Confusion on battles

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:A point no one else seems to have made about fighting out of your class, is the real difference in processing and targeting accuracy of the larger vessel.

Another thing that has slightly bothered me, as someone who works in technology: that a one-hundred-thousand-tonnes ship from 2000 years from now wouldn't have the necessary processing power to do whatever computational tasks it wanted to, compared to a 500k tonne one. You can embark a nice, full data centre for less than 1000t. The limiting factor doesn't seem to be weight. Or volume required, given molycircs.

It could be heat dissipation, but that obeys the square-cube law: a vessel's weight is proportional to its volume, which grows with the cube of the linear dimensions, whereas the surface area for dissipating heat grows with the square. Ditto for sensor equipment, since they are mounted on the hull.

The number of control links is an extension of this: why aren't they massively higher than the highest number of missiles one can throw? If it's processing power, see above. If it's some physical limitation, like laser transceivers, then how precise does your laser transmission need to be? Since you're already transmitting towards the enemy, security is achieved by encryption, not obscurity of the link. The transmissions must also be in bursts, so each should last less than 1 ms. If each missile can run "without control" for 100 ms without getting lost, then you should control 100 of them with each transceiver assembly.

With FTL this gets more difficult because we don't know the bandwidth and how bulks those transceivers are.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The number of control links is an extension of this: why aren't they massively higher than the highest number of missiles one can throw? If it's processing power, see above. If it's some physical limitation, like laser transceivers, then how precise does your laser transmission need to be? Since you're already transmitting towards the enemy, security is achieved by encryption, not obscurity of the link. The transmissions must also be in bursts, so each should last less than 1 ms. If each missile can run "without control" for 100 ms without getting lost, then you should control 100 of them with each transceiver assembly.

Pretty sure the fire control links was based on a mental model rooted in how Naval SAMs still all worked when the series was conceived back in the 90s; beam-riding. Where every SAM in the air needed its own dedicated illumination radar and losing radar triggered a self-destruct (a few longer ranged ones had an autopilot feature which would let them follow a ballistically more efficient path and then intersect the illumination radar closer to the target - but still if they didn't pick up the that beam by a certain point they'd self-destruct).


So in that mental model you need lots of dedicated fire control hardware links because each is spending lots of time hand holding a specific missile.

Now even many current SAMs don't need that; the ship sends commands telling them where to go for most of the flight and then at the end they use their own sensors for final intercept. So now the ship just needs a search radar capable of refreshing inbound target status often enough backed up by computers capable to tracking each target and directing a missile into intercept position of it. Now you don't need dedicated fire control hardware for each missile.
But at least up until Keyhole II that's not really the model the Honorverse followed (even though the module used rapidly ceased to make sense even in the real world)

Jonathan_S wrote:Pretty sure the fire control links was based on a mental model rooted in how Naval SAMs still all worked when the series was conceived back in the 90s; beam-riding. Where every SAM in the air needed its own dedicated illumination radar and losing radar triggered a self-destruct (a few longer ranged ones had an autopilot feature which would let them follow a ballistically more efficient path and then intersect the illumination radar closer to the target - but still if they didn't pick up the that beam by a certain point they'd self-destruct).


So in that mental model you need lots of dedicated fire control hardware links because each is spending lots of time hand holding a specific missile.

Now even many current SAMs don't need that; the ship sends commands telling them where to go for most of the flight and then at the end they use their own sensors for final intercept. So now the ship just needs a search radar capable of refreshing inbound target status often enough backed up by computers capable to tracking each target and directing a missile into intercept position of it. Now you don't need dedicated fire control hardware for each missile.
But at least up until Keyhole II that's not really the model the Honorverse followed (even though the module used rapidly ceased to make sense even in the real world)

Yeah, we just have to accept that there is some limitation we aren't aware of. I just meant to say it bothered me, slightly, given my background.

Even if Keyhole II solves the control link problem, the fact that an SD can process tactical data better than a CL is hard to get. Except for the point that Bob made: an SD has a better tactical section, not better computers.

The underlying model is the pen and paper version of Harpoon.

And having more people looking at data is goong to be a marginal help, but everything happens so fast that you cant process it fast enough if you are depending on people. And the Honorverse has essentially infinite computer power in a shipping container. You don’t need tens of thousands of cubic meters for more computers. Thats a weak justification, not the reason.