A Call to Duty -- Spoilers

Actually, no spoilers, but it was a really good read about a period when technology was less advanced than under Honor Harrington.

However, the Lieutenant was right about his impossible weapon.

In longs defense he did mention the various things that would need to be able to happen to create the weapon which were all well beyond the tech capabilities of anybody at the time.

Also I question the point of making a sim with this weapon system given the equipment they had at the time if any force had actually fielded true multi drive missiles it would have been even worse of a duckling drowning than buttercup was so I am not sure what would be gained from it.

kaid wrote:In longs defense he did mention the various things that would need to be able to happen to create the weapon which were all well beyond the tech capabilities of anybody at the time.

Also I question the point of making a sim with this weapon system given the equipment they had at the time if any force had actually fielded true multi drive missiles it would have been even worse of a duckling drowning than buttercup was so I am not sure what would be gained from it.

But, but, it let the Lieutenant show of his Gen-i-us

(yeah, no win, or actually impossible, sims are pretty pointless. Might as well sim what would happen in the planet-eating mind-control hordes of the Andromeda Galaxy attacked)

Unless you are trying to sim how fast you can drop your sails and surrender modeling weapons that far beyond the cutting edge vs ships still using auto cannons for point defense is a waste of everybody's time and energy.

kaid wrote:Unless you are trying to sim how fast you can drop your sails and surrender modeling weapons that far beyond the cutting edge vs ships still using auto cannons for point defense is a waste of everybody's time and energy.

yep. Though if you get to the point where you think you could build the weapon with, say, 50 years of concentrated R&D then it makes sense to quietly start some sims of what you think it can do - both to determine whether it's really the best avenue to pursue and to start thinking about counters for when other people get it. (And counters to those counters)

But there's no reason to do even that if you've no hope of building the weapon you're similating.

Like right now it makes sense to try some sims with, say, vehicle borne lasers 20-50x more powerful than we can yet build. Or with hypersonic missiles. Do they actually give enough of an advantage to be worth it. Are they too affected by (simulated) environmental conditions? How much is worth giving up to have them?

But it doesn't make sense to simulate teleporting bombs or inertia-less craft. Those are, as far as we know, impossible. So even if they turn out to be simulated world beaters you don't learn anything useful from that. [edit: originally auto-corrected to "world beards"; which I'd failed to notice ]

Jonathan_S wrote:

kaid wrote:Unless you are trying to sim how fast you can drop your sails and surrender modeling weapons that far beyond the cutting edge vs ships still using auto cannons for point defense is a waste of everybody's time and energy.

yep. Though if you get to the point where you think you could build the weapon with, say, 50 years of concentrated R&D then it makes sense to quietly start some sims of what you think it can do - both to determine whether it's really the best avenue to pursue and to start thinking about counters for when other people get it. (And counters to those counters)

But there's no reason to do even that if you've no hope of building the weapon you're similating.

Like right now it makes sense to try some sims with, say, vehicle borne lasers 20-50x more powerful than we can yet build. Or with hypersonic missiles. Do they actually give enough of an advantage to be worth it. Are they too affected by (simulated) environmental conditions? How much is worth giving up to have them?

But it doesn't make sense to simulate teleporting bombs or inertia-less craft. Those are, as far as we know, impossible. So even if they turn out to be simulated world beards you don't learn anything useful from that.

Perhaps the officers running the sim were doing it in league with the 'Lt' to plant the possibility of the weapons advancement in future navy officers. Sort of 'seeding the field' so to speak.

Jonathan_S wrote:

kaid wrote:In longs defense he did mention the various things that would need to be able to happen to create the weapon which were all well beyond the tech capabilities of anybody at the time.

But, but, it let the Lieutenant show of his Gen-i-us

(yeah, no win, or actually impossible, sims are pretty pointless. Might as well sim what would happen in the planet-eating mind-control hordes of the Andromeda Galaxy attacked)

You are right. If you can think of something that may be outside of today's technology, you can indeed do some planning for it. You can define sims. You can think of counters, etc.

In the case of your planet-eating mind-control hordes of the Andromeda Galaxy it's much harder. This is called a Black Swan event and you don't plan for it, because you have no idea what to expect.

The term Black Swan comes from the fact that for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands, all swans were graceful water floating birds that were all white. Then people got to Australia and they found black swans. The book The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He has some good thoughts on how you handle such events. Usually, however, such things are handled poorly -- witness the current excitement about Ebola which we've known about for 40 years or so, but -- it simply couldn't happen here with our advanced medical systems, protection systems, advanced drugs, etc. -- yeah Riiiight.

I would think that you could do up a sim somewhat ahead of currently possible technology and use it as a goal, a way of specifically targeting research to meet the goal. I would imagine that this happens all the time, probably in real time.

Don

kaid wrote:Unless you are trying to sim how fast you can drop your sails and surrender modeling weapons that far beyond the cutting edge vs ships still using auto cannons for point defense is a waste of everybody's time and energy.

Pretty sure the SLN said the EXACT same thing. Until someone showed them it WASN'T beyond someone's capabilities to do so. Granted the only thing the SLN should be practicing in their current death traps is how to strike a wedge.