Theemile wrote:Sharkhunter, Relax is pointing out that the Honorverse doesn't seem to use many of the Electrical Engineering and computer technologies developed over the last 50 years. Simple things like IP protocols via WiFi mean one radio transmitter can send specialized, separate data to dozens if not hundreds of receivers. Cellular technologies allow secure, encrypted signals to bounce from 1 central transmitter to the next. Some of the "techniques" David is employing appear outwardly outdated compared to what we know now.
If memory serves, Relax is an engineer for Boeing (correct me if I'm wrong here) and has a background in such systems.
Cool info! on the technology info and Relax' background.
I'm wasn't in the "antennas & engineering" division, etc. but worked for a CDMA telco a bit more than a decade ago. but am mostly in the data world. Which leads to the question.
Ugly paragraph warning, would love to get feedback.
Doesn't multiple missile control per channel imply an omnidirectional signal a la wifi, etc.? To wit: the reason I haven't had problems with David's "control channel" technology has to do primarily with "amount of directional data vs. jammability over millions of km" requiring a ship to not only independently track a missile that is accelerating away at increasingly large fractions of C, (while not losing lock itself) but a maneuvering target with it's own decoys and ECM and update those ECM/penetration profiles for as long as possible. I've also imagined with no particular reasoning that the missiles likely have an amount of spin as well, to defend against EMP/nuke pulses with the missile's wedge.
Let's say that's a gig of data in a very short interval of time. That gig has to arrive unjammed by anything such as wedge interference, get unscrambled, update the seeker's info, yada yada yada in real time. That interval is stated to be short enough that even "rotating control" between three missiles increases the likelihood of a miss by a significant margin.
But that's where RFC/MWW started. Keyhole 1, then Keyhole 2, then Moriarty and Mycroft seem to establish multiple control paths for missile(s) downrange, now even at FTL speeds and distances. So his 'tech' is improving as the wars go on, which seems reasonable.
I think my biggest 'missile-tech' problem is that any attack missile ought to have the equivalent solving capacity as any of the biggest current Beowulf'd supercomputer clusters AD2015 and at terahertz processing speeds, let alone a near aircraft carrier size destroyer, yet we 'hear' that an SD's computers are much more able to get missiles on target than a DD's.
