Apollo Redundancy

tlb wrote:Unless you want to insist that the text is wrong:

It's actually capable of generating entirely new targeting and penetration commands on its own. They're not going to be as good as the ones a waller's tac department could generate for it if the link were still up, but we're estimating something like a forty-two percent increase in terminal performance at extreme range as compared to any previous missile or, for that matter, our own Mark 23s with purely sub-light telemetry links, even if the Apollo bird is operating entirely on its own.

The text isn't wrong. But it is talking about an estimation before actual real-world (real-Galaxy?) data came about and any tweaks and improvements that they added.

The Battle of Beowulf would seem to contradict it, though there are about 2 T-years between the estimations and the battle. Those missiles were extremely effective at 220 million km / 12 light-minutes. It's possible that's only ~50% of what plain Mk23D would have done without the ACMs, because AFAIK no one had tried to fire missiles at that range before. But I don't think it is likely.

Alternatively, it's possible that the ACMs kept the performance from degrading (much) over that long flight, whereas Mk23D alone would have. That is to say, at 65 million km, the ACMs alone without the FTL link would only add 42%, but that number grows at longer distances because the baseline you're comparing to was going low. But the text says "terminal performance at extreme ranges" and I read "extreme ranges" as "more than the usual 3-stage range."

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The text isn't wrong. But it is talking about an estimation before actual real-world (real-Galaxy?) data came about and any tweaks and improvements that they added.

The Battle of Beowulf would seem to contradict it, though there are about 2 T-years between the estimations and the battle. Those missiles were extremely effective at 220 million km / 12 light-minutes. It's possible that's only ~50% of what plain Mk23D would have done without the ACMs, because AFAIK no one had tried to fire missiles at that range before. But I don't think it is likely.

Alternatively, it's possible that the ACMs kept the performance from degrading (much) over that long flight, whereas Mk23D alone would have. That is to say, at 65 million km, the ACMs alone without the FTL link would only add 42%, but that number grows at longer distances because the baseline you're comparing to was going low. But the text says "terminal performance at extreme ranges" and I read "extreme ranges" as "more than the usual 3-stage range."

The Apollo missiles at Beowulf were operating autonomously, there was no control information transmitted after the initial launch instructions. There was no Ghostrider and no information being fed by Hermes bouys and yet the first flight destroyed over six tenths of the attacking fleet. So how does that contradict that the computers in the command missiles would improve the effectiveness of those missiles?

How can you think that the missiles without the Apollo command units would have done anything close to that result?

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.

Also I'd note that FTL transmissions and your grav sensors to let you see the wedges of missiles and ships are looking at the exact same types of signals.

Any jamming strong enough to fully block FTL transmissions is going to seriously degrade ships or RDs from spotting each other or from getting good tracking on inbound missiles.


Sure a ship's wedge, or even a missile's, is a lot strong than an FTL transmission. But enough jamming to keep the later from coming through is still going to produce a lot of noise that'd tend to hide the others at long range and produce uncertainty about their course and position at short range.
(And of course, to the best of our knowledge, nobody's figured out how to create effective FTL jamming in the first place)

Jonathan_S wrote:Any jamming strong enough to fully block FTL transmissions is going to seriously degrade ships or RDs from spotting each other or from getting good tracking on inbound missiles.

If FTL jamming were achieved, then that would eliminate the most important sensors; but could you then develop an anti-radiation missile to hunt down the jamming locations (and include the smarts to handle multiple sources with signal jumping).

However we do not need jamming to get to a lack of FTL communication, just destroy the command points (either ships or Mycroft stations).

Exactly how and when are you going to destroy the control missile from an Apollo pod- even if the ACM is the only one in each pod that is using an FTL transceiver? It's slightly behind the attack missiles of the pod and it will be one of how many FTL sources in a 20 or 200+ pods worth of missiles. They are ALL screaming in at the targets and still accelerating so they are moving and to some degree doing vector changes in final attack mode.
Are you using CM? Will the CMs make it through the little constellation of attack missiles in front of the ACM for that pods worth? At that point, will it make any practical difference because of the range of the CMs and that the attack missiles already have "very recent" updates and are going to be at or really close to being able to track their last designated targets with their onboard system.

Can you put an FTL detector in a CM that could discriminate between the ACE or the background noise of all the FTL transmitter of the ships that are shooting at you? As understand it, you have two basic choices on a CM. 1) You fire the CM when the incoming missiles are going to be close enough that the CM impellers are still active when they -hopefully- inter penetrate their volleys AND the CMs have enough on-board capacity to shift a bit to bring A target inside the destructive volume of it's impellers. 2) As the range drops -"precipitously"-because the attacking missiles are still accelerating and there isn't a lot of maneuver room for the CMs to make an interception vs being fired as max acceleration to where the Tactical Computer thinks the attack missile (one CM per Attack Missile) will be really really soon and there isn't a lot of time for the CM range anything. At that point, unless the ACM is carrying a warhead and lasing rods, it's done most of its job and has becomes just another decoy to suck off a CM from something that can hurt the target. Your shooting through all that clutter of impellers at max and ECM birds. What's the time differential to go for the ACM vs the nearest of it's attack brood?

Brigade XO wrote:Exactly how and when are you going to destroy the control missile from an Apollo pod-

track their last designated targets with their onboard system.

Can you put an FTL detector in a CM that could discriminate between the ACE or the background noise of all the FTL transmitter

I do not see how they possibly could even if they were using LIGHT speed radio telemetry. We are told FTL tranceivers are not omnidirectional when they broadcast, but rather unidirectional.

Relax wrote:I do not see how they possibly could even if they were using LIGHT speed radio telemetry. We are told FTL tranceivers are not omnidirectional when they broadcast, but rather unidirectional.

Nothing is really directional. There are always side lobes and such. But it still seems pretty hard to do.

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:I do not see how they possibly could even if they were using LIGHT speed radio telemetry. We are told FTL tranceivers are not omnidirectional when they broadcast, but rather unidirectional.

Nothing is really directional. There are always side lobes and such. But it still seems pretty hard to do.

Hard? I'd wager impossible, but certainly impractical. The ship is constantly moving and maneuvering, and a ship may have several launches in space against several enemies in all different directions. It may be directional-ish, but even that seems both impossible and impractical.

Thanks Guys,

So we think the chance of loosing an Apollo Control missile is too low to be concerned about.

So unless you are facing something like Harkness's Baracade we can leave it behind.

Still the Uplift in Attack & ECM Missiles for 16 per controll channels from a 4:2 mix would be a significant gain. Especially on for any BC(P) types that have limited space.

Mind you I don't think BC(P)'s have Keyhole II because it's too big so I would expect them to carry "pure" Mk23 pods or even the Mk16 DDM's as the RMN ones have taken to doing.