar and electronic warfare of various kinds, at least one of them worked with those systems specifically. Essentially, where as many space games have WW2 ships in space, Nebulous has modern ships in space.
There's tons of examples today of cyberwarfare done without deliberate backdoors, ranging from just crashing remote systems to deny service, all the way up to using advanced infiltration techniques to attack high value systems by jumping through low value systems. Imagine a sci-fi spaceship where the internal systems are networked together and someone finds a flaw in the system's communications software that can be remotely exploited with a speciality crafted signal sent to the ship, they could then use their remote access to the comms system to control or attack other systems in the ship.
I'd say anti-Gundam Antidote system from Witch From Mercury counts as EW. It's a jamming field that interferes with the mind-machine data format Gundams use to operate, although IIRC it's never explained how it works. Since the GUND format is doing some quantum entanglement space magic stuff, antidote must be pretty exotic too.
Star Trek was the inspiration for one of the greatest table top ship-to-ship warfare simulation games - Star Fleet Battles, they do deep dives into Electronic Warfare and even go into Electronic Counter Measure (ECW) and Electronic Counter-Counter Measure (ECCW). If you are into rule heavy games I recommend Star Fleet Battles (SFB).
i've messed a bit with the idea of some form of remote hacking, not so much to take over the target like BSG but more to just degrade the targets combat capabilities and interfering with targeting. Also since space tracking is going to heavily rely on tracking targets via heat sources such as IR i've pondered things like massive space flares during which the targeted ship switches off its drive(s) and uses low heat thrusters or rcs to nudge itself onto a new course. We see similar in the Expanse where ships kill transponders and drives and sneakily maneuver onto a new course, but without the "flares"
Surprised you didn't mention the use of electronic anti-hijacking measures, such as Kirk's infamous use of the USS Reliance's prefix code to remotely trigger the other ship to drop their shields. Seems like a major pertinent example of electronic warfare in scifi.
3:32 tbh, if timed properly, chaff could very well work in space. When you said that, I remembered from Attack of the Clones that Obi-wan used the spare parts for his Delta-7 as chaff to stop a missile that was right on his tail, allowing him to both save his ship and disappear from Jango at the same time.
One of my favorite examples comes from Neal Asher’s Polity Universe (if you remember Snow in the Desert from Love Death Robots, that was written by him and is a short story in that universe or a version of it). Their electronic warfare is literally just the logical extreme of combining hacking and the em warfare, they can transmit and assemble viruses and other attacks with lazers by i think manipulating the quantum states of computers. Super cool.
So weird to see the Cornfield Cruiser show up on this channel; I grew up in the next town over from it, it was a local icon. Neighbor actually worked for Lockheed on the Aegis development.
Funny you should mention NULKA. 32 years ago, I was the Gunnery Officer on the Spruance-class destroyer USS JOHN HANCOCK (DD 981), and we were the test ship for NULKA. Now, NULKA is not an acronym like every other USN program, it was an Australian aboriginal word for 'very swift.' So the crew created an acronym that reflected our feeling about the unexpected, underway test event: NULKA, the Navy's Unsolicited Liberty Killing Apparatus. ;-)
EW can be very interesting. From my personal experience, it's not just aircraft that deploy flares and chaff like you normally see, but warships as well. Nulka is pretty awesome and has even saved one of our ships from getting damaged. In my story writing, ships have just about everything they can use for EW, including countermeasure decoys. The one catch is alien tech and human tech aren't always compatible, requiring extensive time to configure things for each other, and are generally useless against each other when it comes to hacking.
Very funny to include the Unicorn Gundam's NT-D system here, because, despite its usual function of increasing the performance of the mobile suit when active in response to a Newtype, at higher outputs(?) of the system, its pilot has taken control of enemy remote weapons in a manner similar to hacking, with less computers and more psychic powers. Interestingly enough, a better example of electronic warfare in the Gundam Franchise is in The Witch From Mercury, in which multiple mobile suits, most notably the Aerial Rebuild in conjunction with Quiet Zero (whose function would most likely be defined as an electronic warfare platform), make use of 'data storms' to disrupt and take control of enemy weapons.
Minovsky Particles are also basically EW as well. It's just absurdly powerful and indiscriminate to the point of shifting the entire military doctrine of the setting
Yeah Minovsky Particles are basically why Mobile Suits and Battleships in the Universal Century have to get close to fight. In the real world it would take away the advantage of aircraft like the F-22, who normally could kill beyond visual range, forcing a lot more dogfights.
Didn't see it mentioned, and it only shows up as a short clip in the video. Many Gundam series operate on the premise that there's so much jamming and chaff that close range combat is common, and that long range coms don't work. Often with the idea that it's some invincible device or a particle that acts like chaff mixed with flares along the entire EM spectrum.
Electronic warfare is a major part of space combat in Honor Harrington. My favorite are the Manticoran Dragon's Teeth EW platforms, they are basically missles that create the illusion of dozens of other missles to fool counter missles and laser clusters.
EW comes in to play in the Honorverse, both the signature reduction to get closer in the ambush at Hancock Station and also the active where the untrained Masadans put the active EW on auto to confuse the missiles till the Weapons officer catches on and smashes contact nukes into the transmitters by having them seek the jammers since they were repeating a pattern.
And of course, the ECW/ECCW arms race between Haven and Manticore throughout their wars, especially dealing with missile guidance and ship to missile comms.
It's one of the things I love about Star Trek 2 The wrath of Khan, the use of the prefix code and how it acts as a security lockout for the networked systems on the ship from being accessed remotely. if you can order your enemies defense systems to disengage, that's pretty severely effective EW.
Ships and drones of The Culture do this to an extreme extent, using their effectors to take control of security systems, other ships or even the nervous systems or brains (the GCU Grey Area) of people
Grey Area was one twisted mind. Great series, one of the few that does culturally integrated AI in a way that is not immediately dystopic. Shame Banks isn’t around anymore.
Faking ship signatures was used a lot in Star Trek, like making a Runabout look like a freighter on sensors. Also communication jamming was done by enemies when the plot needed it. And don't forget when Geordi's Visor got hacked or the Enterprise was infected with an Iconian virus. Jamming and computer viruses were also a thing in the Stargate series. I mean they met replicators or whole entities in their computer systems.
"Of course they are jamming us, do you expect our enemies to stop behaving like enemies, why do you think we have assigned courier shuttles?" -Kaiser Longarm Von Reinhard of the Galactic Empire.
It was a thing right back in the first Mobile Suit Gundam series, a good spread of minovsky particles in an area jammed most conventional sensors and communications, hence why so many MS fights are at close range with line of sight weapons.
One SciFi game worth looking into regarding EW in my opinion is "Star Fleet Battles" (and it's PC adaption "Star Trek: Starfleet Command"). There you have electronic countermeasures (ECM) to disrupt weapons lock, electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) to regain weapons lock and wild weasel shuttles to lure seeking weapons like drones/missiles and plasma torpedoes away from a target. The original board game even gets deeper into EW with things like ECM drones or scouts lending ECM or ECCM to allied vessels. I first heard about chaffs and flares in "Star Wars: X-Wing vs TIE Fighter" and "Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance" with the former dispersing an incoming missile and the latter actively attacking it. The "Wing Commander" series of games also uses EW a lot. Not only does it have decoys against missiles but there's a particular series of missions in the 4th main game "The Price of Freedom" in which an EW vessel is actively jamming your sensors and seeking weapons as well as disabling your shields.
Seconded. Shipboard EW suites, EW offensive missiles to confuse counter-missile fire, LACs fitted primarily as area EW for their consorts, penetration aids on offensive missiles to defeat enemy EW, manipulatinmg one's own ships' signatures,
Agreed. But you really should re-read the entire series, including the anthologies. They only thing I enjoyed more than binge-reading the Honorverse was binge-watching The Expanse. Actually, now that I think about it, I probably enjoyed the Honorverse more.
