Fall 1924 – RMN/GSN Tactical changes

ThinksMarkedly wrote: <snip>
Bandwidth isn't everything. The Hermes is a civilian product, built to civilian specifications. So it's possible -- very likely even -- that there are other things it traded off that a military unit would have needed, like for example latency, or its own stealth. If it can be picked off easily in a battlefield, it's not going to help much in controlling missiles.

Where has it ever been stated that Hermes is a "Civilian" device? FTL comm is a military secret. Hermes buoys may be handling high level government traffic, but we've never seen any indication that a Hauptman type or other civilian is using it for his communications.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
BuWeaps argument seems to be that there is no need for a ship type that fills the role that a CA traditionally does. I don't know what their argument is -- actually, I don't know what the role of a CA is in the first place. Given the RFC quoted text and what you're saying BuWeaps is saying, I could infer that the RMN needs a ship type that can perform some of the battlecruiser roles but not all, and that can be sufficiently achieved with just light cruisers.

CA role is identical to that of the BC in the HV and why both RMN Buships and I am arguing that ONE of the type should be eliminated or close enough to accurate. Hrmm I wonder who will win, me or RMN BuShips... A more detailed breakdown would be HotQ/SVW timeframe at least in the books, but how they still justify both classes has always puzzled me when everyone has DN/SD back then.

Traditionally in wet navy it is not so.

Must also remember, hrmm I forget where DW talked about this, maybe More than Honor appendix??? or SVW appendix? is that the BC/BB was originally the largest ship in the HV and then BB showed up equivalent to wet navy WWi/WWII timeframe and then DN, then SD showed up in reverse or wet navy history. So, rather the opposite of wet navy.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:Whatever the device used by Honor for FTL video is called. Guess it is not Athena. Mind fart for whatever it is that links Manticore A and Manticore B and she and others have used to talk.

Wrong Greek god name. That's Hermes, not Athena

Doh, Yes, of course it is the Greek god Hermes with his winged feet. Yikes, should have remembered that. I knew Athena, goddess of wisdom/war was wrong but...

Relax wrote:Doh, Yes, of course it is the Greek god Hermes with his winged feet. Yikes, should have remembered that. I knew Athena, goddess of wisdom/war was wrong but...

Hermes allows us to pass messages in FTL speeds, but not necessarily intelligent messages! If they'd called it Athena, then they'd have required that only thoughtful messages be passed.

"Military Intelligence" comes to mind.

Hey, finally FOUND
FTL keyhole light via Hermes + RD
Uncompromising Honor pg. 336/337 when Honor is talking to Elizabeth to upgrade SAG-C/BC'P/BCL

Knew it was in there somewhere.

Sorry it took so long to find it.

Relax wrote:Hey, finally FOUND
FTL keyhole light via Hermes + RD
Uncompromising Honor pg. 336/337 when Honor is talking to Elizabeth to upgrade SAG-C/BC'P/BCL

Knew it was in there somewhere.

Sorry it took so long to find it.

Thanks for persisting and digging it up. I assume this is the key bit (since the page numbers for the .RFT version don't match the printed book)

Uncompromising Honor wrote:“I suspect the initial concept came from Foraker,” she said, “but the final proposal has Sonja’s fingerprints all over it, too. Basically, they took a good look at the way our Saganami-Cs and Rolands have been integrating Ghost Rider into their fire control loops, and they’ve come up with a refinement. For all intents and purposes, their suggestion is that we use Hermes buoys in conjunction with Ghost Rider. The Agamemnons have plenty of telemetry links; their links just don’t have an FTL capability. So the idea is that we strap Hermes buoys onto Ghost Rider recon drones and then tractor four or five more buoys just outside an Agamemnon’s wedge perimeter and let them talk to each other. Hermes has a lot more bandwidth—and more channels—than the standard shipboard grav com, Elizabeth. So if we pair buoys between those tractored to the ship and the ones mounted on the recon platforms then feed the telemetry links through the buoy channels and use the ones on the recon platforms to talk to the missiles…”
She raised an eyebrow as her voice trailed off. Elizabeth looked at her for several seconds, then began to nod—slowly, at first, but with increasing enthusiasm.
“Don’t get too excited,” Honor warned. “Like I say, it’s a stopgap. Neither Ghost Rider drones nor buoys are what you might call tiny, which means they’ll displace a lot of missiles. And the entire system’s on the…ramshackle side. It won’t have Keyhole’s bandwidth, even with all the buoys an Agamemnon can handle, and it won’t provide the additional missile-defense Keyhole’s laser clusters offer, either. But it will help a lot, and from the shipboard end, most of the refit will consist of software changes, so we should be able to put it into service quickly.”

