Upcoming designs: regarding the Apollo ACM...

StealthSeeker wrote:I would point out a couple of things. The Mk16 can't keep up in speed or distance with the Mk23-e control missile. Second, the Mk23 missiles that are launched as part of a "pod group" have had their control links modified to work with just the control missile, high bandwidth vs sensitivity. (so says the snip-et)

So standard ship launched Mk16's and standard ship launched Mk23's won't link to the Mk23-e anyway. Vice versa,... pod launched Mk23's that link to Mk23-e control missiles can't communicate with standard ship control links.

Now Mycroft may have both FTL and light speed control links and it could therefore control missiles it launched of either variety.

SharkHunter wrote:My surmise is that every attack missile in a given pod is slaved to the same signal, whether there's an ACM in the loop or not.

Weird Harold wrote:Your surmise is wrong. The ACM, among other things, is necessary to combine eight attack missiles into one fire-control link. Without the ACM, one fire-control link is required for each missile, unless the reduced control of rotating control links is acceptable....

SharkHunter wrote:--snipping--
I think I'm just in an argumentative mode on this one. If that were true, then an SD(P) could only control as many missiles as an SD, which makes the battle of Elric [where two Medusa(s) were handling the launch and fire control enough to account for missiles the something like 8 SD(s)] impossible, unless you're saying that the SD(p)s have many multiples more in terms of control links.

The reason I think every missile in one pod synchs to the same signal is that we've never read about a pod being aimed at more than one target, which would be possible if the missiles were individually controlled. Contrast that with the simplicity of:

"Every missile in a pod is programmed to receive "your target downrange is "ship x".... Latest ECM pattern is y", Pen-Aid timing Z", you don't need multiple signals for the missiles themselves to know what to do. Each individua missile itself will follow whatever programming bit applies to it's payload.

Jonathan_S wrote:Your logic makes sense for smarter missiles. (As Relax has pointed out several times), but even though it makes sense RFC seems to have modeled his missile combat limitations differently; more like the 1970's missile guidance (where each missile needed a dedicated emitter).
Someone said he was inspired by the old game Harpoon - set in that era.


So it seems that each missile really does require a dedicated high bandwidth connection with the controlling ship. (Actually a the exception that proves the rule, Theisman basically pulled your trick in Ashes of Victory. He had the forts in Barnett copy the data from one pod's missiles to 6 other pods, to multiply his offensive fire control; but it says at a reduction of accuracy. That implies that normally they do hand-hold each launch, and don't just copy data broadly)

SD(P)s do appear to have many more control links than their pre-pod predecessors. Note that even when using towed pods the pre-pod designs were limited in the number of missiles they could control (and the limit was way less than 10x the number of broadside tubes; as you might expect under your idea). That seems further evidence that pods don't multiply fire-control. (Even when, as you say, you seem to point multiple entire pods at single targets -- not split fire from one pod against multiple targets)

At All Costs, Chapter 65 wrote:But Lester Tourville also had Shannon Foraker's "donkey," and that meant every one of Sebastian D'Orville assumptions about the number and size of the salvos he could throw was fatally flawed. And what else he had was far more control channels for the missiles he carried. 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. But the older, pre-pod ships could control only a hundred apiece, whereas each of Tourville's ships had control links for three hundred and fifty missiles, and by using Shannon Foraker's rotating control technique, they could increase that number by approximately sixty percent. So whereas Home Fleet could effectively control a total of just under twenty-two thousand missiles per salvo, Second Fleet could control eighty-four thousand without rotating control links. Worse, it could have increased that total to almost a hundred and thirty-five thousand, if it was prepared to accept somewhat lower hit probabilities, and the "donkey" meant Tourville could actually have deployed the pods to fire that many.