the earliest example in a movie I remember was from the original Star Wars; during the attack on the Death Star the base on Yavin warns the attacking Rebels that "we've picked up a new group of signals, enemy fighters are headed your way"
If there are any old enough fellows out there who recognize where my Avatar comes from, you'll know that E War was a huge factor in Eve Online. Now, it's been quite a *long* time since I played Eve, so probably nothing works like this anymore, and also there is probably a lot more E War than this, but back in the 2007-2012 days, if you were a Caldari pilot like I was, there really was only 1 job in a fleet that anyone wanted you to do. Your job was the train very good E War skills and to fly a jammer ship. The Falcon was super OP at the time, and was the Jammer of choice for a long time, but plenty of other ships could jam. There were 4 principle types of E War in Eve Online and each race made use of different methods. A basic breakdown of how those worked in the ancient past follows. ECM, short for Electronic Counter Measures, also just called jamming/jammers, was the Caldari preferred method of E War. Ships like the Blackbird, Rook, Falcon, Kitsune, and Scorpion had specialisations to make them better ECM ships. When a ship was jammed by ECM, it made it impossible for them to lock any targets or to fire weapons, so ECM was very powerful as it prevented all attacking of enemies with targetted weapons, it prevented any real useful ability to send drones to attack targets, it prevented any other forms of E War, and it prevented any friendly interactions you might try to do to your own fleet members, like transferring capacitor or remote repairing. It was very powerful. The way ECM worked was pretty simple. Every ship had a specific type of sensor. I usually thought of them as the flavors, because the different types of ECM had different colors to match the sensor types, and all the sensors worked the same. There was no game mechanic different between the flavors. Caldari used Gravimetric, Gallente used Magnetometric, Amarr used Radar, and Minmatar used Ladar. A given ship's sensors would have a power level - for a completely made up example, an Amarr Abaddon Class Battleship might have 10 points of Radar power. If an ECM pilot wanted to stop that battleship from locking targets, they would use radar jammers against them. A jammer could put out a certain power level of jamming, so maybe your ship could deal 6 points of jammer power per jammer. So if you had 2 radar jammers and you activated both of them on the battleship, you'd apply 12 points of jamming, which was more than his 10 points of sensors, and that was pretty much that. He was jammed now. It was usually best to use the jammer that matched the sensor type of the opponent, but there were also multispectral jammers that would work against anyone, but they would apply far fewer points of jamming than the specific types would. Different ships had different bonus levels and thus different effectiveness for the jammers, but trained skills for the pilot had a HUGE effect too. To make it harder to jam your ship, you could fit the imaginitively named ECCM, or Electronic Counter-Counter Measure. Basically, it gave you more points in sensors to make it take more points to jam your ship. There was also a thing called Projected ECCM where another ship could fit this module and target your ship and apply ECCM to you from their ship as a buff. Sensor Dampeners were the Gallente preferred E War method. I never flew Damping ships, so I can't remember which ones were optimal for it as quickly. I think the Maulus was a Damping frigate. There was an Electronic Attack Frigate based on the Maulus that damped too, but I forget the name of it. Anyway, the Celestis, Lachesis, and Arazu were all Damping ships too IIRC. Anyway, where jamming with ECM just made it impossible to target lock anything at all, Damping either shortened your targetting range, or slowed your target locking time. Every ship in Eve had a stat called "Scan Resolution." The higher your ship's scan res, the faster you could lock stuff. Objects also had something called a Signature Radius. The bigger the sig radius, the easier it was to lock a ship quickly, and there was some formula that I don't know that made some kind of ratio out of your ship's scan res and the target sig radius which determined locking time. Basically, this means that if you had a ship with a really high scan res, and you wanted to lock something tiny, like a frigate, your high scan res would let you lock that target in a second or two, even though the target had a small sig radius. If you had low scan res, it might take you 10 seconds to lock that same target. It was generally set up so that ships could lock something the same size or larger than themselves fast, but they locked things smaller than them slowly. This is important because the way Damping worked, if the Damper ship wanted to make you lock slower, they would load their Sensor Dampers with a script that would cause the damper to dramatically lower your scan resolution. It might double your lock time, or worse. If the Damper pilot wanted to just prevent you from locking targets at all, they would load a script that would reduce your target locking range. It was common to use enough dampers and enough scripts to reduce that lock range to 0 meters... It worked pretty well lol. To combat sensor dampening, you could fit your ship with Sensor Boosters, aka a Sebo. It was pretty common for a lot of PvP ships to fit a Sebo even if you didn't explicitly expect to be damped, because a Sebo without a script would boost your locking range and your scan res by a small amount, but just like the damper, you could load scripts into the Sebo that really boosted the effect. Targetting range scipts could be used to massively boost your locking range, and at the time I played, it was pretty common for fleets of Sniper Battleships to fight at ranges from 120-220km. The hard cap on targetting range was 249km, and there were a few battleships with extreme range that could have easily exceeded that range. There was also a scan resolution script that could massively reduce target locking times. It wasn't uncommon for battleships to fit these, since it could take a pretty long time for battleships to lock some targets. Part 2 in replies lol.
Tracking Disruptors, called TDs, were the Amarrian E War method, and you could find them on things like the Arbitrator, Curse, or Pilgrim. Again, more ships than that had bonuses to Disruptors. I'm just giving a couple examples. Where ECM and Damping either prevented targetting altogether, or made it much more difficult, tracking disruptors just made hitting your target with weapons a lot harder. Crucially, a TD had no effect on missile weapons or drones launched by another ship. Missiles simply didn't use the mechanics that a TD altered, so they did nothing to a missile boat, and if you wanted to use a TD to interfere with drones, you had to target the individual drone and TD the drone. If you put disruptors on the mothership, that didn't do anything. That would be like if you could jam the radar of an air craft carrier in real life, and suddenly the squadron of F-18 Hornets that are 300 miles away from the ship had their radars all stop working. Anyway, what tracking disruptors did do was interfer with either tracking speed or turrets, or alter the optimal ranges and falloff ranges of the turrets. Turret tracking speed in Eve was pretty important in PvP and good pilots (read as way better than me by miles) would know things like what range and transverse velocity they needed to maintain in relation to another ship to prevent themselves from getting hit. This was a huge thing when I played, and using really fast ships like the Vagabond Class Heavy Assault Cruiser to just fly faster than enemy weapons could track was HUGE. It was called "Speed Tanking" and it was one of the many things that most of my Caldari ships I flew sucked at. Anyway... tracking speed, in brief worked basically the way it works in Star Wars where big guns are really bad at hitting small targets. If the target can move across the sky faster than the gun can track the target, you have a very hard time hitting. A tracking disruptor loaded with a tracking speed disrupton script could reduce the tracking speed of turretted weapons on an enemy ship, causing them to miss their shots. You could also load a TD with an optimal range reduction script, which just reduced the effective range of the weapon being fired. To combat this, a ship could fit Tracking Enhancers. As you can probably guess from the big about dampers, you could load a tracking enhancer with a script to increase tracking speed or optimal range. There were other items like tracking computers which also helped with this effect. Again, like with a Sensor Booster, it was pretty common for ships to fit tracking computers or enhancers even when not expecting to explicitly run into a TD ship, just because a large ship with slow tracking guns might have a harder time hitting something fast, like the aforementioned speed tanking Vagabond. It appears that in the time since I stopped playing, they have basically added TDs that work for missiles too, but apparently they're a different module completely and I know nothing about how they work. I would assume they effect the explosion radius and explosive velocity of missiles fired from a ship, since explosive velocity would interact with the velocity of a target and the the explosive radius would interact with the signature radius of a target to determine how much damage was dealt, so if you used something to mess with the explosive velocity and explosion radius of a missile boat, it would screw them up big time. Come to think of it, I know there are some sort of missile targetting computers that basically work the same way as a tracking computer, just for a missile rather than a gun, so it makes sense that there would be a counter E War solution to reduce that same effect. Lastly, the Minmatar had target painters. Target painters are the only real offensive thing here. ECM, Damping, TDs, and whatever the missile TDs are called all work to degrade the capability of the target, but target painters, or TPs, work to enhance the effectiveness of friendly weapons. This is very in keeping with the in game lore for the Minmatar, who tends to have a ship design philosophy that resembles that of the US Navy during WWII. To put it bluntly, the Minmatar are the Eve Online race who would look at their ship and say, "Why isn't there another gun here? There is physically enough space to permit 1 more gun. I want 1 more gun here." Then the starship engineer would say something like, "Yes, Admiral, but you see... your ship only has enough CPU to mount 8 guns, and it already has 8 fitted," and the Minmatar guy would throw that engineer out of an airlock while shouting, "9 is better than 8, you dingus!" Anyway, ships like the Hyena, Rapier, and Bellicose are Minmatar ships with bonuses to Target Painting. One really nice thing about a TP is that if 1 person in the fleet has a TP, and they use it on a target, everyone fiting at that target will get improved weapon proformance. TPs were also really useful in PvE, because a lot of PvE missile boats kind of sucked at killing smaller ships, but hit the little guy with a TP and your missiles would hit the little guy like he was a big guy. What the target painter did was it would increase the signature radius of the target that was being painted. Higher sig radius helped turrets track better and helped missiles hit harder. I don't actually think there is any sort of countermeasure for use against target painting, which is another unique thing about the Minmatar offensive E War. All in all, TPs were very useful in pretty much any combat scenario. There are a bunch of other kinds of E War, like ECM bursts on capital ships, E War drones, and you could probably call things like Nos and Neuts electronics warfare, but I think this post is plently long enough as it is, and it's also the stuff I can remember from a game I stopped playing damn near 13 years ago now, so I'm sure it's all hopelessly out of date. Does anyone know if they let Caldari pilots fly anything that ISN'T a Falcon these days?
Check out Star Trek Fleet Command and support Spacedock:
t2m.io/Spacedock
How about no.
