SOS - Control Links and Salvos

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Though at some point you exceed the number of missiles it can simultaneously control. And LACs probably have less excess fire control (for redundancy or pods) than larger hyper-capable warships.

So even though you could in theory delay launch a Ferret's entire magazine in one go it probably can't control most of those missiles if it does that.

And as it was pointed out that RMN/GSN LACs fire forwards, so the LAC wouldn't be able to accelerate while stacking all these missiles; otherwise it would quickly run into the coasting missiles ahead of it. (The missile launch tubes don't impart all that much velocity)

But if you're willing to coast while stacking missiles I don't see any reason a LAC wouldn't be able to stack multiple salvos for a simultaneous delayed activation. (They'd just be restricted to how many salvos they could actually control; with any in excess of that being little more than very expensive and not very effective blind-fired decoys)

Another point I just remembered, Shrike revolver launchers cycle in 2 seconds, so the entire 20 missiles a Shrike carries are launched in about 10 seconds, vs. the ~8 seconds a DD/CL missile launcher takes to cycle. In short, a Shrike launch is pretty much coming in as one lengthy salvo anyway, very little ballistic coast is required. More importantly, Shrikes are meant to work in groups, so a single integrated salvo is created by 6 ships, not one.

Hence why I used the Ferret in my example . They carry far more missiles than the Shrike and use more conventional magazines and launchers. (Amazing what you have room for once you're not trying to shoehorn a BC graser into a LAC)

Avoiding the Shrike saved me having to go look up the revolver size and firing rate; or try to guess whether or not it has enough fire control to handle flushing all its missiles in a minimum-time stream.

The Ghost Rider drone was headed to where the next RMN ship should be comming in and Megan knew where that was... I suspect it was part of the last instructions from the Admiral as he was tasking her to get the information to the incomming ships. Essentialy if it was just the one ship they were not going to be able to do much more than watch but they would have had the ability to access the tactical information from any GR drones in-system.
And the GR Megan sent would have not needed to generate a lot of FTL traffic if it was really close to the entry point. Essentialy it would be:
EMERGENCY SLN IN CONTROL AND IN PROCESS OF DESTROYING INFRASTRUCTUTER, ALL BUT ONE OF RMN SQUADRON DESTROYED. QUIERY ALL GR DRONES IN SYSETM FOR UPDATE. STAND BY FOR TIGHTBEAM TAC AS OF (AND THE TIME CHOP FOR WHEN SHE SENT IT OFF)

Or she could have had it send in FTL: CASE ZULU. Go General Quarters and query GR's

She knew at least one ship was due, there was the possiblity there were more but the actual abilit of multiple ships being able to do anything hours after she sent off the GR would be low. They would still have to grab the tactical data both from her messenger and then quiery the remains GR's and would be hours comming into the system.
The most promising bit for Megan is that the SLN didn't know (for sure) that there other ships on the way and they would not have had a record of where (what approch vector) the squadron had origianaly come in on- and I seriously doubt that Hypatia was going to give it to them in the event thay asked at this point- so whatever showe up was going to still be outside the hyperlimit and it's tactical sensors would have been showing what had been going on many hours earlier and I would suspect a captain would have immediately gone to GQ and got all defences on-line. There was no mention of the SLN Task Force leaving any pickets at the edge of the system but it is unlikely they came in on the same vector as the RMN squadron. Also no mention of SLN ships being sent out (that I remember) to cover any of the routine commercial approches to the system in order to snag any incomming freighters or to run down anything already in-system that decided to bolt.
Recall that this wasn't their only target. That is why they had the TUFT freighters, as missle colliers to provide the pods nessiary to devistate the infrastructure of this system and then each of the others they were to progress to. Their biggest fear was that they would find a RMN force of signifcant size in-system and have to deal with that. I can't recall but I think they probably could have not engaged but used a variation of Parthan Shot to target what they could from tube launchers (there were a lot of those) and resupply from the TUFTS if they didn't want to roll pods to do the same.

