Roland DD or not?

wastedfly wrote:Ya know, maybe one of you discussing radio, (Antenna, waveguide, Balun, amplifier, SIGINT) should actually know something about the subject before posting?

Number of missiles able to be controlled has little, to nothing in common with surface area.

Thanks. What does determine it?

wastedfly wrote:Ya know, maybe one of you discussing radio, (Antenna, waveguide, Balun, amplifier, SIGINT) should actually know something about the subject before posting?

Number of missiles able to be controlled has little, to nothing in common with surface area.

It shouldn't. But RFC's mental model (based on his various descriptions of fire control and control links) seems to be something more similar to early generation of naval surface to air missiles (where each missile you wanted to control needed a dedicated illuminator radar) than to command driven missiles - where as long as your search radar knows where the target is you can send separate commands to lots of different missiles nearly simultaneously though a single set of antennas.

Obviously the underlying technology would be completely different in the Honorverse. But RFC consistently talks about the volume control links consume, and the limited numbers you can put on a ship. That doesn't really make sense with the latter para dyne.


But with old naval SAMs, ship size was one significant factor of how many illuninator radars you could mount, and therefor how many SAMs you could control and that mental model seems to fit how things are described in the honorverse fairly well - losing the link causes the missile to go "dumb" unless the link is reaquired or the missile is already in its terminal phase; number of control links limits how many missiles you can control; separate long range offensive and, much smaller, dedicated short range defensive control links, etc.

I suspect you are right. I've heard that essentially the honorverse combat started as Harpoon in space.

But essentially what has to happen is sending a rather small amount of data to a missile that tells it how to find a target, then possibly some instruction on how to run the attack. Plus there needs to be some sort of peer-peer communications to keep missiles from crashing into each other.

kzt wrote:I suspect you are right. I've heard that essentially the honorverse combat started as Harpoon in space.

But essentially what has to happen is sending a rather small amount of data to a missile that tells it how to find a target, then possibly some instruction on how to run the attack. Plus there needs to be some sort of peer-peer communications to keep missiles from crashing into each other.

I was thinking, maybe the missiles are subject to individually targeted electronic warfare, calling for support tailored to each one of them from the firing unit. It's at least one account of why mama needs a hand to hold each one of her explosive babies.

JeffEngel wrote:I was thinking, maybe the missiles are subject to individually targeted electronic warfare, calling for support tailored to each one of them from the firing unit. It's at least one account of why mama needs a hand to hold each one of her explosive babies.

The command loop time is too long for that to be sensible.

kzt wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:I was thinking, maybe the missiles are subject to individually targeted electronic warfare, calling for support tailored to each one of them from the firing unit. It's at least one account of why mama needs a hand to hold each one of her explosive babies.

The command loop time is too long for that to be sensible.

Is it too long all the way through? I mean, if a missile needs personal lovin' only half way to target, then salvo control is still limited that long before the ship's free to send another missile happily on its way.

And if the command loop is too long for that, doesn't that make it too long for any one-to-one, link-to-missile relationship? (Which, admittedly and again for all I know, may be another way of stating the general problem we've got with the missile control link model.)

I am not going to even bother to try to explain. It would require you to learn multiple subjects you have no basic knowledge base in.

You can find these arguments in prior threads if you really wish to peruse them.

Short answer is:
1a) Missile combat as portrayed in the Honorverse is a perverse joke regarding logic and science.
1b) Who the heck wants to read a treatise on missile combat intricacies in a fiction book???
2) KISS rules and what the author says are limitations are, even though it makes no rational sense even with 1950's technology. Read NIKE missile battery air interceptor technology even with its severe limitations.

Jonathan_S wrote:

wastedfly wrote:Ya know, maybe one of you discussing radio, (Antenna, waveguide, Balun, amplifier, SIGINT) should actually know something about the subject before posting?

Number of missiles able to be controlled has little, to nothing in common with surface area.

It shouldn't. But RFC's mental model (based on his various descriptions of fire control and control links) seems to be something more similar to early generation of naval surface to air missiles (where each missile you wanted to control needed a dedicated illuminator radar) than to command driven missiles - where as long as your search radar knows where the target is you can send separate commands to lots of different missiles nearly simultaneously though a single set of antennas.

