Attacking Darius:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm pretty sure conventional ships can't evade at full accel in any direction. They have some limited ability to manouver within their wedge; so I couldn't be surprised if the ship could fairly quickly displace within its wedge by a several km in any direction; but it seem that to slow down or build a side vector in any meaningful way you need to change heading as the wedge seems to mostly accelerate forwards.

I wasn't thinking of moving inside the wedge, since that has a displacement of +/- a few km at best. I was thinking of moving the whole ship+wedge system in an arbitrary direction that is not the flight path.

However given that a spider drive is described as effective make up of tractor beams strong enough to grab onto the hyperwall itself I suspect a spider ship's propulsion could at the very worse pull it in a 45 degree strafe in at least 1 of three directions at ~1/3rd its normal max acceleration (simply by using one skeg's worth of spider emiters without balancing them out with the other 2 - thus pulling the ship directly in the direction they're all facing)

Indeed I suppose it could simply pull less in any of the three keels, so it could have 2/3rd of its top acceleration at any 120°, plus 1/3 of full acceleration at 120° offset 60° from those other. Except for:

However there's one big question mark about doing any of this; and that's their lack of compensator. In a warship under wedge/sail the grav plates just have to provide 1g as the compensator isolates the whole interior ship from any force from the drive's acceleration; and so they literally won't notice if the ship can move sideways or backwards.
But the spider ships don't have those and rely on massive grav plates to counteract the crushing forces of acceleration; and we're told that their decks are set up like a skyscraper (many short decks perpendicular to their forward acceleration) in order to achieve this. (Whereas normal wedge/sail powered ships have fewer long decks running the length of the ship, paralle to their forward acceleration). So those grav plates may not be able to shield the crew from a powerful sideways or rearward acceleration. We just know know, but it's certainly possible that the spider drive might be theoretically capable of accelerating in some directions at rates that would pulp the crew.

Very good point. We have no clue how grav plates work and whether they can shield any acceleration not perpendicular to themselves. We don't even know if they work in the reverse direction. If they can't shield the lateral acceleration at an appreciable fraction, then the ship can only move forward and has to turn very slowly. Not only would the people inside get squished when moved sideways and all manner of projectiles being fired at them from unsecured stations, the ship itself may not be strong enough to support the centrifugal (pseudo) force while turning. Not to mention making people dizzy, if it's a turn for a non-negligible time.

As for impellers, given that turnovers exist, I think we can safely conclude ships cannot accelerate at full in the reverse direction. Wedges are not symmetrical any way, with a kilt and a throat of different sizes. On the other hand, we know they can turn on any axis while the wedges are up (read: they don't have to shut them down, turn, then bring them up). And unlike spider ships, like you wrote above, the ship inside the wedge feels no acceleration from the outside world.

So the question is: when an impeller ship turns, is it turning inside the wedge and therefore the wedge follows (which implies there's a lag), or is it turning the wedge and therefore itself? Since it can move inside the wedge, my guess is that it has the ability to project the wedge at non-fixed distances and angles from the ship, which in turn means that the wedge orientation can be manipulated from inside the ship.

Either way, we know a ship can turn. So the only question is how fast and whether that is sufficiently fast to be used in evasive manoeuvres while under terminal missile attack.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:But, I would assume it should be far easier for a Spider to launch a platform behind the swarm of missiles to overpower the signal they are receiving. Since RMN missiles operate so closely together, it should make it easier. Also, do note that the control missile is in constant communication with the ship sending it updated info in real time. Cutting that link also kills the effectiveness of the Apollo brood. And it should be far easier to overpower the output of the control missile.

Such a platform wouldn't last. If it puts enough FTL grav-com energy to overpower the missiles downrange, it's probably the single brightest source in the star system after the star itself. The closest missile wave still uprange will target it and kill it.

So this becomes a matter of who can outshoot the other: the ones with missiles or the ones with jamming platforms.

And don't forget that the Apollo broods are still far more effective than any previous missile, MDM or not, even without the control links. As witnessed in both Beowulf and earlier at Spindle (Terekhov was firing from Saganami-C cruisers, no Keyhole was in sight).

I am not so sure the platform won't last. It will be deployed between the missile salvos and their mothership. The jamming will then be uprange from the enemy. The jamming will happen behind the brood of missiles directed AT the missiles in the aforementioned "constructive jamming" which doubles the amplitude of the signal in effect killing it. I am not so sure the platform will even be detected by the mothership since its jamming is directed AWAY from the ship and towards the avalanche that just passed it. And since the control missile's relay is cut, it cannot relay anything back. And if the platform gets into optimum position before the avalanche can get close enough to go into solo mode, then the exercise is moot.

