Missile Telemetry

Somtaaw wrote:

Star Knight wrote:The comparatively tiny Mark-23E has the necessary hardware / bandwith / energy budget to control 8 other missiles. And uses a ninth link to get instructions from the waller.

The Apollo Control Missile is as large as two Mark 23's combined, thats why the pods went from 10 missiles per pod, to 8 plus the ACM. That's not comparatively tiny, when MDM's start at the 100 ton range, and go upwards from there, I would estimate Mark 23's at being somewhere between 130 tons and 150 tons per missile.

I think Star Knight meant "comparatively tiny" as compared to a starship's control links.

yeah, tiny compared to the volume/energy budget a Superdreadnought has available for missile control stuff

Duckk wrote:Because the Apollo missile doesn't need to talk to a missile 3+ light minutes away. It doesn't need a honking big transmitter any more than my wi-fi router needs to talk to the Mars rovers.

that sounds reasonable

To a point at least, i'd argue that space is big in any case and there should be know difference between Emitters covering a light second or a couple of light minutes.
But its no my tech to dream up anyway, so it wokrs however you say it works

Duckk wrote:

Star Knight wrote:How is it possible to get a control missile to send instructions and stuff to 8 other missiles, when a full sized SD(P) maxes out at about 400 control links?

Hell, you can just cut out the control missile, install the Apollo control unit on board of the waller itself and control 3.200 missiles at sublight speeds.

Because the Apollo missile doesn't need to talk to a missile 3+ light minutes away. It doesn't need a honking big transmitter any more than my wi-fi router needs to talk to the Mars rovers.

Also the ACM stays at roughly the same velocity as its brood, it doesn't have to deal with reshifting on the links to them.

A ship talking to a missile that's not only 3+ lightminutes away, but going up to 0.8c, has to have much more power and much wider frequency support than a control missile talking to missiles less than a couple light seconds away moving at roughly the same speed.

I'd speculate that, to keep missile size down, you might try and put all the redshift handling on the shipboard control link hardware. The missiles could use more or less fixed frequency trancievers, and let the ship deal talk to them by broadcasting on high enough extra frequency that the signal will redshift down to what the missile us expecting; and simultaneously receive at way lower frequency than the missile sent (and of course those frequencies change throughout the missile's flight). (Plus in a cell phone like method you could use a smaller, less powerful transmitter and antenna on the missile end if you put much bigger more sensitive receivers on the ship as well as a more powerful transmitter there)

But, again, an ACM need not deal with that while talking to its 8 nearby, formation flying, controlled missiles.

It's important to remember that Apollo is the combination of two, maybe three concepts - FTL transceiver and relay missiles, with the third being a beefed up tac computer.

Each of those three concepts in isolation trades off more than it gains.

1) FTL transceiver on all missiles = ammo capacity cut by over half(instead of ~20%).
2) You don't need a LS relay missile; as Haven showed, it's possible to rotate fire control links for a modest accuracy penalty. They also slaved entire pods of missiles to each of a fort's fire control channel at Barnett. There is no intrinsic benefit to a LS relay missile - indeed, it would impose delays upon the communication loop - and until podlayers showed up, even pod-towing combatants could not saturate their own fire control anyway.
3) As with #1, adding or reallocating mass on all missiles to larger and better computers = ammo capacity cuts. It's also a comparative waste of computing power, as each missile then only has one payload to deliver(as it is currently, Apollo's beefy computer has six attack and two EW missiles to work with).

Lord Skimper wrote:Other than a way to control missiles, which we know by definition, what is it, how does it work?

Is it Ladar, radar, or something else? Why is it limited to a few 'channels' and why does it take up hull space on a ship?

According to MaxxQBuNine in response to my query about his images of a Star Knight cruiser on DeviantArt, there are flat panels mounted below each missile tube which are radar or the 20th Century PD equivalent. There are also LIDAR transmitters for the energy weapons.

For the actual images & his reply to my comment go to DeviantArt & look up his images. They are excellent.

munroburton wrote:It's important to remember that Apollo is the combination of two, maybe three concepts - FTL transceiver and relay missiles, with the third being a beefed up tac computer.

Each of those three concepts in isolation trades off more than it gains.

1) FTL transceiver on all missiles = ammo capacity cut by over half(instead of ~20%).
2) You don't need a LS relay missile; as Haven showed, it's possible to rotate fire control links for a modest accuracy penalty. They also slaved entire pods of missiles to each of a fort's fire control channel at Barnett. There is no intrinsic benefit to a LS relay missile - indeed, it would impose delays upon the communication loop - and until podlayers showed up, even pod-towing combatants could not saturate their own fire control anyway.
3) As with #1, adding or reallocating mass on all missiles to larger and better computers = ammo capacity cuts. It's also a comparative waste of computing power, as each missile then only has one payload to deliver(as it is currently, Apollo's beefy computer has six attack and two EW missiles to work with).

I'm not so sure about your second point. Consider what happened to the SLN SDs at Spindle, where 12 Saganami-C CAs used FTL links to RDs to obtain targeting information that was sent via light-speed links to Apollo Control Missiles (and in turn to the attack and ECM missiles) fired from pre-positioned missile pods from missile colliers, vastly multiplying the amount of missiles they could control.

munroburton wrote:It's important to remember that Apollo is the combination of two, maybe three concepts - FTL transceiver and relay missiles, with the third being a beefed up tac computer.

Each of those three concepts in isolation trades off more than it gains.

