Apollo Redundancy

Somtaaw wrote:If they can't pull FTL data from their RDs, and can't FTL update Apollo, the GA does lose many of it's advantages. They'd be down to better compensators, and relying on Apollo's jacked-up borderline AI computers being in autonomous mode.

The only place we have seen that happen was at Beowulf, after the destruction of Mycroft; where the autonomous missiles still destroyed over sixty percent of the attacking Solarian ships. I am not sure how that would compare to attacking a fleet with better defenses, but it still might be almost as good as a pre-Alliance Havenite fleet attacking ships of the RMN.

I think that I saw somewhere that missiles do not have a full compensator, instead there is something about their drive that includes a compensator effect.

tlb wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:If they can't pull FTL data from their RDs, and can't FTL update Apollo, the GA does lose many of it's advantages. They'd be down to better compensators, and relying on Apollo's jacked-up borderline AI computers being in autonomous mode.

The only place we have seen that happen was at Beowulf, after the destruction of Mycroft; where the autonomous missiles still destroyed over sixty percent of the attacking Solarian ships. I am not sure how that would compare to attacking a fleet with better defenses, but it still might be almost as good as a pre-Alliance Havenite fleet attacking ships of the RMN.

I think that I saw somewhere that missiles do not have a full compensator, instead there is something about their drive that includes a compensator effect.

Missiles use a different compensation technology tied to the drive nodes. We're not talking about 0 G devices like the ship comps are, but something... limiting?....

It's never really been more than mentioned in passing.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:One other important thing is that no DSO is going to go after the ACMs first in a counter-battery. They have to focus on the actual attack birds. Even if they could kill all the ACMs, the attack missiles are still damn good Mk23D and they're the most important threat. You can blunt the full salvo somewhat by tanking away 11% of it that is the ACM, but you'd probably do better taking away 11% of the actual warheads. Even if they take out some Dazzlers or Dragon's Teeth instead of warheads, it's probably still a better use of the CMs.

But that is against a traditional wedge-based opponent whose wedges can be seen and the ACM has been given definitive localization parameters within its attack profile.

Against a highly stealthed ship -- where it isn't exactly known where the ship is or how it is maneuvering -- the calculus changes quite a bit. Against an LD, autonomous mode becomes a pipe dream, literally a shot in the dark.

The mothership will need to constantly feed probable coordinates -- updated by whatever whiff of the LD it (or the mother ship's spider-detection system) thinks it detects -- to the ACM. And then the ACM will share the data with its brood. The brood will be as blind as the ACM. IOW, I am afraid that against the LDs the entire launch will need to be led all the way in to the slaughter. Which means the ACM will be a critical component of any launch. Against an LD, autonomous mode might be a pipe dream.

.

Somtaaw wrote:Your assumption is flawed that a stealthed ship somewhere between the two ships is only using CMs for anti-missile. During the ballistic phase, attack missiles (if you can localize them) are HIGHLY vulnerable to beam weapons. Mk23s are only crowding the 0.3-0.6 range, but beams are twice as fast and there's no missile wedges to block the laser/graser.

If you had a ship that was entirely, or mostly beam-based, they'd be able to put a pretty large hurting on a ballistic Apollo salvo. And being at the mid-point, it would have much better eyes on where Apollo's stage 2 drive burnt out and the salvo went ballistic; than the ultimate target would.

That's an interesting concept: using anti-shipping beam weapons (which have a range of 2 to 3 light-seconds) instead of PDLCs. That gives you much better ranging against the missiles and allows the ship that is doing the attacking to be further out. If I were that ship, however good my stealth was, I wouldn't want to be within 100,000 km of the missile salvo -- there's a non-negligible chance that the networked sensors would see me!

However, anti-shipping beams don't have a high cycle rate. At 0.54c, the missiles would be out of range within 4 seconds, so it seems like the ship would be able to fire each emitter once only. Plus, anti-shipping isn't designed to hit such small targets, even though they aren't evading.

This attack is also geometrically difficult: the interception platform must have been placed directly on the flight path of the missiles before they were themselves launched. So it can't be done if the source of the missiles isn't known well in advance (e.g., they've transitioned from hyper in the last 10 minutes). What's more, this means this technique can only be used once: after the interception has happened, the next salvo(s) will curve away and add an orthogonal separation of a few million km. That decreases the powered range and increases the ballistic one, but it makes interception negligible again.

If this was an alpha salvo, the stealth ship can't take out enough ACMs (there'll be hundreds, even a thousands of them). If this was medium-sized salvo, then it'll be followed by another.

The ultimate target also would get pretty good interceptions against Apollo if it were far enough back to easily tell them apart from attack missiles. But by that point in time, Apollo has already done 99% of its job, and could self-destruct on it's own, the only last reason for Apollo to follow the Mk23's into laserhead range is on the off-chance of an 'abort attack' command being issued.

