Retrofitting the RMN: A Saganami Island Assignment

Galactic Sapper wrote:Easy enough to solve, at a cost.

You set up TWO Apollo missiles, one of them effectively built backwards. That is , the FTL com designed to face forward in flight. Pair that with a typical Apollo missile with the com oriented aft. To reach the leading flight of missiles you transmit to the pair trailing that flight at a suitable distance, the normal missile receives instructions and lasers it over to the backwards missile, the backwards missile sends the instructions forward to the leading flight.

You'd still lose some function, since the missiles wouldn't be controlled in FTL mode but rather a slightly better autonomous mode. You could in theory launch enough following pairs to assign one pair to each Apollo missile in the lead flight of missiles, but that would get absurdly expensive fast as you can't fit more than 3-4 Apollo missiles per pod (one Apollo forces you to remove 4 missiles from a 12 missile pod, so three per pod, but maybe the pod could be rearranged enough to get the fourth in there).

Adding to the idea, swim the uplink ACMs out the boatbay with delayed activation like an RD- they should have the ability to spin up the reactors in the boat bays as they do RDs. Why waste 2 additional pods when we don't need a consistent salvo?

Galactic Sapper wrote:Easy enough to solve, at a cost.

You set up TWO Apollo missiles, one of them effectively built backwards. That is , the FTL com designed to face forward in flight. Pair that with a typical Apollo missile with the com oriented aft. To reach the leading flight of missiles you transmit to the pair trailing that flight at a suitable distance, the normal missile receives instructions and lasers it over to the backwards missile, the backwards missile sends the instructions forward to the leading flight.

You'd still lose some function, since the missiles wouldn't be controlled in FTL mode but rather a slightly better autonomous mode. You could in theory launch enough following pairs to assign one pair to each Apollo missile in the lead flight of missiles, but that would get absurdly expensive fast as you can't fit more than 3-4 Apollo missiles per pod (one Apollo forces you to remove 4 missiles from a 12 missile pod, so three per pod, but maybe the pod could be rearranged enough to get the fourth in there).

There's no reason you couldn't put a transceiver on either end of the Apollo control missile. It has no warhead and it needs no forward sensors to keep track of the tens of millions of km away. It just needs to follow the other 8 missiles it's already in contact with and which are the single brightest sources it can see in the entire sky.

The only question is whether it can orient the transceivers on either end to keep a comm lock with both the mothership and the other salvo at the same time. If the angles aren't just right, one of the two might be out of the transmission cone.

That begs the question of whether the mothership must also remain within a cone of the base flight path of an active Apollo pod swarm.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:There's no reason you couldn't put a transceiver on either end of the Apollo control missile.

Size, presumably. The reason the Apollo missile is so freaking big right now is that they couldn't engineer a com unit any smaller than that. Although you could use a variation of Theemile's idea and just build the thing into a recon drone size body. You'd have to launch it well in advance of the main missile launch to get it into position but then it would also be almost entirely undetectable.

...It occurs to me that we've recreated a slightly more capable version of the Hermes buoy at this point. :facepalm:

Assuming future 23E-23E communication is possible and extends some effective control beyond the initial KH2-23E range, isn't the solution to launch sequential, equally-sized salvos?

Doing so would allow the salvos to form a chain for even more controlled range, albeit with trade-offs.

munroburton wrote:Assuming future 23E-23E communication is possible and extends some effective control beyond the initial KH2-23E range, isn't the solution to launch sequential, equally-sized salvos?

Doing so would allow the salvos to form a chain for even more controlled range, albeit with trade-offs.

TBH, I don't know what it solves. We know that 8 light-minutes is too far for accurate control and we concluded that the FTL link doesn't extend much beyond 6 light minutes. So a 23E-23E communication might extend that range, but we're still talking about a VERY far targetting. Accuracy is going to suffer, period.

So it's good for a paper. With Ghost Riders, Hermes and 23E-23E comms, you can actually fight from 100 million km away. But that doesn't mean you want to.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:Assuming future 23E-23E communication is possible and extends some effective control beyond the initial KH2-23E range, isn't the solution to launch sequential, equally-sized salvos?

Doing so would allow the salvos to form a chain for even more controlled range, albeit with trade-offs.

TBH, I don't know what it solves. We know that 8 light-minutes is too far for accurate control and we concluded that the FTL link doesn't extend much beyond 6 light minutes. So a 23E-23E communication might extend that range, but we're still talking about a VERY far targetting. Accuracy is going to suffer, period.

So it's good for a paper. With Ghost Riders, Hermes and 23E-23E comms, you can actually fight from 100 million km away. But that doesn't mean you want to.

