JohnRoth wrote:
It's certainly true that someone has to have the ability to tell the fire control system that a particular ship is friendly, or the opposite, but I'd think that would be the responsibility of the captain or the Officer of the Watch. The tac officer would only have that during the middle of a fight.
This is only one quote in your argument, but the difference in your position and mine is that all of this stuff is separated in your view, requiring multiple people to agree in order for the weapons to fire.
In my view, there is a hierarchy of people who can give the command to fire, and higher authority locks out lower authority. The only time lower authority gets control is when authorized explicitly (firing on local control for training perhaps) or because the local system no longer can communicate with higher authority (battle damage).
We see this over and over in the text. To pick one example, at 1st Hancock they describe how a missile slips through the tacnet's fire plan to target one of the smaller screening ships, and the tacnet releases the screening ship to actually defend itself (instead of the fleet as a whole). The command to change fire plan is given too late and the ship dies.
One override that is at a lower level is it seems like captains have the ability to take the entire ship out of the tacnet independently. This is how Young fled at Hancock and at 4th Yeltsin we see the BB's doing this when it appears the defensive fire solution for the wall of battle isn't going to get the job done (this is probably a dumb panic decision, but they had the privs to do it)
At Hancock, everyone executed the fire plan sent by the flag. The consequences of somebody not doing that is shown by Young.
You want a flexible, simple way of allowing fire control to happen, because a battle can spring on you in literally seconds. Somebody comes out of stealth and fires on you, or somebody hypers in. We've seen the Bellepheron DN get a fire plan together in less than a minute from a cold start, on an old-style, manpower intensive ship not at battle stations, using the temporary authority of an ensign and, presumably, a compentent tac officer backing the newbie in the command chair.
You get BETTER fire control execution with everyone at battlestations and everyone engaged in the process. But the fleet can execute a fire control plan entirely from computer control, triggered by a single person, while most of the staff are still running out of the shower, or their bedrooms or whatever to their battle stations.
Who writes those canned fire control programs that the fleet will use in such an emergency? The fleet tac officer.
If the fleet tac officer decides to blow up the fleet simultaneously, whatever lower level overrides exist (like commander taking his ship out of the tacnet) won't be able to be executed in time.