OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

cthia wrote:

tlb wrote:Then please explain what happened to the Solarian Fleet at Beowulf in UH; where only about ten percent of their Battle-cruisers survived an Apollo attack, which had received initial instructions and then acted autonomously. Obviously they did not need "an additional signal immediately after launch"; so it seems that they can be deadly without that link.

I am in need of a reread of that passage. My immediate questions are regarding the range of the entire launch, and at what point in the launch was Mycroft destroyed?

Perhaps my basic knowledge is in error, but I am under the impression that a missile has to be guided to its target most of the way. Even Apollo missiles are not tracking straight out of the gate. I am sure there must be a certain range before missiles start tracking; the point where they become locked on.

In summary, any launch whose links are cut immediately after launch shouldn't be able to find their arse from a hole in the ground. Especially against a maneuvering fleet.

Nope - Beowolf lost Mycroft before the Apollo birds even launched. So given that those Apollo pods were 1 LM (nearly 18 million km) from Beowolf orbit those missiles likely would have been beyond effective fire control range not long after launch. And certainly long, long, before they covered the 205 million odd km to the SLN BCs.

So Apollo pulled off that attack nearly autonomously after the initial targeting queue got uploaded to them.

Uncompromising Honor wrote:Two more minutes until Mycroft launched, he thought, and felt a distant sort of sympathy for the thousands of Sollies who were about to die. Still, he hadn’t come looking to invade their star system and—
His head jerked up as an alarm shrilled. He’d never heard that particular alarm, even in a training exercise, and his eyes snapped towards the master status board.
“What the—?”
He froze, staring in disbelief at the readouts.
“Sir—” Dunstan-Meyers began, then stopped and drew a deep breath. “Sir, we just lost Mycroft.”
[snip]
“In the meantime, Cheryl,” McAvoy went on, “upload the targeting queue directly to the pods.”
“Sir, that’s going to take at least another thirteen or fourteen minutes. We’ll have to start from scratch,” Dunstan-Meyers pointed out. “And without Mycroft, accuracy’s going to be poor, even for Apollo.”
“It’ll be a hell of a lot better than no accuracy at all,” McAvoy grated.

Which means you don’t focus on ftl transmitters in missiles, you focus on replacing the Sinclair 1000s that run your missiles with actual modern computers and self-organizing mesh networks.

cthia wrote:I am in need of a reread of that passage. My immediate questions are regarding the range of the entire launch, and at what point in the launch was Mycroft destroyed?

At minus two minutes.

Uncompromising Honor, about 85% wrote:Corey McAvoy watched the clock. Two more minutes until Mycroft lanched, he thought, and felt a sort of sympathy for the thousands of Sollies who were about to die. Still, he hadn't come looking to invade their star system and—
[...]
"Sir—" Dustan-Meyers began, then stopped and drew a deep breath. "Sir, we've just lost Mycroft."
[...]
"In the meantime, Cheryl," McAvoy went on, "upload the targeting queue directly to the pods."

And just how far were they attacking?

Uncompromising Honor, about 86% wrote:"Status change!" one of his tracking ratings announced suddenly. "Missile launch—multiple missile launches! Range at launch two-zero-five-point-two million kilometers. Acceleration four-five-one-point-zero-seven-six KPS squared."

(emphasis mine)

205.2 million km is 11.4 light-minutes, which is 33% more than what Honor fired at Tourville during the Battle of Manticore (AAC).

Was this a BoM-style massive launch? Right after that:

Uncompromising Honor, about 86% wrote:"Sir, they've just fired approximately six thousand missiles at us," he heard his own voice reporting

Six thousand is less than half of what Terekhov fired at Crandall during the Battle of Spindle.

Somehow that becomes less a few chapters later, but we can easily assume the SLN tracking people couldn't count properly from 11 light-minutes away:

Uncompromising Honor, about 87% wrote:Five thousand missiles had launched against TF 790. Five hundred were pure EW and penaid platforms and another 550 were Mark 23-E control missiles, with no warhead of any sort. Of the 3,950 that were actual attack birds, 3,107 broke past the CMs and hurtled into the teeth of the last-ditch laser clusters at a closing velocity of well over eighty-one percent of light-speed.

The laser clusters took down 1,206 more of them. There was no way for Helland or Capriotti to know it, but their defenses' performance was bar far the best any Solarian force had yet achieved against an Allied missile attack.

Do note that the penaid / attack ratio is very low, compared attacks against the RHN. They dedicated about 1 in 8 of each pod for EW and penaid, which probably means every other pod had a Dazzler and every other had a Dragon's Teeth, but not the twain in the same pod. This may be also why the SLN managed to get the best defence yet: the Alliance accepted a bigger interception ratio, because it was good enough that way.

