OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

Loren Pechtel wrote:
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.

Well Honot’s long range demonstration “strike” had the advantage that she wasn’t trying to actually land hits. She had the Apollo missiles fly through Tourville’s missile defense envelope - but not actually engage. So they wouldn’t have needed to settle down onto the more predictable vectors necessary to put a laser head within 50,000 km of a target’s broadside, nose, or tail. Heck they may not have ever entered anybody’s PDLC envelope.

She was just bluffing by showing she could dance missiles though (some of?) their defenses from 8 LM away.

And don’t forget that while Tourville still had more ships by the time Honor launched on him he probably had weaker defenses than Chin had against McKeon. He’d already taken a bettering against Home Fleet and the slugging match with 3rd. And the Home Fleet LACd have eviscerated his own LACs and screen. So he may well have been an easier target. Combine that with making an easier shot (flyby rather than actual attack) and you’ve got much of an explanation for the success Honor got with her “strike” of fewer missiles.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
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.

Well Honot’s long range demonstration “strike” had the advantage that she wasn’t trying to actually land hits. She had the Apollo missiles fly through Tourville’s missile defense envelope - but not actually engage. So they wouldn’t have needed to settle down onto the more predictable vectors necessary to put a laser head within 50,000 km of a target’s broadside, nose, or tail. Heck they may not have ever entered anybody’s PDLC envelope.

She was just bluffing by showing she could dance missiles though (some of?) their defenses from 8 LM away.

And don’t forget that while Tourville still had more ships by the time Honor launched on him he probably had weaker defenses than Chin had against McKeon. He’d already taken a bettering against Home Fleet and the slugging match with 3rd. And the Home Fleet LACd have eviscerated his own LACs and screen. So he may well have been an easier target. Combine that with making an easier shot (flyby rather than actual attack) and you’ve got much of an explanation for the success Honor got with her “strike” of fewer missiles.

I dunno if I can fully agree with that Jonathan. Honor was also firing far less missiles. What was it, 64? And what was it, four missiles survived and performed a well choreographed dance for the enemy's consumption?

What that demonstration launch showed, is that Apollo missiles can target any ship at will, while evading the missile defense. One of Apollo's strengths is that it can perform real time maneuvering to somewhat blunt a CM launch. Much akin to Hemphill's counter to the Tripple Ripple.

I got the feeling the Havenite crew was absolutely shocked with relief that they weren't receiving a full dose of laserheads.

At any rate, the demonstration launch was an insanely mission-effective 64 missiles?

Oh! It is an error to say that Honor was not trying to land a hit. She was. She was targeting the wedge.

"I hit what I was aiming at!"

cthia wrote:Oh! It is an error to say that Honor was not trying to land a hit. She was. She was targeting the wedge.

"I hit what I was aiming at!"

That's true. And hitting a wedge is still hard. Sure, the wedge is huge compared to the ship. But it's still tiny compared to the space between ships, so hitting nothing is far easier.

Then again, they don't have to hit a particular ship's wedge. Any wedge would have sufficed and Honor can claim that's the one she was targetting all along.

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.

Consider the wet navy subs--yes, the torpedo isn't armed until it's gone far enough that a detonation will not harm the unit that launched it. However, the torpedo will carry out the orders it was given even if the link is cut--and the link is pretty fragile. You need to carry many miles of wire, it's got to be a very thin wire!

That torpedo fired at the Red October was not armed--but it was tracking.

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.

Depends on the power levels. The Dazzlers successfully jam at countermissile ranges but nobody attempts to jam other ships at missile ranges--because they simply can't produce enough power.

You’d need some sort of super stealthy platform that could manage to get on the gun-target line without anyone detecting it. Ask Honor or anyone else in the RMN, it’s totally impossible to get something that big with that kind of power i to that position undetected. So no, not possible.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Depends on the power levels. The Dazzlers successfully jam at countermissile ranges but nobody attempts to jam other ships at missile ranges--because they simply can't produce enough power.

