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The future of "Donkey"

Join us in talking discussing all things Honor, including (but not limited to) tactics, favorite characters, and book discussions.
Re: Honorverse series, the future..?
Post by Weird Harold   » Wed Oct 01, 2014 11:02 pm

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kzt wrote:The minimum needed for a missile to attack someone is a vector, acceleration profile and distance. You can send that to every single missile at the same time.


Not if the missile is a TOW or it's virtual descendant.

Honorverse missiles aren't wire guided, but they do require individual guidance for most of their runs as if they were.
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Re: Honorverse series, the future..?
Post by kzt   » Wed Oct 01, 2014 11:05 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:
kzt wrote:The minimum needed for a missile to attack someone is a vector, acceleration profile and distance. You can send that to every single missile at the same time.


Not if the missile is a TOW or it's virtual descendant.

Honorverse missiles aren't wire guided, but they do require individual guidance for most of their runs as if they were.

Which is really damn hard to do when the control loop is longer then the time to impact, which happens pretty damn early in flight....
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Re: Honorverse series, the future..?
Post by Weird Harold   » Wed Oct 01, 2014 11:19 pm

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kzt wrote:Which is really damn hard to do when the control loop is longer then the time to impact, which happens pretty damn early in flight....


Which is why Apollo was invented. :roll:

The communications lag didn't really become a problem until Manticore and Haven started extending ranges beyond effective control-loop communications time. In the meantime, they're still locked into the old one link to one missile command loop paradigm.
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Re: Honorverse series, the future..?
Post by Dafmeister   » Thu Oct 02, 2014 4:31 am

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kzt wrote:Which is really damn hard to do when the control loop is longer then the time to impact, which happens pretty damn early in flight....


It happens pretty damned early in flight for an MDM, but MDMs have been around for less than a decade - their first combat use was at the Second Battle of Basilisk in 1913 PD. Prior to that, the control lag was no more than 20 seconds or so each way at maximum range, with a powered flight time of three minutes.

The other thing to remember about control links is that they're two-way - the ship is constantly receiving information from the missiles, which as a phased array of radar, lidar and gravitic sensors.
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Re: Honorverse series, the future..?
Post by Somtaaw   » Thu Oct 02, 2014 8:00 am

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kzt wrote:The problem with your explanation is that you don't have to give detailed direction to every missile. Consider an Army company being marched. Does the commander have to explain to every single person how he expected them to move, or give them detailed instructions. No, he gives a broadcast command, like "forward, march" and everyone starts marching forward.

The minimum needed for a missile to attack someone is a vector, acceleration profile and distance. You can send that to every single missile at the same time.


But in combat a simple forward march just results in a company of corpses. You start giving more complicated orders. A platoon takes that hill, B platoon suppression, etc.

Missiles you need to give target heading, location and speed. Notable features to help hold lock, EW information to blind target and not be lured away, along with where that specific missile is to detonate. And that would be the beginning.

And as stated by Daf and Harold, missiles changed from early books where doctrine had fossilized to the newer books with MDM and Apollo. Apollo being a smart missile with limited AI and controls its brood.

Actually I swear I saw Honor, or Mike, consider using Apollo to control 8x as many missiles. The 1 link to each Apollo bird, which then slaves the orders to its pod brothers and sisters. Add in Keyhole II Invictus and a handful of ships could control almost as many as Second Fleet used on Home Fleet in the first Battle of Manticore.
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Re: The future of "Donkey"
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Oct 02, 2014 10:31 am

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wastedfly wrote:
Valen123456 wrote:Truth be told i am still not entirely clear about exactly a control link actually consists of. Whist i understand the coordination required for fire control and the impact of increased number of links on new Manticoran ships, im not clear on what the "link" actually is. Is it a frquency channel that requires more computer processing power, or is it a physical signal broadcaster/reciever for each missile tube?


Warning Pet Peeve of HV: HV = HonorVerse

How do you control anything remotely today?

1) Information from object is Transmitted transmitter/antenna to an antenna/receiver. There are other things like op amps, balun, etc between the transmitter and antenna but, lets just call it part of the transmitter for now.

2) Frequency used, higher frequency = higher amount of bandwidth along with the data compression used can multiply the amount of data on a single frequency by 10X even using simple compression schemes. IE the higher the frequency the larger the number of sub frequencies one can use on the EXACT SAME FREQUENCY BAND buried in the signal itself. Why tens of thousands of people can all be on their cell phones downloading videos in the same place, using the exact SAME frequency. The amount of data needing to be transmitted after compression determines the number of frequency bands used if one has multiple tranceivers attached to a single antenna or multiple antennas.

3) Data is received, analyzed, sorted.

4) Operator, either human, or automatic computer response, then sends information to the transmitter.

XXXXXXX A transceiver is simply a transmitter/receiver in the same package. They both use the exact same antenna, op amps, etc. Some parts they do not, but a lot of same circuits they do. XXXXXXXXX

THIS IS the Communication and Command loop.

I think the limits of the honorverse control links were inspired by the dedicated radar illuminators used by beam-riding/semi-active radar homing surface to air missiles.
In those there was no direct command link, and you could only control one missile per illuminator. So the number of illuminiators a ship could carry dictated how many simultaneous targets it could engage. And each one of those radars needed space, power, and a line of sight to targets; so there was limited space and weight available in the ship superstructure to mount them. So number of illuminator radars was always a trade-off.
(I see Weird Howard mentioned another type of individually controlled missile; wire guided ones like the TOW)

Now the Honorverse fire control links aren't described as working anything like that (and semi-active radar homing is a non-starter over light minute ranges), but I think that's were the tactical and design limitations of wanting dedicated firecontrol links (analogous to dedicated radar illuminators) came from.


Now none of that changes your [snipped] points that there should be better ways to do this (just like Navies have moved to active homing missiles that do use datalink to command their onboard 'auto-pilot' to fly them into terminal attack possition; removing the need for dedicated illuminator radars)
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