The Short Victorious War, Chapter 17 wrote:At the moment, Sir, I'd have to say that, unless Admiral Parks changes his mind and takes them with him, there should be enough pods to pull it off. I gave Captain Corell our latest figures when we came aboard this evening, and Commander Turner is working out the software changes now."
Sarnow glanced at Corell, who nodded in confirmation. A few people—notably Commander Houseman—looked skeptical, but Honor felt a trickle of satisfaction. The concept might be a tactical antique, yet its very outdatedness should keep the Peeps from expecting it in the first place.
A parasite pod was nothing more than a drone slaved to the fire control of the ship towing it astern on a tractor. Each pod mounted several, usually a half-dozen or so, single-shot missile launchers similar to those LACs used. The idea was simple—to link the pod with the ship's internal tubes and launch a greater number of birds in a single salvo in order to saturate an opponent's defenses—but they hadn't been used in a fleet engagement for eighty T-years because advances in antimissile defenses had rendered them ineffective.
The old pods' launchers had lacked the powerful mass-drivers which gave warships' missiles their initial impetus. That, in turn, gave them a lower initial velocity, and since their missiles had exactly the same drives as any other missile, they couldn't make up the velocity differential unless the ship-launched birds were stepped down to less than optimal power settings. If you didn't step your shipboard missiles down, you lost much of the saturation effect because the velocity discrepancy effectively split your launch into two separate salvos. Yet if you did step them down, the slower speed of your entire launch not only gave the enemy more time to evade and adjust his ECM, but also gave his active defenses extra tracking and engagement time.
It was the tracking time that was the real killer, for point defense had improved enormously over the last century. Neither LAC launchers nor the old-style pods had been able to overcome the advantage it now held (which was one reason the Admiralty had stopped all new LAC construction twenty Manticoran years ago). Moreover, the RMN's data on the People's Navy's point defense, available in no small part thanks to Captain Dame Honor Harrington, indicated that the Peeps' missile defenses, while poorer than Manticore's, were still more than sufficient to eat old-style pod salvos for breakfast.
But the Weapons Development Board, not without opposition from its then head, Lady Sonja Hemphill, had resurrected the pods and given them a new and heavier punch. Hemphill rejected the entire concept as "retrograde," but her successor at the WDB had pushed the project energetically, and Honor couldn't quite see the logic behind Hemphill's objections. Given her vocal advocacy of material-based tactics, Honor would have expected her to embrace the pods with enthusiasm . . . unless it was simply that something inside the admiral equated "old" weapon systems with "inherently inferior' ones.
As far as Honor was concerned, an idea's age didn't necessarily invalidate it—especially not with the new launchers, whose development Hemphill herself had overseen. Of course, Hemphill hadn't intended them to be used in something as ancient as pods. She'd been looking for a way to make LACs effective once more as part of the tactical approach her critics called the "Sonja Swarm." The new launchers were far more expensive than traditional LAC launchers, which was the official core of Hemphill's opposition to "wasting" them in pods, but expense hadn't bothered her where the LACs were concerned. Building one with the new launchers pushed its price tag up to about a quarter of a destroyer's, especially with the fire control upgrades to take full advantage of the launchers' capabilities, yet Hemphill had lobbied hard for the resumption of LAC construction, and she'd succeeded.
Like most of her jeune école fellows, she still regarded LACs as expendable, single-salvo assets (which didn't endear her to their crews), but at least she'd seen the virtue in increasing their effectiveness while they lasted. The fact that it also gave them a better chance of survival was probably immaterial to her thinking, but that was all right with Honor. She didn't care why Horrible Hemphill did something, on the rare occasions when it was the right something. And however loudly the cost effectiveness analysts might complain, Honor had a pretty shrewd notion how LAC skippers felt about the notion of living through an engagement.
But the point at hand was that the same improvements could be applied to parasite pods, and, despite Hemphill's objections, they had been. Of course, the new pods—with ten tubes each, not six—were intended for ships of the wall, which had plenty of redundant fire control to manage them, not battlecruisers. But it sounded like Turner was finding the answer to that, and their missiles were actually heavier than the standard ship-to-ship birds. With the new lightweight mass-drivers BuShips had perfected, their performance could equal or even exceed that of normal, ship-launched missiles, and their warheads were more destructive to boot. The pods were clumsy, of course, and towing them did unfortunate things to a warship's inertial compensator field, which held down maximum accelerations by twenty-five percent or so. They were also vulnerable to proximity soft kills, since they carried neither sidewalls nor radiation shielding of their own, but if they got their shots off before they were killed, that hardly mattered.
"Good, Isabella." Sarnow's voice recalled Honor to the conversation at hand. "If we can get him to leave them here, we can put at least five on tow behind each of our battlecruisers—six, for the newer ships. Even the heavy cruisers can manage two or three." He smiled thinly. "It may not help in a long engagement, but our initial salvos should make anyone on the other side wonder if they've run into dreadnoughts instead of battlecruisers!"

The Short Victorious War, Chapter 30 wrote:Admiral Mark Sarnow's task group had completed its turn, presenting its broadsides to the oncoming enemy, and the missile pods streamed astern like lumpy, ungainly tails.
"Stand by," Honor murmured. No active sensors were live, but they'd had literally hours to refine the data from their passive systems, and she felt her lips trying to draw back from her teeth.
The tactical net's hair-thin lasers linked the task group into a single, vast entity, and data codes flashed as each division of battlecruisers and cruisers confirmed acquisition of its assigned target. She waited two more heartbeats, then—
"Engage!" she snapped, and Task Group Hancock 001 belched fire.
Nike and Agamemnon alone spat a hundred and seventy-eight missiles at the Peeps, almost five times the broadside of a Sphinx-class superdreadnought. The other divisions of her squadron had fewer birds, but even Van Slyke's cruiser divisions had twice a Bellerophon-class dreadnought's broadside. Nine hundred missiles erupted into Admiral Chin's teeth, and every ship's drive came on line in the same instant. They swerved back onto their original heading, redlining their acceleration, and deployed decoys and jammers to cover themselves as they raced ahead down the Havenites' base course at 4.93 KPS2.
* * *
For one terrible moment, Genevieve Chin's mind froze.
Two superdreadnought squadrons couldn't have spawned that massive salvo, and the Manties only had battlecruisers! It was impossible!

