Rock-Cable, A Computer Program to Simulate Aircraft to Missile Cable Dynamics

摘要

The report describes the development of a Fortran computer program that simulates the response, i.e., cable velocities and position vs. time of a cable being deployed from a missile as it flies out and away from the aircraft that the cable is attached to. The main objective of this program is to point out what conditions might allow the cable to wrap around the aircraft as the missile is deploying cable. The program is quite general in that any flightpath for the aircraft or missile can be directly employed into their respective subroutines and the state of the entire cable is then calculated as a function of time. The longitudinal shapes of the cable between the aircraft and missile have been plotted for two missile flightpaths and for various tensions imposed on the cable by the missile as it deploys the cable. (Author)