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KEYHOLE REFIT

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KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by Varangian   » Wed Jul 13, 2022 12:27 pm

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So just curious.

Could the Medusa and GSN early flight Harrington SD(P) be refitted with Keyhole?

I know it is a space/volume issue, but is there any other reason- cost?
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:22 pm

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Varangian wrote:So just curious.

Could the Medusa and GSN early flight Harrington SD(P) be refitted with Keyhole?

I know it is a space/volume issue, but is there any other reason- cost?

It's possible; according to David Weber, but it'd slow and costly.
The estimate from At All Costs First Lord of the Admiralty (White Haven) is that refitting a Keyhole I SD(P) to Keyhole II takes at least 6 weeks.

At All Costs - Ch 52 wrote:only ships built with Keyhole capability from the outset can handle the Mark Two platforms, and they're essential to making the new missiles work. We can refit with Keyhole II—in fact, the decision to build that in is part of what's delayed the Andermani refits—but it requires placing the ship in yard hands for at least six weeks


However in a later post, archived on the infodump site, David Weber said that if you really wanted to you could refit a non-Keyhole ship; it'd just be a lot more significant of a refit. (Which makes sense -- pretty much anything is possible if you're willing the throw enough time, money, and manpower at it -- but not everything that's possible is reasonable)

runsforcelery - Refitting to the Keyhole-II standard
( June 29, 2005) wrote:
I'd estimate, however, that the time requirement to install this system aboard any ship (pod-layers or pre-pod) from scratch would be a minimum of four to six months.

Note that even the low end of that is almost 1/4 as long as it would take to build a new Invictus from scratch in that same slip. And the Invictus carries a lot more pods and a lot more point defense than a Medusa or early flight Harrington. (And refit time is usually more expensive than new build time because there's always extra gotchas you find where you have to deal with repairs or field modifications that have snuck in and caused this ship to deviate from the original plans)

There's a good argument that the RMN would be better off simply scrapping those old ships and retaining, or building, an all Invictus force. It'd cost more per hull, but you also get a lot more capability per hull in an Invictus than in a Medusa with a bodged on Keyhole II.



Now if for some weird political/budgetary reasons you couldn't replace the old Medusas with Invictus, or could only replace them on a 4:1 ratio, but did have the budget for refits then sure -- refit away.
* 4 Apollo-d Medusas would almost certainly be better than trading them out for 1 Invictus, and
* 4 Apollo'd Medusas would certainly be far, far, better than 4 stock Medusas.
But, budget and politics allowing, you'd be better off saving the refit money to put towards new builds; then keep enough unmodified 1st get SD(P)s in service to keep your target numbers up; retiring them as new build 2nd (or future 3rd) generation SD(P)s commission to replace them.
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by Theemile   » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:41 pm

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Varangian wrote:So just curious.

Could the Medusa and GSN early flight Harrington SD(P) be refitted with Keyhole?

I know it is a space/volume issue, but is there any other reason- cost?


Some of these ships were updated - but they lost some of their broadside for it (not listed) and a 75K ton computer room was added to the back of the Pod Bay (the back section of the bay was walled off with armor to do so), so updated ships lost ~100 Pods (out of ~512 initially).

Many were just updated to Keyhole 1, and some were updated to Keyhole II. The KHI upgrade took 4-6 months, and the KHII took longer - The KHI to KHII update is much easier, but still an extensive upgrade over several months.

In peacetime this is a no brainer, but in War, having multiple ships out for 4-6 months is a bad thing - most of the upgrades were done on damaged ships or ships scheduled for other upgrades/deep maintenance; so many were never touched - in fact 20 of the 65 initial Medusas survived the war without the upgrade to Keyholes.