It could be worse. What will happen if the jamming jams the communication between the control missile and its brood, or worse, overpowers all of the missiles' sensors? The blind leading the blind?

cthia wrote:I am not so sure the platform won't last. It will be deployed between the missile salvos and their mothership. The jamming will then be uprange from the enemy. The jamming will happen behind the brood of missiles directed AT the missiles in the aforementioned "constructive jamming" which doubles the amplitude of the signal in effect killing it. I am not so sure the platform will even be detected by the mothership since its jamming is directed AWAY from the ship and towards the avalanche that just passed it. And since the control missile's relay is cut, it cannot relay anything back. And if the platform gets into optimum position before the avalanche can get close enough to go into solo mode, then the exercise is moot.

It could be worse. What will happen if the jamming jams the communication between the control missile and its brood, or worse, overpowers all of the missiles' sensors? The blind leading the blind?

Why wouldn't the missiles be able to communicate back?

A sufficiently capable jammer aimed at their rear would be blinding their receivers; so they can't hear anything from the mothership. But the jamming shouldn't affect their rear facing transmitters, and since you've got the jamming directed away from the mothership it wouldn't be jamming its receivers either. So the missile telemetry should still be coming in, the mothership just won't be able to send back any commands. (Though unless this jamming platform is jamming both FTL and normal lightspeed control links the mothership could fall back on the later to get some updates through).

Okay, after a while without the return link sending commands the missiles might not be able to keep their transmissions aimed well enough for the mothership to hear -- but that'd be at least several minutes before that could happen. More than enough time for the mothership to receive the telemetry showing the mother of all jammers lighting up the missile's receivers.

(Even in the very best case, where this works once -- like the triple ripple did -- it seems easy enough to adjust Apollo's programming and behavior, and the fleet's general tactics, to largely mitigate the issue)


Oh, and the jamming platform also has to worry about any unseen recon drones far enough downrange to see it broadcasting, but sufficiently off to the side of the jammer's focus to still be able to transmit their sightings back to the main fleet.

cthia wrote:I am not so sure the platform won't last. It will be deployed between the missile salvos and their mothership. The jamming will then be uprange from the enemy. The jamming will happen behind the brood of missiles directed AT the missiles in the aforementioned "constructive jamming" which doubles the amplitude of the signal in effect killing it. I am not so sure the platform will even be detected by the mothership since its jamming is directed AWAY from the ship and towards the avalanche that just passed it. And since the control missile's relay is cut, it cannot relay anything back. And if the platform gets into optimum position before the avalanche can get close enough to go into solo mode, then the exercise is moot.

In addition to what Jonathan said, this assumes that there is a single Apollo launch or a few bursts of them, sufficiently so that the all of the salvoes are downrange from the transmitter.

That may be the case, in the case of a probing attack. The invading forces may not know what there is to target, so they send a few waves of missiles and stop, waiting to see the results. But by this very scenario, this forced the defenders to reveal their jamming platforms for a few thousand missiles, not a full alpha launch.

In the case of a concentrated attack, an alpha launch is likely followed by successive salvoes every minute or less. So there's likely going to be some salvo still uprange of the transmitter and able to retask a few missiles to hit it. The defenders would need to strike balance at the point in which they attempt to jam: do it too early and their platform gets killed, allowing the missiles to "un-jam" themselves until the replacement is in place and transmitting. Do it too late and it the alpha launch may have sufficient targetting to do too much damage.

Moreover, if there are successive salvoes, the next one coming into range is going to be too close for a narrow jamming, so some of the ACMs may still be able to communicate back to their motherships even if all don't. And even if that's not the case, this helps pinpoint where the jammer is for the next salvo less than a minute behind.

And as Jonathan said, the moment this technique is revealed, the counter-technique can be quickly put into place. We haven't seen any jamming-defeating techniques so far, but as I said earlier, we can't assume they haven't thought of that and come up with a solution. ECM and ECCM is a game of who has the latest counter.

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:EDIT: Uh, one possibility for jamming, and the ONLY possibility in space based warfare is to fly PAST the incoming missiles and jam... Which utterly precludes vast amounts of power for jamming

No, the target is almost always in a straight line between the launching ship and the missile swarm. Or close enough that it doesn't matter.

And I tend to believe that an entire planetary power grid can usually produce significantly more power than a missile reactor. This tends to suggest to me that the power budget of defenders jammer might be somewhat higher than the output of a missile transmitter.

And you can predict generally where the point that your opponent will likely be based on the geometry of the situation. And these are the guys with gigantic invisible ships. A DN class reactor complex probably produces a pretty good amount of power. Since people parking huge invisible jammers between the fleet and the target probably didn't get predicted during the design phase of Apollo it seems likely that this might prove troublesome.

