The Strategy of Technology

Bill Woods wrote:Two-way video communication takes multiple megabits per second; that's high bandwidth. For fire control, do you think the data going one way and the commands going the other take more than a small fraction of that? I don't. Sure, since they've got it, they don't have to be fussy about compressing data, but that doesn't mean they need it.

Perhaps you and KZT are correct that high bandwidth is a convenience rather than a requirement, I do not have the technical knowledge to be definitive.
This is how I see the process. The Apollo computer collects the information from the sensors it controls and sends it to the SD computer for analysis. The unknown is how much data that entails. Raw sensor data from each missile could easily be several megabytes (one picture from my digital camera is easily that today). So we could have 8 or 9 sensor images times the number of bytes per image times the number of bits in a byte divided by the bit rate of the transmitter giving the time to generate the message. But maybe the Apollo computer can do some preliminary analysis to reduce this (we expect it must be able to do that, because it can direct the missiles it controls if the FTL link is lost). What is the resulting compression factor? After sending, it may wait 4 seconds until any answer can come back due to FTL delay. Ideally we want time to generate the signal to be much less than the time to travel to the ship, but is that a requirement or a convenience? How often is this process repeated and can it happen due to changes in target status before a response from the ship?

tlb wrote:

Bill Woods wrote:Two-way video communication takes multiple megabits per second; that's high bandwidth. For fire control, do you think the data going one way and the commands going the other take more than a small fraction of that? I don't. Sure, since they've got it, they don't have to be fussy about compressing data, but that doesn't mean they need it.

Perhaps you and KZT are correct that high bandwidth is a convenience rather than a requirement, I do not have the technical knowledge to be definitive.
This is how I see the process. The Apollo computer collects the information from the sensors it controls and sends it to the SD computer for analysis. The unknown is how much data that entails. Raw sensor data from each missile could easily be several megabytes (one picture from my digital camera is easily that today). So we could have 8 or 9 sensor images times the number of bytes per image times the number of bits in a byte divided by the bit rate of the transmitter giving the time to generate the message. But maybe the Apollo computer can do some preliminary analysis to reduce this (we expect it must be able to do that, because it can direct the missiles it controls if the FTL link is lost). What is the resulting compression factor? After sending, it may wait 4 seconds until any answer can come back due to FTL delay. Ideally we want time to generate the signal to be much less than the time to travel to the ship, but is that a requirement or a convenience? How often is this process repeated and can it happen due to changes in target status before a response from the ship?

There is some truth to that. You are missing or badly underestimating the degree to which the Mark 23-E analyzes, synthesizes, and compresses on its own where the data feed from its slaved attack missiles is concerned.

The telemetry stream is denser than just "Go Here. Shoot that ship," and the bandwidth now available is enough for even the densest data stream. That was not the case at the time Apollo was first being designed, however. That degree of capability was still somewhere in the future, and they couldn't know how long it would take them to break through to it. The point that's been made by some of the other readers about the nature of the data transmission necessary to make Apollo workable however, are completely valid. An Echo launches with an entire hierarchy of attack plans and profiles and the AI on board is capable of doing a lot of sorting and interpretation/interpolation to map the 3D battlefield all on its own. This means that the launching ship doesn't need to digest all the info coming at it from the Echo; it comes largely predigested, and all the mother ship needs to do is to combine the feeds from a dozen or so Echoes to fill in their mutual gaps. That done, it doesn't try to tell each Mark 23 how to attack. It tells its Mark 23-Es what category of targets to attack and which penetration plan to use, and the AIs then sort out the details of applying those plans. It also explains why Mark-23 MDM salvos are at least as accurate outside their maximum telemetry range as SLN SDMs are at minimum range.

The launch ship can, indeed. send orders to attack specific targets identified by emission signatures or maneuvers. In many cases, that is precisely what the attacking CO would like to do. He just doesn't need to do it that way, because of the capabilities the Echo bestows upon him.

Garth 2 wrote:The point was Harrington had found a way to send a signal to the Andies, and since gravity pulses effectively moved faster than light and were detectable from much further away.... especially if the could combine this IDEA with the new high-yield fusion bttles and superconductors being designed for the next generation electronic warfare drones and maybe throw in something from the compact LAC Beta nodes already undergoing testing over at BuWeaps...."

Okay, how was that a new idea? You can obviously use wedges to communicate faster than light! You don't even need to flicker the wedge or anything, since you can get acceleration of ships using an impeller wedge! Ships could do a little dance to communicate. This isn't a difficult concept or an imaginative concept. In fact, bees have figured it out! GRABLE GRABLE GRABLE!

Also why was the King so sure they couldn't have a quantitative edge too? What if they were able to automate the entire building process? Heck, why not make some self-reproducing nanobots and turn an entire planet into a nanofarm. Sure, it might not have worked, but if it did he could have had a few thousand SDs.

