[spoiler] The future of missile combat

Dauntless wrote:we've drifted a bit (hardly a surprise) so lets start again.

a world with near SL core world tech and industry has decided it wants its own empire and doesn't care if worlds join willingly or are forced.

I'm not sure such a world could defend itself from the GA for the next few decades.
Well not without wall to wall missile pods anyway.

They would have to do it politically. Benign dictators as it were.
When the political system collapses, there's nothing wrong with empire building if you make things better for all your subjects.

Weird Harold wrote:A primary benefit of the Apollo system is the multiplication of control channels.

Develop a two-stage missile by bolting together two standard missiles of any class and a contrive a control missile with an AI/fire-control repeater and the same drives. Build a pod-nought to dispense the pods that launch the DDCM and brood (the brood can be any size you're willing to build a pod big enough for) and Bob's Your Uncle. You've got a system that will both out-range and out-gun anything except a SD(P) with KH-II and Apollo pods.

Another factor in RMN/GA superiority is the destructiveness of missile warheads on a class-for-class basis. Where the Cataphract design (with a CM based second stage) had to downsize warheads to make the missiles tube-launchable, the RMN found ways to improve grav-pinching warheads and squeeze bigger lasing rods into smaller missiles.

Any "world with near SL core world tech and industry" should be able to increase the power of their warheads in some way. Put bigger warheads on smaller missiles would let you stack more stages fire-able from tubes. (or stack more DDMs in a DDCM pod's brood.)

Smaller ships, DDs and CLs shouldn't ever really need DDMs, though. They have no business standing up to CLs and bigger and their normal missions aren't worth the cost of shrinking a DDM to fit. Bigger warheads are probably a different story, though.

Yup, extend the Apollo sublight control capability--make a missile that commands 8 missiles and can accept command from another missile. Any ship can then fire a salvo capable of taking down anything. Decide how many missiles you want, put that many in space, if you can't control them you send out enough control missiles so you can, then send them all on their way. They would also have a better chance of hitting.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:A primary benefit of the Apollo system is the multiplication of control channels.

Develop a two-stage missile by bolting together two standard missiles of any class and a contrive a control missile with an AI/fire-control repeater and the same drives. Build a pod-nought to dispense the pods that launch the DDCM and brood (the brood can be any size you're willing to build a pod big enough for) and Bob's Your Uncle. You've got a system that will both out-range and out-gun anything except a SD(P) with KH-II and Apollo pods.

Another factor in RMN/GA superiority is the destructiveness of missile warheads on a class-for-class basis. Where the Cataphract design (with a CM based second stage) had to downsize warheads to make the missiles tube-launchable, the RMN found ways to improve grav-pinching warheads and squeeze bigger lasing rods into smaller missiles.

Any "world with near SL core world tech and industry" should be able to increase the power of their warheads in some way. Put bigger warheads on smaller missiles would let you stack more stages fire-able from tubes. (or stack more DDMs in a DDCM pod's brood.)

Smaller ships, DDs and CLs shouldn't ever really need DDMs, though. They have no business standing up to CLs and bigger and their normal missions aren't worth the cost of shrinking a DDM to fit. Bigger warheads are probably a different story, though.

Yup, extend the Apollo sublight control capability--make a missile that commands 8 missiles and can accept command from another missile. Any ship can then fire a salvo capable of taking down anything. Decide how many missiles you want, put that many in space, if you can't control them you send out enough control missiles so you can, then send them all on their way. They would also have a better chance of hitting.

Essentially, the RMN doesn't "need" to do that now - each ACM in a salvo is networked with each other and the take given to one ACM from the mothership should be shared by all. If the launch platform is not in FTL control mode, all a mother ship would need to do is update the attack profiles of as many ACMs as possible over the RF links and let the ACMs do the grunt work.

Annachie wrote:
They would have to do it politically. Benign dictators as it were.
When the political system collapses, there's nothing wrong with empire building if you make things better for all your subjects.

Isn't that how Gustav Anderman started his little empire? Conquest, at least to the extent of having an unscheduled change in management, at the same time, fixing whatever problems the previous political power structure allowed to accumulate. IIRC, that's what happened when he took over New Potsdam to be, resolving a planetary plague while he was at it.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:A primary benefit of the Apollo system is the multiplication of control channels.

Develop a two-stage missile by bolting together two standard missiles of any class and a contrive a control missile with an AI/fire-control repeater and the same drives. Build a pod-nought to dispense the pods that launch the DDCM and brood (the brood can be any size you're willing to build a pod big enough for) and Bob's Your Uncle. You've got a system that will both out-range and out-gun anything except a SD(P) with KH-II and Apollo pods.

Another factor in RMN/GA superiority is the destructiveness of missile warheads on a class-for-class basis. Where the Cataphract design (with a CM based second stage) had to downsize warheads to make the missiles tube-launchable, the RMN found ways to improve grav-pinching warheads and squeeze bigger lasing rods into smaller missiles.

