Upcoming designs: regarding the Apollo ACM...

Theemile wrote:No, the problem isn't the FTL handofff between ships - Apollo has that covered in it's playbox. We've never seen the RF links move between control platforms. If a ship launches a missile - the ship controls the missile. For an ACM pod to work, the control links have to jump from the launching ship to the Pod launched ACM's control, or be configured prior to the launch to communicate with the ACM, and never have a wedge block the signals. Not saying it cannot happen, but it is different firing mode than we have ever seen and may not be possible.

Remember, the Apollo attack missiles are MODIFIED Mk-23s with a different firecontrol comm system to cross talk via "short" range with the ACM - forming more of a small mesh wifi (or Lifi) network, than the normal long distance 1 way control parameter update. Since they are not launching in formation with the pod ACM, would it work? Probably, but sadly, that's a David decision.

Havenite ships can hand off control of attack missiles:

War of Honor, Chapter 58 wrote:Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs' long flight times, the Manties' deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos . . . and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21's flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge . . . and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters' fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.

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

Weird Harold wrote:

Theemile wrote:We've never seen the RF links move between control platforms. If a ship launches a missile - the ship controls the missile.
...

Shadow of Saganami
Battle of Monica wrote:Hexapuma and Aegis, with their own counter-missiles and enough from the other ships to fill all their redundant control links, destroyed two hundred and nineteen missiles in the outer zone, ripping them apart with precisely directed counter-missile kamikazes.

Yes, I know that is about counter missiles. It is however the first explicit example I turned up in a quick search.

Maya's Marksman-class cruisers are built on the philosophy of being able to pick up missiles fired by their missile ships (avalanche-class?) as the missiles catch up to and pass the Marksman ships.

I'm with WeirdHarold on this one.

Drop back all the way to "pre-Buttercup", at Elric, bolding mine:

Ashes of Victory wrote:The Allied chiefs of staff had been firm in their instructions: the new ships were not to go about flaunting their ability to roll waves of pods from their hollow-cored central magazines. If the Peeps didn't know about them yet, this was not the time to alert the enemy to their existence. But that didn't mean they couldn't pass those same pods on to their consorts. The Peeps' point defense tracks would amply demonstrate that the incoming fire had originated with the units actually towing the missiles at the moment they launched. What it wouldn't tell them was that all of those missiles were under the fine-meshed, carefully honed fire control of GNS Isaiah MacKenzie, with her two division mates poised to assist if they were needed.

Now, it could be argued that the "assist" would be with supplemental launches, I suppose, but that's not what the textev says, and it's also "years ago" and a couple generations of hardware back in the Honorverse, and the Mark 23E still has all of the original links in play PLUS the FTL & enhanced AI.

Plus I would find it hard to believe that Rozak's trick with the Marksman isn't already in the RMN playbook or will be in short order given that a) Manticoran tech is superior to Erewhons, and b) Anton Peterson, aka Caparelli's former chief of staff on loan from the RMN arrived very quickly after the request by Palane, etc. for naval assistance and was likely above Torch helping monitor the battle at the time of the battle with the PNE. If not before, you surely don't think that Hemphill is going to leave that stone unturned after that, do you?

One more about ship-to-ship handoff and a launch time interval that means that missile control can be handed off, synched up, etc. The textev is all the way back in PD1903:

Honor of the Queen wrote:Rafael Cardones fired his second broadside thirty seconds after the first, and Troubadour's launchers followed suit, slaved to his better fire control.

So are we going to argue about whether a Chanson class destroyer design (PD 1867 and later) can hand off to a Star Knight class (design date PD 1893 and after) can pass missile control between ships, but still say that the light speed links on later RMN missile classes cannot be used the same way?

Vince wrote:
Havenite ships can hand off control of attack missiles:

War of Honor, Chapter 58 wrote:Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs' long flight times, the Manties' deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos . . . and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21's flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge . . . and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters' fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.

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

This part of the book is referring to the passing of missile pods to other ships with functioning fire control. The missiles had not yet been launched from their pods. So this is not an example of control of already launched missiles being passed from one ship's fire control to another.

SharkHunter wrote:One more about ship-to-ship handoff and a launch time interval that means that missile control can be handed off, synched up, etc. The textev is all the way back in PD1903:

Honor of the Queen wrote:Rafael Cardones fired his second broadside thirty seconds after the first, and Troubadour's launchers followed suit, slaved to his better fire control.

So are we going to argue about whether a Chanson class destroyer design (PD 1867 and later) can hand off to a Star Knight class (design date PD 1893 and after) can pass missile control between ships, but still say that the light speed links on later RMN missile classes cannot be used the same way?

Isn't this refering to slaving fire control systems before the missiles are launched? If so, I'm still not passing control of already lunched missiles from one fire control system to another.