As a user of this app I love how it never looks, works, plays or performs anywhere close to what the footage claims.
i've waited for this video for so long that i screamed with joy when it dropped
I'm sorry, but I genuinely *DON'T* recommend anyone plays STFC. The grinding is abysmal, lots of bugs that just don't get fixed and the monetization of the game is ridiculous and has no sense behind it and their support team takes weeks to respond to any kind of issue. Plus, the game locks you to a server after a certain level, after you actually have a chance to learn about it, and a bad server and literally kill any chance you have to make progress. Oh, and promo codes like this one have about a 50% chance to just not work on a new account, with support refusing to do anything about it or fix the issue.
Don't play this game. Support Spacedock, but don't play STFC
I already have Star Trek fleet command but I will request a breakdown on the aircraft carrier from paw patrol the mighty movie
“Cue the Spaceballs clip“ Damn man, that was the perfect combination of timing, delivery, and the clip used. I had to pause the video because I was laughing so hard.
Lonestar!
I can't explain how disappointed I was going to be if the clip, or even a passing reference, wasn't used to that scene.
I'd just re-watched Spaceballs a few hours ago! xD
We lost the bleeps the sweeps and the creeps
Some earlier Star Wars novels handwave the dogfights by explaining that everyone's electronic warfare is too good and homing missiles are basically useless, except for all the ones that aren't.
Modern Star Wars goes even harder on this, ironically. The canon explanation as to why TIE Fighter targeting is so weird is literally that the ECM of the other fighter fights against the TIEs targeting system.
Thrawn also says the reason ships have such exposed bridges is because all sensors can easily be jammed or spoofed, so you need to actually see normally
The beyond visable range missles I guess.
The ones that work are super expensive, massive thrust capacity, droid brained missiles. Everything else is basically visual range supported or dummy so as to avoid it being turned off or turned against the user. If it is cheaper to fly a dozen fighters close and launch bombs with the same strike efficiency, then why not do that.
@@Boopity7739 Ghost
@@littlekong7685But not use droid missiles?
so a few things to note about a more realistic space combat scenario:
1) there is always signal noise in space, there are very clever ways to filter it out, but if the return signal to noise ratio is too low, the sensor will not find it
2) tracking a target and searching for a target are two completely different tasks. a track will almost always be more stable and less likely to deceive than a search cycle
3) searching in 3D space takes a lot longer than people realize
4) Tracking things farther away takes far more energy, and far larger sensors than people realize
5) EWAR will always be a major part of space combat from this point forward
So Sir Isaac Newton maybe the deadliest SOB in space, but Shannon and co. are not far behind :)
Based on a lot of Habitual Line Crosser videos and other sources, I'm given to understand that phased array systems are "track while scan." The system is constantly switching between wide area scans and high fidelity tracks on known contacts.
I imagine it works like that one comment on a Highfleet vid.
Radar (or sensor) active is like shining a light in the dark. In this case, your shining a light through the void in space and so everyone has an idea where you are and what your doing but so do you.
Passive radar (or 'stealth' mode) would be you turning off your light and trying to find where the nearest source of light is. It could be the one your looking for or otherwise. In most cases, you looking for a transponder signal that identifies the target, or a 'moving mass' that matches a specific profile.
Then we have jamming which is either pulling out the floodlights and blinding everyone or generating an obvious signal to the point it becomes dubious in its authenticity.
As you said, space is far more vast than anyone could perceive and the fact is that we don't have the exact solution pinned down yet to feasibly manage a comm system in general across Sol. At the same time, this lack of capability to actually track and latch on to different targets much less reliably search for one is its own form of 'natural EWAR'.
What I'm trying to say, is that you can keep the lights on in the dark, if only because the signal is difficult to make out from the other ghosts.
@@TheNapster153 It's also important to note that it's always easier to sense an active system from much further away than that active system can get signal returns. For instance, an F-15 might see a MiG-23 at 60 miles, but that MiG-23's RWR will detect the F-15's radar many miles further than that.
I remember in Bablyon 5, John Sheridan mention during the war, no Earthforce ship could lock on to any Minbari ship given it had some form of 'stealth' capability. In a later episode, a renegade Minbari cruiser intentionally turned off its stealth as it wanted to fight with humans in a bid to die in battle.
Ahh, yes, Minbari stealth tech. Also known as the only reason the Minbari only suffered single digit ship losses. Because without it a Nova and Shoalin are pretty evenly matched, and Earthforce had *a lot* of Novas.
That's the same episode. its his introductory episode. season 2 episode one. That's what clued him in something was wrong.
@@hanzzel6086actually, the Nova had a very short range with its heavy plasma guns, while a Sharlin could turn it to scrap with its antimatter beam from a long distance. So it wasn’t just the stealth tech. The first human ship that could stand toe-to-toe with the Sharlin is the Warlock. I’m guessing the Excalibur is also up there
@@artembentsionov A significant part of that short range was having to manually aim them using the Mark-1 eyeball. While the Shoalin was longer ranged, without it's "stealth" a Nova actually stood s chance of getting in range. Admittedly, it would probably take at least two (or three) in order to reliably get one into range reasonably intact, but I'm pretty sure Earthforce had (at least at the start) those numbers. And the Minbari were already horrified by the unsustainable levels of causalitys they where taking (because they basically couldn't afford any, because they hadn't actually built a warship in a millenia), so, yeah a very different and quicker end to that war.
@@hanzzel6086 No the range issue was mostly Plasma vs Fusion Beams. Plasma does not have a very long range at all, the Minbari "slicer beams" on the other hand did. The Minbari also had the bad habit of waiting till the EA ships fired before killing them. In a serious war without stealth tech, the EA would have lost even harder than they did. At no point in the Earth Minbari war did the Minbari take the humans seriously. If they ever decided to... I shudder to think.
Remember they have been in space thousands of years longer and have anti-matter as a by product of their power generation and a backup obsolete tech while the EA is not even up to using anti-matter at all yet. That is a MASSIVE difference in power, by several magnitudes. At their first meeting the main Minbari ship was hit by dozens of Plasma, pulse cannon and laser hits and only lost a small number of people, conversely a single slicer beam hit kills or cripples any and all EA ships.
I think the Battletech universe encapsulates the issues best: Yes, EW exists but it's a higher tier of rulesets for more advanced players, while more casual players are free to ignore them.
I joked on a BT video that cramming a Raven's EW suite into a Charger would make for a REALLY funny Wild Weasel mech...
@@templarw20I am totally going to try this... This is going to be a fun horror movie in a way
@vonneely1977 - While I like where you are going - I'm going to argue - for the best Space Battle using Electronic Counter Measures (ECW) and even ECCM (Counter-Counter) you want to check out Star Fleet Battles, they dive very deep into that. Battletech is amazing and a heavy-heavy rules battle game - but if you dig that you are in heaven - and you will be in that with SFB.
Even some of the Battletch games tried to reproduce aspects of the more advanced EW. With Mechwarrior: Living Legends being a big lighlight of that.
@@templarw20 Still results in a weapons platform whose motto is "You gotta be f'n kiddin' me," I hope!
I've always loved the dummy balloons in Gundam. Having established a universe where line-of-sight is integral to warfare, making pre-fabricated dummies that instantly inflate in a vacuum that match the silhouette of your ships, Mobile Suits, and sometimes just space debris is such a simple but effective concept that requires no real technological advancement in the setting to work. I never knew navies in the real world were doing something fairly similar with ships using deployable decoys.
One of my favorite subjects. Electronic Warfare was my Rate in the US Navy. It is easily misunderstood and overlooked.
your rate was my autistic hyperfixation for a few years! It is too easily overloooked, but theres a group of nerds eager for scraps i promise ya
Which is probably a contributing factor to why it’s overlooked, because a lot of the information about what EW does and how it works is classified.
Perum had a video talking about what items were doing more than their fair share in the Russian invasion of Ukraine (both sides). On the Russian side their EW vehicles (Krasukha?) were ranked top of the list as they kept Ukrainian drones from getting near enough to target artillery on other Russian formations. Thought you might like that ranking.
Trying to explain people that EW isn't a magical shield that automatically disable weapons in working radius is pretty hard
Electronic Warfare is also used in EVE Online and is even spelled out as a thing some ships specialize in.
You got the hood ol fashion Electronic Counter Measures (ECM, or "jams") which jam enemy ships but require specialized jammers as each faction uses different kind of targeting, RADAR won't be affected by a Gravimetric jammer. That also includes Burst Jammers. Multispectrum jammers that hit everyone around them. Pisses the space cops off.
Weapon disruption (Tracking and Guidance Disruption) disrupt the guns and missiles ability to hit.
Remote Sensor Dampening ("damps") reduces a players ability to target multiple ships at once.
and Target Painting which is basically pointing a laser to help everyone shoot it.
There is also Electronic Counter-Counter Measures that boosts your ships sensors and amplify tracking but unfortunately there are no mirrors to reflect target painting...
No one ever designated the ewar ship as primary by accident. Same goes for the logi.
@@jaredragland4707 EVERYTHING ON THE DOMMIE!
and it was only a few years ago people could even lock onto E-War ships.
Caldari ECM Supremacy!