A Rising Thunder, Chapter 22 wrote:Eleventh Fleet’s velocity rose to 5,647 KPS. The hyper limit lay 963,000 kilometers behind Oppenheimer, and the range to Tango Two had fallen to 12.3 million kilometers. The Manties were 3.2 million kilometers inside Cataphract’s powered envelope, even with no ballistic phase built into the attack run, although projected accuracy at forty-one light-seconds would be abysmal. On the other hand, he only had to worry about forty targets, and each of his superdreadnoughts had twelve missile pods towing astern. That gave him over five thousand pods, each containing ten missiles, which didn’t even count his tubes. Each of his superdreadnoughts had given up a pair of tubes in each broadside to squeeze in Aegis, but that left them thirty per side. If he flushed all of his pods and fired a full broadside from each of his superdreadnoughts, he could put over 64,000 missiles into space simultaneously.
Their simulations had demonstrated that they couldn’t hope to usefully control more than 17,000 or so at a time, of course. But if he used only 4,200 pod-launched missiles to back his broadsides each time he launched, he could fire twelve salvos that size before he exhausted them. That would be better than four hundred missiles per launch for each and every one of Tango Two’s wallers, and his fire plan concentrated his entire first salvo on only half his potential targets. No superdreadnought ever built could fend off eight hundred and fifty capital ship missiles arriving in a single, cataclysmic salvo! So it was only a matter of them—

Vince wrote:Unnesting quotes

<Snipped>

Even the SLN--that most conservative and technologically backward navy--has more fire control links on its SDs than the number of missile tubes[:

A Rising Thunder, Chapter 22 wrote:Eleventh Fleet’s velocity rose to 5,647 KPS. The hyper limit lay 963,000 kilometers behind Oppenheimer, and the range to Tango Two had fallen to 12.3 million kilometers. The Manties were 3.2 million kilometers inside Cataphract’s powered envelope, even with no ballistic phase built into the attack run, although projected accuracy at forty-one light-seconds would be abysmal. On the other hand, he only had to worry about forty targets, and each of his superdreadnoughts had twelve missile pods towing astern. That gave him over five thousand pods, each containing ten missiles, which didn’t even count his tubes. Each of his superdreadnoughts had given up a pair of tubes in each broadside to squeeze in Aegis, but that left them thirty per side. If he flushed all of his pods and fired a full broadside from each of his superdreadnoughts, he could put over 64,000 missiles into space simultaneously.
Their simulations had demonstrated that they couldn’t hope to usefully control more than 17,000 or so at a time, of course. But if he used only 4,200 pod-launched missiles to back his broadsides each time he launched, he could fire twelve salvos that size before he exhausted them. That would be better than four hundred missiles per launch for each and every one of Tango Two’s wallers, and his fire plan concentrated his entire first salvo on only half his potential targets. No superdreadnought ever built could fend off eight hundred and fifty capital ship missiles arriving in a single, cataclysmic salvo! So it was only a matter of them—

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:...Snip...

Hmmmm. I thought most of Van Slyke's cruisers were Prince Consorts, which was why Warlock was so warmly welcomed. . . In spite of the captain. And why the his squadron flagship was a Crusader. The PrConsort broadside missile count was 8, just to complete your list.

...Snip...

Regards, Rob

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:...

Some will argue that there is sufficient fire control with Apollo, at least in a defensive role. I think a defender would get more bang for their buck by buying those Victory class SDs from those primitives on Yeltsin. There were what, 30 of them with the same fire control a sphinx class had? But that is another thread.

Regards, Rob

SharkHunter wrote:

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:Vince,

Some nice quotes, you have the textev on tap. And I mostly agree with your basic point. But you seem to be overestimating the SLN's standard capability. And we are not privy to Haven's numbers for pre-pod ships, but they don't seem to be following the SLN as slavishly as the they might have (the Duquesne class isn't much like the Scientist, as an indicator).

The RMN warships have (at least, Hexapuma had) about a 60% redundancy on a standard salvo (a stacked double salvo, in this case). The SLN had very little extra for their SDs.