Uh, the discussion was finding Spider graser torps, LD's, etc using missiles, etc to find them.... Who the Hell needs back targeting info from orbital industry/forts around a planet? A basic telescope works just fine and no, it won't be jammed as everything sticks out like a GIANT beacon against the background radiation of space.

Missiles are talking to themselves and this is perpendicular to the point source they are looking for or which is trying to jam them.

As for sending data back, Here it is fairly easy to be unjammable or close enough to it. Why? We are moving at near relativistic speeds of light speed. So, the hysteresis of the waveforms incoming will tell you who is what and which to discard. So, unless the opponent has a platform between YOUR missiles and YOUR ships analyzing the wave forms and sending said data back to the jammer to then try to mimic it proactively then it is hopeless.

Lets do a timestamp analysis of just a square wave form. At even 0.1C, the angle the square wave rises at changes when it hits 0.2C assuming nothing has changed. The jammer has to calculate the distance and change in form assuming everything is STATIC and UNCHANGING as it takes man Seconds for said JAMMING mimic'd frequency to reach the outgoing missiles signal. To make sure your signal is unjammable, all you have to do is modulate the frequency or the hysteresis of the outgoing signal. This is absurdly easy to do. The Opponents Jammer is multiple seconds behind even if we ASSUME it has a platform between your missiles and your ships

So, unless one is going to assume amplitude swamping of the Entire EMS for multiple minutes at a time at multiple light seconds jamming is utterly impossible.

cthia wrote:
The MA are smart, people. They are A L P H A S.

You could be the smartest in the universe, it doesn't matter in a dictatorship(MALAIGN) as no one is allowed to do Shit until head honcho political operative who doesn't know shit about Engineering, warfare etc, tells you to jump.

How many days did all of the USSR listen to classical Music when Chernobyl happened again? Oh right, 2days and then no info, just went back to normal broadcasting. Uh, in case you don't know, every time something MASSIVE happened in USSR, all broadcasting was cut and classical music started playing.

Lots of VERY smart people in USSR, not one of them did squat Shit until Gorbachev told them to finally move... of course by this time, most of the 190TONS Uranium(9.5Billion curies if it all went up) had already gone into the countryside... Equivalent to several thousand nuclear Gigaton bombs if one goes by eyewitness accounts for percentage of the uranium pile which had evaporated(50%-->75%). Even Russia said ~45Million Curies(1.5X more Cesium curies than every nuclear bomb ever detonated by all nuclear powers in history)

Just saying, smart people matter far less than bureaucratic inertia, structure, etc. Give me dumb people who are able to make their own decisions than a bunch of smart people waiting for head honcho mucky muck and then have to explain, placcate, dodge the horse shit from head honcho mucky muck to approve said decision.

Why dictatorships/Socialism/Communism fails. 50 dumb people are smarter than the most brilliant single person.

Relax wrote:Lets do a timestamp analysis of just a square wave form. At even 0.1C, the angle the square wave rises at changes when it hits 0.2C assuming nothing has changed. The jammer has to calculate the distance and change in form assuming everything is STATIC and UNCHANGING as it takes man Seconds for said JAMMING mimic'd frequency to reach the outgoing missiles signal. To make sure your signal is unjammable, all you have to do is modulate the frequency or the hysteresis of the outgoing signal. This is absurdly easy to do. The Opponents Jammer is multiple seconds behind even if we ASSUME it has a platform between your missiles and your ships

That's not very difficult to calculate, and that's assuming grav-comms are affected by doppler and/or time dilation. But since the mothership can receive them all, the technology for compensating for this exists.

The biggest difficulty is that each salvo is at a different speed, so at a different relative doppler from one another. The jammer needs to jam multiple frequencies. In fact, this is a pretty good anti-jamming technique: frequency hopping spread spectrum. Couple that with direct sequence and spread over a very wide spectrum, the amount of energy the jammer needs to put out can become impractical very quickly.

Relax wrote:

cthia wrote:
The MA are smart, people. They are A L P H A S.

You could be the smartest in the universe, it doesn't matter in a dictatorship(MALAIGN) as no one is allowed to do Shit until head honcho political operative who doesn't know shit about Engineering, warfare etc, tells you to jump.