Target painter basic redirection device (for alpha clones glorified mirror that tracks your target)
Target painter advanced redirection device (omegas reflects a wider spectrum of frequencies more reverse target painting bonus)
since chaff would move along the vector of the vessel it's launched from, its effectiveness in space would likely depend on how long it takes to disperse, and how the vessel that launched it moves around the cloud.
if your particles are big enough and moving fast enough, chaff might also double as flak, which may be either good or very bad depending on how much you use and whether you want that orbit to be safe to access after the fight.
Assuming you want it to disperse. They could all be laced into a web so that they stay together.
@@jakeaurod There's a lot you could do with a conductive net...
Oh, that makes me think it'd be pretty effective in space.
Cos in atmosphere chaff decelerates very rapidly after release, and doppler radars can distinguish a fast plane from a slow cloud of chaff unless the plane is moving perpendicular (no doppler shift) to the radar beam.
But in space the cloud will just keep going forever and can prolly stay together for a decent time if you release it gently.
@@user-bw6jg4ej2m Using the net idea, and hook a transmitter into it, you could generate one or more decoy signals too.
You could keep the cloud of chaff together if it is magnetic and the dispenser can generate a large magnetic field to then keep the chaff together and have it move around in certain ways to help increase its effectiveness.
Two good examples from Star Wars: in a New Hope Han Solo jams the comms of the two Tie Fighters that intercept the Falcon when it emerges from hyperspace over Alderan. The second a bit more arguable example is from Andor when Luthan Rael uses those dart things as a somewhat literal example of destruction of enemy EW assets.
Take the A-Wing as Example 3 for free. The sting in its tail was that it had a sensor jammer that bigger ships could burn through, but could blind and mute enemy fighters.
The example Andor is fantastic as it is also a metaphor for Luthan's strategy against the Empire, turning its strength against itself, forcing them to overreact to attack until it blows back on them.
And a bad example... "Jam the speeders!" *sigh*
@@PetersonZF welcome to multiple writers with different visions all trying to write stories in the same universe
some are great (andor)
Some... not so much (Ahsoka)
also the CIS that jamm communication of the entire planet of Naboo
7:35 SEAD is in the true NATO spirit of "scissors beats rock".
The expanse books go into a lot more detail about EW and particularly Naomi's remarkable skill at it that I think it's a shame more of that didn't make it into the TV series (I would guess they couldn't figure out how to make it visually interesting)
As I'm just finishing the first book, but have watched the show more than a few times all the way through, this is the first thing that came to mind.
I always wondered about that, I kinda figured that the Roci would be like an F-35 on steroids and meth.
@@logicplagueIt’s funny because the Corvette-Class Light Frigate is supposed to be an escort ship, that’s why it has so many PDCs for its size.
@@yourfriend8052 Yeah, a Donnager-class battleship already has great coverage, but when it deploys a pair of Corvettes-class to screen it, it might as well be immune to missiles.
I think lack of how to make it visibly or dramatically interesting is why it rarely comes up.
I can't believe Nebulous fleet command wasn't mentioned once in this video! EW is a huge part of that game, with you being able to put radar jammers and countermeasures on your ship to disrupt your enemy's detection capabilities and to defeat enemy missiles.
I cannot believe I completely forgot about Nebulous when we were making this video, it was the original inspiration for doing a video on this topic in the first place!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana very sad best Ewar game not included
@@televized1781 Forgive me
@@hoojiwana It's funny because when you mentioned using stealth in conjunction with EW to increase the noise and make stealth easier, I was immediately reminded of one of my builds in that game which does exactly that.
Or even funnier, a battleship that masquerade as a Destroyer, and a destroyer that emits signature of a battleship 😂
Ah yes, my autistic stealth battleship that have speed of a space turtle... sadly the OSP autism mine spam was useless in newer updates...
Several of the Gundam series have the Mobile Suit power plants double as electromagnetic jammers, usually by emitting some sort of macguffin particle or wave (e.g. Minovsky Particles in UC, GN Particles in 00, Ahab Particles & Ahab Waves in IBO) that prevents the employment of long-range guided munitions.
In some Gundam Universes, it also prevented Nuclear Fission so it effectively made nuclear weapons obsolete (looking at you SEED)
Not just preventing the use of long range guided munition, but also targeting and wireless communication, difficulting coordination and effectively making remote controlled weapons like drones useless
I like that it Minovsky interference was an accidental byproduct of the reactor while also being the thing that made close range space combat viable in the canon.
The thing with electronic warfare, is that when your side is winning you don't/barely notice it exists, but when the enemy is winning you likely only notice after it's resulted in you get blown up or shot.
The game Nebulous Fleet Command made me really appreciate EWAR. It isn't very flashy, but it's absolutely critical to being effective and staying alive. You don't quite get it until you see a swarm of incoming missiles suddenly veer away from your ship confused by your jammers!
One of the more creative uses of electronic warfare I know of comes from the Blue Planet mod for Freespace. The main factions use plasma beams for their main guns, but there's a new faction which doesn't have access to them. They lose a lot of ships to beam fire until they realize they can use a pinpoint radio beam to throw off the beam's targeting sensors. The game does some pretty neat stuff with it: the jamming is less effective against "slash beams", which fire in an arc; TAG missiles, which have a radio beacon rather than a warhead, can allow beam lock even through jamming; and the jamming system was improvised from a class of science ship and can't be integrated into any other ship without extensive retrofitting that they don't have the time for, leaving them with a huge tactical liability. The same faction used modified escape pods as sensor decoys early in the war, although that only worked for a few weeks.
Spent a large part of my USAF career maintaining EW systems for the Wild Weasel squadrons, and later getting deep into the theories / implementation. Great video / content!
Bodacious Space Pirates is one of the few anime I've seen that engaged in electronic warfare. This was a fairly normal thing for space pirates to do and an early battle featured one ship trying to take over another ship remotely, with the two sides fighting for control while the attacking ship worked to get closer. EW was important to pirates as they needed to be able to capture their targets without destroying them.
Was about to mention them.
The book series Honor Harrington (Honorverse) is really focused on EW, and describes it very well and why it is so important in-universe.
- For example a multi-stage EW-component of a missile attack.
1) The missiles approach, usually in swarms of several hundred or thousands (the largest barrage to the point I'm at was several hundred thousand)
2) Then, at the border of point-defense range one type of EW-missile gives a massive short burst of static to make the weapons systems lose lock
3) Then another type of missile scatters into eight parts to mimic fake missiles, causing many of the PD-systems to re-acquire on false targets
4) Missile impact usually using directed bomb-pumped x-ray lasers
And the brute force solution of triggering a wall of conventional nuclear explosions like a WW 2 flak barrage to destroy or at least damage the incoming wave of smarter munitions (sorry I can't remember the specific book that was in).
I really like the r&d in the honorverse, the series is long enough that technology changes visibly and then the other side has to adapt
I need to keep reading those books simply because of shit like that
Currently on Flag in Exile and then I need to get more
The EW game gets even scarier when (spoilers past here) the Manties start using FTL comms. Battles over such big distances give the defender the advantage of faster response to enemy EW efforts for their attack missiles. A communication loop of a minute or more makes adjusting EW and ECCM profiles effectively impossible. It's a great 'oh, f--k me' moment when the other side realizes what's going on. Especially the one that think all the tech advances they're using a 'neobarb fairy tales'.
Spoilers for book 7 or 9 I guess:
Im pretty sure the biggest barrage was 6000 BPX-RLs from a havy superdreadnought fleets missile nascelles or what ever theyre called against a desperate and completly outmatched manti in a system with some random station. Dont remember much I only listened to the audio books
Communication jammers are basically THE deciding factor in the Legend of the Galactic Heroes universe too !
Because you can't easily communicate with thousands of ships the commanders of both sides need to keep those rigid formations even in space, a very interesting concept because they need to anticipate what the enemy will even before the battle happens.
To the point courier shuttles are used in the larger engagments.
Easy enough to program in various formations, given clocks and computers of the advance tech. We think far too linear with future tech. They don't need strict formations, only strict communications before the battle. @@eps200
In the The Expanse books, electronic warfare plays a somewhat important role, with jamming and laser dazzling being employed. This was mostly Naomi's job on the MCRN Tachi, but the TV show glossed over it, probably because of either screen time considerations or because they thought viewers would have a hard time understanding it. Also, a torpedo getting blown up by PDC fire looks way cooler than a torpedo becoming stupid and vanishing into the void because it lost its target lock due to jamming.
I have my associates in cyber security and one of the topics I really took a shine to was EW even before I knew its name. I remember a very old Kipkay video tutorialing puting IR LED's into a pair of work glasses to jam parazzi cameras. I paird it with retroreflective garb to demonstrate how to sircumvent advaced AI tracking cameras because you show up as a big blob. some of them have gotten smarter since then and only use visible light but others not so much.
Loved the brief inclusion of EVE Online, would love to see you do videos about analyzing EVE!
I never thought i'd hear the TREE SHARK and SPY-1 test be brought up by you Hooji but here we are.