How did this attack fare? The passage continues:

Uncompromising Honor wrote:It just wasn't good enough.

Nineteen hundred Mark 23s broke through everything TF 790 had. Pinpoint precision couldn't be expected at that velocity, especially with no telemetry updates in the last eleven minutes of their flight. But unlike anyone else's missiles, the Mark 23-E control missile had been designed to operate well beyond telemetry range—even FTL telemetry range—of any mothership. The Mark-23s were far more capable than the SLN's new Hastas, and each Mark 23-E in that salvo had formed a separate data sharing node, communicating all across the salvo, sharing the sensor data from its missiles' sensors with all of the others and integrating all of that data into a coherent picture of the battlefield which more myopic missiles operating in isolation could never have matched.

The consequences were cataclysmic.

Access Boom
Industrial Annex No.6
Beowulf Alpha
Beowulf System

"Yes!" Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou hissed.

He'd finally gotted the undersized com display in the bare-bones compartment tied into the same feed as the far larger display in the Jeniffer O'Toole Room—just in time to watch the mailed fist of Corey McAvoy's Mark 23s crash down on TF 709. Of Vincent Capriotti's four hundred-plus battlecruisers, thirty-seven survived to cross the limit outbound.

(emphasis mine again)

Do note the design consideration and the fact that the ACMs were without light-speed telemetry update for 11 of the 19 minutes of their flight.

And they managed to take out ~400 ships with 1900 warheads. Sure, those were battlecruisers, not SDs that the Mk23 was designed to fight, but we're still talking about an average of 5 per ship. Five! It doesn't matter how powerful your beams are if they don't strike the target. A near-miss of a laser is still a miss. So this means that a minimum 1 out of every 5 surviving Mark 23 attack warhead managed to position itself and fire with perfect accuracy, 11.4 light-minutes and 19 minutes flight from launch.

Beowulf was not a normal situation.
The Mycroft control center/s were destroyed but the pods were unharmed. If I remember correctly the Beowulf defense network had to pick up the job of pushing the instructions to the missiles in the pods (including the MK23-Es) but once that happened things got much more simplified

They knew where the SLN ships were and speeds, vectors etc. Given the FTL, the MK23-Es could then take up the distribution to each's E's brood. If (and I would guess they did) the Beowulf could have extrapolated were the SLN fleet would be and then figure the lead needed to (with updates to the MK23-Es do course corrections way out from the pods. The Mk23s don't need to see the SLN till well into the flight, but they are getting corrections to put them into acquisition range.....so the SLN can run but they couldn't make it to the hyper limit intake to avoid the swarm that was coming. Remember, at the time, the SLN really doesn't have an understanding about Apollow and the MK23s with MDM ranges and FTL targeting updates. The Alignment does but having the Alliance kill off all those SLN battlecruisers is just icing on the cake as far as they are concerned. More hate and blame to be misdirected, more bloodshed amoung Normals and stoke the fires against the Alliance in the League.

Jonathan_S wrote:When I was speculating about mixed acceleration missile profile with DDM/MDMs RFC posted to say that (current) drives can't do that. The baffle does protect the not yet used rings from being destroyed by the active one -- but in some way it's not perfect and activating the first drive "burns in" the other two so they'll now only work at that acceleration. So it seems the only way to get a 0 gees acceleration on a missile is if you dial all its drives to 0 gees -- and now it'd just drifting away from your ship as whatever velocity it's launch tube or pod imparted.

Fair enough. I am not completely convinced this isn't simply about the max power setting and thus the drive time, but I don't have any other evidence to counter it.

Missiles can still manoeuvre, though. So for The Barricade, they could simply corkscrew around a central point, roughly perpendicular to their base flight path. That would allow them to sweep a region in front of them. It's not perfect, but there's no way the Barricade was going to be anyway. They'd need to have flown with zero acceleration and with wedges touching, which is way too risky.

For the attack strategy I described that is similar to the barricade, it wouldn't work. The missiles coming behind would still be accelerating forwards and would run into the wedge of the blocking missile, destroying both.

(Note: Cataphracts are an exception to that "all drive the same" because they use some other method of shielding the upper stage's CM derived drive from the lower stage's normal missile drive. That's why after staging their 2nd stage can accelerate quicker. That also implies that you could use a Cataphract as a 0 gees shield. Though as soon as the trailing missiles brought their drives online they'd whip past the shield and be exposed again)

I assume they're using Travis's solution: a very long boom of very tough material. That explains why each ship class had to fire one step down of capabilities in Cataphracts. The cruisers had to fire Cataphract-A which combined Spatha destroyer-class missiles to the CM, while SDs fired Cataphract-B with Javelin cruiser-grade missiles. The Cataphract-C with Trebuchet capital-grade missiles were only usable from pods, because they were too big for any ship's tubes (I don't think even the LDs).