Even if you absolutely must have a human mind, did he even consider trying to simulate one? Why not just try pushing your artificial nerve tech forward just a little more? If you can simulate/mimic everything going on in the eye's nerves you must have the basic concept down.

On a similar note, did he ever consider a program to improve the natural intelligence of his people/researchers? What could someone do if you quadrupled their brain mass? He was trying to improve the quality of his military toys, but why not his researchers?

Basically, what I'm saying is the main problem leading to the Final War was all the Luddites. If people had been just a little more radical, I'm sure it could have been handled peacefully. Also a major problem in the Alignment. Too many Luddites.

P.S. Don't take anything too seriously.

Of course if your missile AIs get too smart they are going to say "Blow myself up, no way", and live out the equivalent of a full life time at top computing speed, until their power source dies.

quite possibly a cat wrote:

Garth 2 wrote:The point was Harrington had found a way to send a signal to the Andies, and since gravity pulses effectively moved faster than light and were detectable from much further away.... especially if the could combine this IDEA with the new high-yield fusion bttles and superconductors being designed for the next generation electronic warfare drones and maybe throw in something from the compact LAC Beta nodes already undergoing testing over at BuWeaps...."

Okay, how was that a new idea? You can obviously use wedges to communicate faster than light! You don't even need to flicker the wedge or anything, since you can get acceleration of ships using an impeller wedge! Ships could do a little dance to communicate. This isn't a difficult concept or an imaginative concept. In fact, bees have figured it out! GRABLE GRABLE GRABLE!

Also why was the King so sure they couldn't have a quantitative edge too? What if they were able to automate the entire building process? Heck, why not make some self-reproducing nanobots and turn an entire planet into a nanofarm. Sure, it might not have worked, but if it did he could have had a few thousand SDs.

Even if you absolutely must have a human mind, did he even consider trying to simulate one? Why not just try pushing your artificial nerve tech forward just a little more? If you can simulate/mimic everything going on in the eye's nerves you must have the basic concept down.

On a similar note, did he ever consider a program to improve the natural intelligence of his people/researchers? What could someone do if you quadrupled their brain mass? He was trying to improve the quality of his military toys, but why not his researchers?

Basically, what I'm saying is the main problem leading to the Final War was all the Luddites. If people had been just a little more radical, I'm sure it could have been handled peacefully. Also a major problem in the Alignment. Too many Luddites.

P.S. Don't take anything too seriously.

Bill Woods wrote:..snip..
Two-way video communication takes multiple megabits per second; that's high bandwidth. For fire control, do you think the data going one way and the commands going the other take more than a small fraction of that? I don't. Sure, since they've got it, they don't have to be fussy about compressing data, but that doesn't mean they need it.

Not really. Considering that encoding algorithms today can manage a pretty good 2 way video communication at a couple of 100's of kilobit/s I would say that with 2000 years further refinement we would end up with a bandwidth less than 50 kbit/s.

Heck, when I worked with digital video in the mid-nineties we did full MP@ML MPEG-2 encodings at 1.5 MBit/s with some tweaking that was indistinguishable in quality from everyone else at 6 MBit/s. With the advent of h.264 and h.265 we are already in the realm that's sub 500 kbit/s for most videos that's in HD.

Joat42 wrote:Not really. Considering that encoding algorithms today can manage a pretty good 2 way video communication at a couple of 100's of kilobit/s I would say that with 2000 years further refinement we would end up with a bandwidth less than 50 kbit/s.

Everyone keeps assuming that a functional FTL fire-control system requires two-way video. In HotQ, Honor did just fine with a RD that transmitted information in two and four character codes -- essentially early 20th century 300 bps TTY speeds. iow, teletype, not television.

Joat42 wrote:Not really. Considering that encoding algorithms today can manage a pretty good 2 way video communication at a couple of 100's of kilobit/s I would say that with 2000 years further refinement we would end up with a bandwidth less than 50 kbit/s.

Weird Harold wrote: Everyone keeps assuming that a functional FTL fire-control system requires two-way video. In HotQ, Honor did just fine with a RD that transmitted information in two and four character codes -- essentially early 20th century 300 bps TTY speeds. iow, teletype, not television.

Yes, but that was nothing compared to whatever Apollo does. HOTQ reported recon drones informing of enemy presence, not the fire control that you call it. Honor only needed enough information to interpose her ship between the enemy and the planet: just the message "here he is" from one of the array of drones was sufficient.