Also recall that the SLN ships were fairly close to the planet and, I believe, no longer engaged in evasive maneuvers once the RMN ships had been smashed and were no longer fireing on the SLN. So if Megan's initial group of launcher only fired missiles had the range then the rest of them would also. Those missiles would be heading generaly at the concentrations (such as they were) of the SLN ships and are not going to have shown any launch signature. So they are incomming ballistically and diverging from Meghan's course-she is NOT heading back into the SLN ships but whatever her vector she is moving under as best stealth she can generate. She knows where the the next RMN ship should show up so she can have her tac team watching that area AND she has that GR heading in their direction. At any point, if she sees a hyper-footpring from the right place, she can have the drone send it's message as a warning.

IF the SLN hadn't called it off, they would still have lost more ships and she would have been (probably) getting farther and farther away the whole time. Kill them till she's dry and keep skating away. She's in a modern RMN DD. She has legs and stealth.

I love the makeshift message Brigade XO. How close to the planet were the SLN? Not too close Megan's missiles, or debris, could hit the planet?

Question, do all GR drones share the same info with each other in case one gets destroyed or has to take itself out of the equation? If so, they'd have to be smart enough on their own not to send their signal across the enemy's path. But if they store the same info, although it is a built-in redundancy, seems to waste memory.

Question. When swimming missiles out for a delayed activation, what keeps them from drifting too close to each other once they light off?

Brigade XO wrote:The Ghost Rider drone was headed to where the next RMN ship should be comming in and Megan knew where that was... <snip>

It is probably SOP for an RMN ship or formation to either drop a GR drone at the hyperlimit or plug into an existing cloud and keep a live (or periodic) tac update to it. They have experienced too many cases where it was needed not to. Something the SLN never learned.

cthia wrote:I love the makeshift message Brigade XO. How close to the planet were the SLN? Not too close Megan's missiles, or debris, could hit the planet?

Question, do all GR drones share the same info with each other in case one gets destroyed or has to take itself out of the equation? If so, they'd have to be smart enough on their own not to send their signal across the enemy's path. But if they store the same info, although it is a built-in redundancy, seems to waste memory.

Question. When swimming missiles out for a delayed activation, what keeps them from drifting too close to each other once they light off?

Drones- all depends on how they are programmed. Usually they stay silent, using whisker lasers to pass details in hostile environments. Normally only the closest in a cloud would respond to a ping from a new ship. Think of it as a mesh network which is aware of their positions. The communications method used is part of the setup programming.

Missiles- nothing but their initial trajectories, plan them well. Missiles have RCS thrusters, but they are usually only for terminal maneuvering, and on never missiles, realigning after launch for off bore shots. They are not intended to push the missiles around, only to reorient them.

If the missiles from Arngrim can take tactical uploads via Ghost Ryder, then they don't have to use thrusters to reorient and take time off them for terminal maneuvers., they are already heading in the direction of the SLN taskforce, they may even have each set aimed at a particular SLN BC as of Megan's launch (well, where that BC should be if nothing elce changed). She could have altered the orientation of her ship to put them in the initial correct direction instead of using missille thrusters to do that after launch. If Rear Admiral Yountz had not made the decision to break off and leave the system, she would have targeted him with one of the missles sets (by FTL) and those missiles would have lit off the drives and then reoriented on the fly to engage their target. The the rest of the launched birds (and maybe those still in her magazines ) could could also be fed updates based on new information and certainly the next set to be used would get an update on what the latest surviving SLN commander was riding in.

Theemile wrote:Drones- all depends on how they are programmed. Usually they stay silent, using whisker lasers to pass details in hostile environments. Normally only the closest in a cloud would respond to a ping from a new ship. Think of it as a mesh network which is aware of their positions. The communications method used is part of the setup programming.

Those are Ghost Rider drones. They don't use lasers for communication, they use FTL comms. We don't know exactly how that works, but we've seen enemies baffled by unexplained alpha wall vibrations. Whether that's "backscatter" of a more directed communication or whether the communication is omnidirectional, we don't really know.

What matters is that the SLN simply can't read that. Their gravitic sensors are too coarse to even pinpoint where the GR is. There was one sitting at 30,000 km from one of the SLN BCs, transmitting, and not getting detected.