The other problem of Travis' complaint ("as big as a frigate, as expensive as a destroyer") didn't come into play because the SLN didn't actually pay for those missiles. At least, not aboveboard... I'm pretty sure some of the MAlign's budget came from graft and corruption in the SLN's. It's also possible that there were materials now that didn't exist in Travis' time, so they could have a much smaller cross-section and not be prohibitively expensive. Though at this point, I'm not sure cost was a factor: they either had a DDM to attack something or they hopelessly lost the war.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I assume they're using Travis's solution: a very long boom of very tough material. That explains why each ship class had to fire one step down of capabilities in Cataphracts. The cruisers had to fire Cataphract-A which combined Spatha destroyer-class missiles to the CM, while SDs fired Cataphract-B with Javelin cruiser-grade missiles. The Cataphract-C with Trebuchet capital-grade missiles were only usable from pods, because they were too big for any ship's tubes (I don't think even the LDs).

The other problem of Travis' complaint ("as big as a frigate, as expensive as a destroyer") didn't come into play because the SLN didn't actually pay for those missiles. At least, not aboveboard... I'm pretty sure some of the MAlign's budget came from graft and corruption in the SLN's. It's also possible that there were materials now that didn't exist in Travis' time, so they could have a much smaller cross-section and not be prohibitively expensive. Though at this point, I'm not sure cost was a factor: they either had a DDM to attack something or they hopelessly lost the war.

I suspect that impeller nodes of all types are tougher and more resistant to nasty external influence than they were in Travis's time (4 centuries of incremental improvements).

So I speculate that a 20th century PD missile's impeller ring likely wouldn't need as much physical separation from another, to avoid harmful interference, as a 16th century PD one. So even if you were otherwise using 16th century materials for the entire rest of the missile you could probably get away with a substantially shorter boom between a pair of 20th century drive rings than Travis would have needed.


(And missiles in general seem to have gotten a lot more affordable over those centuries. So while I'm sure Cataphracts aren't cheap I doubt they're more than a few times as expensive, once in mass production, as the regular SDMs those ships would be carrying -- and certainly far short of being "expensive as a destroyer" )

cthia wrote:

tlb wrote:Then please explain what happened to the Solarian Fleet at Beowulf in UH; where only about ten percent of their Battle-cruisers survived an Apollo attack, which had received initial instructions and then acted autonomously. Obviously they did not need "an additional signal immediately after launch"; so it seems that they can be deadly without that link.

I am in need of a reread of that passage. My immediate questions are regarding the range of the entire launch, and at what point in the launch was Mycroft destroyed?

Perhaps my basic knowledge is in error, but I am under the impression that a missile has to be guided to its target most of the way. Even Apollo missiles are not tracking straight out of the gate. I am sure there must be a certain range before missiles start tracking; the point where they become locked on.

In summary, any launch whose links are cut immediately after launch shouldn't be able to find their arse from a hole in the ground. Especially against a maneuvering fleet.

Jonathan_S wrote:Nope - Beowolf lost Mycroft before the Apollo birds even launched. So given that those Apollo pods were 1 LM (nearly 18 million km) from Beowolf orbit those missiles likely would have been beyond effective fire control range not long after launch. And certainly long, long, before they covered the 205 million odd km to the SLN BCs.

So Apollo pulled off that attack nearly autonomously after the initial targeting queue got uploaded to them.

Uncompromising Honor wrote:Two more minutes until Mycroft launched, he thought, and felt a distant sort of sympathy for the thousands of Sollies who were about to die. Still, he hadn’t come looking to invade their star system and—
His head jerked up as an alarm shrilled. He’d never heard that particular alarm, even in a training exercise, and his eyes snapped towards the master status board.
“What the—?”
He froze, staring in disbelief at the readouts.
“Sir—” Dunstan-Meyers began, then stopped and drew a deep breath. “Sir, we just lost Mycroft.”
[snip]
“In the meantime, Cheryl,” McAvoy went on, “upload the targeting queue directly to the pods.”
“Sir, that’s going to take at least another thirteen or fourteen minutes. We’ll have to start from scratch,” Dunstan-Meyers pointed out. “And without Mycroft, accuracy’s going to be poor, even for Apollo.”
“It’ll be a hell of a lot better than no accuracy at all,” McAvoy grated.

