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Apollo Redundancy

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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by Somtaaw   » Sat Sep 03, 2022 9:30 pm

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cthia wrote:Question:

I assume the missiles are fired directly from the pods? If so, how are the pods kept stationary while firing? Or are they ejected first? If they are not ejected then there will be wedge fratricide. If they are ejected before firing, that is also a moment of vulnerability.



That was covered long ago with the pods from both Hancock era, and the first-gen MDM pods pre-Buttercup that came with the research for LAC Shrike launchers.

Highly advanced and modernized launchers that are just as good as those found aboard ships. So missiles from pods are thrown out at extremely rapid velocity and presumably just enough angling, even with the older pods that hold a full 10 Mk23's that within seconds of launch they can bring up their missile wedges without fratricide.

tlb wrote:So are mass-drivers reactionless?


With how much thrust is applied to a missile coming out of the mass driver launcher, they'd have to be.

That or once the missiles are fired, the pod is considered irrelevant? To be recovered if possible, Honor's suggestion from commanding Wayfarer to put homing beacons onto them, especially since they're designed for low detectability. Henke at Solon rolled a few hundred of all remaining pods of her BC(P) pods and leaving them in one giant cluster managed to get within proximity/mine range of a Republican task force.

During combat, you don't really need to care if a pod is now flying backwards at high speed, you'll either recover it after the battle is won, or transmit an order and the on-board fusion plant deliberately fails containment to self-destruct.
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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by tlb   » Sat Sep 03, 2022 10:28 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:During combat, you don't really need to care if a pod is now flying backwards at high speed, you'll either recover it after the battle is won, or transmit an order and the on-board fusion plant deliberately fails containment to self-destruct.

Actually you do, if the missiles are fired in sequence with recoil (reaction), then the last missile fired will have considerably less velocity imparted to it, because of the negative velocity accumulated by the pod. Each missile, as it is launched, will receive less velocity than the previous. If the missiles out-weight the empty pod, then that last missile can start out by going backwards also.

If you launch all the missiles at once with recoil and the missiles out-weight the empty pod, then the pod will end up moving faster than any of the missiles (but at least the missiles will be grouped together).
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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 12:17 am

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tlb wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:Well the Es are bigger with the 4th drive so they can accelerate up to 0.8c and then still have a 4th drive to maneuver laterally for terminal attacks.
The Fs add the longer ranged FTL transceivers - so the Mycroft relays wouldn’t need to be as close in order to still talk to them.

You read that wrong. All the regular Mark-23 missiles (including the Mark-23E) have three drives. All of the system defense variants have four drives for longer range (the missiles at Beowulf had to add a ballistic interval).

Yeah.
Well, actually, I knew the 23E was the 3-drive ACM; I just had a momentary brain fart.

Logically you'd expect to still have a split in the 4-drive missiles between the ACMs, with the transceivers, and the attack/ECM missiles, with the warheads/Dazzlers/Dragon's Teeth. You wouldn't expect all 4-drive missiles to be 23Fs. So I had the (incorrect) thought of "oh, the 23F they're talking about transceivers so it must be the 4-drive ACM. So going down one letter must have been its 4-drive attack counterpart" -- even though I did know the 23E wasn't that. I just utterly failed to realize what I'd written.
Oops.
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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by cthia   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 8:13 am

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tlb wrote:
Somtaaw wrote:During combat, you don't really need to care if a pod is now flying backwards at high speed, you'll either recover it after the battle is won, or transmit an order and the on-board fusion plant deliberately fails containment to self-destruct.

Actually you do, if the missiles are fired in sequence with recoil (reaction), then the last missile fired will have considerably less velocity imparted to it, because of the negative velocity accumulated by the pod. Each missile, as it is launched, will receive less velocity than the previous. If the missiles out-weight the empty pod, then that last missile can start out by going backwards also.

If you launch all the missiles at once with recoil and the missiles out-weight the empty pod, then the pod will end up moving faster than any of the missiles (but at least the missiles will be grouped together).

You also have to worry about "pod fratricide" if the pods are ballooning out of control all over the place; which could also interfere with missile launch. Imagine all of those pods recoiling during an Alpha launch.

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: Apollo Redundancy
Post by Somtaaw   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 1:55 pm

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tlb wrote:
Somtaaw wrote:During combat, you don't really need to care if a pod is now flying backwards at high speed, you'll either recover it after the battle is won, or transmit an order and the on-board fusion plant deliberately fails containment to self-destruct.