Great vid! (Old head USAF B-52 crew dog here). EW back in the day was meant to buy time and not necessarily to defeat enemy defenses. If the EW equipment confused the enemy system/system operator long enough to either enable us to exit the enemy's engagement envelope OR pop off a weapon, then that was win.
Star Trek is pretty big into EWAR as well. Every instance of communications, sensors, scanners, and targetting come to mind. It kind of just falls into it's place of a fight or conflict that all has to be managed to bring the whole set piece together.
Oh, this reminds me of my homeverse's missile tactic.
If you're using torch missiles and for some reason try to get a direct hit on the target, you can have the missile turn around and start retro-burning shortly before impact to dazzle or damage sensors, mitigate or completely stop point-defence fire and maybe do some extra damage to the target's protection before the actual warhead hits.
Nebulous: Fleet Command imo does a fairly good job modelling EWAR
I cannot believe I completely forgot about Nebulous when we were making this video, it was the original inspiration for doing a video on this topic in the first place!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
I just remember watching an interview with a maker of N:FC and him mentioning that they got it close enough to realism that there was at least one small naval group using it informally as training, specifically for coordinating missile launches I believe.
One of the sci-fi which puts the most focus on EW I can think of is Heavy Gear. Where all of the mechs have some EW equipment as a defensive layer and then most mech squads and companies will have a few dedicated EW platforms for more powerful/specilised/offensive work.
I played a bunch of heavy gear 2 back in the day, and it was always a good question as to how much ECM and ECCM to put on your mech...
The ECM package would usually screw your radar up when it was on full power, so it had to be used carefully to be stealthy but still have info on your enemy.
Btw, this is the PC game, not the tabletop.
Heavy gear did a good job with that, for sure. I think Nebulous: Fleet Command models EW warfare even better.
I find an interesting wrinkle in the evolution of electronic warfare exists in the lore of the Universal Century Gundam series.
Early particle researchers working on the reactors that made space flight and even mobile suit construction possible discovered an unintended (at first) side effect; the reactors emit a radiation that, while harmless to humans, is VERY unhealthy for traditional radar and radio signals, and even visible light.
This "Minosvski Particle" caused the massive step backwards in EW evolution that brought back close-combat with fighters and suits, as well as space battleships launching, effectively, cannon broadsides at one another at ranges which would be laughably small in other space combat series.
It's the entire justification for big robots flying at one another in space, and I believe it's as fair a reason as any to justify them, when in storytelling perspetives, they stand as a metaphor for old infantry combat in general, as much as a revival of it.
War gets a lot harder when you have to actually be up close with your target, that's part of the point of the series.
I'm glad somebody mentioned this.
They kind of brought it back, to a degree, in Gundam OO, where the GN Particles could interrupt conventional radar (It was quickly overcome part way through the first half, but it still applies).
I'm honestly shocked that nobody in Iron-Blooded Orphans thought to mask the identity of the Ahab reactors before they introduced the Vidar in the second half, too.
wasn't that one of the reasons that they ended up going with the ground sonar tank in 8th MS team?
@@hughsmith7504Indeed it was.
As I recall, the creator realized, in the late 70s no less, that if technology continued then eventually we'd reach a state where the human element was removed from warfare entirely. Hence, he made the Minovsky particles to counteract that. Reading about that was what inspired me to come up with something in my own setting, with the same purpose of preventing AI from taking over everything in war. In my own sci-fi setting, electronics warfare is so advanced it has a habit of making electronic targeting useless, thus necessitating living beings who can make decisions over whether their computer readings are correct or not, or do things manually if they just can't get the systems to work.
When one side DOESN'T have that... well, speaking of Gundam, Gundam Wing had its Mobile Dolls, which could pretty much curb-stomp any pilot that isn't a main character in a stupidly advanced prototype.
@@EbonyManta Not to mention, without the need to rely on human pilots, Mobile Dolls could usher in a never-ending age of war, with as many forces as you had resources to build. That, If I remember right, was part of the plot too; if war didn't have a reason to end, it never would, so the colonists and the Gundam pilots in Wing were trying to remove OZ, who were making reasons NOT to end war (no human involvment in the fighting being one of them with the MD program) so they could direct and profit by the struggles.
I really want to watch the whole series again. I've got the DVDs, I could do so :)
In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, there are a few distance shots of the battle of the resurrection ship, showing both the battlestars and the baseships. In one of these, you can clearly see a missile headed toward Pegasus - and then suddenly flying off in a random direction.
I appreciate the discretion they used at that moment - you can see that the missile was countered (either by a Raptor or Pegasus), but they resisted the urge to have someone scream over comms "missile jammed/countered!" and just let the visual explain itself to those paying attention.
One of THE BEST examples I've seen of this, is in the anime Mouretsu Kaizoku (Bodacious Space Pirates). Almost all ships have EW Suites designed to protect, counter, and attack other ship's systems, and are pivotal in battles, as the EW specialists have to balance between preventing system intrusion while disrupting enemy ships with their own intrusion, causing ship weapon accuracy to dynamically shift over the course of battle. They also depict it visually in a simple enough way for the viewer to understand what is happening. There is even a point where one opponent gets hacked too fast, so they turn off all methods of intrusion and fly blind, relying purely on visual means to track their target.
I've been writing a Star Wars fanfic set in the Sequel Trilogy, and the hero ship is a variant New Republic cruiser covered in sensors and radio equipment. It was originally intended as a command ship that can see everything on the battlefield and effectively order other ships around, but it proved to be a crucial guerilla warfare craft for its ability to jam the First Order's hyperspace tracking technology and turn it against the FO by passively tracking their radar-emitting ships. It also proved useful as a mobile headquarters and broadcaster for a galaxy-wide propaganda war.
EW can be great fun for storytelling if the author invests in it.
Gundam (in the UC at least) sorta uses electronic jamming as a basis for the justification of a lot of rule of cool stuff, including the titular mobile suits themselves since the magical pseudosciencey minovsky particle, which seems to be produced in copious amounts by any combat vehicle sorta disables any longer range radar or tracking or even radio, forcing the close quarters combat mobile suits are specially designed for. aside from the awesome mecha themselves though it also gives rise to a lot of cute little things like how the system they use for long range communication sorta looks like Morse code and how most ships still have at least some big guns
Gundam 00 started out with this being one of Celestial Beings major advantages and explored how the world adapted and turned it into a weakness.
I really liked in Zeta and after where you could send signals through contact with a ship or mobile suit. You had magnetic lines that could be fired at another machine to have direct communication and even instances where two opposing pilots could banter and spout opposing ideologies while locked in close combat.
Nebulous Fleet Command has some excellent EW mechanics. A powerful jammer can overwhelm enemy sensors and hide your ships, enabling you to move in relative stealth, although the enemy will absolutely know they are being jammed. Jamming is also effective at both decreasing the accuracy of enemy missile salvos, and also at screening your own missiles by hiding their signature from enemy fire control radars. Some expensive missiles even carry their own radar jammers and chaff decoys to overwhelm enemy fire control radar and screen for the missile salvos.
One example that might be used here was in the German Serie Perry Rhodan. During the third cycle, the heroes encounter a race of sentient robot called the Posbis. Aside of their powerful "transformer canon", their main advantage over the heroes was a device that dephased their ships four hours into the future. In short, even if you knew where they were, you still could not hit them, aside of a lucky shot here and there; while they could hit you with impunity.
Is there a reason you can't fire a missile into their position and set a 4-hour timer?
@@RorikH they tried but due to the nature warfare, usually they hit you before you had a chance to fire back. The heroes won because they realized they were caught in a crossfire of a more ancient war and managed to convince the biological part of those hybrid robot that were on the same side. ( which was true).
How about a video on chemical and biological warfare in science fiction
Sounds interesting
With how spaceships are, I can't imagine Bio or Chem being all that useful in an outright attack on ships. Some kinda poison food or disease that would slowly work it's way through the crew with a long incubation period and a quick kill would probably work.
Space stations would probably be better targets for pure Bio or Chem attacks, the larger the station the better the results (Zeon's chem attacks on multiple human space colonies (starting with Side 2) in preparation of operation British)
Nanomachine fueled bioweapon...
I think spacedock will told us the avatar gas mask technology can solve it.
That's actually some of the most underutilized aspects in Sci-fi as well. I agree.
In the Expeditionary Force series, there are a handful of scenes from the POV of some heavily upgraded missiles where they talk to each other (literally) and sacrifice some missiles to blind enemy sensors so the remaining missiles can reach the target, or have one missile blasting out active sensors to provide guidance to stealth missiles so they can get through enemy point defense. A huge part of the series combat is centered on electronic warfare, including hacking enemy ships. IT's an excellent series and well worth the read.
One faction in the Lost Fleet series uses computer worms planted in enemy ships to erase any evidence of them being there, giving them the appearance of being very good at stealth.
There's only one man who dares give me the raspberry.
SPACEDOCK!