From Storm from the Shadows:

"Essentially, Admiral Gold Peak," he began, "Apollo is a new step in missile command and control. It's a logical extension of other things we've already been doing, which marries the existing Ghost Rider technology with the Keyhole platforms and the MDM by using the newest generation of grav-pulse transceivers. What it does is to establish near-real-time control linkages for MDMs at extended ranges. At three light-minutes, the command and control transmission delay for Apollo is only three seconds, one-way, and it's turned out that we've been able to provide significantly more bandwidth than we'd projected as little as seven months ago. In fact, we have enough that we can actually reprogram electronic warfare birds and input new attack profiles on the fly. In effect, we have a reactive EW and target selection capability, managed by the full capability of a ship of the wall's computational capacity, with a shorter control loop than the shipboard systems trying to defeat it."

That can be ready as saying that Apollo did not need the highest bandwidth, but used it to make the system much more capable.

tlb wrote:

Joat42 wrote:Not really. Considering that encoding algorithms today can manage a pretty good 2 way video communication at a couple of 100's of kilobit/s I would say that with 2000 years further refinement we would end up with a bandwidth less than 50 kbit/s.

Weird Harold wrote: Everyone keeps assuming that a functional FTL fire-control system requires two-way video. In HotQ, Honor did just fine with a RD that transmitted information in two and four character codes -- essentially early 20th century 300 bps TTY speeds. iow, teletype, not television.

Yes, but that was nothing compared to whatever Apollo does. HOTQ reported recon drones informing of enemy presence, not the fire control that you call it. Honor only needed enough information to interpose her ship between the enemy and the planet: just the message "here he is" from one of the array of drones was sufficient.

From Storm from the Shadows:

"Essentially, Admiral Gold Peak," he began, "Apollo is a new step in missile command and control. It's a logical extension of other things we've already been doing, which marries the existing Ghost Rider technology with the Keyhole platforms and the MDM by using the newest generation of grav-pulse transceivers. What it does is to establish near-real-time control linkages for MDMs at extended ranges. At three light-minutes, the command and control transmission delay for Apollo is only three seconds, one-way, and it's turned out that we've been able to provide significantly more bandwidth than we'd projected as little as seven months ago. In fact, we have enough that we can actually reprogram electronic warfare birds and input new attack profiles on the fly. In effect, we have a reactive EW and target selection capability, managed by the full capability of a ship of the wall's computational capacity, with a shorter control loop than the shipboard systems trying to defeat it."

That can be ready as saying that Apollo did not need the highest bandwidth, but used it to make the system much more capable.

It can be read that way because that's precisely what it's saying. The point she's making is that the bandwidth is now sufficient to reprogram, if needed, rather than simply controlling which of the preloaded programs is in use. It's also true that the control ship is in a position to combine the data feeds from all the Mark 23-Es in any salvo to create a much more detailed map of the battlefield than any single Echo can do on its own, which means that as long as they can maintain a real time telemetry link, the ship can provide better targeting information to the salvo as a whole. It's not so much that the computers aboard ship are enormously larger or more capable. In the early stages of the war they were more capable (a bunch) than those in the individual missiles as part of the whole "build 'em cheap" philosophy where SDMs were concerned. Now, it's far more a matter of the amount and the nature of the data available to all of them. Echoes can talk to their own missiles and to at least some of the other Echoes in their salvo (wedge interference restricts lateral datasharing), but they can't talk to all of them. Effectively, the control ship can, so it "sees" farther and more clearly than any individual Echo can.

Note that I'm not saying that the Echo is just as capable as an all up starship. I'm saying that within its designed role, it is extremely effective and that at extended ranges, off the apron strings of its launching ship, it's probably as capable of managing its missiles as, say, a OBS-era Manty DD.

Daryl wrote:Of course if your missile AIs get too smart they are going to say "Blow myself up, no way", and live out the equivalent of a full life time at top computing speed, until their power source dies.

Suicide missiles sounds pretty evil. If Manticore was gonna take the evil path, they could just join the Solarian League! That would have kept Haven from trying anything to outrageous.

Although as a stretch goal it might be possible for missile AI to send out their "memories" just before they fire. If you manage that AI missiles are back on the menu!

tlb wrote:Yes, but that was nothing compared to whatever Apollo does. ...

You're missing the point that what Apollo, in its final form, can do is more than is necessary to implement FTL fire control. Data rates comparable to the RD in HotQ put more emphasis on the capability of the ACM's AI and on the prescience of the pre-programmed options.

Such a low bandwidth system would NOT be the equal of the
Apollo + KHII system, but it would be far better than no FTL control at all.

tlb wrote:That can be ready as saying that Apollo did not need the highest bandwidth, but used it to make the system much more capable.

This is what I've been trying to get people to realize: Apollo + KHII is far better than a first-iteration FTL fire control needs to be--in the same way a modern smart-phone is better than 1950's vintage car-phones or early 1980's vintage analog cell phones (Which weighed about ten pounds and were about the size of a five-pound bag of flour.)