Any "world with near SL core world tech and industry" should be able to increase the power of their warheads in some way. Put bigger warheads on smaller missiles would let you stack more stages fire-able from tubes. (or stack more DDMs in a DDCM pod's brood.)

Smaller ships, DDs and CLs shouldn't ever really need DDMs, though. They have no business standing up to CLs and bigger and their normal missions aren't worth the cost of shrinking a DDM to fit. Bigger warheads are probably a different story, though.

Yup, extend the Apollo sublight control capability--make a missile that commands 8 missiles and can accept command from another missile. Any ship can then fire a salvo capable of taking down anything. Decide how many missiles you want, put that many in space, if you can't control them you send out enough control missiles so you can, then send them all on their way. They would also have a better chance of hitting.

Essentially, the RMN doesn't "need" to do that now - each ACM in a salvo is networked with each other and the take given to one ACM from the mothership should be shared by all. If the launch platform is not in FTL control mode, all a mother ship would need to do is update the attack profiles of as many ACMs as possible over the RF links and let the ACMs do the grunt work.

In Storm From the Shadows, Gold Peak is doing a sim with Apollo and what she did was fire one Apollo off at ships located I think it was 84 Million kms away. Then delayed a full lanch by 30s. The as soon as the first Apollo pod reported its sensor readings they updated the full lunch with its targeting info.

Actually, yeah that does sound like Gustav.

Apologies for the necro-post

munroburton wrote:This is why I mentioned the Viper. It might be restricted to the GA currently, but how difficult is it really to fit a small warhead+rod on a countermissile?

Especially if ships are being redesigned to fire multi-drive missiles and the traditional single-drive shipkiller begins to disappear. I can't see a viper type missile being more expensive than an ERM or DDM from the same manufacturing tech base.

Probably not too hard. OTOH without the extended drive endurance of a Mk31 a nuke equipped CM only has a powered range of 1.6 - 2.2 million km. Against a target without a sidewall an energy mount has an effective range of about a million km. If you're close enough for a CM drive delivered warning shot you're almost close enough for the vastly cheaper energy mount warning shot.


(OTOH the RMN doesn't have exclusive access to that enhanced endurance tech. The 2nd stage of a Cataphract is CM derived and has the same 75 second burn time of a Mk31 or Viper. Though way less acceleration, and consequently shorter range)


As for future of missile combat - I'd expect the baffle tech to get out there sooner or later. But I also expect the RMN to continue improving their version. An exchange with RFC here a little while back led to the interesting statement that the current baffle only works if all the drives are set to the same acceleration profile - currently if you launch an MDM with the first drive set to full power the next 2 also have to be full power or unspecified bad things happen. Oddly without FTL fire control most MDM combat happens are ranges that are short enough that a mixed acceleration profile (if possible) would actually work better. So a breakthrough that provided even better shielding might allow mixed acceleration settings.

Also at some point I'd expect the RMN to combine the drive tech for increased endurance with multi-drive. That alone could give a DDM like the Mk16 50% more range (45 million km vs 30)

But that's the easy technical upgrades.

From a tactics standpoint Hasta or Mistletoe will probably become more common to try to strip away towed pods before they can be launched. That should put more pressure on podlayers to hold back from massive Alpha strikes and make it riskier for smaller units to rely on external missiles to make up their throw weight. So more pressure for long ranged internally launched missile or pod laying designs.


As others have pointed out Hasta is a SLN realization that much better sensors and AI can to a significant degree compensate for being beyond effective control range. While I suspect the Apollo FTL control will be one of the last GA advantages to fall I'd expect more autonomous control missiles / link multipliers to become common far more quickly. The advantages they give are just too large to be ignored while chasing the holy grail of FTL control.

I'm also wondering who will be the first to experiment with uni-directional FTL commands to missiles. I'm assuming that the receiver would be significantly smaller and easier to design than the transmitter (since a ship's normal grav sensors can read FTL transmissions). So a missile, or control missile, able to receive updates via FTL still seems to have an advantage over one that's light-speed both ways. The RMN may focus on shrinking FTL tranceivers to the point where they can be used with DDMs but other navies may settle for an expedient half a loaf.


The RMN hasn't chosen to pursue this but I also wonder some other navy will find it worthwhile to mount one or two FTL missile control channels onto their CAs or BCs. That would give a squadron that was towing their version of Apollo pods a "sniper" capability to even the odds at extreme range before closing within effective light-speed control range of the enemy. Sure with only the ability to control 1 or 2 pods you'd probably need several ships working together to deliver effective weight on a target, but it might be worth the opportunity cost to carry the control link even when your normal missiles can't use it.