@Spacedock there is an Anime series "Bodacious Space Pirates" that brings EW front and center repeatedly in the plot and is much better than you might initially expect. Particularly Episodes 3-5 center around a battle that is 95% fought using electronic warfare going as far as utilizing social engineering as part of their EW efforts. Their are a lot of very well thought out concrete tactics and potential consequences of using EW in a battel discussed and or implemented in this series. for example there is a discussion where they talk about possibility that if you loose at EW an enemy ship might just open all of your ships external airlocks, and it doesn't matter how good your armor and weapons' are if that happens.
There's a game called Nebulous: Fleet Command that features electronic warfare heavily, in pretty much all aspects mentioned here except for pure stealth tech. Getting good radar tracks on the enemy can be the deciding factor in a fight, and missiles use a variety of seeker heads to avoid jamming and verify trargets against countermeasures. The solo dev used to be an intelligence officer in the US navy, so it's incredibly accurate, I highly recommend checking it out if you're into this sort of stuff.
In a sci-fi setting I'm building, everyone takes EW to heart. They're heavy on mosaic warfare and everything that looks like a wing or blade on a ship is a transmitter or receiver. Ships daisy-chain comms lines and datalinks together to get through noise that blankets the whole battlefield, and the bigger a ship is, the better its sensors and the more of the battlefield it can influence. And of course, such oversized directionalized emitters can be used as powerful weapons to burn through enemy networks once you've figured out who to blind first. They're so big on fighters partly because you can see and influence a huge section of space for relatively cheap with wings of them on the same network.
Reminds me of "A Fire upon the Deep", though a somewhat more aggressive flavour of electronic warfare. Or Giant's Star
It seems more broadly literature is more likely to go into that direction.
I just want to commend you on a very good and well presented video. I am a retired US Air Force Electronic Warfare Officer with over 30 years served. Your explanation of the basic concepts was outstanding. Due to the sensitive and otherwise highly classified nature of the subject I have struggled to explain my job to others. I think for now on I will just show your video. Thank You.
Robotech (macross saga) used EW regularly. I'll talk about one use of each side.
The humans had their planes hide in an asteroid belt (more of a stealth option here) and the aliens failed to scan them.
The aliens had a specific battle pod that jammed the Battleship while it flew ahead of an attack force. It worked so well it jammed things that were supposed to show up (and were innocent 'white noise') so the Battleship had a small precious window to scamble fighters to fight "whatever was coming" as they fought that battle blind.
For the infrared jamming present on IRCM systems, it's typically messing with the control systems guiding the missile, and not just luring it away. Many ATGMs are semi-actively guided by the vehicle which fired it tracking the IR signature of the missile and providing it commands based on that IR signature. The IRCM systems fool the vehicle's sensor into tracking the wrong IR source
"Mouretsu Pirates" (or "Bodacious Space Pirates" in English) is a sci-fi anime about pirates where electronic warfare plays a massive part in the storyline.
It would be awsome to see SciFi version of wild weasels squadran.
Wing Commander 5 had some missions where you have "wild weasel" load outs, heavy in anti-radiation ordnance, to soften big targets.
There's also a mission in the HBS Battletech PC game where you have an EW mech, and your (under-gunned) quartet has to take out a facility by sneaking around. The EW prevents attacks from indirect fire weapons (like the heavy missile turrets around the target) unless something (like the opposing forces wandering the streets) has a direct line of sight.
Hopefully they use the original Unofficial Motto of the earliest Wild Weasel crews "YGBSM" attributed to Jack Donovan.
This was the natural response of an educated man, a veteran EWO on B-52s and the like, upon learning that he was to fly back seat to a self-absorbed fighter pilot while acting as flypaper for enemy SAMs.
The ECM/ECCM arms race between the Manticoran and Havenite forces in the Honorverse went into some details of the Electronic Warfare- as well as other angles, like the Keyhole and Apollo systems, (deployed sensor platforms and missile system which had a sensor relay platform "missile" with the damaging missiles in the swarm)
Glad you mentioned the Defence Onion, because it also applies to hacking. Apparently no one on Caprica was familiar with that concept LOL. System backdoors can be mitigated by firewalls. See also, Colonial Fleet could simply have turned their radios off. Backdoor no longer accessible. Of course they'd be less effective without comms, but sure beats being a sitting duck.
In scifi settings EW is expanded to include all sensors a species may use, not just electromagnetic ones. The Honor Harrington series is rife with EW examples, which include spoofing FTL gravitic sensors. In universe avoiding detection is very difficult, so there is focus on getting the enemy to misidentify ships so as to cause tactical missteps, generate surprise and secure advantage.
One great example of EW was in the Battle of Chintaka in Deep Space Nine. The used their own systems to trick the weapon platforms into reading the power station as an enemy combatant.
Thanks!
Battle of Yavin: the briefing warns of the immense jamming, and during the battle the TIE fighters successfully approach the Rebel fighters without being noticed until they're already in gun range.
A relate sci-fi trope would be drive signatures. where ships drives or reactors have a, depending on the setting, a more or less unique fingerprint by which they can be identified. This makes it desirebable to change the drive signature in one way or the other. Or to use decoys if the signature are less specific and/or not know to the enemy.
Like the Pella in the Expanse's finale
One of the best uses of EW/ECW (Electronic Warfare/ Electronic Counter Warfare) is in the anime Bodacious Space Pirates. I know, I know, some of you are gonna cringe over this one. But if you actually pay attention to the anime, the way that they use EW/ECW in space combat is vary dynamic. All battles always begin engage with EW/ECW ,even if just mentioned, before any ships get in to firing range. So before the first shots are fired there is already a mass of battle going on just trying to hacking / prevent the hacking of the spaceship's main computer (MC) systems. Because if you hack into a spaceship's MC, then you have control over things like weapons, engines, navigation, sensors, and even more importantly life support. Yes hacking your foes MC and then venting them in to space is a legitimate space tatic. While not done it is mentioned/ implies it has and can happen.
EW is mentioned in Star Wars often enough. for example, in Return of the Jedi, Calrissian realizes they are being jammed when they are unable to detect the status of the Death Star's shielding (immediately before the famous "it's a trap" scene).
An interesting take on scifi EW comes in the form of Eldar holofield and cameleoline tech. Both obviously have visual-based elements, a cameleoline cloak is basically an active-camo cape for a soldier to hide under meanwhile holofields are, well, hologram emitters that hide the ship and project an image of it in a different location. The EW aspect comes in when we consider that in 40k, auspex (equivalent to radar/sonar) is widely used across imperial forces, from navy sensors and weapon targeting to handheld infantry versions to vehicle-mounted arrays.
Holofield emitters contain targeter-confusing and auspex-baffling technologies, meaning you're essentially firing blind and looking for auspex "ghosts" (partial/glitchy returns, which only appear intermittently if at all), meanwhile on the infantry level, cameleoline has nanotech weaved into the physical cloak itself which distorts all but the most powerful auspex returns making it almost impossible to find the wearer simply through scanning. In both cases you're forced to either try and eyeball it (hard enough in an infantry fight, basically impossible in a starship battle), or make educated guesses AND know what you're looking out for, OR know exactly where the eldar are hiding and focus all detection efforts on that area.
At 5:17 that is the USS Rancocas (aka "the Cornfield Cruiser").
You need to include EVE Online. . . .It uses physics, there are a variety of types and sizes of weapons. E-warfare in spades
There are bits of an Eve online trailer in there, but EW in the game (and in generally really) is not terribly exciting visually so it's a bit difficult to include other footage of.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
There is a Polish book series called "Algorytm wojny" where EW often plays a crucial role during ship combat. EW blocks on ships can either be used to guide your own missles, or to try and jam the enemy missles. This combined with stealth, mind games and artifical inteligence makes the setting really engaging in my opinion.
3:46 , That Battlestar Galactica shot was just amazing
The Honor Harrington book series makes great use of EW in space fleet battles. For a time, long range missile exchanges dominated, overshadowing much shorter range beam fire. EW was king with vast arrays of decoys and such giving the hi tech advantage. The lower tech side eventually countered with the "Triple Ripple", a barrage of crude nuclear warheads with no target at all beyond X volume of space. Not enough to damage heavily shielded ships, sure, but all the external/remote fancy electronic doodads in that volume ate sht. This turned the subsequent battle into a low tech analog slugging match.
About wild weasel while it's a funny term i think sead and especially dead which are the official acronyms also sound very good
YES! Finally! I waited for this. Thanks in advance im sure its Amazing 🤩.
01:00 - went right to the topic
I was kinda expecting "NEBULOUS: Fleet Command". A selling point is that it was created by people from the navy, and considering the immense focus on radar and electronic warfare of various kinds, at least one of them worked with those systems specifically. Essentially, where as many space games have WW2 ships in space, Nebulous has modern ships in space.
There's tons of examples today of cyberwarfare done without deliberate backdoors, ranging from just crashing remote systems to deny service, all the way up to using advanced infiltration techniques to attack high value systems by jumping through low value systems. Imagine a sci-fi spaceship where the internal systems are networked together and someone finds a flaw in the system's communications software that can be remotely exploited with a speciality crafted signal sent to the ship, they could then use their remote access to the comms system to control or attack other systems in the ship.
