Commerce raiding

tlb wrote:

Theemile wrote:They now used "minefields" of missile pods at the MBS junction in place of the old mines - I assume they are IFF based, but I'm not certain.

What period of the war is "now", before the capture of Trevor's Star or after the formation of the Grand Alliance? Also is it a regular pod that ships use or a system defense pod (that must have extra capabilities, to include its own fusion reactor)?

Post 1st war. I would assume full microfusion reactor System Defense variants - but even normal Manty flat pack pods have their limited sys-def mode, so potentially every pod may have said capability.

Theemile wrote:They now used "minefields" of missile pods at the MBS junction in place of the old mines - I assume they are IFF based, but I'm not certain.

tlb wrote:What period of the war is "now", before the capture of Trevor's Star or after the formation of the Grand Alliance? Also is it a regular pod that ships use or a system defense pod (that must have extra capabilities, to include its own fusion reactor)?

Theemile wrote:Post 1st war. I would assume full microfusion reactor System Defense variants - but even normal Manty flat pack pods have their limited sys-def mode, so potentially every pod may have said capability.

It is my understanding that system defense pods have to be command controlled, the range is normally too great to even consider IFF. Consider the Apollo pods at Beowulf, which would have accepted FTL commands from Mycroft, but that had to receive light speed commands to launch and attack.

tlb wrote:

Theemile wrote:They now used "minefields" of missile pods at the MBS junction in place of the old mines - I assume they are IFF based, but I'm not certain.

tlb wrote:What period of the war is "now", before the capture of Trevor's Star or after the formation of the Grand Alliance? Also is it a regular pod that ships use or a system defense pod (that must have extra capabilities, to include its own fusion reactor)?

Theemile wrote:Post 1st war. I would assume full microfusion reactor System Defense variants - but even normal Manty flat pack pods have their limited sys-def mode, so potentially every pod may have said capability.

It is my understanding that system defense pods have to be command controlled, the range is normally too great to even consider IFF. Consider the Apollo pods at Beowulf, which would have accepted FTL commands from Mycroft, but that had to receive light speed commands to launch and attack.

Well, it's probably down to programming - at Beowulf, the pods were part of the Mycroft system, and programmed to take their instructions as such, not to act as a minefield. At the junction, some MDM pods are set as a minefield to attack ships coming through the junction without friendly IFF. They may be set to be in autonomous mode and fire on ships without friendly IFFs like the mines did. Remember, they had to take the time to reprogram all the pods at Beowulf to take their orders from a different source. (future programmers, always make sure to have a failover solution/channel in place).

penny wrote:Why does that remind me of the fact that the Somalian gunboats attacking Cruise Ships are beginning to be met with machine guns installed onto the rails.

But yeah, I asked why the RHN were sitting on that huge surplus of BBs. Didn't they have a HOLOTANK? Move some pieces around the board. May as well send them all to Pearl Harbor.

Anyway, Jonathan, when commerce raiding you are taking a chance. Can't win them all. Won't win them all. That's why you've got to put some thought in picking your targets. Can armed freighters (is carrying pods considered armed?) operate in all systems?

Cruise Ships are NOT carrying machine guns to ward off Somalian or another gunboats. Or just handguns or rifles. Too many problems in conflicting local national laws as to what can and cannot be brought into National spaces.
They normally "just" avoid places that are having pirate problems by 1) not stopping at ports in those countries, 2) sailing far enough offshore to be beyond reasonable range and by pushing along at 19+ knots which makes interception and boarding attempts real interesting. 3) they have excellent radio and phone communications and effectively can call to request assistance from naval units of various countries who are in the area (Somalia and a bit north of there has a few gray ships of various nationalities in the area and some of them can send a helo as well). The cruise ships are typically running fully lit up- actual lighting in addition to requirements of navigation- and are clearly identifiable as to what they are. They typically have a few more knots of speed available even at 19 to run faster. Having a problem with actual naval warship is another discussion but these days the cruise ship will already have started conversations with it's owners so in short order a whole lot of people are going to know there is a problem. They are also really careful about staying out of the territorial waters of countries like Cuba etc without approved and acknowledged permission to pass though or enter.