That does tell us that whatever Keyhole II is doing it's got more bandwidth that a Hermes buoy (which can support multiple full video streams).

From that, and talking about how it'll "displace a lot of missiles" to do this I'm wondering if that means they have to shove those Hermes buoys into the pod-bay somehow (presumably because they don't fit elsewhere in the ship?)
If so that would seem to limit the ability of smaller Mk16 equipped ships to duplicate this feat...

Oh, and one of the other limits on this "ramshackle" lashup is that to provide FTL updates to the missile you'd need time for the Ghost Rider drone to move Hermes Buoys downrange. (Because the link appears to be ship -laser/radio-> buoy -ftl-> buoy -laser/radio-> missile) Even at their normal 50% acceleration rate your Mk16s move at 46,000 gees, while a Ghost Rider is only 5,000 gees while remaining stealthy or 10,000 gees flat out -- and that's assuming that strapping a giant buoy to it doesn't affect its acceleration rate. So, you either have to see the enemy coming in time to get buoys scattered downrange, or else you'll initially be fighting without FTL control links.

[At 5,000 gees it'd take a Ghost Rider 19 minutes to make a zero-zero intercept at 16 million km; and you likely wouldn't want your Hermes buoy go to sailing past the enemy at over 1/10th the speed of light; so you'd want to make turnover and slow down to eventually match the enemy's course and speed at a reasonable range ahead of their formation. But even if you sent one flying by it'd still take 14 minutes to reach 16 million km. Though of course your fire control lag steadily shrinks as the buoy moves closer to the enemy; it's hardly all or nothing. But it probably doesn't reach full effect until the closest downrange buoy is within a few million km of them]


Still, great find and thanks again for locating and sharing it -- I'd totally forgotten that passage.

And despite my tendency to look at its limitations it'd still be a massive boost to missile effectiveness when the situation lets you employ it.

Yes, limited for downrange missiles. Significant limitations.
This would in effect give FTL for CM fire though...

Personally, far down range ECM pattern matching and quick update for penetration aids seems far more likely than actual individual control links. Could be a broad broadcast to all missiles updating at say 5-->10Mkm from target before entering CM bands where said Hermes buoy itself does not become an OBVIOUS glaring counter target. One would think it would be the equivalent of a supernova broadcasting, "HELLO, SHOOT ME!" as it would have to direct its information toward the enemy pinpointing it in space.

Right now, IIRC, at 3.5Mkm, CM interception rate is ~<20% while close in intereception rate is ~>80%

@ ~15t/CM per 100 CM's fired, we are talking a wastage of 60*15t or 900t every time 100Cm's are fired.

An RD is ~200t(SoSAG) Hermes = ??? 200t? 100t? Built to be attached to an RD apparently judging by how many conversations in recent books we have over Hermes buoy's so, I am leaning towards 100t or so. Could be a couple hundred tons just as easily. So, crudely speaking, the low end would be 300t worth of CM's would have to be saved at long range to pencil out without speaking of advantages of fighting on your side. 300t/15t = 20CM's of interception benefit.

Quick Q: Do we have to count the 200t of the RD? RMN etc are already using RD's to see incoming fire, why could this not also do that job with an attached Hermes as well? 3D position in space could be a problem, but we have also been told there are multiple layers of RD's watching close in so... <<meh>> For now, lets assume we cannot dual use said RD and its tonnage counts against total ship system active defense load.

Just as an example: A Roland carries 800CM's. A Hermes buoy attached to a RD would only have to increase interception rate 20/800 ~2.5% hit at rate to pencil out. All before we talk fighting on your side to the enemy.

Slam dunk! Sign me up.

Given how effective 23Es have turned out to be even without tight shipboard control (such as when beyond FTL range; apparently only around 3 LM[1]); retaining nearly 30% of the accuracy it would have under tight FTL control[2], I wouldn't be surprised to see a Mk16E control missile developed.

It wouldn't have an FTL transceiver, but just including the control link multiplier (1 fire control slot per pod, rather than per missile) and the 'AI' for long range accuracy boost, I think that would more than compensate for losing 1 or 2 attack birds from a Mk16 pod, especially given that they carry 14 missiles per pod.