And don't forget that such a thing is going to be the brightest spot in any tracking radar. It would be child's play for the missiles to home in on it. At this point, you have two choices:

1) a remote transmitter platform. That has limitations in power levels, even with transmitted power. It probably burns itself out after a couple of uses or just a couple of seconds. It might be enough, though -- we have seen Dazzlers used defensively.

2) overwhelming the sensors. For a wedge ship, if you can manage to overwhelm the sensors with the energy deluge, the missiles couldn't determine what's a wedge and what's an opening, so they couldn't determine the right attack angle. For a spider, without a wedge, this is less of a solution. The overwhelming might simply blur the actual position of the ship.

cthia wrote:Oh! It is an error to say that Honor was not trying to land a hit. She was. She was targeting the wedge.

"I hit what I was aiming at!"

I think you're mixing up Honor's demonstration strike with one of the ones during Lacoon's seizure of the wormholes (where they did target the inside of the defender's wedges as a warning). But Honor's missiles hit "absolutely nothing".

At All Costs wrote: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 sick feeling of helplessness frayed around the edges as he realized there were less than sixty of them. Whatever they were, they weren't a serious attack on his surviving ships, so what—?
His jaw tightened as the missiles made their final approach. But they didn't detonate. Instead, they hurtled directly through his formation, straight through the teeth of his blazing laser clusters.
His point defense crews managed to nail two-thirds of them. The other twenty pirouetted, swerved to one side, then detonated in a perfectly synchronized, deadly accurate attack . . . on absolutely nothing.

So while that does imply that they did pass within PDLC range it does not actually say that at any point the passed within the 50,000 km laserhead range of any of Tourville's battered ships.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

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.

Consider the wet navy subs--yes, the torpedo isn't armed until it's gone far enough that a detonation will not harm the unit that launched it. However, the torpedo will carry out the orders it was given even if the link is cut--and the link is pretty fragile. You need to carry many miles of wire, it's got to be a very thin wire!

That torpedo fired at the Red October was not armed--but it was tracking.

Wet navy subs do have a minimum arming distance on their torpedoes (or historically they did and I assume they still do). But, at least in the USN's WWII sub fleet, which I'm most familiar with that did not require any follow-up command sent from the sub. (In fact there was no way to do so, given that wire guidance for torpedoes had not yet been developed -- they were all fire and forget, whether running down a fixed gyro bearing, running a pattern, and one of the early acoustic homing torpedoes. The way the minimum arming distance was achieved was by a very small free spinning propeller on the nose of the torpedo - once it was launched its motion through the water would cause that propeller to spin and rotate a shaft -- once a sufficient number of rotations had occurred the torpedo was armed.

(In at least one case that made for a very nervous trip back to base when the sub managed to launch a torpedo into a closed outer tube door. It was wedged, but the outer door was sprung and letting water in. They couldn't get the torpedo in or push it the rest of the way out, couldn't access that arming prop, and couldn't tell whether or not it was spinning as the sub moved -- so all the way back to base they were faced with the possibility that it might eventually spin enough times for the magnetic detonator to become live, detect the steel hull of the sub, and blow them all to kingdom come!)

Oh, and torpedoes in WWII were hardly unique in that kind of delayed arming w/o any signal from the launch platform. Naval (and presumably land based) AA shells required a certain number of rotations to arm (so they couldn't go off and kill the gun crew should they somehow encounter a sufficiently hard or sufficiently radar reflective object, depending on fuze type, immediately after firing). And bombers dropped bombs that had arming propellers very similar in concept to the ones on torpedoes. Everyone wanted some reasonable assurance against their weapons accidently killing them; but none of that (that I'm aware of) relied to a transmitted signal to arm.


So while Honorverse missile many have a minimum arming range,
a) we know it can't be very far because Theisman used laserhead from inside 500,000 km, energy range, in HotQ. and
b) it likely isn't something that required an arming signal from the launching ship, and hence wouldn't be anything that could be jammed.

Most heavy weapon ammo has a mechanical safety that is based on several factors that ensures the round is safely clear of the launcher before it arms.

Artillery rounds normally arm based on massive acceleration, spinning fast and also spinning x number of times.