After the war - Will anyone update the Medusas while thousand plus pod capacity Invictuses exist in large numbers, or will they be dropped directly into the reserves. My money is on the reserves, we already know a fair amount of the wall will be sent there, and the capability to upgrade ships to KH does not exist in 1924.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by kzt   » Wed Jul 13, 2022 5:52 pm

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The real problem is quarters for all the crew you need running around replacing the vacuum tubes in that 5 million cubic foot computer room. :roll:
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by cthia   » Thu Jul 14, 2022 1:48 am

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Personally I appreciate this thread because I never understood the big deal when refitting for Keyhole, and even less for Keyhole II. They are simply platforms, so I thought, simply bolt them to the exterior of the hull, somewhere. And why did the upgrade come at the expense of pods, or anything else if the platforms were mounted to the hull? :oops:

Mine eyes have been opened.

But surely they would be upgraded before mothballs claimed them?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by kzt   » Thu Jul 14, 2022 2:17 am

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cthia wrote:Personally I appreciate this thread because I never understood the big deal when refitting for Keyhole, and even less for Keyhole II. They are simply platforms, so I thought, simply bolt them to the exterior of the hull, somewhere. And why did the upgrade come at the expense of pods, or anything else if the platforms were mounted to the hull? :oops:

Mine eyes have been opened.

But surely they would be upgraded before mothballs claimed them?

You could, you know, just tow them. Or pack them in a freighter and unload them before combat.

But it's hard to plan when everyone is always sprinting between the computer room and the vacuum tube repair shop.
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Jul 14, 2022 8:04 am

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Here's what RFC said about their size and complexity in this 2009 post
runsforcelery wrote:Keyhole-One was originally envisioned solely as a telemetry relay platform. Think of it being something along the lines of a submarine raising its radio mast to transmit. The idea was to get a control platform outside the boundaries of the wedge in order to allow a ship's fire control to establish and maintain telemetry links around the interfering barrier of the wedge. Moreover, the original concept concentrated almost entirely on considerations of improved offensive fire control, which did include the idea of giving greater flexibility to target management. In particular, one of the very early concepts was to facilitate "hand-off" between ships, allowing the ship with the best "visibility" to manage fire from her consorts, but did not include any great concern with managing counter-missile fire, extending sensor reach, or making any direct contribution to the mounting ship's close-in defenses.

As the concept began working its way through development, however, it began to evolve. Initially, the idea had been that each ship would carry a large number of relatively small, cheap, expendable communications platforms. They would be outside the wedge and the side walls, and thus vulnerable, and what they were expected to do was relatively simple. The RMN's remote sensor platform capability was already good enough that the emphasis was on a cheap platform designed purely to communicate with outgoing missiles.

In the development process, BuWeaps came to consider additional missions Keyhole might be expanded to include. One of the very first was to include additional telemetry links for counter-missiles. Another early contender was to use the new system to expand a ship's "onboard" sensor perimeter, giving it better "situational awareness" in its own area, regardless of where the remote sensor platforms might be deployed. As its mission and capacity grew, Keyhole became a steadily more sophisticated and capable — and thus larger and less expendable — platform. As it incorporated its own sensor suite and expanded its communications, it became increasingly valuable (in both the tactical and the logistical senses), which made it only logical to fit it with its own point defense. It was made as stealthy as something radiating as powerfully as it did could be made, and it was equipped with its own rudimentary ECM in order to make it more difficult to localize it and destroy it. And, of course, each incremental increase in capability brought with it its own incremental increase in size and cost. You can, if you will, think of this as setting out to design the F-16, or even the A-10, and ending up with the F-15. Every step along the way made absolute, demonstrable, unquestionable good military sense, and the final product was worth every penny of investment, and yet what emerged at the end of the developmental process had changed so much in degree that it had ended up changed in kind, as well. It was, effectively, a completely different animal from the initial concept.

So, at the end of the development process (I'm speaking here of Keyhole-One development), the original cheap, expendable, single-function telemetry link had evolved into a highly capable platform which was an integral part of the mounting ship's sensor suite, provided a much more capable communications node then had originally been envisioned, was stealthy and hard for any opponent to lock up for offensive fire control, and which possessed sufficient onboard point defense capability to not simply defend itself but offer a significant increase in the mounting ship's close-in defenses, as well. The platform itself is stuffed full of essential equipment and hardware, but probably at least a quarter of Keyhole-One's capabilities depend on computer support aboard, and (especially) power generation from, the mounting ship.