Wait. Duh... ACMs in a salvo share data and commands via a mesh network (mentioned in UH), so we know there already are ACM to ACM comms with the ability to update the swarm with instructions from the firing platform if some are cut off for some reason. The big question is what radios do the mesh network use and what are their range?

Theemile wrote:Wait. Duh... ACMs in a salvo share data and commands via a mesh network (mentioned in UH), so we know there already are ACM to ACM comms with the ability to update the swarm with instructions from the firing platform if some are cut off for some reason. The big question is what radios do the mesh network use and what are their range?

Communication between ACMs in the same salvo is easy, just use light-speed comms (electromagnetic waves, a.k.a. radio, microwave or laser links). By the time of the ACM deployment, radio communication will have been a solved problem for 22 centuries. If space in the missile is at a premium, use something that weighs very little instead of a bulky FTL transmitter which you don't need anyway.

We don't know if the FTL transceiver can operate in any direction, even if not omnidirectionally. Today, we can use phased antennae to direct a signal to a specific direction, without moving parts. Whether that's possible with FTL, we don't know.

What I think the biggest challenge for missile-to-missile communication will be the wedges. We know a ship can sense through its wedge roof and floors, but it takes computing power. Given that missiles must stay pointed at the target lest they lose the target lock, it's unlikely they can normally see through their own wedges. The ACM may be different, since it carries no warhead, but the FTL transmitter and a more powerful computer.

We also don't know if FTL transmissions can cross a wedge distortion. It's conceivable the wedge interferes since it is detectable at FTL speeds, so it necessarily affects the alpha wall.

Of course, this problem can be solved by having all the missiles (not just the ACMs) fly on roughly the same plane, no more than a few km above or below it.

Wait! You don't actually need all missiles to talk to all other missiles: a message may bounce through multiple ACMs until it reaches the destination. So as long as each ACM is in line-of-sight not obstructed by wedges to at least one other ACM, the entire salvo is in theory in meshed connectivity.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:Assuming future 23E-23E communication is possible and extends some effective control beyond the initial KH2-23E range, isn't the solution to launch sequential, equally-sized salvos?

Doing so would allow the salvos to form a chain for even more controlled range, albeit with trade-offs.

TBH, I don't know what it solves. We know that 8 light-minutes is too far for accurate control and we concluded that the FTL link doesn't extend much beyond 6 light minutes. So a 23E-23E communication might extend that range, but we're still talking about a VERY far targetting. Accuracy is going to suffer, period.

So it's good for a paper. With Ghost Riders, Hermes and 23E-23E comms, you can actually fight from 100 million km away. But that doesn't mean you want to.

Aye. The major trade-off is that a force which could control all of its missiles within its KH2 range would have to split the first(and only) salvo up. If something like Chin's Fifth Fleet at Manticore is targeted, you're probably better off throwing an alpha salvo and letting the 23Es go autonomously.

It's a technique I could see system defense pods using. Fleets with more limited pod supplies might prefer to hold fire until the range has closed sufficiently. However, system defense pods should be able to make use of pre-deployed control platforms scattered throughout the system.

--snips, but whacked our names as I don't think I could get them right --

Isn't the solution to launch sequential, equally-sized salvos?

I don't think so. No damage assessment and wasted missiles.

So it's good for a paper. With Ghost Riders, Hermes and 23E-23E comms, you can actually fight from 100 million km away. But that doesn't mean you want to.

I'm thinking about a situation like Hypatia -- without a Nike but with a pod-equipped, non-Keyhole ship needing to fight at a distance. It doesn't necessarily mean fighting at 100 million kilometers, just extending the FTL range is good enough.

It's a technique I could see system defense pods using. Fleets with more limited pod supplies might prefer to hold fire until the range has closed sufficiently. However, system defense pods should be able to make use of pre-deployed control platforms scattered throughout the system.

Given that the MAlign whacked Mycroft at Beowulf, and a set of RMN ships out in the Verge wouldn't have Mycroft... this would be a much more difficult to defeat solution, and available to Sag-Cs, Rolands that launched the pod-based missiles etc. up to a certain range.

SharkHunter wrote:

So it's good for a paper. With Ghost Riders, Hermes and 23E-23E comms, you can actually fight from 100 million km away. But that doesn't mean you want to.

I'm thinking about a situation like Hypatia -- without a Nike but with a pod-equipped, non-Keyhole ship needing to fight at a distance. It doesn't necessarily mean fighting at 100 million kilometers, just extending the FTL range is good enough.

You know, thinking about Hypathia, the SLN was close enough to Hypathia that there was no noticeable delay. Which means it, and by extension the entire TF, is within several thousand KM of the planet. Quite likely all around the planet.

So how come there wasn't any issues with the RMN using missiles at ships in close proximity to the planet?