I'd say anti-Gundam Antidote system from Witch From Mercury counts as EW. It's a jamming field that interferes with the mind-machine data format Gundams use to operate, although IIRC it's never explained how it works. Since the GUND format is doing some quantum entanglement space magic stuff, antidote must be pretty exotic too.
I have been waiting for this since it was announced! So excited!
Star Trek was the inspiration for one of the greatest table top ship-to-ship warfare simulation games - Star Fleet Battles, they do deep dives into Electronic Warfare and even go into Electronic Counter Measure (ECW) and Electronic Counter-Counter Measure (ECCW).
If you are into rule heavy games I recommend Star Fleet Battles (SFB).
i've messed a bit with the idea of some form of remote hacking, not so much to take over the target like BSG but more to just degrade the targets combat capabilities and interfering with targeting. Also since space tracking is going to heavily rely on tracking targets via heat sources such as IR i've pondered things like massive space flares during which the targeted ship switches off its drive(s) and uses low heat thrusters or rcs to nudge itself onto a new course. We see similar in the Expanse where ships kill transponders and drives and sneakily maneuver onto a new course, but without the "flares"
I think a good example of electronic warfare in star wars is the imperial interdictor cruiser.
Makes me happy to see that even some Babylon 5 footage was included in this. :)
Surprised you didn't mention the use of electronic anti-hijacking measures, such as Kirk's infamous use of the USS Reliance's prefix code to remotely trigger the other ship to drop their shields. Seems like a major pertinent example of electronic warfare in scifi.
That's probably a VERY good example of the hacking type, before that sort of thing was in popular culture.
3:32 tbh, if timed properly, chaff could very well work in space. When you said that, I remembered from Attack of the Clones that Obi-wan used the spare parts for his Delta-7 as chaff to stop a missile that was right on his tail, allowing him to both save his ship and disappear from Jango at the same time.
One of my favorite examples comes from Neal Asher’s Polity Universe (if you remember Snow in the Desert from Love Death Robots, that was written by him and is a short story in that universe or a version of it). Their electronic warfare is literally just the logical extreme of combining hacking and the em warfare, they can transmit and assemble viruses and other attacks with lazers by i think manipulating the quantum states of computers. Super cool.
So weird to see the Cornfield Cruiser show up on this channel; I grew up in the next town over from it, it was a local icon. Neighbor actually worked for Lockheed on the Aegis development.
Funny you should mention NULKA. 32 years ago, I was the Gunnery Officer on the Spruance-class destroyer USS JOHN HANCOCK (DD 981), and we were the test ship for NULKA. Now, NULKA is not an acronym like every other USN program, it was an Australian aboriginal word for 'very swift.' So the crew created an acronym that reflected our feeling about the unexpected, underway test event: NULKA, the Navy's Unsolicited Liberty Killing Apparatus. ;-)
EW can be very interesting. From my personal experience, it's not just aircraft that deploy flares and chaff like you normally see, but warships as well. Nulka is pretty awesome and has even saved one of our ships from getting damaged.
In my story writing, ships have just about everything they can use for EW, including countermeasure decoys. The one catch is alien tech and human tech aren't always compatible, requiring extensive time to configure things for each other, and are generally useless against each other when it comes to hacking.
Amazing video and great to see Nulka getting some love. From a proud Australian.
Very funny to include the Unicorn Gundam's NT-D system here, because, despite its usual function of increasing the performance of the mobile suit when active in response to a Newtype, at higher outputs(?) of the system, its pilot has taken control of enemy remote weapons in a manner similar to hacking, with less computers and more psychic powers.
Interestingly enough, a better example of electronic warfare in the Gundam Franchise is in The Witch From Mercury, in which multiple mobile suits, most notably the Aerial Rebuild in conjunction with Quiet Zero (whose function would most likely be defined as an electronic warfare platform), make use of 'data storms' to disrupt and take control of enemy weapons.
Minovsky Particles are also basically EW as well. It's just absurdly powerful and indiscriminate to the point of shifting the entire military doctrine of the setting
Yeah Minovsky Particles are basically why Mobile Suits and Battleships in the Universal Century have to get close to fight. In the real world it would take away the advantage of aircraft like the F-22, who normally could kill beyond visual range, forcing a lot more dogfights.
Didn't see it mentioned, and it only shows up as a short clip in the video. Many Gundam series operate on the premise that there's so much jamming and chaff that close range combat is common, and that long range coms don't work. Often with the idea that it's some invincible device or a particle that acts like chaff mixed with flares along the entire EM spectrum.
Electronic warfare is a major part of space combat in Honor Harrington. My favorite are the Manticoran Dragon's Teeth EW platforms, they are basically missles that create the illusion of dozens of other missles to fool counter missles and laser clusters.
That boer war example is sooo fascinating
EW comes in to play in the Honorverse, both the signature reduction to get closer in the ambush at Hancock Station and also the active where the untrained Masadans put the active EW on auto to confuse the missiles till the Weapons officer catches on and smashes contact nukes into the transmitters by having them seek the jammers since they were repeating a pattern.
And of course, the ECW/ECCW arms race between Haven and Manticore throughout their wars, especially dealing with missile guidance and ship to missile comms.
God Honorverse is so good.
It's one of the things I love about Star Trek 2 The wrath of Khan, the use of the prefix code and how it acts as a security lockout for the networked systems on the ship from being accessed remotely. if you can order your enemies defense systems to disengage, that's pretty severely effective EW.
Ships and drones of The Culture do this to an extreme extent, using their effectors to take control of security systems, other ships or even the nervous systems or brains (the GCU Grey Area) of people
Grey Area was one twisted mind. Great series, one of the few that does culturally integrated AI in a way that is not immediately dystopic. Shame Banks isn’t around anymore.
Faking ship signatures was used a lot in Star Trek, like making a Runabout look like a freighter on sensors. Also communication jamming was done by enemies when the plot needed it. And don't forget when Geordi's Visor got hacked or the Enterprise was infected with an Iconian virus. Jamming and computer viruses were also a thing in the Stargate series. I mean they met replicators or whole entities in their computer systems.
3:04 Only one man would dare to give me the raspberry! LO..O..O..NESTAR!
"Of course they are jamming us, do you expect our enemies to stop behaving like enemies, why do you think we have assigned courier shuttles?"
-Kaiser Longarm Von Reinhard of the Galactic Empire.
I've seen chaff used in space in Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans, even in Gundam 00 they use electronic warfare due to the nature of the GN Drives
It was a thing right back in the first Mobile Suit Gundam series, a good spread of minovsky particles in an area jammed most conventional sensors and communications, hence why so many MS fights are at close range with line of sight weapons.
The mechanical scan vs AESA Scan clip you had in this video is amazing
One SciFi game worth looking into regarding EW in my opinion is "Star Fleet Battles" (and it's PC adaption "Star Trek: Starfleet Command").
There you have electronic countermeasures (ECM) to disrupt weapons lock, electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) to regain weapons lock and wild weasel shuttles to lure seeking weapons like drones/missiles and plasma torpedoes away from a target.
The original board game even gets deeper into EW with things like ECM drones or scouts lending ECM or ECCM to allied vessels.
I first heard about chaffs and flares in "Star Wars: X-Wing vs TIE Fighter" and "Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance" with the former dispersing an incoming missile and the latter actively attacking it.
The "Wing Commander" series of games also uses EW a lot.
Not only does it have decoys against missiles but there's a particular series of missions in the 4th main game "The Price of Freedom" in which an EW vessel is actively jamming your sensors and seeking weapons as well as disabling your shields.
David Weber's Honorverse was a masterclass in EW escalation and countermeasures. I need to reread the books, at least to book 12.
Seconded.
Shipboard EW suites, EW offensive missiles to confuse counter-missile fire, LACs fitted primarily as area EW for their consorts, penetration aids on offensive missiles to defeat enemy EW, manipulatinmg one's own ships' signatures,
Agreed. But you really should re-read the entire series, including the anthologies. They only thing I enjoyed more than binge-reading the Honorverse was binge-watching The Expanse. Actually, now that I think about it, I probably enjoyed the Honorverse more.
Why not read the expanse? @@Vulpine407
the earliest example in a movie I remember was from the original Star Wars; during the attack on the Death Star the base on Yavin warns the attacking Rebels that "we've picked up a new group of signals, enemy fighters are headed your way"
If there are any old enough fellows out there who recognize where my Avatar comes from, you'll know that E War was a huge factor in Eve Online. Now, it's been quite a *long* time since I played Eve, so probably nothing works like this anymore, and also there is probably a lot more E War than this, but back in the 2007-2012 days, if you were a Caldari pilot like I was, there really was only 1 job in a fleet that anyone wanted you to do. Your job was the train very good E War skills and to fly a jammer ship. The Falcon was super OP at the time, and was the Jammer of choice for a long time, but plenty of other ships could jam. There were 4 principle types of E War in Eve Online and each race made use of different methods. A basic breakdown of how those worked in the ancient past follows.
