Stupid Apollo Tricks

Loren Pechtel wrote:1) Why burn missile stages to do what the starship drive can do?

To add to what a starship drive can do. Also because a missiles wedge at the kind of ranges I specified is barely detectable and of no concern if they are detected at that range; it's far beyond even effective MDM range, after all.

Loren Pechtel wrote:2) This reveals 4-stage missiles for no good reason.

The idea will work for any missile capable of a ballistic phase. It works better for four stages, and the first two stages would be far enough out they couldn't be counted.

The third stage burn for mid-flight course correction is more likely to spill the beans to an alert sensor tech, but it isn't really required.

Loren Pechtel wrote:3) If you C-frac plus burn the missile it will be going at over 97% of lightspeed when the last stage fires. Think it's seeker will function?

No idea what the final velocity might be, but it should be something close to what the four-stage Apollo can achieve from rest with four consecutive burns. The sensors should be able to handle that with a margin of error. Obviously, you're not going to boost the missiles beyond their sensors' limits.

Weird Harold wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Given how Mycrofts are described, as fire control relays, I'm not sure that's sufficient to pull off this trick.

A Rising Thunder
Chapter Thirty-three wrote:Essentially, Mycroft was simply a couple of dozen Keyhole-Two platforms parked at various points in a star system. It was a little more complicated than that, since the platforms were designed to operate on beamed power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.

Mycroft is a Keyhole II + everything from ship-board that supports it. Since it is inspired by Moriarty it probably has a SD's Tactical Department and appropriate life support aboard as well.

Huh, I obviously forgot that passage. I wonder why they did it that way. I've got a hard time accepting that Manticore is willing to give autonomous computers launch control over missiles with literally hyperlimit wide reach - especially since RFC has been fairly insistant that man in the loop results in more effective performance from missiles; do to human insight on ECM timing and approach as well as loading new filters to help ignore (or home in on) decoys and ECM from the target.

But nothing seems to show Mycroft as a manned platform (if so I'd expect it to be bigger and tougher - in realiting Apollo capable forts scattered around. Manticore knows to well, from their own attack with Mistletoe, how vulnerable the personnel on a manned fire control platform can be if it's not in an armored and defended installation.

And frankly originating fire control from the nearest Mycroft node (as opposed to relaying it) seems relatively pointless. From a fort in planetary orbit you can cover over half the volume inside the hyper limit with relayed FTL at less lag than lightspped control of an MDM at max powered range (65 million km) More than enough reach to crush any attack well short of their own effective range.

Maybe the local autonomous fire control is a fallback? Once send commands placing it at the equivalent of general quarters maybe it can autonomously counter-attack if the normal control forts are somehow taken out?
There would still be some risk that an inopportune communication loss could lead to it launching against somebody it shouldn't, but at least it wouldn't be in that mode all the time. 'Cause that system has a much, much, wider danger zone that the mines that can autonomously engage unknown wormhole transits during wartime - I wouldn't want to leave it in "auto-launch" mode any longer than I had to.

Or maybe it's a compromise solution. It still needs a remote authorization to launch, but self-generates all the detailed fire control commands. But then, based on RFC's pervious statements, it should be far less effective than if it had a full human run tactical section in the loop...


Guess we'll just have to wait and see if RFC elaborates on exactly how it's normally used.

Weird Harold wrote:No idea what the final velocity might be, but it should be something close to what the four-stage Apollo can achieve from rest with four consecutive burns. The sensors should be able to handle that with a margin of error. Obviously, you're not going to boost the missiles beyond their sensors' limits.

Actually we don't know what that would be. Missiles don't seem to suffer relativistic effects from their high speed - a 3 drive MDM burns out at around 80% the speed of light. But the distance the books state they travel corresponds to Newtonian physics, not relativistic. My personal retcon is that wedges somehow can apply more power to offset the relativistic mass gain so they don't lose acceleration due to time dilation and mass increase.