And as I mentioned before, attacking the ACMs at this point would be counter-productive. Every ACM or ECW bird you've taken out is a warhead you haven't.

cthia wrote:The mothership will need to constantly feed probable coordinates -- updated by whatever whiff of the LD it (or the mother ship's spider-detection system) thinks it detects -- to the ACM. And then the ACM will share the data with its brood. The brood will be as blind as the ACM. IOW, I am afraid that against the LDs the entire launch will need to be led all the way in to the slaughter. Which means the ACM will be a critical component of any launch. Against an LD, autonomous mode might be a pipe dream.

I'd agree that the FTL link would allow the mothership to see through the eyes of the attack birds that are going ahead and thus make better decisions than the ACMs alone would, sending them back better targeting instructions. No doubt about it.

But I don't think autonomous mode would be a "pipe dream." It should be significantly better than non-Apollo broods, even against stealth targets.

If you want to argue that firing more dumber missiles would increase chances, we can do that. If the FTL links are constantly being jammed, it might be better to fire cheaper, dumber missiles in much greater quantities in hopes of saturating all possibilities and compromising the stealth.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:The mothership will need to constantly feed probable coordinates -- updated by whatever whiff of the LD it (or the mother ship's spider-detection system) thinks it detects -- to the ACM. And then the ACM will share the data with its brood. The brood will be as blind as the ACM. IOW, I am afraid that against the LDs the entire launch will need to be led all the way in to the slaughter. Which means the ACM will be a critical component of any launch. Against an LD, autonomous mode might be a pipe dream.

I'd agree that the FTL link would allow the mothership to see through the eyes of the attack birds that are going ahead and thus make better decisions than the ACMs alone would, sending them back better targeting instructions. No doubt about it.

But I don't think autonomous mode would be a "pipe dream." It should be significantly better than non-Apollo broods, even against stealth targets.

If you want to argue that firing more dumber missiles would increase chances, we can do that. If the FTL links are constantly being jammed, it might be better to fire cheaper, dumber missiles in much greater quantities in hopes of saturating all possibilities and compromising the stealth.

You are not considering that if the attack birds cannot detect a spider drive, they don't see a thing. Sending back a bigger collective picture of nothing, is still nothing. A collage of nothing is nothing.

Unless those attack birds have been retrofitted with spider drive detectors, they are useless without guidance from the ACM, which is useless without guidance from the Mothership, which is useless without guidance from a spider drive detector, which is useless unless it works. Efficiently enough.

It is irrelevant how smart the missile's onboard AI is. It can't autonomously find a target it can't see. It would be smart but blind.

.

tlb wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:If they can't pull FTL data from their RDs, and can't FTL update Apollo, the GA does lose many of it's advantages. They'd be down to better compensators, and relying on Apollo's jacked-up borderline AI computers being in autonomous mode.

The only place we have seen that happen was at Beowulf, after the destruction of Mycroft; where the autonomous missiles still destroyed over sixty percent of the attacking Solarian ships. I am not sure how that would compare to attacking a fleet with better defenses, but it still might be almost as good as a pre-Alliance Havenite fleet attacking ships of the RMN.

Yes they do have other advantages, but if Manticore were stripped of it's FTL advantage while facing a near tech-parity foe? Take pre-Alliance Haven, they put up quite a good fight for years, and if they could knock FTL out of the equation, their point defense of mass over accuracy could blunt even a lot of Apollo.

Because knocking out FTL not only impacts Apollo fire control, it also impacts Ghost Rider drones seeing EW changes and decoy launches in real-time. It also removes the advantage of having GR drones track missiles that go ballistic and sending that intel back in time to be useful, which impacts on Manticore's ability to perform long-range countermissile hits.

Overall Manticore becomes less accurate, falls for decoys and ECM more often, and they'll take more hits in return because they're half-blind compared to what they've gotten used to.


But it would take considerable effort to lock some, or even most of a star system out from allowing the grav-pulse to send signals. Even if you were building something that broadcast omni-directionally, it would have to be extremely powerful, and there'd need to be hundreds, if not thousands just for basic coverage of a notional FTL jammer. And by very nature of the grav-pulse emissions, missiles would be able to home in on them very easily, so you'd need multi-millions to account for combat losses and some kind of limited replacement.

tlb wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:If they can't pull FTL data from their RDs, and can't FTL update Apollo, the GA does lose many of it's advantages. They'd be down to better compensators, and relying on Apollo's jacked-up borderline AI computers being in autonomous mode.

The only place we have seen that happen was at Beowulf, after the destruction of Mycroft; where the autonomous missiles still destroyed over sixty percent of the attacking Solarian ships. I am not sure how that would compare to attacking a fleet with better defenses, but it still might be almost as good as a pre-Alliance Havenite fleet attacking ships of the RMN.

Somtaaw wrote:Yes they do have other advantages, but if Manticore were stripped of it's FTL advantage while facing a near tech-parity foe? Take pre-Alliance Haven, they put up quite a good fight for years, and if they could knock FTL out of the equation, their point defense of mass over accuracy could blunt even a lot of Apollo.

Because knocking out FTL not only impacts Apollo fire control, it also impacts Ghost Rider drones seeing EW changes and decoy launches in real-time. It also removes the advantage of having GR drones track missiles that go ballistic and sending that intel back in time to be useful, which impacts on Manticore's ability to perform long-range countermissile hits.

