OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Got any ideas? Because I don't, short of some sort of GPS telemetried to the missiles from Hermes Buoys seeded throughout a friendly system. But in general, I got nothing.

The pods don't have to be oriented in a certain way. I am simply giving them the benefit of the doubt. They need to be fired in the right direction, so whether they are physically arranged pointing in the right direction before launch or they maneuver accordingly, my point has always been that they need initial instructions from the ship to do so. I can't see how missiles exit the ship kinesthetically omniscient. How can a missile know where it is, let alone where the enemy is without being led to slaughter?

Missiles have always had to be led to laughter. The longer the range to target the more important it is to maintain the link with the ship. Greatly extended ranges have an inherent lightspeed limit which was problematical in steering a missile to target. FTL was invented to shorten the lag time. So, in greatly extended ranges, how does even an Apollo missile manage to find its arse from a hole in the ground if there is absolutely no communication with the mothership immediately after launch?

That is what happens to pods. They have to receive guidance instructions. Didn't David say that missiles didn't lock on to the wedge? They couldn't at extended ranges anyway.

Which is my point. When would the mothership share that data? While they are in their launch tubes? That data may be useless by the time they are actually launched. And if the link with the mothership is cut immediately after launch...

I simply cannot swallow that cutting both tendons of an Apollo launch immediately after launch won't render a launch useless. We do know that traditional missiles are rendered useless if their mothership is destroyed by the enemy launch. I understand that that only applies to non GA ships, but whatever Apollo changed to make that no longer true I haven't a clue.

If that is true, then why are enemy launches negated if their ships are destroyed? It is because they don't have Apollo.

But! What makes Apollo so special that the missiles DO NOT NEED THE LINK?! So an Apollo missile can just arrange itself toward the right "quadrant of the sky" before it lights off its drive, and it won't light off before its cohort in front of it lights off? And it will head towards the enemy all without additional instructions after it leaves the ship? So, Apollo missiles no longer need an FTL link or any other type of tendon it would seem? If an Apollo missile simply needs coordinates then they never needed an FTL link -- if they can simply be given initial coordinates -- other than which target to destroy.

Yes, the missiles can detect gravitics, but those sensors are very limited as you said. The gravitc footprint of a particular target only comes into play after the missiles finds itself within its own detection range. I am proposing cutting Apollo's entire launch immediately after launch. They should all be orphaned at that point. Little orphaned Annies.

I can believe that they are programmed in the tubes with initial instructions, but I don't think that bearing and possibly mode is selected until after they exit the ship, and have cleared the wedge!

Off-bore launches should be even more dependent on additional communication from the mothership before launch to reorient itself properly before lighting off its wedge. A missile's wedge is brought up to power. It doesn't bmake sense for a missile's to have to fight against a full up wedge to turn it. So, either Apollo missiles still incorporate a rocket for its initial orientation (which I am unaware of) or they are oriented in advance.

Do you accept that a drone can be fired and run a complex course without special instructions from the ship?

tlb wrote:It would defeat the purpose, if the ship had to continually send instructions to a reconnaissance drone that was intended to be stealthily checking an enemy position. I think you need to accept that missiles have some sort of guidance system that can get them from point A to somewhere close to point B. The ship cannot be treating them like an old-fashioned RC plane, where every change had to be communicated in the minutest detail and they certainly cannot count on anything like a GPS satellite being available.

The biggest part of ship control among the pre-Apollo missiles had to do with when to light off the decoys and Dazzlers, acquiring a target and then discriminating between valuable targets and enemy decoys. But with Apollo, the command missiles can do all that, if necessary. However I believe that even the older missiles could try to attack the enemy without continual instructions: note that Filareta's mass launch killed ships and people that Honor regretted.

cthia wrote:But I am asking how, exactly is that accomplished? Do the missiles incorporate some sort of highly sensitive gimbal that interfaces with the computer which measures time and acceleration to figure position?

cthia wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't see any reason why it couldn't be accomplished.

Got any ideas? Because I don't, short of some sort of GPS telemetried to the missiles from Hermes Buoys seeded throughout a friendly system. But in general, I got nothing.

Attitude determination – knowing which direction New Horizons is facing – is performed using star-tracking cameras, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) (containing sophisticated gyroscopes and accelerometers that measure rotation and horizontal/vertical motion), and digital Sun sensors. Attitude control for the spacecraft – whether in a steady, three-axis pointing mode or in a spin-stabilized mode – is accomplished using thrusters.

The IMUs and star trackers provide constant positional information to the spacecraft’s Guidance and Control processor, which like the Command and Data Handling processor is a 12-MHz Mongoose V. New Horizons carries two copies of each of these units for redundancy. The star-tracking cameras store a map of about 3,000 stars; 10 times per second one of the cameras snaps a wide-angle picture of space, compares the locations of the stars to its onboard map, and calculates the spacecraft’s orientation.

I simply cannot swallow that cutting both tendons of an Apollo launch immediately after launch won't render a launch useless. We do know that traditional missiles are rendered useless if their mothership is destroyed by the enemy launch. I understand that that only applies to non GA ships, but whatever Apollo changed to make that no longer true I haven't a clue.

cthia wrote:But missiles are different. Storyline has always asserted that missiles had to be guided to their targets by a communications link that became less efficient as engagement ranges increased. Missiles never had a self awareness of their location in the quadrant in an absolute sense.

