Upcoming designs: regarding the Apollo ACM...

SWM wrote:

wastedfly wrote:PS. PDLC's are not Shotguns. Holy cow. Moving 0.0000001 degree is as hard as "moving 20 degrees. These are not swivel mount. The lens is electrically driven.

You're right. I forgot that tidbit, but found confirmation in the Pearls. I don't think it is quite correct to say that 0.0000001 degree is as hard as 20 degrees, but the Pearls do imply that it can be moved fast enough that it doesn't matter.

Relax wrote:Personally, I am with SVW on how the PDLC's SHOULD work. Why bother having so many emitters? Salvos come in in waves, not in a stream. If you cannot fire all ~14 or 16 emitters at a single salvo, what is the point? May as well throw most of the emitters away and save yourself the tonnage. Rather increase the tonnage in capacitors, so the PDLC's and their respective emitters you do have can all be fired.

Still even if PDLC work this way this in no way means attacking from multiple vectors is somehow a good move. Allowing even more PDLC's to fire at your missiles violates Divide and Conquer.

cthia wrote:

SWM wrote:Well, that's why I suggested you would have to modify your proposal, in light of this obscure feature of Apollo ACMs.

Now, to go back the other direction, I'm still not convinced that your multi-pod cluster control is necessary. You are correct that for a long time, the text talked about the limitations of fire control. But now with Keyhole II and Apollo, fire control is no longer the concern. A fleet can now control such massive missile waves that no fleet can withstand it.

The problem now, which David has expressed several times, is how to defend against such massive waves. Current Manticoran development is looking at how to make ships more survivable.

Thanks for the updated info.

Still, as I indicated to Harold, my proposal still makes sense as a preprogrammed canned response. In the unforeseen event that a Keyhole II platform is severely damaged reducing the number of control links. I see no reason it should not exist as a canned response, available in that rarely occurring scenario.

Better to have and not need, than to need and not have.

SWM wrote:

Relax wrote:Personally, I am with SVW on how the PDLC's SHOULD work. Why bother having so many emitters? Salvos come in in waves, not in a stream. If you cannot fire all ~14 or 16 emitters at a single salvo, what is the point? May as well throw most of the emitters away and save yourself the tonnage. Rather increase the tonnage in capacitors, so the PDLC's and their respective emitters you do have can all be fired.

Still even if PDLC work this way this in no way means attacking from multiple vectors is somehow a good move. Allowing even more PDLC's to fire at your missiles violates Divide and Conquer.

As I already pointed out earlier, the PDLCs can fire all the lasers in the cluster at the same time, at multiple targets, with some loss in accuracy. It's in the Pearls.

Relax wrote:I already know that. What I have issue with is the "loss in accuracy" and therefore they do not "all fire" at the same time when the system designer KNOWS waves of missiles are incoming preordaining the overwhelming need for all of your PDLC's to fire at the same time to effectively at the same time.