Stupid Apollo Tricks

Lord Skimper wrote:Why did RFC say that SD(P) can only control 200 missiles. seems they could control 1600-2400 each.

You mean compared to control links of a Saganami-C?

I dont know about the 200 missiles, but at Manticore Eighth Fleets 32 SD(P) fired 69984 missiles including 7776 Mark 23-E.
Of those 32 SD(P) one was a Medusa Class and not Apollo capable (Honor says 50 out of 53 wallers will have Keyhole 2, McKeon had Elizabeth I. and Revenge with him).
And 22 were actually refitted IAN Adler Class SD(P).
How much control links they have compared to Invictus Class SD(P)s is anyones guess.

Anyway, 31 Apollo capable ships control 7776 Mark-23E. Thats 250 missiles each. And i dont think they fired the maximum possible amount, they nearly used up half their pods in that salvo.

But i agree, compared to what the Saganamis fired at Spindle, the number of missiles a modern SD(P) can control seems far too low.

I have no idea where people get 200 missiles per SD(P) from. From AAC:

Not all of the forty-two Manticoran, Grayson, and Andermani SD(P)s confronting him were Keyhole-capable. Still, the majority of them were, and the pod-layers as a group could simultaneously control an average of four hundred missiles each.

Weird Harold wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:3) If you C-frac plus burn the missile it will be going at over 97% of lightspeed when the last stage fires. Think it's seeker will function?

No idea what the final velocity might be, but it should be something close to what the four-stage Apollo can achieve from rest with four consecutive burns. The sensors should be able to handle that with a margin of error. Obviously, you're not going to boost the missiles beyond their sensors' limits.

Three missile stages give about .8c. I would assume the sensors are built for that. .97c makes life much harder for anything but gravitic sensors. A system defense missile doesn't expect to have any great starting velocity, I would be surprised if the seekers are built for that kind of velocity.

Also, the fact that the ideal targets won't have wedges means the gravitics are out the window, it's lightspeed only. Active sensors are also out the window--Honorverse radar is good out to about a million km--send a pulse out at that distance while you're closing at .97c and you'll be only 900km away when you get it back. You weren't aimed within 900km of the target already? You fly on past before even detecting it. And even if you are aimed basically perfectly you'll have less than a millisecond on your clock before you fly past--and 1/30th of a second before your warhead is useless.

Given those numbers, at that speed the missile might as well not have a seeker at all. Against wedge-down targets it's simply going to have to attempt to ram a point in space. (On the other hand, success takes out the ship and could even take out nearby ships.)

cthia wrote:Can we get away with vectoring Apollo right up their hollow? How stealthy is Apollo? Storyline always supported getting in embarrassingly close.

And can we vector an RD in someone's LAC bay as they're launching? Set to self-destruct?

It doesn't look like they can get that close without being picked off. Look at what happened with the Mistletoe attacks--they got in close but they were picked up. It's just the targets didn't have point defense, they couldn't pick them off in time.

Johnathan_S, thanks for the post regarding "Keyhole Survivability" in the "Missile Telemetry" thread. I'm... digesting... digesting... LOL

Came across this...

The EW systems in a single ship's platforms also have the capacity to do the sort of "jingle-jangle" that we've seen ships doing with deployed decoys in the past. By jumping back and forth between the platforms while transmitting orders, it's actually possible to convince missile seekers that the commands are coming from a single platform located midway between the two actual platforms… which brings them in directly on the deploying ship's wedge.

This is hilarious. Them darn dirty sneaky Manties!

Seems it'd be possible to step that tactic up a notch and intentionally "leak" signals from the platforms to draw shoals of missiles on a particular vector to be intercepted by pre-programmed CM launches.

To be sure. Do Apollo control missiles have the ability to communicate with each other?

Utilizing ballistically launched Apollo missiles as sheep herders - forcing your enemy into a particular region of space.

cthia wrote:Utilizing ballistically launched Apollo missiles as sheep herders - forcing your enemy into a particular region of space.

A missile in its ballistic phase is almost untrackable. How is your enemy going to know you're herding him?

cthia wrote:To be sure. Do Apollo control missiles have the ability to communicate with each other?

Doesn't look like it.

It appears (admittedly mostly from lack of information) that they can only talk with the controlling ship/keyhole and their 8 'slave' Mk23s because there's been no indications (that I can recall) that they're capable of performing self-coordinated attacks or otherwise directly talking to other nearby ACMs.

Hi Duckk,

Good to see you still keeping us on our toes.

It might be from HA-H in ART's chapter 22, where she points out that Filareta's BF SD's can only handle 40 missiles at once, while each of hers [including the RHN's] can handle 200; though she wasn't telling the full truth, nothing but the truth...

Technically, the SLN/BF SD's can fire salvo's every 30-45 seconds, then over 3 minutes they ought to have anywhere from 120 to 240 fire control links, depending on when they cut the fire control links.

Confirming your AAC reference, there's Terekhov in SoF, chapter 31 where he explains to Brigadier Yucel that just 2 of the RMN/RHN alliance SD's could have controlled all of the missiles fired at Crandall at Spindle; ie 1536 pods or 768 fire control links each, or the RMN-RHN fire control link ratio might be 2-1 or 1024-512.

Of course he could have been exaggerating...

L

Duckk wrote:I have no idea where people get 200 missiles per SD(P) from. From AAC:

Not all of the forty-two Manticoran, Grayson, and Andermani SD(P)s confronting him were Keyhole-capable. Still, the majority of them were, and the pod-layers as a group could simultaneously control an average of four hundred missiles each.

Hi Jonathan_S,

Excellent points as usual, but the problem I've always had with 4 drive missiles is that there just isn't enough rime or velocity left to be worthwhile.

Since RMN triple drive MDM's accelerate for 9 minutes at 451 'G's per second, their terminal velocity is .81 C [243,000 KPS] or 90% of the .9 C limit for all things human built, let alone capitol anti-ship missiles, so the 4th drive could only accelerate to just less than 27,000 KPS at most [just under a minute at 451 'G's], for 811,800 km; which is pretty paltry range however low the acceleration.

L

Jonathan_S wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:No idea what the final velocity might be, but it should be something close to what the four-stage Apollo can achieve from rest with four consecutive burns. The sensors should be able to handle that with a margin of error. Obviously, you're not going to boost the missiles beyond their sensors' limits.

Actually we don't know what that would be. Missiles don't seem to suffer relativistic effects from their high speed - a 3 drive MDM burns out at around 80% the speed of light. But the distance the books state they travel corresponds to Newtonian physics, not relativistic. My personal retcon is that wedges somehow can apply more power to offset the relativistic mass gain so they don't lose acceleration due to time dilation and mass increase.

But if you try to apply those same Newtonian calculations to a 4 drive they'll tell you in a straight-line run it burns out 1.07c; which is obvious nonsense. Not sure if RFC is going to start factoring in relativistic effects past 0.82c, or declare a speed limit based on wedge 'magic', or what. But until we know, we can't figure out what they'd be capable of, except that it's pretty clearly more than the 0.81c the normal 3 drive Mk23 can do.