Actually, in general compact transmitters are easier to build than compact receivers. Receiver sensitivity, which directly affects signal-to-noise ratio and with it sets bandwidth, is a direct function of antenna aperture. Transmitter output is a function of the power-handling capacity of the components and coupling efficiency, via the antenna, to space. There's no reason to think that this general rule is any different for gravitics. We know that really sensitive gravitics receivers are physically huge, and Honor actually comments to herself on the difficulty of squashing a receiver into a missile chassis during 2nd Marsh.

Jonathan_S wrote:Apologies for the necro-post
< snip >

I'm also wondering who will be the first to experiment with uni-directional FTL commands to missiles. I'm assuming that the receiver would be significantly smaller and easier to design than the transmitter (since a ship's normal grav sensors can read FTL transmissions). So a missile, or control missile, able to receive updates via FTL still seems to have an advantage over one that's light-speed both ways. The RMN may focus on shrinking FTL tranceivers to the point where they can be used with DDMs but other navies may settle for an expedient half a loaf.


The RMN hasn't chosen to pursue this but I also wonder some other navy will find it worthwhile to mount one or two FTL missile control channels onto their CAs or BCs. That would give a squadron that was towing their version of Apollo pods a "sniper" capability to even the odds at extreme range before closing within effective light-speed control range of the enemy. Sure with only the ability to control 1 or 2 pods you'd probably need several ships working together to deliver effective weight on a target, but it might be worth the opportunity cost to carry the control link even when your normal missiles can't use it.

Louis R wrote:Actually, in general compact transmitters are easier to build than compact receivers. Receiver sensitivity, which directly affects signal-to-noise ratio and with it sets bandwidth, is a direct function of antenna aperture. Transmitter output is a function of the power-handling capacity of the components and coupling efficiency, via the antenna, to space. There's no reason to think that this general rule is any different for gravitics. We know that really sensitive gravitics receivers are physically huge, and Honor actually comments to herself on the difficulty of squashing a receiver into a missile chassis during 2nd Marsh.

Interesting, thank you. I'd missed or forgotten that reference.

For those reading along at home here's the quote from CH 58 of WoH.

War of Honor wrote:Not even Manticore had yet been able to find a way for the platforms to send targeting information directly to MDMs, and even an MDM was too small for BuWeaps to cram in an FTL receiver which would have allowed real-time targeting telemetry to be relayed through the ships who'd launched them

I'd been assuming it was the transmitter that was the problem because the only things we'd seen that created grav signals were impeller nodes, which are a fairly noticeable percentage of the tonnage of their host platform. But you've got a point that receivers probably require available square footage in a way transmitters don't (even if the transmitters might out-mass the receiver).

I'd assumed missiles already had forward facing grav sensors, so duplicating that facing rearwards shouldn't be too hard (though it's possible there are engineering issues like proximity to the impeller node rings). But it's possible that missiles were simply too small to mount useful grav arrays - or at least that their arrays lack the sensitivity to read high bandwidth lower power signals even if they could see ship or missile wedges as useful ranges.

Louis R wrote:
Actually, in general compact transmitters are easier to build than compact receivers. Receiver sensitivity, which directly affects signal-to-noise ratio and with it sets bandwidth, is a direct function of antenna aperture. Transmitter output is a function of the power-handling capacity of the components and coupling efficiency, via the antenna, to space. There's no reason to think that this general rule is any different for gravitics. We know that really sensitive gravitics receivers are physically huge, and Honor actually comments to herself on the difficulty of squashing a receiver into a missile chassis during 2nd Marsh.
Interesting, thank you. I'd missed or forgotten that reference.

For those reading along at home here's the quote from CH 58 of WoH.
War of Honor wrote:
Not even Manticore had yet been able to find a way for the platforms to send targeting information directly to MDMs, and even an MDM was too small for BuWeaps to cram in an FTL receiver which would have allowed real-time targeting telemetry to be relayed through the ships who'd launched them


I'd been assuming it was the transmitter that was the problem because the only things we'd seen that created grav signals were impeller nodes, which are a fairly noticeable percentage of the tonnage of their host platform. But you've got a point that receivers probably require available square footage in a way transmitters don't (even if the transmitters might out-mass the receiver).

I'd assumed missiles already had forward facing grav sensors, so duplicating that facing rearwards shouldn't be too hard (though it's possible there are engineering issues like proximity to the impeller node rings). But it's possible that missiles were simply too small to mount useful grav arrays - or at least that their arrays lack the sensitivity to read high bandwidth lower power signals even if they could see ship or missile wedges as useful ranges.

Why missles with grav com? You can use your sensor probes to give your missles target updates. The Probe maybe will loose their stealth while transmitting, but should be easier to add the missle control frequencies to a probe, than develope a new smaller Apollo warhead.

That was the point what I didn´t understand at captain Zavala´s battle. Why could he speak with his enemies, using his sensor probes, but couldn´t send the self destruct code to his missles with the same probe? Maybe the probes coudn´t use the bandwide of the missles, but that should be easy to change.