The original Keyhole-One platform was about the size of a LAC. The more fully developed Keyhole-One platform carried aboard units like the Nike-class battlecruisers is substantially larger, and fitting a ship to carry it costs quite a bit of potential broadside armament space. It also presents some armoring difficulties, since the platform itself has to be armored when it is tractored into its bay on the exterior of the mounting ship, and the bay itself has to be armored in order to protect the ship when the platform is deployed. Because of those considerations, at the moment, no Keyhole-capable ship currently carries more than one platform in each broadside. This would give a squadron of six ships 12 Keyholes, and, especially given the platform's elusiveness and self-defending capability, the RMN regards this as sufficient to guarantee reasonable survivability through redundancy.

Keyhole-Two is another can of worms entirely. First, the platforms themselves are substantially larger. While the final (or, at least, currently final) generation of Keyhole-One is somewhere around 65,000 tons (or darned near the size of a prewar destroyer), Keyhole-Two is even larger. This is because in addition to the requirement that it must retain its light-speed telemetry links for counter-missiles and non-Apollo shipkillers, it must also fit in the dedicated FTL coms used to communicate with the Apollo control missiles. In other words, a Keyhole-Two platform has to be "bilingual," with the capability to perform its Apollo control function in addition to all of the standard Keyhole-One functions, and this inevitably drives size upward. It is also even more heavily defended, since each platform is individually bigger (and more expensive), represents a larger increment of the mounting ship's capabilities, and (because of its size and emission signature) is a less elusive target. The power budget is also substantially greater. A very large percentage of the computer support carried on board by Keyhole-One has to be located inside the mounting ship, which eats into the ship's internal volume. Additional power generation and transmitting equipment is also necessary, which eats even further into internal volume.

A superdreadnought fitted with Keyhole-One can be re-fitted with Keyhole-Two fairly quickly. Note the use of the word "fairly." Essentially, the superdreadnought has sufficient volume inside its protected core hull that fitting in the additional equipment — while not especially easy — is much simpler than it would be in, say, a Keyhole-One-equipped battlecruiser. Every superdreadnought so far fitted with Keyhole has been a pod-layer, and the quickest and simplest way to accommodate Keyhole-Two is to partition off one end of the central missile core, armor it thoroughly, and then mount the required equipment in the protected space thus created. This somewhat reduces ammunition stowage, does not give you ideal access for servicing and routine maintenance, and leaves the critical new components at least marginally more vulnerable than they would be if they were located inside the core hull proper. On the other hand, any hit which got to the onboard end of the Keyhole-Two installation would almost certainly have to come up the missile core from aft. In such a case, they hit would already have done so much damage that the ship's true main battery — it's missile pods — would already have been mission-killed. Note, however, that a ship need not be able to launch its own pods in order to control someone else's pods through its Keyhole platforms, so theoretically, at least, even a superdreadnought whose missile core had been completely gutted could still be combat-effective. For example, a consort whose own fire control had been crippled might well roll pods for an SD(P) which had lost its own missile core but still had Keyhole-Two capability.
So making space to carry around a pair of platforms bigger than destroyers, plus the tractors, beamed power, ultra-high-bandwidth telemetry link antenna, shipboard computing support equipement, etc. etc. is a major ask.

In a retrofit simply carving out the broadside docking area for them requires removing the tubes, CM launchers, PDLC, antenna, etc. that were already occupying that prime real estate, cutting away and reshaping the armor belt to create the 'divot' this thing will semi-recess into is a major project; and that's just the exterior work.

Even going from Keyhole I to Keyhole II would require enlarging that docking area; so carving away and reshaping the hull armor; quite possibly removing (or displacing) all the things that used to abut the Keyhole I dock.

