tlb wrote:ThinksMarkedly wrote:And when was the last time they fought with MDMs from within 1.3 million km of the enemy? They may have noticed that Apollo was 50x better than non-Apollo (62c FTL, reduced a little because it's not the exact same thing), but that put the performance into a range that they had not fought at since before Operation Buttercup and never with MDMs.
Jonathan_S wrote:For that matter they'd have very rarely engaged at such close range with SDMs either.
That's within CM range!
And even if they were in a missile duel at 1.3 million km the threat environment would have been far different since they'd be shooting at missiles that had nearly zero base velocity and even being able to accelerate at full power they'd be sitting ducks for CMs and PDLCs. A far cry from an MDM screaming across the defensive zone at a sizable fraction of the speed of light!
So nobody had ever fought at under 2 million effective km with 0.6c+ missiles.
Pick whatever range you want as the normal distance for a missile engagement, the point is that Apollo has the same control at a distance at least 50 times farther away. Plus it has that added speed when it reaches the envelop for anti-missile engagement.
PS. I generally ignore all the numbers that float around during an engagement in the book, because they are sleep inducing for me; but FTL control gives better than an order of magnitude improvement.
It definitely gives better than an order of magnitude. It gives a 62x improvement
(in normal space).
But those numbers that put you to sleep also show why that 62x improvement can't really be replicated at any range with light-speed fire control. (Or conversely why, without Mycroft relays, you can't use Apollo to hit a target 62x further away)
Sure the fire control loop is the same for an Apollo missile at 62 million km as for a light-speed control link a 1 million km. But the further distance gave the Apollo missile the time needed to build up to its relativistic closing speed. It's going to flash across the targets defensive zone in less than 13% of the time of the missile at just 1 million km. That's over 7 time longer for the defenses to shoot at the slower, closer range, missile.
But if we go the other way and look at the ideal light-speed fire control MDM engagement range of around 33 million km the fire control signals take 110 seconds to reach the missile. FTL signals can cover 2,046 million km in that same 110 seconds.
Unfortunately an Apollo fire control link between Keyhole II and missile seems to have a maximum signal range of less than 108 million km (FTL signal taking 5.8 seconds) - so you just can't FTL control them at large enough distances
(again, without Mycroft relays) to get Apollo as laggy as normal fire control's ideal engagement range.
Apollo lets you have
much tighter control over the missiles at extended MDM range while still retaining the high relativistic closing speed that give so little time to defenders to stop terminal MDMs. That killing combination just can't be recreated
at any range with light-speed control links.