Actually you do, if the missiles are fired in sequence with recoil (reaction), then the last missile fired will have considerably less velocity imparted to it, because of the negative velocity accumulated by the pod. Each missile, as it is launched, will receive less velocity than the previous. If the missiles out-weight the empty pod, then that last missile can start out by going backwards also.

If you launch all the missiles at once with recoil and the missiles out-weight the empty pod, then the pod will end up moving faster than any of the missiles (but at least the missiles will be grouped together).



Lots of the wordings regarding pods, whether as early as Hancock, or major (recent) battles like Solon, Lovat or Manticore describe pods as "belching 10 missiles into space" so I don't believe they're firing consecutively, it's an Alpha launch and the pod gets all 10 birds into space simultaneously.

But I don't think pod launchers are imparting nearly as much initial thrust as you think they are. "Modern" pods, that came out as a result of the Shrike research are described as imparting the same, or slightly higher thrust compared to shipboard launchers. We don't see even tiny Rolands, Shrikes, or Katanas suddenly getting slapped with any kind of motion when they start dumping missiles as fast as possible.

So I think pods, or shipboard launchers, are only imparting enough velocity to get the missile clear of the launching ships wedge quickly and with enough separation to not kill each other. Roland hammerheads alone prove that a Mk16 launcher can't be much more than 20m long, even with some kind of gravitic rails beyond the physical launcher itself, you cannot possibly get 46000 gravities worth of initial velocity, there simply isn't enough length to apply it.

And pods by definition are pretty tiny, tens of meters on a side at most, but they have similar or slightly higher than shipboard, without the length of a shipboard launcher. It doesn't make sense at all, and might just be another handwavium application.
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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by tlb   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 2:47 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:But I don't think pod launchers are imparting nearly as much initial thrust as you think they are. "Modern" pods, that came out as a result of the Shrike research are described as imparting the same, or slightly higher thrust compared to shipboard launchers. We don't see even tiny Rolands, Shrikes, or Katanas suddenly getting slapped with any kind of motion when they start dumping missiles as fast as possible.

So I think pods, or shipboard launchers, are only imparting enough velocity to get the missile clear of the launching ships wedge quickly and with enough separation to not kill each other. Roland hammerheads alone prove that a Mk16 launcher can't be much more than 20m long, even with some kind of gravitic rails beyond the physical launcher itself, you cannot possibly get 46000 gravities worth of initial velocity, there simply isn't enough length to apply it.

And pods by definition are pretty tiny, tens of meters on a side at most, but they have similar or slightly higher than shipboard, without the length of a shipboard launcher. It doesn't make sense at all, and might just be another handwavium application.

The wording is that the pod mass-drivers are giving as much thrust as the ship's tubes are giving; I really do not care how much that is, it is the effect on the pod that concerns me.

Rolands, Shrikes, or Katanas really do not come into it, as they are all wedge driven; so you will not see recoil which can be counteracted by that wedge. The pod does not have a wedge; so unless the mass-driver in the pod is reactionless, the pod will recoil and the missile cannot have the same thrust as from a ship.

I agree that there is hand-wavium involved; it is the same hand-wavium that allows a pulser to project a dart at much high velocity than a bullet without an appreciable increase in recoil.
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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by cthia   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 5:19 pm

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Could the pods be using stabilizing thrusters?

::Grasping at straws to save the supply of handwavium for the next book::

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: Apollo Redundancy
Post by Brigade XO   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 6:20 pm

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At battle of Beowulf, the Silver Bullets are deployed to loiter and discover where the control nodes for the pod fields are located. They did that by looking specifically for FTL transmissions from points with in the system ( looking for those nodes) and by looking for and calculating where the transmissions from the pods might be going as a way to triangulate.

