OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Indeed. That is why I championed the idea that the MAlign may be able to somewhat level the playing field if they cut Apollo's link.

That assumes that it's the link that makes them deadly. On one hand, we have Honor saying she couldn't have taken Tourville out from a given distance, implying the distance was the issue and therefore the link lag was a factor.

Jonathan_S wrote:I got the impression it wasn't the lag -- after all Tourville was at 150 million km (about 8 light-minutes). That would give an FTL lag of just 8 seconds; equivalent to engaging with conventional missions at the ludicrously close range of 2.4 million km. That's less than half of SDM range!!!

That's a short enough fire control loop that they should still be utterly deadly.

Instead I think the problem is that that's beyond their com range -- that the ACM transceivers aren't powerful enough to transmit and understandable signal that far nor sensitive enough to pick out what the Keyhole IIs are sending. That makes the lag irrelevant.


(Also, IIRC, one of the changes to the larger system defense variant of Apollo was more capable transceivers boosting their com range. There'd be no point to that, nor to the Mycroft FTL fire control relays if Apollo was already lag limited at a mere 8 LM)

In essence, it is the link that makes them deadly; an Achilles' heel that will assert itself if the link can be cut very close to launch. That means the MK23-E has to lead its brood from beginning to end, with absolutely no update whatsoever.

And if the missiles need an additional signal immediately after launch for some reason, well, then an entire launch could be rendered useless.

No, it's also the computer that fits in the cubic meters of free space and needs gigawatts of power to run. You could never fit that many vacuum tubes in a regular Mk23.

cthia wrote:In essence, it is the link that makes them deadly; an Achilles' heel that will assert itself if the link can be cut very close to launch. That means the MK23-E has to lead its brood from beginning to end, with absolutely no update whatsoever.

And if the missiles need an additional signal immediately after launch for some reason, well, then an entire launch could be rendered useless.

Then please explain what happened to the Solarian Fleet at Beowulf in UH; where only about ten percent of their Battle-cruisers survived an Apollo attack, which had received initial instructions and then acted autonomously. Obviously they did not need "an additional signal immediately after launch"; so it seems that they can be deadly without that link.

Jonathan_S wrote:I got the impression it wasn't the lag -- after all Tourville was at 150 million km (about 8 light-minutes). That would give an FTL lag of just 8 seconds; equivalent to engaging with conventional missions at the ludicrously close range of 2.4 million km. That's less than half of SDM range!!!

That's a short enough fire control loop that they should still be utterly deadly.

Instead I think the problem is that that's beyond their com range -- that the ACM transceivers aren't powerful enough to transmit and understandable signal that far nor sensitive enough to pick out what the Keyhole IIs are sending. That makes the lag irrelevant.


(Also, IIRC, one of the changes to the larger system defense variant of Apollo was more capable transceivers boosting their com range. There'd be no point to that, nor to the Mycroft FTL fire control relays if Apollo was already lag limited at a mere 8 LM)

Signal strength was the reason why Honor had to use the emplaced Hermes Buoys (an older generation of tech which didn't have the bandwidth of Apollo) as repeaters, which was the 150 missile limiter.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And since IIRC even mission killing a Republic SD(P) takes 200-300 laserhead hits; and somewhere around a quarter to a third of each salvo will be decoys and jammers it's frankly still utterly astounding that from no more than about ~800 laserheads enough would survive to get those 200-300 hits in the face of a full unshaken fleet of that size!

Loren Pechtel wrote:Remember, there are several rods per laserhead. And from what we saw when Honor fired on the same fleet he shouldn't have been stacking them that deep. He didn't know how much overkill he was doing, though.

Though even if Honor didn't devote as many missiles per target the fleet's defensive fire was still split up more because she had 32 SD(P)s vs McKeon's 6.

I'm talking about the performance she showed in firing that demonstration--McKeon was throwing a lot more birds, he should have fared at least as well against the defenses.

cthia wrote:And if the missiles need an additional signal immediately after launch for some reason, well, then an entire launch could be rendered useless.

At Spindle we learned the Apollo birds still have the radio links.

cthia wrote:And if the missiles need an additional signal immediately after launch for some reason, well, then an entire launch could be rendered useless.

Loren Pechtel wrote:At Spindle we learned the Apollo birds still have the radio links.

Let's assume that he did not really mean "immediately after launch", but instead meant far enough out that there are significant time delays in light speed communication. At that point the control missiles can still talk to each other and operate as an autonomous unit, as they did at Beowulf.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:And if the missiles need an additional signal immediately after launch for some reason, well, then an entire launch could be rendered useless.

Loren Pechtel wrote:At Spindle we learned the Apollo birds still have the radio links.

Let's assume that he did not really mean "immediately after launch", but instead meant far enough out that there are significant time delays in light speed communication. At that point the control missiles can still talk to each other and operate as an autonomous unit, as they did at Beowulf.

I do mean immediately after launch. Literally. I am assuming the missiles are not armed until after they exit the ship. More specifically, after they clear the wedge. Similar to wet navy subs? If not, then the jury is in on how Shannon pulled off her OOPS. But if it is so, the launch may never even receive the signal to arm.