And all that in addition to the massive interior support hardware and computing power, that kzt likes to complain about ;), required to utilize the thing.
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by Theemile   » Thu Jul 14, 2022 10:05 am

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cthia wrote:Personally I appreciate this thread because I never understood the big deal when refitting for Keyhole, and even less for Keyhole II. They are simply platforms, so I thought, simply bolt them to the exterior of the hull, somewhere. And why did the upgrade come at the expense of pods, or anything else if the platforms were mounted to the hull? :oops:

Mine eyes have been opened.

But surely they would be upgraded before mothballs claimed them?


That and KHI is 50-60 Ktons - KHII is 120 Ktons.
The first is the size of an old Frigate, the 2nd is the size of a modern Light cruiser. you need different fixtures built into the hull for each.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by Theemile   » Thu Jul 14, 2022 10:08 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:Here's what RFC said about their size and complexity in this 2009 post
runsforcelery wrote:Keyhole-One was originally envisioned solely as a telemetry relay platform. Think of it being something along the lines of a submarine raising its radio mast to transmit. The idea was to get a control platform outside the boundaries of the wedge in order to allow a ship's fire control to establish and maintain telemetry links around the interfering barrier of the wedge. Moreover, the original concept concentrated almost entirely on considerations of improved offensive fire control, which did include the idea of giving greater flexibility to target management. In particular, one of the very early concepts was to facilitate "hand-off" between ships, allowing the ship with the best "visibility" to manage fire from her consorts, but did not include any great concern with managing counter-missile fire, extending sensor reach, or making any direct contribution to the mounting ship's close-in defenses.

As the concept began working its way through development, however, it began to evolve. Initially, the idea had been that each ship would carry a large number of relatively small, cheap, expendable communications platforms. They would be outside the wedge and the side walls, and thus vulnerable, and what they were expected to do was relatively simple. The RMN's remote sensor platform capability was already good enough that the emphasis was on a cheap platform designed purely to communicate with outgoing missiles.

In the development process, BuWeaps came to consider additional missions Keyhole might be expanded to include. One of the very first was to include additional telemetry links for counter-missiles. Another early contender was to use the new system to expand a ship's "onboard" sensor perimeter, giving it better "situational awareness" in its own area, regardless of where the remote sensor platforms might be deployed. As its mission and capacity grew, Keyhole became a steadily more sophisticated and capable — and thus larger and less expendable — platform. As it incorporated its own sensor suite and expanded its communications, it became increasingly valuable (in both the tactical and the logistical senses), which made it only logical to fit it with its own point defense. It was made as stealthy as something radiating as powerfully as it did could be made, and it was equipped with its own rudimentary ECM in order to make it more difficult to localize it and destroy it. And, of course, each incremental increase in capability brought with it its own incremental increase in size and cost. You can, if you will, think of this as setting out to design the F-16, or even the A-10, and ending up with the F-15. Every step along the way made absolute, demonstrable, unquestionable good military sense, and the final product was worth every penny of investment, and yet what emerged at the end of the developmental process had changed so much in degree that it had ended up changed in kind, as well. It was, effectively, a completely different animal from the initial concept.

So, at the end of the development process (I'm speaking here of Keyhole-One development), the original cheap, expendable, single-function telemetry link had evolved into a highly capable platform which was an integral part of the mounting ship's sensor suite, provided a much more capable communications node then had originally been envisioned, was stealthy and hard for any opponent to lock up for offensive fire control, and which possessed sufficient onboard point defense capability to not simply defend itself but offer a significant increase in the mounting ship's close-in defenses, as well. The platform itself is stuffed full of essential equipment and hardware, but probably at least a quarter of Keyhole-One's capabilities depend on computer support aboard, and (especially) power generation from, the mounting ship.