SharkHunter wrote:One more about ship-to-ship handoff and a launch time interval that means that missile control can be handed off, synched up, etc. The textev is all the way back in PD1903:

Honor of the Queen wrote:Rafael Cardones fired his second broadside thirty seconds after the first, and Troubadour's launchers followed suit, slaved to his better fire control.

So are we going to argue about whether a Chanson class destroyer design (PD 1867 and later) can hand off to a Star Knight class (design date PD 1893 and after) can pass missile control between ships, but still say that the light speed links on later RMN missile classes cannot be used the same way?

StealthSeeker wrote:Isn't this refering to slaving fire control systems before the missiles are launched? If so, I'm still not passing control of already lunched missiles from one fire control system to another.

This may be one example, with a comparison to the rotating control links pioneered by Shannon Foraker.

At All Costs, Chapter 65 wrote:Home Fleet's Fire Plan Avalanche called for the pre-pod superdreadnoughts to deploy their pods as quickly as possible. They had to jettison them anyway, in order to clear their own defensive systems, and D'Orville had known from the beginning that he was going to lose a huge percentage of their total pod loads without ever actually firing their missiles. There was nothing he could do about that, however, and the older ships passed control of as many of their additional missiles as they could to their more capable consorts.
The Medusa, Harrington, Adler, and Invictus-class ships didn't deploy a single pod of their own in the initial broadsides. They used solely the pods deployed by D'Orville's older ships, reserving their better protected, internally stowed pods for the follow-up salvos it was at least possible they might live to launch. And since they were firing pods which had been effectively deployed in a single massive pattern, Avalanche also fired its salvos in closer, more tightly spaced intervals than the Republican Navy had yet seen out of any Allied fleet. In fact, Avalanche was almost—not quite, but almost—conceptually identical to Shannon Foraker's rotating control doctrine.

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

The use of the phrase "the older ships passed control of as many of their additional missiles as they could to their more capable consorts" strongly implies that the older ships initially had control of the missiles they fired, then transferred that control to the newer ships. (You can't pass control of missile(s) from ship A to ship B if ship A never had control of missile(s) in the first place.)

Arguing against that is the fact that the older ships didn't have enough fire control links to control the missiles they fired from the pods they deployed (unless they were initially using rotating control links to maintain control of the missiles until the missiles moved far enough away from Home Fleet for the newer ships to establish line of sight to the missiles' transceivers and then acquire control of them).

--snipping--

Vince wrote:Arguing against that is the fact that the older ships didn't have enough fire control links to control the missiles they fired from the pods they deployed...

Thanks! that is way closer to some of the points I was groping towards than anything I've managed to articulate before.

Significantly: a different thread pointed out that in general, every ship in an attacking formation (likely squadron or task group level at least) is likely maneuvering within a light second of each other. 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. That plus ship-to-ship hand off suggests to me that the missile or missiles are pre-synched to an existing signal "channel" by the tactical computers, and will follow the directions from that channel all the way till the missile's end of run. I'm not generally talking about handing off a given set of missile's control channel willy-nilly in the battle space.

Tactically, to my mind this points towards the concept that there's no reason that each missile in a Mark-16 salvo or -pod shouldn't be slave-able to a specific ACM's tactical channel, even if "present ships" don't have the ability to independently launch that controlling missile in the first place. Handing off the channel to control the ACM from the ship launching it to to the ship assigned to it should be a piece of cake and redundant (light speed links) to any ship in the formation, and (FTL) to any KH-II platform in the system/battle space. Otherwise expecting increased accuracy at extended ranges starts to verge on the ridiculous.

All of that said... let's assume that a set of missiles can synch to a control signal within a light second shortly after launch. Even if a single "ACM" acts as that signal source as a rotating control for three pods, even using the "Spindle" tactical variation, that set of missiles would still be far more quickly update-able and still far more accurate than a former DDM/MDM pod & tubes based coordinating launch.

That's why I for one am arguing that a future version of the RMN's attack missiles, plus our notional "ACM-B", should be design/upgradable to do just that.

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.

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.

If the ACM wasn't a necessary component of salvo multiplication, several million Manticoran dollars could have been saved at Spindle by NOT launching the ACM's from the Apollo pods and controlling the Mk-23s directly.

--snipping--

Weird Harold wrote:

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.

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....

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.

What you get with the ACM is an AI that is multipliers more capable and powerful even independently of ship control than that in the Mark 23's, and a 64x faster link, so you can provide up to the last second updates for target, ECM, and penetration profiles. It also lets them stay clumped to make the ECM/Penaid and warhead hit likelihood much higher than eight missiles each trying to acquire the same target blindly.

How is that less sensical than individual control?

Unnesting quotes

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.

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)