ThinksMarkedly wrote:penny wrote:I could've sworn in a court of law that textev witnessed the RMN finding out that Apollo's ECM were also effective against enemy missiles. Implying that it had not been previously used in that capacity. Am I misremembering something?
I think the timing.
This was observed, but much earlier than Apollo. At the very least, Apollo has little to do with ECM anyway. Any improved ECM effectiveness due to the control missile would also be irrelevant in the condition you're talking about. Firing Dazzlers close to the launching ships isn't typically done, but was in the books somewhere to confuse the attacking missiles.
Jamming incoming salvos using Dazzlers is definitely something the RMN did. But I can't find any reference to it until after Apollo was a thing; though nothing about it appears to
require Apollo as the Mk23 Dazzlers would be effectively identical between Apollo and non-Apollo pods.
It's mentioned a couple of times in AAC
At All Costs wrote:Brankovski had five hundred and sixty LACs, one for every thirty attack missiles, and they punched a steady stream of counter-missiles into their teeth. Tethered and free-flying Ghost Rider decoys sang to the Republican MDMs' sensors. Dazzlers were launched into their faces, exploding in bursts of blinding interference. And Imperator and her consorts punched out wave after wave of Mark 31s.
The front of the Republic's missile attack eroded under TF 82's defensive fire like a cliff, crumbling under the assault of a stormy sea. But, like the cliff, it was only the front of a far larger mass. Thousands of MDMs were killed, yet more thousands remained, and Honor Harrington watched them reaching out for her command.
At All Costs wrote:The LACs couldn't place themselves between one threat and the rest of Third Fleet without leaving it uncovered against the other, and so they held their position, spitting Vipers against the wall of destruction crashing towards Theodosia Kuzak's command.
Thousands of Mark 31 counter-missiles went out with the Vipers, and Truman felt Chimera quiver as her own counter-missile tubes went to rapid fire, but nothing was going to stop all of that torrent of MDMs. Decoys and Dazzlers strove to bewilder or blind the incoming missiles, but still they came on.
Note that (except for McKeon's handful of ships, attached from 8th fleet) none of the 3rd fleet ships had Apollo -- proof that using dazzlers defensively doesn't require Apollo.
Then it's mentioned briefly again in UH
Uncompromising Honor wrote:The Dazzlers had been originally devised as a penetration aid, designed to knock down and blind the sensors feeding a target’s defensive fire control with massive spikes of electromagnetic and gravitic interference. They were especially effective against counter-missiles [...]
That was what the Dazzler had been designed to do, but as the Fleet’s missile officers played around with it, they’d quickly realized it had another function. After all, attack missiles and the ships controlling them relied on their onboard sensors, too.
[...]
“What the hell is that?” she demanded.
“Some kind of jamming,” Rosiak replied. “I don’t know how they’re doing it, though. We can’t see shi— That is, we can’t see very much through all the garbage, but CIC’s computers say it’s coming from at least a couple of dozen sources. That means it has to be some kind of independent platform. I don’t see how they could sustain emissions at this intensity for very long without burning out any emitter you could put into a drone, though, and—”
He paused again, pressing the fingers of his right hand against the earbug in his right ear and listening intently. His lips tightened, and he looked back at Isotalo.
“CIC doesn’t think they are sustaining emissions for more than ten to fifteen seconds per platform, Ma’am. But there are a lot of them, and they’re running them in a cascade pattern. That’s going to play hell with the attack birds’ seekers.”
Uncompromising Honor wrote:He hit a macro on his console and the missile control which had passed to him launched Dazzlers from every tube the task group had. They didn’t travel far, and then they erupted squarely in the path of the incoming Cataphracts. There weren’t enough of them and the shell wasn’t dense enough to block all of the Solly missiles’ sensors, but it was close enough to the task group and broad enough to block the vast majority of them, and Solarian missiles didn’t talk to each other the way Apollo birds did.
To End if Fire also mentions the tactic.
By that late in the series RFC had mostly stopped explicitly reiterating the onboard ECM and jammers of the ships -- which might be why Penny appeared to have forgotten they had those. (Though AAC at least mentioned their decoys)
ECM and Jammer as an anti-missile tactic wasn't new; but dazzlers provided an additional approach to it; and one that could be activated further from the ships and closer to the attack missiles. (And by jamming from relatively distant remote platforms it makes any "home on jam" capabilities of the missiles basically irrelevant)
What they
don't seem to have attempted is using Dazzlers at really extended ranges to jam the control links to the missiles and force them to go autonomous way earlier than normal. (By the various descriptions it seems like dazzlers weren't going off until lightspeed lag already cut the missiles off from new updates from the launching ships, and so they were focused on more jamming of the missile sensors. Whereas, if launched the dazzlers earlier you could potentially set them off as they passed the inbound salvo halfway between the ships and deny many of them control updates for critical portions of their flight. (This would work especially well when using Apollo for offense because while that jamming would likely also mess up your own long distance lightspeed control links it wouldn't bother the FTL links to the Mk23Es at all)