I agree that if drones can, missiles can. How? Exactly? I don't rightly know. But if they can simply mimick that apparent ability of drones, then other navies such as the SLN should have the capability as well.

cthia wrote:But I am asking how, exactly is that accomplished? Do the missiles incorporate some sort of highly sensitive gimbal that interfaces with the computer which measures time and acceleration to figure position?

-- snip --

We do know that traditional missiles are rendered useless if their mothership is destroyed by the enemy launch. I understand that that only applies to non GA ships, but whatever Apollo changed to make that no longer true I haven't a clue.

munroburton wrote:Not useless - just less effective, in a similar way that Apollo-without-FTL is less effective than Apollo-with-FTL but still lethal. The performance of "orphaned" missiles is quite poor, but it's not like they freeze up and then self-destruct. They still try to find and hit something.

cthia wrote:I simply cannot swallow that cutting both tendons of an Apollo launch immediately after launch won't render a launch useless. We do know that traditional missiles are rendered useless if their mothership is destroyed by the enemy launch. I understand that that only applies to non GA ships, but whatever Apollo changed to make that no longer true if it is true, I haven't a clue.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Plus, we also have evidence that the FTL comms are highly directional, so jamming them may be equally difficult.

tlb wrote:If jamming methods were attempted, then the direction nature suggests that a system such as used in noise cancellation could be added: add an FTL receiver pointing forwards and subtract some fraction of its input signal from the input signal of the main FTL receiver that points backwards.

tlb wrote:If jamming methods were attempted, then the direction nature suggests that a system such as used in noise cancellation could be added: add an FTL receiver pointing forwards and subtract some fraction of its input signal from the input signal of the main FTL receiver that points backwards.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That sounds incredibly difficult for an EM signal, considering that the equipment that does this processing takes non-zero time and is likely offset from the direct line of travel, so it can't be fast enough to cope with the light signal that is ahead of it. If it can make predictions, that's another story.

For FTL signals, I don't see how that's possible. The wavefront will be much further downrange by the time the interference is calculated. Some Star Trek non-canon manuals say the computer core is wrapped inside a subspace field so it operates at FTL speeds, but there's no such thing in the Honorverse and would not be possible.

I don't see how interference could work. But this is an area where the author could simply decide the physics of the universe do allow for it and we'd have to accept. Jamming is more possible, but I still find it unlikely.

tlb wrote:Do you accept that a drone can be fired and run a complex course without special instructions from the ship? It would defeat the purpose, if the ship had to continually send instructions to a reconnaissance drone that was intended to be stealthily checking an enemy position. I think you need to accept that missiles have some sort of guidance system that can get them from point A to somewhere close to point B. The ship cannot be treating them like an old-fashioned RC plane, where every change had to be communicated in the minutest detail and they certainly cannot count on anything like a GPS satellite being available.

The biggest part of ship control among the pre-Apollo missiles had to do with when to light off the decoys and Dazzlers, acquiring a target and then discriminating between valuable targets and enemy decoys. But with Apollo, the command missiles can do all that, if necessary. However I believe that even the older missiles could try to attack the enemy without continual instructions: note that Filareta's mass launch killed ships and people that Honor regretted.

tlb wrote:I am assuming that the FTL is transformed by the receiver into an electric signal (otherwise how can the missile process it?) and people do that sort of thing with electrical signals all the time; no prediction needed. If anything the FTL inputs should make things easier, because the wave basically hits the front and back at the same time; so no worrying about signal lag. But I am not an electrical engineer, so if I have the concept of electronic noise cancellation wrong, I am sure someone will tell me.

tlb wrote:I am assuming that the FTL is transformed by the receiver into an electric signal (otherwise how can the missile process it?) and people do that sort of thing with electrical signals all the time; no prediction needed. If anything the FTL inputs should make things easier, because the wave basically hits the front and back at the same time; so no worrying about signal lag. But I am not an electrical engineer, so if I have the concept of electronic noise cancellation wrong, I am sure someone will tell me.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Oh, you're talking about generating a wavefront that, when it washes over the receiver, causes destructive interference in the electrical components? That's an intriguing idea.

But far more complex, actually. You'd need to very accurately model what the equipment is doing. That's extremely difficult... especially if you don't have access to intact specimens of them. I suppose the PN and RHN did capture a few intact Ghost Riders (probably as part of capturing full ships, like HMS Eclipse), but that hasn't happened for the Alignment yet, much less for the Mk23-E or F control missiles.

Plus, all that modelling would become invalid if the missile's internals change even slightly. That could happen as part of routine updates to components, such as sourcing them from different suppliers. It's possibly the different systems producing those missiles would be sufficiently different internally among themselves that "one size fits all" does not actually fit. The defender might need to know which exactly production lot a missile wave came from to implement this strategy. That's impractical.

It would be far easier to do it at the gravitic transceiver assembly. You're right that the delay in processing might be negligible. Since the signal and the interference travel at the same speed, the delay in receiving the two for all effects a constant that is equal to the delay in calculating that interference. But you still need a platform that is located near enough the transmission path between the mothership and the receiver.

And yes, I am an electrical engineer (though I've never worked in the field).