penny wrote:Attacking the missiles much farther out along with thickening that same countermissile zone will increase the dependency on control links and increase the duration the control links will be needed before they are freed up to be reused for another launch. Autonomous counter-missile launches can help solve the problem, and the tactic would actually be a more robust solution against an enemy whose stealth is better than your own and who will eat your Keyhole platforms for lunch. Your limited Keyhole platforms.
I think the issues with autonomous CM launches is that:
* they don't currently talk to each other (so you don't get the distributed sensor array that ACMs can benefit from),
* they're much smaller than anti-ship missiles (much less ACMs) so they can't fit sensors that are as large or sensitive, and
* they're spread across a bunch of targets rather than having lots of missiles aiming at a handful of targets (so even if they try information sharing they're mostly looking at different
Now you could build a larger long-range CM which would be more capable of autonomous engagement. But getting the sensors and whatnot needed for that would likely drive up the size even more than a longer ranged drive would. And the bigger the thing is the fewer of them you can carry.
If you're lugging around large extended-range CM you want each one to be as effective as possible, and an FTL control loop from the mothership is going to be far more effective than even the autonomous mode of a missile optimized for that. This ship's vastly larger sensors (and remote feed from RDs) and vastly greater computing power, it going to give is a far better chance to see through or outthink the decoys and ECM from attack missiles than anything you could squeeze into a CM platform (even after you account for how much further away it it looking at the incoming missiles from)
Edit: As for thickening the existing CM zone with autonomous CMs you have to remember that as some point there will be so many CMs flying around that even with Keyhole they start cutting each other's control links. Tightly controlled CMs are going to be a lot more effective than autonomous ones, and so it would be a net loss to fire an autonomous CM if its wedge cut the control link to a controlled CM. That's probably why even with Keyhole SD(P)s don't launch as many CMs as they physically can -- the extras might degrade instead of improve the overall defense.
(Plus even SD(P)s don't carry limitless magazines of CMs. They need to worry a little about 'wasting' them on low probability shots if they might get drawn into a prolonged slugging match. It'd really suck to shoot yourself dry on CMs while enemy fire is still incoming. And we already know they don't tend to use the outer half-million km of their Mk31 range because the hit probabilities, despite the ship trying to help the native autonomous final intercept capabilities, are too low to generally be considered worth it. I suspect similar concerns would be in play for firing autonomous CMs within the normal CM envelope)