OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

kzt wrote:The weapon that gets you 50% of the effectiveness for less than 10% of the R&D is enhanced missile computers and networking of your attack missiles.

This doesn’t require FTL and doesn’t require micro fusion reactors.

Possibly another area that can be exploited. The Mk23-E and its brood have a gang mentality.

The Mk23-E is the bully. Kick the bully's ass and his followers will bug out. In the movies if you destroy the alien mothership the drones it is controlling are rendered useless.

If the Apollo launch encounters a jamming platform downrange near its terminal maneuvers the control missile itself may be overpowered and the entire brood rendered useless.

cthia wrote:I think you are missing the gist of it. Honor's demonstration had evaded the last line of counter-missile defense. There was nothing standing in the way that could stop the salvo from choosing targets; especially while they were still displaying such fine control over their dance maneuvers. They were phucking ballet dancers performing graceful pirouettes. They were taunts. The launch was simply intended to get the point across that "we can dance all over your ships the same way!"

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Yes the launched was just intended to be a demonstration; as such it didn't need to go for damage. Which freed up its missiles to maneuver in more survivable ways; freed from the constraint of actually achieving a valid attack position.

Behind the last line of counter-missile defense is the PDLCs. And from the text we know those fired - but those have engagement ranges of IIRC over 100,000 km and they become exponentially more effective as the range closes. So at 51,000 km just before the laserheads reach standoff range they're several times more likely to score a hit than out near their max range.

I still think that if the missiles had bored in to land hits on one (or more) of Tourville's ships that his fleet would have stopped more than "just" 2/3rd of them. Closing to attack position requires, to a certain extent, abandoning that ballet dancing and eventually pointing your nose towards your target and crossing that 50,000 km line. It's that final predictable terminal attack where each missile is at its most vulnerable. He most likely wouldn't have stopped all of them, not with as much of a surprise as that first (and ultimately only) salvo was; but he might well have picked off another 15 or more.

Also the ships are making predictions about where the missiles will be when the laser reaches them. And when determining the most probably locations they're going to focus on the ones that endanger the ship -- if they miss because the missile veers away that as passive win for them; they didn't get any hits but if the missile veers back they'll have another chance to hit it. So missiles that maintain their distance and pick courses that optimize survival over entering warhead range are going to have higher survival rates than missiles actively trying to get hits. Hell, they might be putting their wedge towards the closest ships -- which is a great way to survive the PDLCs but ensures they're not closing to attack range because they're not pointing their nose within, say, 40 degrees of a warship.

They trailed their skirts through the edges of Tourville's fleet defenses; and yes danced magnificently to show that a mere 60 missiles could avoid getting wiped out. But that's far easier to do when your goal is to have the most missiles survive trailing their skirts; rather that to score the most laserhead hits.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:[
Well, he was firing ~1300 missiles (or fewer) into 110 ship's defenses. Normally 1300 missiles wouldn't make it past the Outer CM defenses.

And in this case Apollo was probably working against him. Knowing he was cracking 110 ship's defenses, he probably aimed Apollo at one ship, and all the missiles followed. If he were firing standard MDMs, most would follow fire control, but some would reacquire nearby ships, doing significant "splash damage" to other the ships surrounding the target, so subsequent salvos focused on the same squadron would be taking out 2 or 3 ships at a time.( assuming the same # of standard MDMs would survive the defenses, which we know they wouldn't)

He was firing quads, so 192 missiles per Apollo armed ship. So under a thousand missiles and was getting a mission kill at least with each salvo. Vs the ~20,000 RHN missiles per RMN SD(P) kill. Apollo is absurdly deadly.

If I was facing that I'd be throwing a lot into R&D on how to disrupt the FTL links.

Kzt packed a lot of implications in this post.

Of course, those are not the absolute number of hits it takes to destroy an SD. An RMN SD cannot absorb 20,000 hits. Rather, the numbers are saying that a 20,000 missile salvo is required to ensure getting enough hits that will destroy an SD.

