Ballistic Missile Simulation

I worked at GlobalSecurity.org as an intern this summer, and in addition to website maintenance and research, wrote a program to estimate the trajectories of ICBMs. It’s possible use is quite limited, because it assumes a knowledge of the technical details of the missile (booster and reentry vehicle characteristics, as well as fuel masses and specific impulse), however it includes estimates for this data by Charles Vick for the main Iranian, Pakistani and North Korean missiles. Interestingly, these missiles are all closely related, as a formal paper I edited indicates.

The program was written in Python, and requires wxPython for windowing and Numpy for plotting. I have compiled all these dependencies together for binaries for Windows and Mac OS X 10.4. The source is also available, and will be of interest to the discerning user. The Read Me has more information on the specifics of the simulation, and is required reading if you’re going to do anything serious with this data.

Disclaimer: I wrote this software as a sophomore engineering student, and I make no guarantee as to the accuracy of the output. It gives me correct values for my test cases, but don’t make policy (or go to war), on my say so.

Update, October 29, 2013:

This code is now on GitHub, with a few gui and packaging changes from Karsten Wolf. github.com/jlev/ballistic-missile-range

The compiled binaries are quite old, and may not work well on more recent operating systems.