1) FTL transceiver on all missiles = ammo capacity cut by over half(instead of ~20%).
2) You don't need a LS relay missile; as Haven showed, it's possible to rotate fire control links for a modest accuracy penalty. They also slaved entire pods of missiles to each of a fort's fire control channel at Barnett. There is no intrinsic benefit to a LS relay missile - indeed, it would impose delays upon the communication loop - and until podlayers showed up, even pod-towing combatants could not saturate their own fire control anyway.
3) As with #1, adding or reallocating mass on all missiles to larger and better computers = ammo capacity cuts. It's also a comparative waste of computing power, as each missile then only has one payload to deliver(as it is currently, Apollo's beefy computer has six attack and two EW missiles to work with).

Regarding the part of your post that is highlighted.

That's not acceptable for Apollo. Apollo's advantage, although because of FTL, is its accuracy. You don't want to ever give up any of your main advantage. We have already established that the control missiles do not talk to each other so they cannot relay any last updated information. And the decreased accuracy would not remain constant across the board, being vulnerable to distance, complexity of vectors, EW and attack profiles.

And in the midst of that chaos, you don't want to be cutting communications channels to rotate, even temporarily - which effectively that's what it amounts to - regardless of the gigasecond response time of the rotating connections/computers.

Vince wrote:

munroburton wrote:It's important to remember that Apollo is the combination of two, maybe three concepts - FTL transceiver and relay missiles, with the third being a beefed up tac computer.

Each of those three concepts in isolation trades off more than it gains.

1) FTL transceiver on all missiles = ammo capacity cut by over half(instead of ~20%).
2) You don't need a LS relay missile; as Haven showed, it's possible to rotate fire control links for a modest accuracy penalty. They also slaved entire pods of missiles to each of a fort's fire control channel at Barnett. There is no intrinsic benefit to a LS relay missile - indeed, it would impose delays upon the communication loop - and until podlayers showed up, even pod-towing combatants could not saturate their own fire control anyway.
3) As with #1, adding or reallocating mass on all missiles to larger and better computers = ammo capacity cuts. It's also a comparative waste of computing power, as each missile then only has one payload to deliver(as it is currently, Apollo's beefy computer has six attack and two EW missiles to work with).

I'm not so sure about your second point. Consider what happened to the SLN SDs at Spindle, where 12 Saganami-C CAs used FTL links to RDs to obtain targeting information that was sent via light-speed links to Apollo Control Missiles (and in turn to the attack and ECM missiles) fired from pre-positioned missile pods from missile colliers, vastly multiplying the amount of missiles they could control.

They combined all three concepts in some way at Spindle, despite not having full FTL control. As you point out, they used FTL-capable RDs to close half of the loop and took advantage of the home ground to pre-position vast numbers of pods.

Any deficiencies they suffered from being limited to LS control was more than made up for by the control bird's extended computers, massive stacks of defensively deployed pods and most crucially, the SLN's hopelessly obsolete ships.

These capabilities aren't replicable in an enemy system or against a near-peer navy. Heck, Admiral Chin's 5th Fleet managed to shoot down twenty thousand of the sixty thousand missiles fired at her under full FTL control. Compare that to the paltry 12,220 or so Crandall was fired upon with LS links and how few of it they stopped.

cthia wrote:

munroburton wrote:It's important to remember that Apollo is the combination of two, maybe three concepts - FTL transceiver and relay missiles, with the third being a beefed up tac computer.

Each of those three concepts in isolation trades off more than it gains.

1) FTL transceiver on all missiles = ammo capacity cut by over half(instead of ~20%).
2) You don't need a LS relay missile; as Haven showed, it's possible to rotate fire control links for a modest accuracy penalty. They also slaved entire pods of missiles to each of a fort's fire control channel at Barnett. There is no intrinsic benefit to a LS relay missile - indeed, it would impose delays upon the communication loop - and until podlayers showed up, even pod-towing combatants could not saturate their own fire control anyway.
3) As with #1, adding or reallocating mass on all missiles to larger and better computers = ammo capacity cuts. It's also a comparative waste of computing power, as each missile then only has one payload to deliver(as it is currently, Apollo's beefy computer has six attack and two EW missiles to work with).

Regarding the part of your post that is highlighted.

That's not acceptable for Apollo. Apollo's advantage, although because of FTL, is its accuracy. You don't want to ever give up any of your main advantage. We have already established that the control missiles do not talk to each other so they cannot relay any last updated information. And the decreased accuracy would not remain constant across the board, being vulnerable to distance, complexity of vectors, EW and attack profiles.

And in the midst of that chaos, you don't want to be cutting communications channels to rotate, even temporarily - which effectively that's what it amounts to - regardless of the gigasecond response time of the rotating connections/computers.

On the contrary, Apollo actually further enables temporarily rotating your control links to other Apollo missiles, because they specifically have enhanced computers that have that autonomous mode. And even by rotating those links among several ACM's, due to the FTL nature, you aren't actually losing very much accuracy at all because you're still using FTL comms to transmit back and forth between launch ship and ACM.

You could basically do a BoMa Second Fleet and just rotate through hundreds of Apollo's, each controlling their 8 brothers & sisters, and the tiny accuracy degradation is still more than off-set by the fact you've got eight times as many missiles in space. And each cluster has that Apollo computer in autonomous mode in between rotations, which is probably at least as good as a pre-war destroyer working off the last set of FTL-transmitted instructions.


The only time you're actually not getting a performance increase, is because you're at SDM ranges, so you can't gain any of the Apollo FTL advantages, nor can you launch enough missiles at SDM ranges to really ramp up the missiles in flight before they're detonating.

cthia wrote:And in the midst of that chaos, you don't want to be cutting communications channels to rotate, even temporarily - which effectively that's what it amounts to - regardless of the gigasecond response time of the rotating connections/computers.

I really hope 21st century AD computers are considerably faster than a gigasecond response time.