Somtaaw wrote:And you've still missed the point. Knock out FTL entirely.... let's take Henke's simulation from Storm From the Shadows (ch 13). Your target is ~82 million km away, that's roughly about 4.5 light-minutes away. With Ghost Rider you have intel only ~4 seconds old, without grav-pulse that intel at time of launch is a minimum of five
minutes old.
The missile salvo was sixty-eight million kilometers from Artemis, speeding steadily onward at 150,029 KPS. Its birds had been ballistic for four and a half minutes, ever since the second drive system had burned out, and they were still ninety-three seconds—almost fourteen million kilometers—from their target, even at half the speed of light.
Your intelligence at time of launch is what the Apollo missiles have, by the time any change in target information is transmitted from the RDs to the launching ship, and from launch ship to Apollo is going to be too long. 5 minute sublight is enough time for the info from the RD's to reach one way, but not go from RD to ship back to missiles, that would require somewhere between 6 and 9 minutes total loop, depending on how far the missiles were and when the RD transmitted relative to the launch.
So Apollo has been effectively in autonomous from the second it launched, certainly by the time 2nd drive cut out and it went ballistic because the target is simply too far for sublight commands to be effective. If the target launched decoys during the ballistic phase, Apollo cannot possibly know how many, it doesn't know those decoy signatures or locations, and it can't even see them at all due to the shrouds covering all sensors for the ballistic portion. In Henke's simulation they jettisoned shrouds around 10 million km from target (72 million km from launch ship), thanks to FTL that's a 4s one-way loop, without FTL thats 4 minutes.
THAT is the point I'm making, that 42% increase was assuming they had Ghost Rider giving the launch ship accurate information in real-time, and that the launch ship could update Apollo, even with sublight links until it got so far downrange you couldn't update it at all. Remove Ghost Rider from that equation and it is physically impossible for Apollo to give a 42% increase, it'd be more like 10%, maybe 15% at best. Apollo computers would have to be more powerful than the computers used in planetary HQs for it to be able to take information 4+ minutes out of date and somehow achieve a 42% accuracy increase. And if they had computers that good... why aren't they using them on the ships, rather than one-and-done missiles?
Except if you're making an apples to apples comparison then both the Apollo and non-Apollo missiles would have to be from ships denied Ghost Rider FTL updates. At that point Apollo is probably
more than 42% better accuracy than those Mk23s. It's getting exactly the same slow recon updates -- but thanks to its swarm computing and sensor fusion will have a far, far, better view of the enemy as it approaches. And the 23Es can still divvy up the targets (too avoid all the missiles going for just the few "brightest" ones) and still have a decent changes of working out which targets are real and which are decoys -- as they've got so many angles.
Now, sure, at some ranges they might still be worse than Mk23's under lightspeed control from ships that do have access to Ghost Rider FTL updates -- but that seems to be neither here nor there. You might have enough jamming that you wouldn't want to launch anything -- but you'd never have a situation where you'd prefer to launch non-Apollo instead of launching Apollo.
Also I think you're overestimating how bad it'd be to get lightspeed delayed recon from the Ghost Riders. Sure it takes 8 minutes for the data to come in 4 LM and then go back out again. But at the moment of launch the missiles are getting data that's 4 minutes old.
As they reach 18 million km they're getting updates that are 9.7 minutes old.
At 36 million km they're getting updates that are 12.6 minutes old.
At 54 million km they're getting updates that are 15.1 minutes old - and by that point have likely been cut loose.
Yeah, that's nowhere near as nice as getting those updates in under 15 seconds - but it's not nothing. It's better than just launching them and never forwarding another bit of data.
OTOH, we're told that at Beowulf (admittedly against 3rd or 4th rate missile defenses) those Apollo missile got "no telemetry updates in the last eleven minutes of their flight"!
If you'd launched fully autonomous, from rest, 11 minutes would mean the target was 85 million km (4.72 LM) away.
Except it's even worse as the SLN BCs were so far out the MDMs should have been ballistic before their last update -- meaning that assuming 3-drive missiles (not 4-drive system defense variants) they actually would have covered more like 115 million km fully autonomously before crushing their targets.
Sure, up until they lost contact Beowulf System Defense HQ was getting FTL updates from drones and remote sensor platforms, even if they had to pass those to the Apollo missiles via lightspeed links. But it doesn't matter since their last update was so many millions of km away from the target. They still covered more distance without even laggy lightspeed updates from the system recon infrastructure than the distance of most MDM engagements.