Hmmmm. I thought most of Van Slyke's cruisers were Prince Consorts, which was why Warlock was so warmly welcomed. . . In spite of the captain. And why the his squadron flagship was a Crusader. The PrConsort broadside missile count was 8, just to complete your list.

The only quibble I have at all is about the SLN's control links. The number of control links for the SLN ships is not as generous as it sounds when you say "17000".

I expect someone already pointed this out, (over and over) but . . .


17000 missiles, fired from 427 SDs, is: 39.81264637002 (40) control links per ship. About a twenty-five percent redundancy on a single broadside launch. Which also reflects on why their fire rate is so slow. They cannot launch again until they release the first salvo from shipboard control.

The hundred or so control links of the Manticoran older wallers would control 3 salvos of the King William (96 Missiles) or Bellerphon types (99 missiles); and the one-for-two rule for the ammunition stores of Manti ships implies firing a salvo at least once per minute--in spite of the 'gunsmoke' effect of all those impeller wedges in those "bad old days" before Keyhole and Ghost Rider.

Which is exactly why the SLN SDs are junk. Replacing their sensors, fire control, loading mechanisms, launchers, sidewall generators, inertial compensators, and adding more point defense laser clusters and cutting in new additional countermissile launchers would get you-- a Frankenstein Majestic clone, sort of.

Some will argue that there is sufficient fire control with Apollo, at least in a defensive role. I think a defender would get more bang for their buck by buying those Victory class SDs from those primitives on Yeltsin. There were what, 30 of them with the same fire control a sphinx class had? But that is another thread.

Regards, Rob

Hmmm. I wonder how many of those ships still exist, and more importantly, can they fire the long range missiles? Although those ships were -tube SD's, you'd have to think they could still mount enough limpeted pods (though they'd obscure the tubes for a while) enough to fire off three or four salvo(s) of pod based Mark-23's before an enemy's missiles would force them to go to tube/broadside fire. For that manner, however, I wonder who could build KH-II platforms if those ships could be retrofitted in the "near future" or if they'd have to / would be able to "tractor in" a Mycroft platform if not.
.

Vince wrote:During the High Ridge build-down, a lot of the older SDs that were not outright scrapped were bought by Grayson at fire sale prices because Benjamin Mayhew recognized that the Manticoran Alliance would need them.

As far as refitting the older ships with Keyhole, see Refitting to the Keyhole-II standard, which talks about both Keyhole I & II refits. Short version: No.

Vince wrote:During the High Ridge build-down, a lot of the older SDs that were not outright scrapped were bought by Grayson at fire sale prices because Benjamin Mayhew recognized that the Manticoran Alliance would need them.

As far as refitting the older ships with Keyhole, see Refitting to the Keyhole-II standard, which talks about both Keyhole I & II refits. Short version: No.

Vince wrote:

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:...Snip...

Hmmmm. I thought most of Van Slyke's cruisers were Prince Consorts, which was why Warlock was so warmly welcomed. . . In spite of the captain. And why the his squadron flagship was a Crusader. The PrConsort broadside missile count was 8, just to complete your list.

...Snip...

Regards, Rob

I initially thought that the rest of Van Slyke's heavy cruisers were Prince Consorts as well, since his flagship was actually HMS Crusader. But the names of the rest of the squadron seem to point to names associated with the Star Knight class and not the Prince Consorts: Magus, Circe, Warrior, Sorcerer*, Merlin*, Warlock. At least one other heavy cruiser left unnamed in The Short Victorious War.

* Indicates cruiser ship names in The Short Victorious War not specifically identified as either light or heavy cruisers.

Jonathan_S wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:I would point out a couple of things. The Mk16 can't keep up in speed or distance with the Mk23-e control missile. Second, the Mk23 missiles that are launched as part of a "pod group" have had their control links modified to work with just the control missile, high bandwidth vs sensitivity. (so says the snip-et)

So standard ship launched Mk16's and standard ship launched Mk23's won't link to the Mk23-e anyway. Vice versa,... pod launched Mk23's that link to Mk23-e control missiles can't communicate with standard ship control links.

Now Mycroft may have both FTL and light speed control links and it could therefore control missiles it launched of either variety.

I'd nitpick your first point. Mk16s have exactly the same acceleration per drive as the Mk23. So if you wanted to fly them in formation with a Mk23 it would be trivial to do so -- just don't use the 3rd drive on the Mk23.

If it was a unified offensive missile salvo that's a problem because it artificially requires all the Mk23s to accept a lower terminal velocity. But if you're 'just' talking about hypothetically using a 23E to control a bunch of Mk16 (because that's the offensive missile you have on hand?) then the lowered terminal velocity of the 23E is irrelevant since it's the terminal velocity of the 16s that matter; and that's the same whether a 23E is flying behind them or not.

Of course your other point is well taken.