But if you try to apply those same Newtonian calculations to a 4 drive they'll tell you in a straight-line run it burns out 1.07c; which is obvious nonsense. Not sure if RFC is going to start factoring in relativistic effects past 0.82c, or declare a speed limit based on wedge 'magic', or what. But until we know, we can't figure out what they'd be capable of, except that it's pretty clearly more than the 0.81c the normal 3 drive Mk23 can do.

Jonathan_S wrote:Huh, I obviously forgot that passage. I wonder why they did it that way. I've got a hard time accepting that Manticore is willing to give autonomous computers launch control over missiles with literally hyperlimit wide reach - especially since RFC has been fairly insistant that man in the loop results in more effective performance from missiles; do to human insight on ECM timing and approach as well as loading new filters to help ignore (or home in on) decoys and ECM from the target.

1) I did specify Mycroft Control Centers in my original suggestion under the assumption that there would be human tactical experts in control of the whole Mycroft self-defense system. A simple FTL relay wouldn't suffice for the kind of target selection and missile control. FWIW, the Apollo ACM has enough AI to manage its brood if the fire-control link is lost; it is more capable than a single MK-23 mounts but essentially the same contingency plan that single missile that loses lock and control-link to reacquire the best target available.

2) I don't seen any textev that Mycroft is an autonomous system. It is a system of networked FTL Fire-control relays. In a full System Defense Mycroft installation, the majority of nodes would be simple fire control relays with one to three control centers with a human tactical staff to make the tactical decisions. In the application I proposed, only the human staffed control centers would be practical and the dispersed "cell tower" scrambling function would not be as critical to success.

caias wrote:

Henry Brown wrote:Or they could just use the sort of tactics Rozak used at the Battle of Torch. Where he had a few fairly modern cruisers to provide fire control. And an ammunition ship to dump pods. The difference is, the Rolands would have much better long range sensors and fire control than the ships Rozsak had at Torch. And the pods the ammunition ship would be dumping would contain much better missiles than the ones he was using.

Which is also pretty much what Henke and Terekhov did at Spindle. Clearly that works. I was thinking of tricks we haven't seen yet. Like abusing the stealth advantage, and the fire control multiplication of Apollo.

Weird Harold wrote:
Your thread title brought to mind the adage, "If it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid."

PS: Your idea would work as well with Mk-23's or Mk16's as with Apollo. The only advantage would be the control-link multiplier of the ACM, but a Roland's normal control channels should be sufficient to control enough missiles for a surprise attack.

I was aiming for "Stupid Pet Tricks", but your version works, too.

With regards to the point at hand, though, I was assuming a Roland has ~40 fire control channels (24 missles per salvo, and the 60% redundancy that the RMN seems to aim for), which would be a pretty small salvo, even in a sneak attack. 320 missiles (8*40) seems much more useful.

Apollo fire control doesn't multiply your ships fire control. You need to send all for signals one for each missile through the apollo missile. Apollo extends range not multiplies missile controls. Roland would be limited to 36-40 missiles.

Lord Skimper wrote:Apollo fire control doesn't multiply your ships fire control. You need to send all for signals one for each missile through the apollo missile. Apollo extends range not multiplies missile controls. Roland would be limited to 36-40 missiles.

Try again.

Duckk wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Apollo fire control doesn't multiply your ships fire control. You need to send all for signals one for each missile through the apollo missile. Apollo extends range not multiplies missile controls. Roland would be limited to 36-40 missiles.

Try again.

Skimper, here's a Hint - read At All Costs. It's clearly stated in chapter 68. (And I think also elsewhere in the series, but that's the first reference I found again)

Jonathan_S wrote: (And I think also elsewhere in the series, but that's the first reference I found again)

Battle of Spindle in MoH
CruRon94 and CruDiv 96.1 fired 1500 Mark19 pods with 1500 control links at the SLN Task Force.
The individual missiles were controlled by the Mark 23-Es.

Can we get away with vectoring Apollo right up their hollow? How stealthy is Apollo? Storyline always supported getting in embarrassingly close.

And can we vector an RD in someone's LAC bay as they're launching? Set to self-destruct?

Why did RFC say that SD(P) can only control 200 missiles. seems they could control 1600-2400 each.