New Manty ship ideas.

Jonathan_S wrote:

SWM wrote:The concept of FTL controlled counter-missiles has been suggested before. Some have suggested combining it with multi-drives. It might work, and might be the direction RFC plans to move. But it is not nearly as easy as you suggest. Adapting FTL comm to counter-missiles will be difficult.

I was about to put forth a (known to be) horrifically inefficient way to do that [Apollo AMC with a CM grafted on it's nose Cataphract style. Too big to fit in any existing pod or tube, too expensive to actually use. ] But while writing up a tongue-in-cheek post about that I had an idea. (Which probably isn't fully fleshed out; so I expect to get some good feedback on everything I managed to overlook)



One efficiency you might be able to pull off today, to get an FTL link CM, is to make the CMs FTL receive-only.

I suspect the majority of the mass and power needed for an ACMs is for their FTL transmitter. But even at 3+ million KMs shipboard sensors can see the CM and it's target well enough that you don't necessarily need to get realtime data back from the CM.

And you might well be able to squeeze a decent receiver into something not horribly larger than a current CM (since the receiver shouldn't be much more than a rear facing grav detector with some software post-processing). If so I suspect you could get acceptable results simply broadcasting updates 'blind' to the CM in such a way that you didn't need to wait for ACKs or sensor feed back from it.


Obviously that assumption would need to be tested. But even if it's wrong an half FTL setup should still cut the latency enough to boost intercept probabilities to the edge of the current powered envelope and beyond. (Assuming of course that the fleet's keyhole's generate the additional grav pulses to talk to them, and that you don't get into a "white-out" situation from too many transmitters too close to each other)

Spacekiwi wrote:Good point. after all, if the transmitters for decreasing the loop between ship and missile to allow for better evasion of counter measures, it probably isnt needed on a CM. But you still get a near halving or response time as updates reach the CM quicker, and so increase the CM effectiveness without increasing size too much. plus, the CM gets the ability of the ship to disstinguish false signals better due to the signal only taking around 0.1 of a sec max to reach the CM, so decoys and dazzlers wont work nearly as well...

[quote="Jonathan_S]I was about to put forth a (known to be) horrifically inefficient way to do that [Apollo AMC with a CM grafted on it's nose Cataphract style. Too big to fit in any existing pod or tube, too expensive to actually use. ] But while writing up a tongue-in-cheek post about that I had an idea. (Which probably isn't fully fleshed out; so I expect to get some good feedback on everything I managed to overlook)



One efficiency you might be able to pull off today, to get an FTL link CM, is to make the CMs FTL receive-only.

I suspect the majority of the mass and power needed for an ACMs is for their FTL transmitter. But even at 3+ million KMs shipboard sensors can see the CM and it's target well enough that you don't necessarily need to get realtime data back from the CM.

And you might well be able to squeeze a decent receiver into something not horribly larger than a current CM (since the receiver shouldn't be much more than a rear facing grav detector with some software post-processing). If so I suspect you could get acceptable results simply broadcasting updates 'blind' to the CM in such a way that you didn't need to wait for ACKs or sensor feed back from it.


Obviously that assumption would need to be tested. But even if it's wrong an half FTL setup should still cut the latency enough to boost intercept probabilities to the edge of the current powered envelope and beyond. (Assuming of course that the fleet's keyhole's generate the additional grav pulses to talk to them, and that you don't get into a "white-out" situation from too many transmitters too close to each other)[/quote][/quote][/quote]

Theemile wrote:Grav receivers are those big spikey arrays that stick out from the hull - not very heavy, but volumetrically large. Possibly too large to fit on the missile -

What about a "towed" array - something that poped out the back of the CM and expanded after the CM was under way? The tether would need to take the accel shear, but it might be doable.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:Grav receivers are those big spikey arrays that stick out from the hull - not very heavy, but volumetrically large. Possibly too large to fit on the missile -

What about a "towed" array - something that poped out the back of the CM and expanded after the CM was under way? The tether would need to take the accel shear, but it might be doable.

I thought missiels could see wedges? Wouldn't that imply they already have grav detectors / receivers?

I'm sure they're widely less sensitive that the ones mounts on recon drones, much less on full up starships (and lets not even compare to the multi-km sized system arrays like Manticore sports).


But I do think they already have them. But whether they've room for rear facing ones and whether those rear facing ones would be sensitive enough to process FTL fire-control signals seem to be open questions.

(For that matter putting a grav sensor too near the drive nodes might cause major issues. Could you have one mounted forward that could deploy out to look after down the missile?)

SWM wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I thought missiels could see wedges? Wouldn't that imply they already have grav detectors / receivers?

I'm sure they're widely less sensitive that the ones mounts on recon drones, much less on full up starships (and lets not even compare to the multi-km sized system arrays like Manticore sports).

I don't recall any text evidence that missiles have grav detectors. We know they have some kind of sensors, but I don't think we have been told exactly what kind or how sensitive they are.

It would be logical for them to have grav detectors. But it seems logical that a big reason the Apollo missile is so big, even though it has no warhead, is because of the FTL comm.

SWM wrote:I don't recall any text evidence that missiles have grav detectors. We know they have some kind of sensors, but I don't think we have been told exactly what kind or how sensitive they are.

It would be logical for them to have grav detectors. But it seems logical that a big reason the Apollo missile is so big, even though it has no warhead, is because of the FTL comm.

BrightSoul wrote: I suspect that LACs are a far cheaper, durable and versatile solutions than this idea.

Jonathan_S wrote:And I was just guessing the transmit side of the FTL comm was the bulky power hungry part, but I certainly could be wrong about that.