So it's apples vs oranges between present day and the time frame of the Haven-Manticore wars.

Besides, commercial ships in the Honorverse that want to carry any kind of armament have to get licenses from the places they are going to visit. Hauptmann's Star Liners have been shown to be armed (with up-to-date weapons and defensives along with fully trained weapons crews) if they are expected to go into places like Silesia and I can expect that they would have gotten the licenses from the places they are going to be going. Even in the SL of the ships were regularly going to be also going into interesting places like Silesia or similar.

Theemile wrote:Well, it's probably down to programming - at Beowulf, the pods were part of the Mycroft system, and programmed to take their instructions as such, not to act as a minefield. At the junction, some MDM pods are set as a minefield to attack ships coming through the junction without friendly IFF. They may be set to be in autonomous mode and fire on ships without friendly IFFs like the mines did. Remember, they had to take the time to reprogram all the pods at Beowulf to take their orders from a different source. (future programmers, always make sure to have a failover solution/channel in place).

It well could be that the same pod interface was used by the manual commands and Mycroft. The difference could be that the pods have to be individually addressed in manual mode (since if they are widely separated, the aiming instructions could differ), but control through Mycroft could apply those changes automatically. Imagine that the Mycroft command center had a screen where the bogies could be painted and then Mycroft programming would supply the adjusted vectors to all the pods under control. If Mycroft suddenly disappears, then those adjustments have to computed and supplied to each individual pod. Even expecting that the signals are FTL, that is going individually to many hundreds of pods; such that at some point the command has to go out that all pods which have instructions must launch. Then the command center begins setting up the next wave.

tlb wrote:It well could be that the same pod interface was used by the manual commands and Mycroft. The difference could be that the pods have to be individually addressed in manual mode (since if they are widely separated, the aiming instructions could differ), but control through Mycroft could apply those changes automatically. Imagine that the Mycroft command center had a screen where the bogies could be painted and then Mycroft programming would supply the adjusted vectors to all the pods under control. If Mycroft suddenly disappears, then those adjustments have to computed and supplied to each individual pod. Even expecting that the signals are FTL, that is going individually to many hundreds of pods; such that at some point the command has to go out that all pods which have instructions must launch. Then the command center begins setting up the next wave.

Yeah, I suspect that the Mycroft relay, in addition to doing and necessary FTL to radio/laser conversion and FTL relay also acted as s local controlling for its assigned pods. So you could tell the Mycroft relay nearest a dispersed cluster of pods "attack these ships, which are moving on this course" and it would expand on than and reach out to the, likely hundreds of, pods assigned to it individually with the initial instructions for its missiles. That might be as simple as repeating the same message hundreds of times and getting and collating the acknowledgement; or it might require adding additional detail to the original instruction -- correcting for where each pod actually orbits, ensuring that each one's missiles are initial flight paths that don't conflict with any nearby pods, etc.

Even ignoring lightspeed lag having to individually contact thousands of pods is going to take longer than contacting a couple dozen relays which then each only have to talk to hundreds of pods. (Numbers are just examples, I don't know how many pods each relay was responsible for; nor how many had to be individually contacted by backup means)

Jonathan_S wrote:

tlb wrote:It well could be that the same pod interface was used by the manual commands and Mycroft. The difference could be that the pods have to be individually addressed in manual mode (since if they are widely separated, the aiming instructions could differ), but control through Mycroft could apply those changes automatically. Imagine that the Mycroft command center had a screen where the bogies could be painted and then Mycroft programming would supply the adjusted vectors to all the pods under control. If Mycroft suddenly disappears, then those adjustments have to computed and supplied to each individual pod. Even expecting that the signals are FTL, that is going individually to many hundreds of pods; such that at some point the command has to go out that all pods which have instructions must launch. Then the command center begins setting up the next wave.