Obviously the underlying technology would be completely different in the Honorverse. But RFC consistently talks about the volume control links consume, and the limited numbers you can put on a ship. That doesn't really make sense with the latter para dyne.


But with old naval SAMs, ship size was one significant factor of how many illuninator radars you could mount, and therefor how many SAMs you could control and that mental model seems to fit how things are described in the honorverse fairly well - losing the link causes the missile to go "dumb" unless the link is reaquired or the missile is already in its terminal phase; number of control links limits how many missiles you can control; separate long range offensive and, much smaller, dedicated short range defensive control links, etc.

The control link question, as far as I know, has to do with data flow, course correction, anti-ECM updates, etc. so that the missile's final attack runs have the highest possible chances to succeed. I am thinking of Monica where Terekhov used his missile range advantage essentially to get updated attack profiles for the rest of his improvised squadron so that when the Monican battle cruisers came in THEIR missile range, they'd be able to end the battle quickly.

SharkHunter wrote:The control link question, as far as I know, has to do with data flow, course correction, anti-ECM updates, etc. so that the missile's final attack runs have the highest possible chances to succeed. I am thinking of Monica where Terekhov used his missile range advantage essentially to get updated attack profiles for the rest of his improvised squadron so that when the Monican battle cruisers came in THEIR missile range, they'd be able to end the battle quickly.

Sure, but you can broadcast the data. You don't control thousands of missiles by telling each of them exactly what to do at time x. That won't work because the target is maneuvering, and changing velocity or vector by a couple of KM/sec would lead all your missiles shooting at nothing.

So what you are doing is telling the various groups of missiles what you want them to generally do and how to spot their targets, and what to do if they can't find exactly the target you want. They already have massive target and attack profile databases (computer storage capacity in the honorverse is essentially infinite) so you are just updating them.

And these are both fairly small messages and fairly high bandwidth. The ships can easily mount gigawatt transmitters and vast receiver antennas, and the missiles have a transceiver at the tail aimed at their mothership.

This assumes you have to tell them anything at all. You already gave them at least a basic "go here, look this direction and then blow up fleet X's ships" at launch, which will certainly keep fleet X busy for a while. In most cases I suspect launching a few thousand missiles at most opponents will do far more than just keep them busy even if you don't ever give them more data then their on-board databases and expert systems have.

SharkHunter wrote:The control link question, as far as I know, has to do with data flow, course correction, anti-ECM updates, etc. so that the missile's final attack runs have the highest possible chances to succeed.

Sure. That's what's described in the books. But that information gets stale very quickly, and shouldn't be that high bandwidth to begin with.

For example the anti-ECM data isn't unique to a specific missiles. Part of it are common to every missile attacking the formation, and the rest is still common to every missile targeting a give ship. So with 100 missiles in flight against 3 targets you should need to send only 4 updates (1 describing the target formation's shared ECM, 1 each describing each targets ECM) and those could be broadcast to all attack missile and the missiles could simple discard/ignor any that wasn't relevant to them (target info on a target they weren't assigned)

But the stuff isn't all that timely. Even with single drive missiles, at max range the updates are laggy. Even for things my ship can see in "realtime" (target wedge changes) it takes about 20 seconds for the update with that information to reach the missile out at 6 million km. For ECM info it's even worse, I've got to wait 20 seconds before I even see the change, then process it, and another 20 seconds for my update to reach my missile. So it's not like I'm sending second by second control - due to the delay I'm forced to send more generic updates; teaching the missile's onboard computer how to better cope with the ECM we've seen (or expect to see) in this battle. I can't hold it's hand because what it's dealing with right now isn't what I can update it about (what it saw 40 seconds ago).


For simplicity the info above was ignoring how far the missile moved during all this; but there's also a point beyond which any new update I send literally won't reach the missile before it completes its run. At max range, for a single drive missile as of SVW, that's about 1.2 million km from impact (or 18% of its run). There will still be updates I sent before that point that it'll receive during that final 18% of it's flight - but new update could reach it before impact.

And MDMs just make this much worse (which is why Ghost Rider drones and Apollo help so much - they cut one or both legs of this data latency by 62x)