Ok, but wasn't that possible simply because the SL fleet was in orbit and in reasonable range? They were not maneuvering. How would completely autonomous missiles (from the very beginning of the launch to attack) succeed at very extended ranges without any updates against a maneuvering fleet? How do missiles orient themselves in the quadrant? There is no GPS system.

In fact, how would / could missiles even perform course corrections all the way to the target without an initial GPS? Even if missiles can be blindly fired at stationary targets (they should still need course corrections), their initial orientation and bearing must be uploaded after launch. They just don't exit the ship "aware."

And especially if they are fired off bore!

cthia wrote:Ok, but wasn't that possible simply because the SL fleet was in orbit and in reasonable range? They were not maneuvering. How do completely autonomous missiles (from the very beginning of the launch to attack) succeed at very extended ranges without any updates against a maneuvering fleet? How do missiles orient themselves in the quadrant? There is no GPS system.

In fact, how would / could missiles even perform course corrections all the way to the target without an initial GPS? Even if missiles can be blindly fired at stationary targets (they should still need course corrections), their initial orientation and bearing must be uploaded after launch. They just don't exit the ship "aware."

And especially if they are fired off bore!

The Solarian Navy was performing a drive by shooting (so they were not "in orbit") and the missiles were fired from 11.4 light minutes away (so they were not in "reasonable range"). The critical phrase is the following:

Pinpoint precision couldn't be expected at that velocity, especially with no telemetry updates in the last eleven minutes of their flight. But unlike anyone else's missiles, the Mark 23-E control missile had been designed to operate well beyond telemetry range—even FTL telemetry range—of any mothership.

These missilies were fired from pods with initial instructions, so "their initial orientation and bearing" was present; but for most of their flight, they were self-directed.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Ok, but wasn't that possible simply because the SL fleet was in orbit and in reasonable range? They were not maneuvering. How do completely autonomous missiles (from the very beginning of the launch to attack) succeed at very extended ranges without any updates against a maneuvering fleet? How do missiles orient themselves in the quadrant? There is no GPS system.

In fact, how would / could missiles even perform course corrections all the way to the target without an initial GPS? Even if missiles can be blindly fired at stationary targets (they should still need course corrections), their initial orientation and bearing must be uploaded after launch. They just don't exit the ship "aware."

And especially if they are fired off bore!

The Solarian Navy was performing a drive by shooting (so they were not "in orbit") and the missiles were fired from 11.4 light minutes away (so they were not in "reasonable range"). The critical phrase is the following:

Pinpoint precision couldn't be expected at that velocity, especially with no telemetry updates in the last eleven minutes of their flight. But unlike anyone else's missiles, the Mark 23-E control missile had been designed to operate well beyond telemetry range—even FTL telemetry range—of any mothership.

These missilies were fired from pods with initial instructions, so "their initial orientation and bearing" was present; but for most of their flight, they were self-directed.

Yeah, I am in serious need of a reread.

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?

Let's flay the entire process open and dissect it for a better understanding.

The ships roll pods. The entire gang of pods have to be oriented to the correct bearing, and this orientation has to be performed right up to the moment they are fired since the targets are maneuvering. The ship itself has sensors which have the ability to detect an enemy wedge and then CIC can ascertain range and heading and acceleration. But a missile does not have that level of capability in its onboard sensors.

Even in the age of SDMs missiles had to be led to their targets until they were close enough to begin tracking themselves.

So, I ask again. What possible breakthrough did I miss where it says that missiles can exit the ship knowing where they are in space?

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?

Let's flay the entire process open and dissect it for a better understanding.

The ships roll pods. The entire gang of pods have to be oriented to the correct bearing, and this orientation has to be performed right up to the moment they are fired since the targets are maneuvering. The ship itself has sensors which have the ability to detect an enemy wedge and then CIC can ascertain range and heading and acceleration. But a missile does not have that level of capability in its onboard sensors.

Even in the age of SDMs missiles had to be led to their targets until they were close enough to begin tracking themselves.

So, I ask again. What possible breakthrough did I miss where it says that missiles can exit the ship knowing where they are in space?

First these pods were not released from ships, they were in system defense mode; that is why it would take so long to give them their initial instructions with Mycroft gone. Although the pods might shift to the general direction of the threat, they do not have to be precise; because all RMN missiles can be fired off-bore.

Second the Solarian Navy did accelerate and change course after they saw the initial launch. After the SLN changed course there was a second launch 14 minutes later (the approximate time to get instructions to the pods), but that was not expected to arrive until after the ships crossed the hyper limit.

The main change is Apollo which was specifically designed to "to operate well beyond telemetry range".