kzt wrote:You misunderstand. They were not “controlling” them. They were launched in fire and forget mode. What they sent them was a flight plan and target cueing, and then told them ‘now go get em!’. Everything after launch was up to the missiles. That’s why David brought up the control missiles the way he did.
Yes.
Something that's been part of the Honorverse from the get go was the problem of any individual missile visualizing the entire battlefield, especially with all the various decoys, jammers, deception mode EW, etc., cranked in. In addition, because of wedge interference, it was really difficult for missiles to communicate with other missiles, especially after evasive routing and maneuvers were cranked in. I'm not saying that any of those things were flat out impossible; I'm saying that the ability to do any of them was severely constrained by these factors. In addition, missile defense was good enough to nail almost any pre-laserhead missile well before it reached attack range. This results in a situation in which missile design philosophy was: these things are going to have minimal hit chances once they get beyond the envelope where their profiles can be updated by someone who can see the entire battlefield, so build them cheap enough (and small enough) we can use them en masse to have a chance of swamping the missile defense.
Recall, BTW, that we're talking about points on a spectrum here, a process in evolution. If you are reading the Travis Lee novels, for example, you will see a huge difference between Travis's missiles and those of Honor's time in terms of relative size, acceleration rates, and general capabilities. Remember, however, that the development of effective laserheads (and the stand off range they permitted) was a relatively recent development as of Basilisk Station.
By the time Roger launched his R&D programs, the missile paradigm had translated (wisely or not) into missiles which had minimal sensor capability as individuals. None of them tried to communicate with each other, except at extremely short range, but each of them carried telemetry links to the launching platforms which allowed those platforms to correlate the take from all the other missiles in the salvo (i.e., from dozens of sensor platforms in a dispersed array). That meant the ships which had launched them were able to do very sophisticated modeling of the tactical environment, then direct the missiles to attack most effectively so long as they were within close enough range that transmission lag was manageable. Beyond that range, hit probabilities dropped off dramatically, which is one reason no one had poured a lot of effort into developing the equivalent of the Saganami-B's extended range missiles. The extra expense and size wasn't worth worth it in weapons which would have very little chance of scoring a hit at their maximum powered range.
This was a well understood model at the beginning of the Havenite Wars. The impact of laserheads in combat was less well understood, because the combatants were sort of in the position of the Royal British Navy in 1914, hypothesizing about the effectiveness of torpedoes based on the experience of the Russo-Japanese war. There was a lot of theoretical analysis and not a lot of hands-on "Oh my God, they're shooting at us!" data to go around.
Project Gram unbalanced the prewar concept of missile doctrine in oh, so many ways. Range was vastly increased, but the MDM's much greater range made the existing "cheap-but-myopic" missile design increasingly less useful. The first step was to improve the individual missile's sensors and onboard computer capability, which allowed hit probabilities at extreme range (which was now much more extreme than it had ever been before) to remain within combat-effective levels, although they were considerably lower than they'd been when the combat ranges were such as to allow effective shipboard control. This is essentially where the RMN was at the time of Operation Buttercup and where the RHN was at the time of Operation Thunderbolt.
When the basic research for Ghost Rider was combined with the MDM, the telemetry range was enormously increased, as well, which restored that portion of the earlier missile paradigm, using the far more capable missiles which had been developed in the meantime. When you couple that with the more powerful laser heads being mounted aboard the missiles, missile combat at what was once extreme range (but would now be considered moderate range, at worst) became really, really deadly. At extended ranges, it was more lethal than it had ever been before, but the possibility of extended missile exchanges (assuming that one side didn't have a "kill-them-all-twice" superiority in pods at the beginning of the engagement) became feasible.
The real killer aspect of Apollo comes in three stages:
(1) The vast range and energetic terminal maneuvers possible for a three-stage MDM. (There is also a four-stage system defense missile, but it had not been put into volume production before Oyster Bay and the decision was made to focus Beowulf's missile production capability on the standard Apollo that could be carried aboard warships.) This particular part of what I think of as the "Apollo Triad" is shared with all other MDMs, of course, but the other two legs of the triad give it enormously more impact in Apollo's case.
(2) The FTL telemetry link, which continues to tie shipboard control (and the greater "reach" the controlling ship and all her consorts possess) into the targeting process when it comes to analyzing the battlefield and directing attack assets as effectively as possible "on-the-fly" at ranges which were previously unimaginable.
(3) The Mark 23-E. The Echo is the most important part of the entire Apollo system. Not only is it the FTL relay through which the firing ships communicate with the attack missiles, but because the Echo is following along behind the attack birds, it is screened and protected by their wedge interference, which means it doesn't have to maneuver erratically even as the salvo approaches its target. Its onboard AI is the best in the business, and while it has no sensors of its own, it gets superb input from the highly capable sensors now mounted in the individual Mark 23s. And all of the Mark 23-Es talk to each other, sharing the data from "their" attack missiles. They are, in effect, capable of performing the function of the controlling starships in the traditional, pre-MDM combat environment, even at maximum powered and ballistic range. One of the key points here is that they can perform that function for any starship that launches them. They are most effective when they can combine with all of the launch platforms' telemetry, as well, since in really big salvos — and I believe we can safely say that we have seen some REALLY Big Salvos in recent years — not even Mark 23-Es have the lateral "reach" to access and process the sensor take from every missile in the salvo.
What this means is that as long as a salvo of Mark 23s is in effective FTL telemetry range of the launching ships (that is, close enough range that the upgrade and performance outweighs the degradation of the transmission lag), an Apollo-armed ship equipped with Keyhole-Two is a sniper armed with a Barrett against anyone without comparable technology. The Mark 23-E, even without Keyhole-Two, is probably the equivalent of a sniper armed with a Springfield in the same range bracket. Beyond that range, when even FTL telemetry is taken out of the equation, the Mark 23-E turns a salvo of Mark 23s into infantry armed with rifles with iron sights up against matchlock-armed musketeers. Large salvo size is still required in order to penetrate capable defenses, but missiles which do penetrate score far, far higher percentages of hits.
This is why there are passages in the books which comment on the fact that extreme-range Apollo launches are much less accurate than closer-ranged launches . . . only enormously more accurate than anyone else's launches.
This is what bit Capriotti at Beowulf even after Mycroft was taken off the table. As I believe I said before, Mycroft is effectively the cherry on top of a system defense capability — the MDM and Apollo — which would already be decisive against almost any attack. In a very real sense, Apollo has returned attacks launched from inside the hyper-limit of a heavily defended star system to the days when Horatio Nelson said "A ship's a fool to fight a fort."
Now, no one says the missile paradigm is going to stay where it is, of course!
Edited to add:
I might point out that the reason Honor used Hermes against Tourville at Manticore was because she wanted to make sure the missiles missed and then to convince him — because of her FTL communications capability — that she could kill every one of his ships with impunity. Which happened to be true.
What Shannon and Sonja come up with in this book that does marry the Hermes buoy to Ghost Rider drones is a jury-rigged lash-up designed to provide a sort (a rather limping, staggering sort) version of Apollo's extended targeting capability to Mark 16-armed BC(P)s. It's nowhere near as capable as Apollo; it's only a lot more capable than anyone else has.
you understand — that the Alignment has gotten at least a pretty good peek at the Grand Alliance's technology. Not necessarily inside the nuts and bolts or the maintenance manuals, since both sides are pretty fanatical about security where that's concerned, but they've got at least as much of an idea about current Alliance military capabilities and where their own R&D programs need to go as the Grand Alliance has now about the streak drive, courtesy of Herlander Simões.