ECM, short for Electronic Counter Measures, also just called jamming/jammers, was the Caldari preferred method of E War. Ships like the Blackbird, Rook, Falcon, Kitsune, and Scorpion had specialisations to make them better ECM ships. When a ship was jammed by ECM, it made it impossible for them to lock any targets or to fire weapons, so ECM was very powerful as it prevented all attacking of enemies with targetted weapons, it prevented any real useful ability to send drones to attack targets, it prevented any other forms of E War, and it prevented any friendly interactions you might try to do to your own fleet members, like transferring capacitor or remote repairing. It was very powerful. The way ECM worked was pretty simple. Every ship had a specific type of sensor. I usually thought of them as the flavors, because the different types of ECM had different colors to match the sensor types, and all the sensors worked the same. There was no game mechanic different between the flavors. Caldari used Gravimetric, Gallente used Magnetometric, Amarr used Radar, and Minmatar used Ladar. A given ship's sensors would have a power level - for a completely made up example, an Amarr Abaddon Class Battleship might have 10 points of Radar power. If an ECM pilot wanted to stop that battleship from locking targets, they would use radar jammers against them. A jammer could put out a certain power level of jamming, so maybe your ship could deal 6 points of jammer power per jammer. So if you had 2 radar jammers and you activated both of them on the battleship, you'd apply 12 points of jamming, which was more than his 10 points of sensors, and that was pretty much that. He was jammed now. It was usually best to use the jammer that matched the sensor type of the opponent, but there were also multispectral jammers that would work against anyone, but they would apply far fewer points of jamming than the specific types would. Different ships had different bonus levels and thus different effectiveness for the jammers, but trained skills for the pilot had a HUGE effect too. To make it harder to jam your ship, you could fit the imaginitively named ECCM, or Electronic Counter-Counter Measure. Basically, it gave you more points in sensors to make it take more points to jam your ship. There was also a thing called Projected ECCM where another ship could fit this module and target your ship and apply ECCM to you from their ship as a buff.
Sensor Dampeners were the Gallente preferred E War method. I never flew Damping ships, so I can't remember which ones were optimal for it as quickly. I think the Maulus was a Damping frigate. There was an Electronic Attack Frigate based on the Maulus that damped too, but I forget the name of it. Anyway, the Celestis, Lachesis, and Arazu were all Damping ships too IIRC. Anyway, where jamming with ECM just made it impossible to target lock anything at all, Damping either shortened your targetting range, or slowed your target locking time. Every ship in Eve had a stat called "Scan Resolution." The higher your ship's scan res, the faster you could lock stuff. Objects also had something called a Signature Radius. The bigger the sig radius, the easier it was to lock a ship quickly, and there was some formula that I don't know that made some kind of ratio out of your ship's scan res and the target sig radius which determined locking time. Basically, this means that if you had a ship with a really high scan res, and you wanted to lock something tiny, like a frigate, your high scan res would let you lock that target in a second or two, even though the target had a small sig radius. If you had low scan res, it might take you 10 seconds to lock that same target. It was generally set up so that ships could lock something the same size or larger than themselves fast, but they locked things smaller than them slowly. This is important because the way Damping worked, if the Damper ship wanted to make you lock slower, they would load their Sensor Dampers with a script that would cause the damper to dramatically lower your scan resolution. It might double your lock time, or worse. If the Damper pilot wanted to just prevent you from locking targets at all, they would load a script that would reduce your target locking range. It was common to use enough dampers and enough scripts to reduce that lock range to 0 meters... It worked pretty well lol. To combat sensor dampening, you could fit your ship with Sensor Boosters, aka a Sebo. It was pretty common for a lot of PvP ships to fit a Sebo even if you didn't explicitly expect to be damped, because a Sebo without a script would boost your locking range and your scan res by a small amount, but just like the damper, you could load scripts into the Sebo that really boosted the effect. Targetting range scipts could be used to massively boost your locking range, and at the time I played, it was pretty common for fleets of Sniper Battleships to fight at ranges from 120-220km. The hard cap on targetting range was 249km, and there were a few battleships with extreme range that could have easily exceeded that range. There was also a scan resolution script that could massively reduce target locking times. It wasn't uncommon for battleships to fit these, since it could take a pretty long time for battleships to lock some targets.
Part 2 in replies lol.
Tracking Disruptors, called TDs, were the Amarrian E War method, and you could find them on things like the Arbitrator, Curse, or Pilgrim. Again, more ships than that had bonuses to Disruptors. I'm just giving a couple examples. Where ECM and Damping either prevented targetting altogether, or made it much more difficult, tracking disruptors just made hitting your target with weapons a lot harder. Crucially, a TD had no effect on missile weapons or drones launched by another ship. Missiles simply didn't use the mechanics that a TD altered, so they did nothing to a missile boat, and if you wanted to use a TD to interfere with drones, you had to target the individual drone and TD the drone. If you put disruptors on the mothership, that didn't do anything. That would be like if you could jam the radar of an air craft carrier in real life, and suddenly the squadron of F-18 Hornets that are 300 miles away from the ship had their radars all stop working. Anyway, what tracking disruptors did do was interfer with either tracking speed or turrets, or alter the optimal ranges and falloff ranges of the turrets. Turret tracking speed in Eve was pretty important in PvP and good pilots (read as way better than me by miles) would know things like what range and transverse velocity they needed to maintain in relation to another ship to prevent themselves from getting hit. This was a huge thing when I played, and using really fast ships like the Vagabond Class Heavy Assault Cruiser to just fly faster than enemy weapons could track was HUGE. It was called "Speed Tanking" and it was one of the many things that most of my Caldari ships I flew sucked at. Anyway... tracking speed, in brief worked basically the way it works in Star Wars where big guns are really bad at hitting small targets. If the target can move across the sky faster than the gun can track the target, you have a very hard time hitting. A tracking disruptor loaded with a tracking speed disrupton script could reduce the tracking speed of turretted weapons on an enemy ship, causing them to miss their shots. You could also load a TD with an optimal range reduction script, which just reduced the effective range of the weapon being fired. To combat this, a ship could fit Tracking Enhancers. As you can probably guess from the big about dampers, you could load a tracking enhancer with a script to increase tracking speed or optimal range. There were other items like tracking computers which also helped with this effect. Again, like with a Sensor Booster, it was pretty common for ships to fit tracking computers or enhancers even when not expecting to explicitly run into a TD ship, just because a large ship with slow tracking guns might have a harder time hitting something fast, like the aforementioned speed tanking Vagabond.
It appears that in the time since I stopped playing, they have basically added TDs that work for missiles too, but apparently they're a different module completely and I know nothing about how they work. I would assume they effect the explosion radius and explosive velocity of missiles fired from a ship, since explosive velocity would interact with the velocity of a target and the the explosive radius would interact with the signature radius of a target to determine how much damage was dealt, so if you used something to mess with the explosive velocity and explosion radius of a missile boat, it would screw them up big time. Come to think of it, I know there are some sort of missile targetting computers that basically work the same way as a tracking computer, just for a missile rather than a gun, so it makes sense that there would be a counter E War solution to reduce that same effect.
Lastly, the Minmatar had target painters. Target painters are the only real offensive thing here. ECM, Damping, TDs, and whatever the missile TDs are called all work to degrade the capability of the target, but target painters, or TPs, work to enhance the effectiveness of friendly weapons. This is very in keeping with the in game lore for the Minmatar, who tends to have a ship design philosophy that resembles that of the US Navy during WWII. To put it bluntly, the Minmatar are the Eve Online race who would look at their ship and say, "Why isn't there another gun here? There is physically enough space to permit 1 more gun. I want 1 more gun here." Then the starship engineer would say something like, "Yes, Admiral, but you see... your ship only has enough CPU to mount 8 guns, and it already has 8 fitted," and the Minmatar guy would throw that engineer out of an airlock while shouting, "9 is better than 8, you dingus!" Anyway, ships like the Hyena, Rapier, and Bellicose are Minmatar ships with bonuses to Target Painting. One really nice thing about a TP is that if 1 person in the fleet has a TP, and they use it on a target, everyone fiting at that target will get improved weapon proformance. TPs were also really useful in PvE, because a lot of PvE missile boats kind of sucked at killing smaller ships, but hit the little guy with a TP and your missiles would hit the little guy like he was a big guy. What the target painter did was it would increase the signature radius of the target that was being painted. Higher sig radius helped turrets track better and helped missiles hit harder. I don't actually think there is any sort of countermeasure for use against target painting, which is another unique thing about the Minmatar offensive E War. All in all, TPs were very useful in pretty much any combat scenario.
There are a bunch of other kinds of E War, like ECM bursts on capital ships, E War drones, and you could probably call things like Nos and Neuts electronics warfare, but I think this post is plently long enough as it is, and it's also the stuff I can remember from a game I stopped playing damn near 13 years ago now, so I'm sure it's all hopelessly out of date. Does anyone know if they let Caldari pilots fly anything that ISN'T a Falcon these days?
Man i was Reallllly feelin the love for Nebulous fleet command in this one