Overall Manticore becomes less accurate, falls for decoys and ECM more often, and they'll take more hits in return because they're half-blind compared to what they've gotten used to.


But it would take considerable effort to lock some, or even most of a star system out from allowing the grav-pulse to send signals. Even if you were building something that broadcast omni-directionally, it would have to be extremely powerful, and there'd need to be hundreds, if not thousands just for basic coverage of a notional FTL jammer. And by very nature of the grav-pulse emissions, missiles would be able to home in on them very easily, so you'd need multi-millions to account for combat losses and some kind of limited replacement.

It would effectively remove the multiplier in 'force multiplier.'

cthia wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Yes they do have other advantages, but if Manticore were stripped of it's FTL advantage while facing a near tech-parity foe? Take pre-Alliance Haven, they put up quite a good fight for years, and if they could knock FTL out of the equation, their point defense of mass over accuracy could blunt even a lot of Apollo.

Because knocking out FTL not only impacts Apollo fire control, it also impacts Ghost Rider drones seeing EW changes and decoy launches in real-time. It also removes the advantage of having GR drones track missiles that go ballistic and sending that intel back in time to be useful, which impacts on Manticore's ability to perform long-range countermissile hits.

Overall Manticore becomes less accurate, falls for decoys and ECM more often, and they'll take more hits in return because they're half-blind compared to what they've gotten used to.


But it would take considerable effort to lock some, or even most of a star system out from allowing the grav-pulse to send signals. Even if you were building something that broadcast omni-directionally, it would have to be extremely powerful, and there'd need to be hundreds, if not thousands just for basic coverage of a notional FTL jammer. And by very nature of the grav-pulse emissions, missiles would be able to home in on them very easily, so you'd need multi-millions to account for combat losses and some kind of limited replacement.

It would effectively remove the multiplier in 'force multiplier.'

Don't forget, if FTL is lost, the ACMs will just fall back on their light speed links. They might not be programmed to do so the first time FTL Jamming is encountered, but it will be standard after that - So at best a one trick pony that long term just limits the effectiveness of the salvo.

And no matter what, when ship control links are lost the ACM will just fall back on meshed autonomous mode if it loses ship control links- which still is 2x or better control results of standard control links (plus the 8x control link multiplier)

So at best, FTL jamming will drop the Manties Apollo capabilities to 16x it's non-Apollo capabilities.

tlb wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:If they can't pull FTL data from their RDs, and can't FTL update Apollo, the GA does lose many of it's advantages. They'd be down to better compensators, and relying on Apollo's jacked-up borderline AI computers being in autonomous mode.

The only place we have seen that happen was at Beowulf, after the destruction of Mycroft; where the autonomous missiles still destroyed over sixty percent of the attacking Solarian ships. I am not sure how that would compare to attacking a fleet with better defenses, but it still might be almost as good as a pre-Alliance Havenite fleet attacking ships of the RMN.

Yeah, we don't get a hard comparison of that.
UH gives us two bits of information on autonomous Apollo, but both seem to compare it to FTL controlled Apollo -- not to pre-Apollo Mk23s.

Uncompromising Honor wrote:The People’s Republic’s analysts had radically underestimated Apollo’s effective range, and all of Chin’s intelligence briefings had told her she was well outside it when Eighth Fleet launched against her. The 44,000,000-kilometer ballistic phase Duchess Harrington had been forced to incorporate into her launch just to reach Chin’s ships had confirmed that she was outside effective shipboard fire control range, and so she had been. But not very far outside it. Eighth Fleet had been close enough to update the Apollo control platforms in near real-time just before it released them to autonomous control, and that autonomous control had been enormously better than anyone in the PRH had believed it could be. Even with that update, the Mark 23s had been far less accurate than they would have been at three light-minutes, as opposed to the four light-minutes at which they’d been launched.

Uncompromising Honor wrote:The Mark 23-E control missiles could accept shipboard telemetry at sixty-four times the range light-speed telemetry made possible, but the Echoes had also been designed specifically for use beyond even Apollo’s shipboard control range, with every control missile in the salvo talking to every other control missile and acting as an individual processing node for the data even when relay to—and through—the mothership was unavailable. Its autonomous accuracy was no more than thirty percent or so of its accuracy under tight shipboard control

The first tells up that the (then?) current Apollo FTL range was between 3 and 4 light minutes; and that by losing connection before reaching Chin the 23Es having to go autonomous were less effective than if they'd still been in FTL range.
The second quantifies that and says that autonomous accuracy is 30% of its FTL accuracy (though I'd assume it would be a sliding scale down to 30%, based on how long they'd had to be autonomous -- not an instant step change where cutting off FTL instantly degrades them 70% )

Still, while we're not given a hard number, it's quite clear than 30% as effective as FTL Apollo is still vastly better than non-Apollo MK23s would do at their extended ranges.

But it'd be nice to know where the crossover point would be between effectiveness of lightspeed controlled Mk23s and fully autonomous Apollo -- are autonomous 23Es as effective as controlled non-Apollo 23s at 30 million km, 50, 15?

---
(Also I'm pretty sure "sixty-four times" is an error and it should be "sixty-two")