Why did everyone become dumb at the end of TEIF?

tlb wrote:You originally said "And finally, fifth, an autonomous attack would be a clear EE violation."; which is a clear, unequivocal statement that you are now trying to back away from. For the sake of argument I will concede that the odds of an EE violation increase sharply if the target seeking on the missiles is dumb.

The Silver Bullets DO count, as they are clearly autonomous missiles that found their targets after a long search and only hit targets as far as we know. The fact that an EE violation was planned to be simultaneous with the Hasta attacks is irrelevant, since that was unrelated to the destruction of the Mycroft stations.

At Galton a missile attack was recognized due to the bow wave at a "significant" fraction of light-speed; so the pods at Oyster Bay must have been slower than that. You are being imprecise since the attacking weapons for Oyster Bay were all "missiles"; the difference is that some had laser heads and wedge drives activated when in attack range of the shipyards, while the others had graser heads and spider drives.

It is also imprecise to say the attacking weapons at Oyster Bay had "last-minute targetting" information, because I expect they were several minutes away; more than enough time to experience the glitches that you worry about for what were essentially autonomous weapons at that point. Basically any missile is autonomous once it is no longer in communication with a controller; but I concede that if the time lapse involved is not more than some small number of seconds, then we should agree that is irrelevant.

I agree that an autonomous weapons launch at targets near a planet is NOT an automatic EE violation. It's not an EE until there's mass civilian casualties outside a valid military target. You just have to worry about the potential risk of accidently causing such a violation.

I would go further and say that the highest chance of an EE violation is an 'normal' MDM on a course generally towards the planet targeting warships or forts.
It'll be flying at very high velocity, so difficult to quickly change its vector;
it'll be fixating trying to resolve its target;
and it'll be subject to a lot of jamming, decoys, and other ECM making it even harder for its limited sensors to figure out what's actually in front of it.

A Silver Bullet, being based on a quite stealthy recon drone body would be able to sidestep most of those risks even if autonomously attacking ships or forts in planetary orbit.
To remain stealthy it's not going to be screaming in at a sizable fraction of the speed of light - so it's got more time to be sure of its targets.
Being a physically larger chassis means that it's got room for the larger more capable sensor suite of the recon drone it was designed from -- so less likely to be fooled by ECM and decoys; especially given the extra closing time to discriminate between real and fake targets.
Being stealthier it's unlikely that it'll be facing jammers, ECM, and decoys the whole way it -- so its view of planetary orbit should be a lot less confusing in the first place than an MDM.
And all that before we talk about whether it's got more computing power (and thus capable of running more sophisticated code) that the MDM.
So a Silver Bullet seems pretty unlikely to accidently slam itself into a planet.

Apollo in autonomous mode is somewhere in the middle. It's not as stealthy as a Silver Bullet (that'd be the RMN's Mistletoe armed recon drone), and the individual missiles and ACMs aren't as large as a Silver Bullet and therefore can't have as large (and so presumably can't have as senstive) sensors as the Silver Bullet. And they do tend to come screaming in at high fractions of C, and into the face of jamming, ECM, and decoys.
However the ACM control missiles do have very power computers running very sophisticated programming and should be able to keep track of no-fly trajectories and keep all their missiles out of them. And they do a sensor fusion trick where each ACM gets the sensor feeds of all 8 of its Mk23s which gives it a very large virtual sensor area - dozens of km in diameter - far larger than any single drone, or even ship, could mount. The small individual sizes of the sensors does limit how much each can pick up, but merging the takes together gives a much better picture than each one had alone. And then the ACMs talk to each other and further share information on what they see and which targets they're picking. So despite screaming in into the face of jammers, ECM, decoys, and the like, an Apollo launch also seems quite unlikely to cause an inadvertent EE violation.

tlb wrote:You originally said "And finally, fifth, an autonomous attack would be a clear EE violation."; which is a clear, unequivocal statement that you are now trying to back away from. For the sake of argument I will concede that the odds of an EE violation increase sharply if the target seeking on the missiles is dumb.

Sorry, the context wasn't clear. We were discussing an unattended attack with missiles.

The Silver Bullets DO count, as they are clearly autonomous missiles that found their targets after a long search and only hit targets as far as we know. The fact that an EE violation was planned to be simultaneous with the Hasta attacks is irrelevant, since that was unrelated to the destruction of the Mycroft stations.

Indeed, but if they had caused more EE violations, it wouldn't have been a problem at this stage. It would have been for Oyster Bay, which is why autonomous wasn't a good idea.

At Galton a missile attack was recognized due to the bow wave at a "significant" fraction of light-speed; so the pods at Oyster Bay must have been slower than that. You are being imprecise since the attacking weapons for Oyster Bay were all "missiles"; the difference is that some had laser heads and wedge drives activated when in attack range of the shipyards, while the others had graser heads and spider drives.

Good point on the pods at OB. Those weren't detected.

So either they were at lower speed than the bowshock could be detected, or the bowshock can only be detected with an active wedge (which the pods didn't have), or the technique to detect the bowshock at that sensitivity was invented or put into use only after OB. Or a combination of all three.

It is also imprecise to say the attacking weapons at Oyster Bay had "last-minute targetting" information, because I expect they were several minutes away; more than enough time to experience the glitches that you worry about for what were essentially autonomous weapons at that point. Basically any missile is autonomous once it is no longer in communication with a controller; but I concede that if the time lapse involved is not more than some small number of seconds, then we should agree that is irrelevant.