Yeah, I suspect that the Mycroft relay, in addition to doing and necessary FTL to radio/laser conversion and FTL relay also acted as s local controlling for its assigned pods. So you could tell the Mycroft relay nearest a dispersed cluster of pods "attack these ships, which are moving on this course" and it would expand on than and reach out to the, likely hundreds of, pods assigned to it individually with the initial instructions for its missiles. That might be as simple as repeating the same message hundreds of times and getting and collating the acknowledgement; or it might require adding additional detail to the original instruction -- correcting for where each pod actually orbits, ensuring that each one's missiles are initial flight paths that don't conflict with any nearby pods, etc.

Even ignoring lightspeed lag having to individually contact thousands of pods is going to take longer than contacting a couple dozen relays which then each only have to talk to hundreds of pods. (Numbers are just examples, I don't know how many pods each relay was responsible for; nor how many had to be individually contacted by backup means)

In other words to make this a problem as described in the books, we have to be using computing power/software from the early 1990's here on earth and even then this is not true in the defensive situation as it is not a high ECM environment where one must have multiple bands on standby due to jamming/spoofing requirements.

Relax wrote:In other words to make this a problem as described in the books, we have to be using computing power/software from the early 1990's here on earth and even then this is not true in the defensive situation as it is not a high ECM environment where one must have multiple bands on standby due to jamming/spoofing requirements.

That seems a very harsh assessment. They had a very futuristic control system that could completely handle multitudes of pods against the expected threat. But were hit with a totally unexpected threat, that reduced them to a much more manual process. This is similar to the satellites that needed reprograming in OBS; except nothing here needed reprograming, instead they had to send out the threat information to the pods on something closer to a one for one basis.

tlb wrote:

Relax wrote:In other words to make this a problem as described in the books, we have to be using computing power/software from the early 1990's here on earth and even then this is not true in the defensive situation as it is not a high ECM environment where one must have multiple bands on standby due to jamming/spoofing requirements.

That seems a very harsh assessment. They had a very futuristic control system that could completely handle multitudes of pods against the expected threat. But were hit with a totally unexpected threat, that reduced them to a much more manual process. This is similar to the satellites that needed reprograming in OBS; except nothing here needed reprograming, instead they had to send out the threat information to the pods on something closer to a one for one basis.

And they had a backup system -- that's why they were able to update the pods. (It may not have been a well practicied fallback proceedure; but they had the backup capability)

But it's just going to take longer to talk to thousands of pods than to use the "phone tree" setup that was designed to parallelize the communication.

And, despite my earlier post, you can't really ignore the lightspeed lag; you want confirmation that the pods received the instructions. Yes you'd include massive redundancy and error correction in your upload so that they should be able to receive it first time despite any communication issues and worst case would at least know they had a hopelessly garbled upload. So if some of those pods are 10 lightminutes from your command fort it's going to take over 20 minutes to send them their programming and get confirmation via lightspeed transmission.

Even if they'd built a totally separate "phone tree" of lightspeed only relays they'd have still had significant lightspeed delays in making and confirming the upload had happened after losing all the Mycroft.

A better solution might have been a backup set of Mycroft than simply sat silent and never ran the communication reediness tests that allowed the Silver Bullets to hunt down the primary network and eliminated it in one fell swoop. Yes, some of the untested backup relays might fail when suddenly called upon; but you'd probably have most of a network that'd still be able to do the FTL "phone tree" and get the launch off faster than using lightpseed links to push out the programming.

Jonathan_S wrote:And, despite my earlier post, you can't really ignore the lightspeed lag; you want confirmation that the pods received the instructions. Yes you'd include massive redundancy and error correction in your upload so that they should be able to receive it first time despite any communication issues and worst case would at least know they had a hopelessly garbled upload. So if some of those pods are 10 lightminutes from your command fort it's going to take over 20 minutes to send them their programming and get confirmation via lightspeed transmission.

Even if they'd built a totally separate "phone tree" of lightspeed only relays they'd have still had significant lightspeed delays in making and confirming the upload had happened after losing all the Mycroft.

I would hope that they had sufficient Hermes buoys. These would not be as quick or as intelligent, but would eliminate the light speed lags.

The first wave of six thousand Apollo system defense missiles was fired after about twenty minutes (or less?).