Brigade XO wrote:How about a slightly differnt look at the LAC passing tac data to an M23 command missile? What about GhostRiders? FTL is FTL. At some point in an engagement you are going to try and have your Recon drones lurking about close to the enemy and if a GhostRider can push data to an M23 command missile, that does save time from having it go back and get digested by the commanding SHIP before getting sent out to the Apollo units.
Yeah the GRs involved have just given away position but 1) how close are they and 2) can your opponent lock them up with missile fire....GRs are notoriously hard to see/find so unless somebody is sitting right on top of one, the only other thing is to saturate a proposed area with missile and hope one of them kills the GR by getting a bing off it and targeting it or gets a wedge kill. Every bird you send after a GR is one you can't through at the ships that are sending volleys at you.
I would say that, for whatever unexplained reason, that "FTL is FTL" is no more true that "radio is radio".
We know for lightspeed links that CM fire control can't talk to anti-ship missiles (and vice versa), and voice coms can't talk to either.
That seems to be slightly less true for FLT since, after all, Honor did manage to push some updates through a Hermes buoy during the BoM. But, on the other hand, ships can talk to GR drones via FTL and can push multiple video streams for communication, and yet we've given to understand that they have zero ability to talk to any ACM via FTL without a Keyhole II.
Yet, it would be quite useful if a ship towing Apollo pods could use FTL to talk to even a few. (Imagine a Roland able to use a few FTL Apollo pods like a sniper). And yet, when they talk of trying to bodge some kind of pseudo Apollo link for BCs it's all about Hermes buoys; not the ship's own FTL links.
So there's probably some reason that the FTL from GR drones isn't actually capable to linking directly to the FTL transceiver of the ACMs. (Even though, as you point out, it'd be really useful if it could)