How to measure weapon accuracy.The July 2005 story entitled "Urban Fighting Highlights Need for Smaller Weapons" should have explained that weapon accuracy includes two components: target location error (TLE TLE Temporal Lobe Epilepsy TLE The Living End (band) TLE Two Line Elements (for satellite tracking) TLE The Learning Equation TLE Taxe Locale d'Équipement ) and weapon delivery error (WDE WDE Whole Disk Encryption (PGP Desktop) WDE War Damn Eagle (Auburn University Tigers) WDE Westinghouse Digital Electronics WDE Wheel Drive Electronics WDE The Widecom Group, Inc. ). But TLE does not refer to "how precisely it [the weapon] finds the target." TLE is introduced in the targeting phase when the target's coordinates are determined. Normally, target location is determined from digital point positioning databases. WDE refers to how close the weapon comes to hitting that coordinate. TLE and WDE can be stated as circular error probable An indicator of the delivery accuracy of a weapon system, used as a factor in determining probable damage to a target. It is the radius of a circle within which half of a missile's projectiles are expected to fall. Also called CEP. (CEP CEP congenital erythropoietic porphyria. CEP abbr. congenital erythropoietic porphyria ), as the story explains, which is a 50th percentile measurement. Weapon error is computed as the square root of the sum of TLE squared plus WDE squared. Using the example from the story, if TLE is 10 meters CEP and WDE is 10 meters CEP, weapon error is the square root of 100 plus 100. The square root of 200 is 14.14. Therefore, in this example, the weapon can be expected to hit within 14.14 meters of the actual target 50 percent of the time. Steve Sarigianis Fort Belvoir Fort Belvoir is a United States military installation and a census-designated place (CDP) in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. The population was 7,176 at the 2000 census. , Va. |
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