Reminds me of the movie Hunt for Red October when the missiles from the Russian sub closed too quickly to arm.

I am assuming that any R&D that is successful in jamming an FTL signal would find jamming a radio signal child's play. We do that now. Concentrating efforts on jamming the FTL signal but ignoring radio signals is like the Japanese ignoring the oil fields at Pearl.

But kzt is right, the computer and power source are the real heavy lifters, but the damn links is the Achilles' heel. A weak link (tendon) that can be cut.

And any such platform that is close enough to the brood of Apollo birds at the moment of terminal maneuvers may be able to generate a signal powerful enough to sever the link between the control missile and its birds.

Whatcha got left is the blind leading the blind.



Since Apollo utilizes two forms of communication then there are actually two tendons that need to be cut. Both of Apollo's heels need to be cut. The FTL signal and the radio signal.

Dollars to donuts the control missile communicates with the brood via radio signals?

kzt wrote:No, it's also the computer that fits in the cubic meters of free space and needs gigawatts of power to run. You could never fit that many vacuum tubes in a regular Mk23.

It's also how those fancy computers now form a network - and share their integrated sensor data. Previously in a multi-target environment, missiles genuinely just went in and fired at whatever they could acquire, be it a SD or LAC. Even the RMN's missiles had nowhere near a 100% hit probability, with many of them wasting their payloads upon an impeller wedge or empty space.

A bigger Apollo salvo becomes cumulatively smarter and more perceptive, beyond what the sum of its parts would add up to. Instead of each single missile relying on a sensor head no larger than its own diameter, an Apollo salvo is an array with a diameter as wide as that salvo's physical dispersion. Which can be hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

It's a bit like the Event Horizon Telescope, which generated those black hole images a few years ago. They used just seven telescopes, but emplaced around our whole planet, generating something with an operating diameter of, well, Earth. Over 12,000km.

Apollo took missiles from relying on individual ~3 metre sensor heads all the way up to the effective diameter of a gas giant or star. That is the true source of its fantastic accuracy. In comparison, the missile-sized FTL com is almost a red herring, it was Manticore saying to Haven, "You struggle to fit FTL coms on LACs. We've put them on our missiles."

Any FTL seems like magic to us, because it is. But in RFC's universe, it's "only" 62 times the speed of C. That multiplier of 62 is nowhere near the potential difference between individual and networked missile sensors, even with smaller salvoes such as the 'bluff' fired at Tourville. Jonathan_S hinted at this earlier.

Jonathan_S wrote:I got the impression it wasn't the lag -- after all Tourville was at 150 million km (about 8 light-minutes). That would give an FTL lag of just 8 seconds; equivalent to engaging with conventional missions at the ludicrously close range of 2.4 million km. That's less than half of SDM range!!!

However, by the time laserhead range is reached, say ~100,000km, the defender's lightspeed lag is down to about a third of a second.

In order for 62C to get into that ballpark, where shipboard FTL fire control is actually capable of directing the final attack sequence(which would make the 23-E's computers utterly redundant) the Apollo-firing formation has to close to approximately six million kilometres. From 15 million km, they can do quite a bit of hand-holding through the countermissile envelope but ultimately the ACMs still have to take over at the last second and do the heavy lifting.

cthia wrote:I do mean immediately after launch. Literally. I am assuming the missiles are not armed until after they exit the ship. More specifically, after they clear the wedge. Similar to wet navy subs? If not, then the jury is in on how Shannon pulled off her OOPS. But if it is so, the launch may never even receive the signal to arm.

Reminds me of the movie Hunt for Red October when the missiles from the Russian sub closed too quickly to arm.

I am assuming that any R&D that is successful in jamming an FTL signal would find jamming a radio signal child's play. We do that now. Concentrating efforts on jamming the FTL signal but ignoring radio signals is like the Japanese ignoring the oil fields at Pearl.

But kzt is right, the computer and power source are the real heavy lifters, but the damn links is the Achilles' heel. A weak link (tendon) that can be cut.

And any such platform that is close enough to the brood of Apollo birds at the moment of terminal maneuvers may be able to generate a signal powerful enough to sever the link between the control missile and its birds.

Whatcha got left is the blind leading the blind.

Since Apollo utilizes two forms of communication then there are actually two tendons that need to be cut. Both of Apollo's heels need to be cut. The FTL signal and the radio signal.

Dollars to donuts the control missile communicates with the brood via radio signals?

I expect that you are correct that the light speed communication is by radio; although tight beam laser is a possibility. But let's assume radio, which is much more susceptible to jamming. At a minimum there is an R-squared problem here; at launch and within the missile flight there is a major difference in proximity, the jamming device is at a far greater distance to the missiles than the missiles are to the transmitter. You even mention that the jamming device needs to be close to interfere with terminal maneuvers.

PS: I am not sure why the question of where the missile is armed has anything to do with Shannon's "Oops" moment. We know that the software "bombs" in the StateSec ships would have attacked both through a fusion reactor dump and through missiles in the ships' magazines. We do not know exactly how Shannon worked it.