The original Keyhole-One platform was about the size of a LAC. The more fully developed Keyhole-One platform carried aboard units like the Nike-class battlecruisers is substantially larger, and fitting a ship to carry it costs quite a bit of potential broadside armament space. It also presents some armoring difficulties, since the platform itself has to be armored when it is tractored into its bay on the exterior of the mounting ship, and the bay itself has to be armored in order to protect the ship when the platform is deployed. Because of those considerations, at the moment, no Keyhole-capable ship currently carries more than one platform in each broadside. This would give a squadron of six ships 12 Keyholes, and, especially given the platform's elusiveness and self-defending capability, the RMN regards this as sufficient to guarantee reasonable survivability through redundancy.

Keyhole-Two is another can of worms entirely. First, the platforms themselves are substantially larger. While the final (or, at least, currently final) generation of Keyhole-One is somewhere around 65,000 tons (or darned near the size of a prewar destroyer), Keyhole-Two is even larger. This is because in addition to the requirement that it must retain its light-speed telemetry links for counter-missiles and non-Apollo shipkillers, it must also fit in the dedicated FTL coms used to communicate with the Apollo control missiles. In other words, a Keyhole-Two platform has to be "bilingual," with the capability to perform its Apollo control function in addition to all of the standard Keyhole-One functions, and this inevitably drives size upward. It is also even more heavily defended, since each platform is individually bigger (and more expensive), represents a larger increment of the mounting ship's capabilities, and (because of its size and emission signature) is a less elusive target. The power budget is also substantially greater. A very large percentage of the computer support carried on board by Keyhole-One has to be located inside the mounting ship, which eats into the ship's internal volume. Additional power generation and transmitting equipment is also necessary, which eats even further into internal volume.

A superdreadnought fitted with Keyhole-One can be re-fitted with Keyhole-Two fairly quickly. Note the use of the word "fairly." Essentially, the superdreadnought has sufficient volume inside its protected core hull that fitting in the additional equipment — while not especially easy — is much simpler than it would be in, say, a Keyhole-One-equipped battlecruiser. Every superdreadnought so far fitted with Keyhole has been a pod-layer, and the quickest and simplest way to accommodate Keyhole-Two is to partition off one end of the central missile core, armor it thoroughly, and then mount the required equipment in the protected space thus created. This somewhat reduces ammunition stowage, does not give you ideal access for servicing and routine maintenance, and leaves the critical new components at least marginally more vulnerable than they would be if they were located inside the core hull proper. On the other hand, any hit which got to the onboard end of the Keyhole-Two installation would almost certainly have to come up the missile core from aft. In such a case, they hit would already have done so much damage that the ship's true main battery — it's missile pods — would already have been mission-killed. Note, however, that a ship need not be able to launch its own pods in order to control someone else's pods through its Keyhole platforms, so theoretically, at least, even a superdreadnought whose missile core had been completely gutted could still be combat-effective. For example, a consort whose own fire control had been crippled might well roll pods for an SD(P) which had lost its own missile core but still had Keyhole-Two capability.
So making space to carry around a pair of platforms bigger than destroyers, plus the tractors, beamed power, ultra-high-bandwidth telemetry link antenna, shipboard computing support equipement, etc. etc. is a major ask.

In a retrofit simply carving out the broadside docking area for them requires removing the tubes, CM launchers, PDLC, antenna, etc. that were already occupying that prime real estate, cutting away and reshaping the armor belt to create the 'divot' this thing will semi-recess into is a major project; and that's just the exterior work.

Even going from Keyhole I to Keyhole II would require enlarging that docking area; so carving away and reshaping the hull armor; quite possibly removing (or displacing) all the things that used to abut the Keyhole I dock.

And all that in addition to the massive interior support hardware and computing power, that kzt likes to complain about ;), required to utilize the thing.


I guess it's not all Computers - part of it is for Pod extension cord storage :)
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: KEYHOLE REFIT
Post by kzt   » Thu Jul 14, 2022 1:54 pm

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Theemile wrote:
I guess it's not all Computers - part of it is for Pod extension cord storage :)

Exactly! ;)
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