The last targetting update must have been several minutes prior to the attack launch. I guess that sufficed.

Try as I may, I cannot shake the feeling that the MA should have known about the bowshock. Isn't a Navy aware of the limitations of its own weapons? Especially one that is so obvious?

Why don't GR drones create the same bowshock? Because they travel alone?

cthia wrote:Try as I may, I cannot shake the feeling that the MA should have known about the bowshock. Isn't a Navy aware of the limitations of its own weapons? Especially one that is so obvious?

Why don't GR drones create the same bowshock? Because they travel alone?

I do not think that recon drones travel at those velocities. The missiles detected at Galton were moving at .42c and I doubt that a recon drone ever hits that speed if anyone can help it. That is certainly faster than Galton's recon drones.

As for whether the Malign should have known about the bow shock wave; it might not have been noticed by the GA, if not for the Ghost Riders.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Try as I may, I cannot shake the feeling that the MA should have known about the bowshock. Isn't a Navy aware of the limitations of its own weapons? Especially one that is so obvious?

Why don't GR drones create the same bowshock? Because they travel alone?

I do not think that recon drones travel at those velocities. The missiles detected at Galton were moving at .42c and I doubt that a recon drone ever hits that speed if anyone can help it. That is certainly faster than Galton's recon drones.

As for whether the Malign should have known about the bow shock wave; it might not have been noticed by the GA, if not for the Ghost Riders.

Thanks, I wasn't sure. I know that recon drones can travel at those velocities, theoretically. We have suggested on the forum that they can. And there is at least several places in text that now escape me, where I assumed that they did. There are instances where recon drones are rerouted and retasked to cover specific areas where I thought the only way they could alter course and respond to their new tasking orders in time to be practically effective was to do just that. Haul flat out. At any rate, now we know why they don't.

cthia wrote:Thanks, I wasn't sure. I know that recon drones can travel at those velocities, theoretically. We have suggested on the forum that they can. And there is at least several places in text that now escape me, where I assumed that they did. There are instances where recon drones are rerouted and retasked to cover specific areas where I thought the only way they could alter course and respond to their new tasking orders in time to be practically effective was to do just that. Haul flat out. At any rate, now we know why they don't.

Well flat out is more an acceleration rate than a velocity. Somewhere in the books it mentions a Ghost Rider drone can managed about 5,000 gees while still remaining stealthy enough to be unlikely to be detected at long range - and twice that if it doesn't care about being seen.

To get to the velocity where the pods were creating bow shock a Ghost Rider trying to remain under that 5,000 g limit would take 40 minutes of straight line acceleration - (and if leaving the Earth would have covered half the current distance to Mars in that time)


Hmm, I'm trying to remember; were the 0.42c missile pods at Galton coasting purely ballistically when their bow shock was detected? I wonder if an active wedge and its rad shielding (like an active recon drone would have) would somehow suppress or absorb such a bow shock.


Of course in a lot of situations where a Ghost Rider drone needs to be somewhere ASAP the RMN doesn't mind if their opponent can tell there's something out there, as long as they can't localize it well enough to kill it. (We've had scenes back during the 2nd war with the RHN complaining that they could get traces of the recon drones, but couldn't nail them down) And so in those situations they wouldn't really care if the drone produced a detectable bow shock on it's way in as long as they slowed down and got back to full stealth before getting close enough for anyone to try to swat away the annoying drone.

Since we are discussing stupidity in the attack on Galton, a new one occurred to me while looking up the text on bow shock wave and I have reread through this thread to be sure that it was not mentioned before.

The Hasta missile was first used by the SLN in the attack on Beowulf, so the GA is well aware of it; it is basically the largest practical warhead stuck on a counter missile engine, which is stuck onto a stealthy recon drone. In use it was mixed with a bunch of real recon drones, so that they would not stand out. Yet the combined fleet has a swarm of recon drones approaching with two types of stealth and they decide not to fire on any of them so that they do not disclose that both are visible.

In the book the first missile attack was called "Shuttlecock" and was the swarm that showed the bow shock waves. Wouldn't it have been smarter to dial back the speed of Shuttlecock and have the actual first attack be by Hasta missiles mixed in with the recon drones that the GA was ignoring? If so, ordering the GA fleet to not fire on the recon swarm would almost be criminal negligence. A slightly better strategy by the GA would be to intentionally aim at the recon drones with the lower stealth level and allow some with the higher stealth to be hit by "accident".

Also considering the much longer ranges that were becoming the norm in missile exchanges, why was the Lorica the first use of a multi stage counter missile? It surprised the GA, even though it was said that such things were in the planning stages. This was paired with the Scutum system to try and manage fire control. In fact the GA could have been implementing a version like Apollo with an FTL Queen Bee that had local control over her swarm, resulting in a system with better control at the longer ranges.

The whole Galton plot had an overly sufficient serving of WTF?

tlb wrote:As for whether the Malign should have known about the bow shock wave; it might not have been noticed by the GA, if not for the Ghost Riders.

There's also the fact that there were hundreds or thousands of Hastas carrying missiles in that swarm. That would generate a lot of noise. A single RD would generate much less.

There is an interesting way to detect 'invisible' probes.

Take a beam weapon. Defocus it so that it illuminates a wide area rather than a point -- not that they are that good at focusing; a diffraction-limited gamma ray laser is a point beam over vast distances. The gamma rays (x-rays are better for this) induces x-ray fluorescence in the target including visible light. Not much, but photodetectors have high quantum efficiency.

Peekaboo--we see you.