Nobody is more enamored with the MK23-E's abilities than I am. I once contemplated opening a thread about its hidden abilities way back in
The Battle of Spindle thread when I posited lots of things that intuitively it should be able to handle, like ramming a warship after it has completed its task of leading all of its sheep to slaughter. But I don't think we should begin ascribing talents that are not native to it. Ramming should prove fatal for an LD at a command missile's terminal velocities.
Theemile wrote:The ACM uses the individual missile sensors as an array to sweep an area. So while one missile is myopic - a launch of 48 (1 set of 6 pods) with networked ACMs is more like a bee or Fly's eye, and much more able to search a spanse, with the ACM assigning a region for each missile to search, and coordinating the amalgamated output.
That is an ability that seems super intuitive. I posited this ability in the Battle of Spindle thread, before I was aware that the ability already existed. It is an incredible ability to be able to share consciousness which I think may be a shoo-in to win top prize of all the MK23-E's talents.
But, a "compound eye" view of "nothing" is still no better than nothing. At any rate, my ballast tanks may need adjusting again. The following is how I thought the system operates ...
cthia wrote:That is my point. The command missile and its brood of missiles has ALWAYS needed the mothership to get them "in the vicinity" of the target. At which point its autonomous program can kick in. Textev has always maintained the difficulty of a missile's job. Like seeing the world through the eye of a needle or something? But if the link is cut long before the salvo can even find the better part of its way, then the exercise is moot. And with not even a bright wedge to get its attention (whether the command missile uses the wedge to simply "identify" the target when it is lost or not) well, too bad.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:What do you mean by "get them in the vicinity of the target?" Obviously they need to be launched and preferably within 65 million km of the target. We know from the Battle of Manticore and Honor's later discussion with Tourville that 70-75 million km are perfectly feasible for an Apollo missile strike, but 150 million isn't. The limit is somewhere in the middle there. And those were with Keyhole II FTL control links.
Yes! I do mean that missiles have always been given the exact heading of the target upon launch. That bearing is usually determined by the enemy's big bright wedge. And missiles were ALWAYS guided to the target. Missiles always counted on the ship's guidance to get them in the vicinity of the targets until it is close enough that it can "lock on."
Jonathan's posts corroborates my assumption ...
Jonathan_S wrote:And older missiles needed a lot of hand holding to get to the point where their onboard sensors could solidly lock onto the target. MDMs had steadily been getting better at needing less (as their extended ranges forced designers to add better and better sensors and AI to them to compensate for the deteriorating fire control abilities at their extreme ranges. And ACMs took that a giant leap forward by linking the missiles sensors together and making the whole much more powerful than any part.
Now, the current generation of missiles do need less hand holding but they are still sheep which still need to be led to slaughter. They don't simply come out of launch tubes able to close on a target without additional help from the mothership, especially against a target which has initiated evasive maneuvers at extreme range. The closer the launch the less hand holding a missile needs because inherently, the distance a ship might move before impact is much shorter. But the missile has always needed course corrections to ensure that the target is found somewhere within its myopic field of view when it arrives. The MK23-E is very near sighted. I didn't know what its "prescription" is in its lenses, but it certainly isn't 20/20. I didn't know until now, that is, compliments of Relax's post. Thanks, btw, ...
Relax wrote:Well, you are not alone. I never thought they had gravitic sensors until SfTS either as DW always wrote the missiles as needing to be babied to the targets, losing lock, until onboard sensors took over about ~1Mkm from target etc and since main targeting systems on warships were gravitic sensors looking for wedges...
So, my point is that the missiles need to arrive on the scene with the target within 1Mkm, or their ability to share consciousness won't matter.
Which is kind of a weakness of the control missile. It can end up leading all missiles off course. The blind leading the blind.IINM, textev also gave particulars that the control missiles radar is initially spread out over the heavens within its narrow field of view until it finds its target then it focuses (narrows) its beam to achieve and maintain a stronger lock. Dispersed radar should limit its range. But to what degree.
I also assumed the control missile used the wedge to identify a target, even if after the target is identified it actually uses the ship's hull(?) or something other to lock onto after it goes into autonomous mode. I also thought it uses the big bright wedge to help it reaquire after it has lost lock. Why not? There's a big bright light saying "Here I am!" Then it reaquires and locks on using its limited range radar.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:If you meant as giving them the first direction and then cutting control links, I give you the Battle of Spindle and the Battle of Beowulf, both cases of which the missiles struck home without control links FTL control links. In the former case, they were even launched without those links. And from the Battle of Hypatia, we know that pre-Apollo missiles, all the way to Mk14 LERM ones, are pretty deadly even without the regular light-speed control links. If anything, Manticore's missiles have broken with the centuries' worth of tradition that missiles needed hand-holding from the mothership all the way to target. It was a natural consequence and necessity of launching from 60 million km away instead of 9.
I wasn't aware of that ability if true. Was a GR drone involved feeding it coordinates? An MK23-E is not so myopic at all if it can simply be launched in the general direction and need no further updates. That would suggest the missile is
very far sighted instead of near sighted. It can't be both.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:Haven's first MDMs had really poor accuracy when running on their third stage, which is why they compensated quality with quantity. It was Manticore that had the tech edge to make their missiles that much smarter. The Apollo missiles may have been revolutionary in having an FTL link, but they had proven their worth even without that link. The Silver Bullet was a minor annoyance during the attack on Beowulf.
Of course, because the use of a third stage implies a launch from extreme range. An extreme range launch implies that a ship can move quite a lot in the interim. Without updates, a missile should be as lost as a polar bear in the Amazon.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:That said, it's completely unknown whether any missile can target a stealthed LD from millions of km away... But the missile can continue going to where it had last been told to go before the telemetry was cut. Even in a 9-minute run, the LD can change its position by only 357,000 km, under emergency 250-gravity acceleration. So if the missiles get to where they expected the bogey to be, there's a good chance some missile groups will be near enough to burn through the stealth. And one shot landing may be sufficient to cripple the stealth.
Well, my vote is that a missile can't! If a warship cannot even
see an LD from millions of kilometers away, it cannot give the missile its initial nudge.
Now, if somehow the LD does something to give up its position then the RMN can at least fire at it. I suppose this is the same scenario facing the SLN against Megan Petersen.
Exactly how
did the SLN finally get her coordinates? (So it thought.)
Something else we must not forget. The details on the LD is scarce. The GA does not know its maximum acceleration, so all of its estimates of its speed and heading are going to be way off.
