Partially discriminatory mortar fire

Edwin W. Paxson

Expert InsightsPublished 1977

Stochastic analysis of heat-seeking maneuverable mortar rounds launched successively at armored targets. The sensor head controlling terminal flight can reject targets set afire or exploded by earlier rounds, but may wastefully target previously immobilized vehicles. The author sets up the differential-difference equations for the process by standard methods and solves them in closed form, using partial generating functions. The resulting formulas are complex, but a good approximation is found in the form of a "pseudo-Poisson" distribution.

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Paxson, Edwin W., Partially discriminatory mortar fire. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1977. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P5807.html.
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