How to calculate a missles flight path? Splines?

[Ladnaks]

Hallo

First, please excuse my bad english.

I am currently making a Java3D game. In this game thera are missles from which I know the start point, the endpoint and the angle at the start point. In a physics book I found a fromula to calculate the flight path. But in some Java3D tutorials I read something about splines which should be more efficient than calculating the current position of the missile with the physic formula.

Currently I am confused about this splines. For what I understand I need some points and a spline interpolates the points between the points I know. Can I just calculate some points of the flight path with the formula and then interpolate the flight path with a spline function?

[Riven]

Splines can only be used in very few cases.
They are almost unusable for any simulation.

Just use your physically correct formulas, I doubt it will hurt performance, unless you launch thousands of missiles.

[moogie]

perhaps pursuit steering behavior would be sufficient?

http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/PursueEvade.html
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/papers/1999/gdc99steer.html

just extend it to 3d

[Ranger]

Easiest way I found was to give the missile thrust, and then steer it left and right. To work out the path, just iterate forward in time.