That is why kzt suggested cutting the link. Apollo is deadly because so many of the missiles of a specific launch target the same object. They have a gangsta (gang) mentality.

cthia wrote:There was a shortage of Apollo pods, but did that include an overall shortage of the entire package? Were the dazzlers, dragons teeth and the control missile all in short supply as well? In other words, could McKeon have seeded each launch with an extra control missile controlling ONLY dazzlers and dragons teeth? Beaters!

kzt wrote:Yes, but this is almost certainly not a field modification. You'd need to get it to a depot if not the factory to do something like this. You certainly can't do it in the missile bay, as that is pretty much stacked solid with enormous missile pods full of huge Mk23 missiles.

cthia wrote:First, let me say that I am grateful not to have to imagine the HV employing a bunch of burly Anton Zilwicki or Harkness types just to maneuver huge missiles around to get them loaded. I hate seeing that aboard a modern ship in movies. When automation goes out, you are screwed.

At any rate, I thought that it could and has been fully field selectable, because textev has indicated that the number of dazzlers and dragons teeth vary with each launch. So I thought it was launch selectable.

A possible solution to this was given:

Jonathan_S wrote:Now what you might be able to do, to a limited amount, is have a couple different loadouts in your pods (some pods with balanced loads, some jammer heavy, some decoy heavy, etc.) and use the cross rails within the pod bay to alter which mix of pods you were rolling. That'd let you somewhat alter the salvo ratios despite being stuck with the existing mix within each given pod.

cthia wrote:At any rate, I thought that it could and has been fully field selectable, because textev has indicated that the number of dazzlers and dragons teeth vary with each launch. So I thought it was launch selectable.

I'm about 99.9% sure that the warhead and laser rods are deleted to provide space for the penaids. So it's probably a fixed ratio per pod or a different part number that contains a certain number of missiles.

I'd bet a bit on 6+1+1, but not sure.

cthia wrote:Apollo is deadly because so many of the missiles of a specific launch target the same object.

That was what was happening with McKeon's salvos, but is that correct in general? I assume that part of Apollo's lethality is that it can assure that the selected targets get equal treatment. An ordinary salvo can have more than 500 missiles attack one target, while less than 100 attack another; because there is no coordination. However with Apollo, once the desired targets are acquired, then the coordination between control missiles ensures that each target is allocated the proper number of missiles and no target gets off lightly. That coordination can expand or contract the target set, so each individual target gets assigned an optimal number of attacking missiles based on their profile (that is number to mission kill a destroyer, cruiser or super-dreadnought, as appropriate).

Jonathan_S wrote:AFAIK the Mk23 missiles in an Apollo pod don't require any modifications to be under the control of its Mk23E Apollo Control Missile. And the differences between the laserhead, dazzler, and dragons teeth Mk23s is just the payload attached to the missile -- simply swapping that converts a missile from one variant to the other. (Basically did they still a big boom on the nose, or a powerful jammer, or a tricksy decoy)

I thought the other missiles in the Apollo pod were Mk23F.

But no. MoH says:

Mission of Honor, ch. 21 wrote:The Echo was the heart of the Apollo system... and big enough that a single Mark 23-E displaced two standard Mark 23s. That had pushed the maximum capacity of a same-dimension pod to just nine missiles, only eight of which were attack birds.

Mission of Honor, ch. 22 wrote:Tuning in all that redundancy gave each of Aivars Terekhov's cruisers one hundred and twenty-eight telemetry links, and each of those links was assigned to one Mark 23-E missile, which, in turn, controlled eight standard Mark 23s.

It looks like I was confusing what the F is. According to the Wiki, it's the control bird for the Mk25 system defence missiles. Why it's not called Mk25 too, I don't know.

cthia wrote:I think you are missing the gist of it. Honor's demonstration had evaded the last line of counter-missile defense. There was nothing standing in the way that could stop the salvo from choosing targets; especially while they were still displaying such fine control over their dance maneuvers. They were phucking ballet dancers performing graceful pirouettes. They were taunts. The launch was simply intended to get the point across that "we can dance all over your ships the same way!"

.

Do note that those missiles were unexpected and Tourville's Second Fleet wasn't ready for them. They had a very long ballistic phase and it looks like Honor had her tactical department program them so they'd bring their wedges up deep inside the defensive basked.

At All Costs, ch. 68 wrote:"What?" Molly DeLaney demanded incredulously. "That's ridiculous! They're a hundred fifty million klicks away!"

"Well, they're coming in on us now anyway," Tourville said sharply as Guerriere's missile defense batteries began to fire once more.