So, the SLN Task Force is being tracked and what are the chances that the BSDF system defense command hooked into that massive constellation of pods and control stations is feeding updates to the pods as to where the SL ships are? Between what the SL force does (Silver Bullet has no idea what they are actually doing since it is concentrating on finding and targeting the control nodes) and the release of Hasta things are more or less loitering along. And then there is a LOT of FTL with a spike to (from System Defense) and from (to the pods) by the the control nodes. And Silver Bullet uses Grazer fire to eliminate every node it has identified.
But, the pods--and the ACMs in them know at least approximately where the SLN fleet is even if it doesn't know it is the primary target yet---which means the ACMs have relative current course speed and acceleration (if any) of the SLN formation. Which is why the Defence Control can effectively FIRE OFF ALL THOSE PODS in a close approximation of there the SLN ships SHOULD BE based on most recent data sent. ......and then they spend some time rigging together a link to the ACMs and giving them the next set of data....by FTL... which lets the ACMs adjust the instructions to their broods.
Sure, it would have been better for Beowulf to not have lost the control stations but since they were already "leading" the target they were able to launch the birds and provide corrections IN REAL TIME after not long interval.
Silver Bullet didn't actually have much effect on what the masses not Pods with ACMs did to the SLN Fleet except stretch out the time it happened.n At the speeds the MDMs were going- even with ballistic phases- they caught up to the SLN way beyond the range the SLN thought possible.
Hasta was the shock and did the damage to Beowulf, well the missile damage. The bombs the Alignment had long since planted and TIMED TO SEND A MESSAGE was not going to be affected in any way by what Silver Bullet did....and the only reason it was delayed was the the guy who pushed the button was delayed & reacting to the SLN.

I guess the Alignment is not quite as smart and able to predict what its advisaries is going to do despite that Superior beings complex. From one perspective, what happened to the SLN fleet was just gravy for the Alignment as it obliterated so many potentially dangerous trained Navy peopler - no matter how poorly they were still doing- and removed the those ships from the SL's ability to deal with "internal problems". And, everything together had the effect of sending Harrington (under orders, mind you) to throw a hard stop to the League continuing to get worse.
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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 6:24 pm

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cthia wrote:For the same reason that pinnaces and cutters are popguns against real warships. A stealthy enough platform designed to take out ACMs may be effective only against ACMs, not against real warships. I am not against an unprecedented tactic of maneuvering and sneaking a counter missile system within range of the enemy. Unprecedented stealth allows unprecedented tactics. The MA has always been about turning the nail on its head.


As others have said, those should fire at the pods, not at the missiles after launch. The pods are collecting in great quantities for an alpha launch and they have an onboard fusion reactor that can be made go critical.

But once the missiles launch, it's one or two seconds until they light up their impellers. That means this putative attacker must be within 1 light-second from the missiles to have a chance of seeing them before their wedges come up, making the sensing much more difficult, and placing impenetrable wedges on the way. I don't think they can get to that range at all, since there should be escorts further out from the SDs, which would be therefore much closer to those ships and presumably detect them.

And as I said before, even if this all worked, it would be a one-time trick. Then these ships have revealed themselves and have been gunned down by the onboard grasers, lasers and maybe even PDLCs, because they are within range.

Plus, tactics that work only once are fine if designed for a particular reason, like allowing an LD to tactically maneuver into a critical position; akin to laying down suppressive fire by eliminating an expected launch. An LD might only need one 'get out of jail free' card.


Fair enough.

Plus, after eliminating or handicapping the launch it could attack the ship before it is blasted out of space.


That would neither be possible nor believable. If the attacking ships had the power to take out the launching superdreadnoughts, they should have done that before the launch. Waiting for a couple thousand missiles to be in space is stupid.

Sure, it could have been ill-timing, but it would still be stupid to reveal yourself by shooting at some missiles (and not even the warheads) before trying to attack the ships that have more missiles. Even if such an attack could blunt the missile salvo sufficiently, the fact that those ships are firing will reveal them to the supedreadnoughts and their escorts. No sane CO would gamble on being able to fire at the missiles and the motherships by firing at the lesser threat first. If they are unable to take out the motherships, those motherships can make a second salvo of similar size.

Taking the CM battle to the enemy could be decisive if an entire Alpha launch could be eliminated before it is even launched.


True, but that means attacking the pods or the launching ships, not one ninth of the missiles.
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Re: Apollo Redundancy
Post by tlb   » Sun Sep 04, 2022 6:25 pm

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cthia wrote:Could the pods be using stabilizing thrusters?

::Grasping at straws to save the supply of handwavium for the next book::

I am open to thrusters to a certain extent, I would certainly expect all pods to point themselves in the correct direction before firing. I do not know if they are sufficient, because you could have equipped each missile in the pod with a chemical (or plasma) first stage as a cheap fix; but they went with mass-drivers instead, meaning (to me) that the mass-driver gives more of a push.
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