[Talisker]

I frankly don’t know about heat seeking missiles, would they necessarily deliver their payload right at the thing that they homed in on? Don’t they detonate some small distance from it?

They detonate at a distance of one cubit.

The Navy uses a common cubit of six hands, but the Air Force uses the Royal Cubit of seven hands. Before translation code was embedded into missile ROMs, this difference caused many a tragedy.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Well ok silly. But unless this is an inertia weapon, they don’t want to wait till they have actually hit their target.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Proximity fuses are as old as the German bombs that were used against England in WWII. (Tube circuitry, then.)