They didn't do much good. He watched sickly as the missiles which had suddenly brought up their impellers, appearing literally out of nowhere, hurtled down on his battered and broken command. They drove straight in, swerving, dancing, and his sock feeling of helplessness frayed around the edges as he realized there were less than sixty of them. Whatever htey were, they weren't a serious attack on his surviving ships, so what—?

(emphasis mine)

So this means those missiles came from an angle that his defences weren't optimised for and showed up late so there was little time to throw CMs at. Add to it that they were trying to avoid the ships instead of engage in attack runs, that means those missiles weren't doing any of what the preprogrammed defensive scenarios were designed for. They'd have kept their wedges all the way through, instead of dropping them for an attack, which means only the Havenites would have limited angles through which to use PDLCs.

That was a mighty bluff. Not only did Honor convince Tourville she could control missiles at a range longer than what she really could, she made it look like those missiles had far more control and manoeuvrability than they actually did in an attack run.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Apollo is deadly because so many of the missiles of a specific launch target the same object.

That was what was happening with McKeon's salvos, but is that correct in general? I assume that part of Apollo's lethality is that it can assure that the selected targets get equal treatment. An ordinary salvo can have more than 500 missiles attack one target, while less than 100 attack another; because there is no coordination. However with Apollo, once the desired targets are acquired, then the coordination between control missiles ensures that each target is allocated the proper number of missiles and no target gets off lightly. That coordination can expand or contract the target set, so each individual target gets assigned an optimal number of attacking missiles based on their profile (that is number to mission kill a destroyer, cruiser or super-dreadnought, as appropriate).

It's not that you can't attempt the same without Apollo. You can and they did. You could focus fire with classic MDMs and if you picked a couple SDs to hammer on you weren't just telling all the missile "here are your two target signatures, pick whichever you can see better".

However, where classic MDM focused fire came up very short compared to Apollo is what happened if they lock their target lock, or got tricked away from their original target via decoys (or heck, when their original target unexpectedly blew up in a prior salvo). Usually they'd be so far downrange before that happened that the launching ship wouldn't have time to retask them before they'd reached the enemy. So, having lost their original target is when classic MDMs would start scrambling around for anything in sight (and thus ending up overkilling a significantly more visible target, or wasting themselves killing destroyers when they were send after SDs). Especially because they lacked the ability to talk to each other, so only the launching ships could ensure that they remained properly spread amongst targets once they had to start reacquiring.


But with Apollo you're much less likely to lose sight or get decoyed away in the first place (better sensors plus being able to use all 9 Mk23's sensors as a sparse array makes it harder to blind and gives it a better chance of at least one of them keeping the original target in sight the whole time). And when Apollo does get a lost target lock the FTL link is fast enough the launching ship often has enough time to make an intelligent new target choice for that pod's worth of missiles and upload it back to them. Also, when the launch ship can't the 23E has a far more capable computer to go with its far better sensor picture and so should have a better chance of autonomously reacquiring its original target. Plus it can talk laterally to other 23Es in its salvo, so one of them might be able to cue it back onto its original target; and for any 23Es that still can't find their original target and can't get a new one from the launching ship, they can look for the best targets anybody can see while still avoiding over-focusing by "calling dibs" and letting their siblings know so the swarm can, even autonomously, do a pretty good job of maintaining the desired fire distribution.

(But whether classic MDMs or Apollo that desired fire distribution doesn't have to be an even number of missiles per ship; nor does it have to be all aimed at one ship type. With either you could dedicated 18 missiles apiece at some DDs and 200 at one SD(P) they were screening -- the only difference is how likely it is that that's still the distribution after the enemy's done their best to break target locks and fool everybody)

tlb wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:He expected them to detonate but they didn't--thus they successfully closed to attack range. Ignore the 2/3, that doesn't mean much in this case--what she really showed is that his defenses can only pick off 40 of her missiles per volley.

His ships picked off 40 out of 60 missiles; but you say that the 2/3 is not significant, only the 40 is? So if there had been 300 missiles in the volley, you believe that only 40 would be picked off and not 200?

About that. The number of incoming birds has little to do with how many get picked off. If anything more birds mean more EW jamming and fewer birds picked off.