And we do know that the Onion lives in an echo chamber, an expression that David himself has said. By that he means that everyone they talk to think the same thing, along the same patterns, with a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. There's no one challenging.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:Lets do a timestamp analysis of just a square wave form. At even 0.1C, the angle the square wave rises at changes when it hits 0.2C assuming nothing has changed. The jammer has to calculate the distance and change in form assuming everything is STATIC and UNCHANGING as it takes man Seconds for said JAMMING mimic'd frequency to reach the outgoing missiles signal. To make sure your signal is unjammable, all you have to do is modulate the frequency or the hysteresis of the outgoing signal. This is absurdly easy to do. The Opponents Jammer is multiple seconds behind even if we ASSUME it has a platform between your missiles and your ships

That's not very difficult to calculate, and that's assuming grav-comms are affected by doppler and/or time dilation. But since the mothership can receive them all, the technology for compensating for this exists.

The biggest difficulty is that each salvo is at a different speed, so at a different relative doppler from one another. The jammer needs to jam multiple frequencies. In fact, this is a pretty good anti-jamming technique: frequency hopping spread spectrum. Couple that with direct sequence and spread over a very wide spectrum, the amount of energy the jammer needs to put out can become impractical very quickly.

Gentlemen, no. Much Ado About Nothing.

First, none of that is necessary if your opponent does not have your frequency or frequencies. One frequency alone is enough security between the mothership and the missiles if your opponent has no way of obtaining said frequency. It requires an infinite amount of power to jam all frequencies unless you are right on top of the receivers or emitters. Plus, any complexity demands the appropriate amount of additional power for the communication. Complexity also decreases the solidity of the communication.

What you are missing is that to execute an effective jam, the frequency or frequencies required MUST already be known. Hint, these platforms analyze the frequencies used just like the Apollo system -- and any navy -- analyzes the frequency(s) used by the enemy's ECM.

Modulating frequencies on the fly will work fine in a closed system. (Like Star Trek's shields). But in an open system where there are separate objects in the system (warship transmitters and missiles downrange) it is impossible. A communication protocol must already be established beforehand. And any jamming platform worth its weight in chips will get the "pattern" that is used easily. It simply needs a good enough look at the pattern. That is already a necessity in the HV and we hear it all of the time. "We got a good look at their ECM."

It all reminds me of my days on the gridiron as a quarterback. When you come out of the huddle (missiles launched) everybody knows the count. If you see trouble at the line of scrimmage, like a blitz coming, then it is fine to "call an audible" (change the play or frequency). But if everyone in the cog doesn't hear the audible, you're going to end up with a busted play. And if your opponent is making a lot of noise in the stands, you are not going to hear an audible. Funny, I never thought having the home field advantage translates into being able to jam frequencies.

Also, the proximity of the jamming device is important. If the jamming platform is much closer to the missiles than the mothership, its power requirements to effect the jam decreases significantly. Hint: Any such platform will be much closer to the missiles.

.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:I am not so sure the platform won't last. It will be deployed between the missile salvos and their mothership. The jamming will then be uprange from the enemy. The jamming will happen behind the brood of missiles directed AT the missiles in the aforementioned "constructive jamming" which doubles the amplitude of the signal in effect killing it. I am not so sure the platform will even be detected by the mothership since its jamming is directed AWAY from the ship and towards the avalanche that just passed it. And since the control missile's relay is cut, it cannot relay anything back. And if the platform gets into optimum position before the avalanche can get close enough to go into solo mode, then the exercise is moot.

It could be worse. What will happen if the jamming jams the communication between the control missile and its brood, or worse, overpowers all of the missiles' sensors? The blind leading the blind?

Why wouldn't the missiles be able to communicate back?

A sufficiently capable jammer aimed at their rear would be blinding their receivers; so they can't hear anything from the mothership. But the jamming shouldn't affect their rear facing transmitters, and since you've got the jamming directed away from the mothership it wouldn't be jamming its receivers either. So the missile telemetry should still be coming in, the mothership just won't be able to send back any commands. (Though unless this jamming platform is jamming both FTL and normal lightspeed control links the mothership could fall back on the later to get some updates through).

Okay, after a while without the return link sending commands the missiles might not be able to keep their transmissions aimed well enough for the mothership to hear -- but that'd be at least several minutes before that could happen. More than enough time for the mothership to receive the telemetry showing the mother of all jammers lighting up the missile's receivers.

(Even in the very best case, where this works once -- like the triple ripple did -- it seems easy enough to adjust Apollo's programming and behavior, and the fleet's general tactics, to largely mitigate the issue)


Oh, and the jamming platform also has to worry about any unseen recon drones far enough downrange to see it broadcasting, but sufficiently off to the side of the jammer's focus to still be able to transmit their sightings back to the main fleet.

You do realize that transmitters and receivers are both antennas. It is the same technique used in satellite jamming in space. If the frequencies are known the signal can be duplicated.

Late edit: But a question arises. Can an FTL signal be jammed without similar FTL capability?

Do forgive the double post. I called an audible.