Brigade XO wrote:If the missiles from Arngrim can take tactical uploads via Ghost Ryder, then they don't have to use thrusters to reorient and take time off them for terminal maneuvers., they are already heading in the direction of the SLN taskforce, they may even have each set aimed at a particular SLN BC as of Megan's launch (well, where that BC should be if nothing elce changed). She could have altered the orientation of her ship to put them in the initial correct direction instead of using missille thrusters to do that after launch. If Rear Admiral Yountz had not made the decision to break off and leave the system, she would have targeted him with one of the missles sets (by FTL) and those missiles would have lit off the drives and then reoriented on the fly to engage their target. The the rest of the launched birds (and maybe those still in her magazines ) could could also be fed updates based on new information and certainly the next set to be used would get an update on what the latest surviving SLN commander was riding in.

Wait. The missiles weren't getting updates from the Ghost Riders. The GRs were transmitting detailed sensor info via FTL to HMS Arngrim, which instead relayed the targetting data to the missiles via regular laser, control links. Those missiles are not Apollo, they don't have FTL receivers. And they were in the wrong position to receive telemetry from a GR drone during the attack run, even if that's possible, since their receivers are on the missiles' tails.

Activating the already-deployed missiles via GR relay, if I understood your tactic correctly, might be possible.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Those are Ghost Rider drones. They don't use lasers for communication, they use FTL comms. We don't know exactly how that works, but we've seen enemies baffled by unexplained alpha wall vibrations. Whether that's "backscatter" of a more directed communication or whether the communication is omnidirectional, we don't really know.

What matters is that the SLN simply can't read that. Their gravitic sensors are too coarse to even pinpoint where the GR is. There was one sitting at 30,000 km from one of the SLN BCs, transmitting, and not getting detected.

But there must be a chance they can be localized, or there wouldn't be any need for the many times the RMN utilized the safety precaution of bouncing the signal back and forth between many Hermes buoys, which use the same communication method. IINM, they employed that method on several occasions against the SLN.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:Drones- all depends on how they are programmed. Usually they stay silent, using whisker lasers to pass details in hostile environments. Normally only the closest in a cloud would respond to a ping from a new ship. Think of it as a mesh network which is aware of their positions. The communications method used is part of the setup programming.

Those are Ghost Rider drones. They don't use lasers for communication, they use FTL comms. We don't know exactly how that works, but we've seen enemies baffled by unexplained alpha wall vibrations. Whether that's "backscatter" of a more directed communication or whether the communication is omnidirectional, we don't really know.

What matters is that the SLN simply can't read that. Their gravitic sensors are too coarse to even pinpoint where the GR is. There was one sitting at 30,000 km from one of the SLN BCs, transmitting, and not getting detected.

GR drones carry the gamut of communications technologies - We've seen GR drones "locked down" multiple times in the series where the Grav and RF comms are turned off and will only communicate over whisker lasers, or programmed to respond with directional comms to a ping from a querying RMN ships.

Regardless, a nice repository of tac data would be safe in one, waiting for the next RMN ships to enter the system.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:Drones- all depends on how they are programmed. Usually they stay silent, using whisker lasers to pass details in hostile environments. Normally only the closest in a cloud would respond to a ping from a new ship. Think of it as a mesh network which is aware of their positions. The communications method used is part of the setup programming.

Those are Ghost Rider drones. They don't use lasers for communication, they use FTL comms. We don't know exactly how that works, but we've seen enemies baffled by unexplained alpha wall vibrations. Whether that's "backscatter" of a more directed communication or whether the communication is omnidirectional, we don't really know.

What matters is that the SLN simply can't read that. Their gravitic sensors are too coarse to even pinpoint where the GR is. There was one sitting at 30,000 km from one of the SLN BCs, transmitting, and not getting detected.

Theemile wrote:GR drones carry the gamut of communications technologies - We've seen GR drones "locked down" multiple times in the series where the Grav and RF comms are turned off and will only communicate over whisker lasers, or programmed to respond with directional comms to a ping from a querying RMN ships.

Regardless, a nice repository of tac data would be safe in one, waiting for the next RMN ships to enter the system.

Well, safe in at least two, to ensure some redundancy. One advantage of GR drones is its complete anonymity. The enemy never knows it's there. I posited many moons ago that a particular GR drone may have to take itself out of the equation because of several reasons, like being too close to a ship to cut its velocity without being detected, or other ships hypering in, evasive maneuvers taking it out of the system, etc.