Heck, without the need to shoehorn in a (relatively) large FTL transmitter and receiver you might be able to build such a thing into a missile the size of a normal Mk16; just with its guts rearranged somewhat to better use volume freed up by having no warhead. In that case a Nike-class, Sag-Cs, or even Rolands could potentially launch those as part of their tube-launched salvos; and the range accuracy bonus wouldn't go to just the BC(P)s.

(Dream aspiration would be to have the 'E' a direct warhead replacement; and then you could swap between laserhead, dazzler, dragons teeth, or control payload as desired, all on a common Mk16 missile body)

That could change tactics by encouraging engagements at even longer ranges. (Even without the Ghost Rider + Hermes lashup Hemphill and Foraker concocted for limited non-Keyhole II FTL fire control)

----
[1] "The People’s Republic’s analysts had radically underestimated Apollo’s effective range, and all of Chin’s intelligence briefings had told her she was well outside it when Eighth Fleet launched against her. The 44,000,000-kilometer ballistic phase Duchess Harrington had been forced to incorporate into her launch just to reach Chin’s ships had confirmed that she was outside effective shipboard fire control range, and so she had been. But not very far outside it. Eighth Fleet had been close enough to update the Apollo control platforms in near real-time just before it released them to autonomous control, and that autonomous control had been enormously better than anyone in the PRH had believed it could be. Even with that update, the Mark 23s had been far less accurate than they would have been at three light-minutes, as opposed to the four light-minutes at which they’d been launched. They’d simply been far more accurate than the Peeps had anticipated." [UH]

[2] "the Echoes had also been designed specifically for use beyond even Apollo’s shipboard control range, with every control missile in the salvo talking to every other control missile and acting as an individual processing node for the data even when relay to—and through—the mothership was unavailable. Its autonomous accuracy was no more than thirty percent or so of its accuracy under tight shipboard control, but that thirty percent was many times more accurate than any current-generation Solarian missile could achieve." [UH]

Jonathan_S wrote:[size=70][1] "The People’s Republic’s analysts had radically underestimated Apollo’s effective range, and all of Chin’s intelligence briefings had told her she was well outside it when Eighth Fleet launched against her.

The People's Republic? That hadn't exited for 6 years at the time these events happened.

I've just checked the text and your reproduction is accurate. And it's not a single mistake, since it repeats "PRH" in the same paragraph.

Big "Oops."

The 44,000,000-kilometer ballistic phase Duchess Harrington had been forced to incorporate into her launch just to reach Chin’s ships had confirmed that she was outside effective shipboard fire control range, and so she had been. But not very far outside it. Eighth Fleet had been close enough to update the Apollo control platforms in near real-time just before it released them to autonomous control, and that autonomous control had been enormously better than anyone in the PRH had believed it could be. Even with that update, the Mark 23s had been far less accurate than they would have been at three light-minutes, as opposed to the four light-minutes at which they’d been launched. They’d simply been far more accurate than the Peeps had anticipated." [UH]

BTW, this actually gives us the total flight time for the Eighth Fleet launch on Fifth. Since "44,000,000-kilometer ballistic phase" is clearly an approximation, I'll approximate here too. That phase was between the second and third stages, which means those missiles were at 6 * 0.09c/min = 0.54c, which means a 4.5 minute coast. That makes the total flight time about 9 + 4.5 = 13.5 minutes.

But the text continues with other contradictory information. It says "the total flight time for Eighth Fleet's missiles from the moment their second stage drives shut down had been only 5.2 minutes." If the missiles coasted for 4.5 minutes, that would they used their third-stage drives for only 0.7 minutes. That's stupid and therefore can't be right. That would imply the missiles arrived much slower than they could have arrived and had a much longer flight time than they had to accept. That would have given Chin too much advantage to intercept them or bug out.

Maybe Honor did intend to simply scare Chin away and give her a chance to leave without suffering too many losses. I don't think so and AAC also tells us the missiles lit back up close to the time they were expected to. So the third stage must have run for close to 3 minutes, not 0.7, meaning that the ballistic phase can't be any more than 2.2, maybe 2.4 minutes long. And 2.4 minutes times 0.54c is 23 million km, not 44. In fact, 44 million km is 2.4 light-minutes.

So, I conclude that 44 million is wrong. Maybe it's a typo and was meant to be 24 million.

I have to sheepishly admit that when I first read the title of this thread my warped brain parsed it as something totally different.

I thought it meant to put a finger on what tactical changes the RMN would employ on the battle field, such as discontinuing to sit all fat dumb and pretty in orbit like sitting ducks with wedges down.

I don't know if other navies in the alliance practice that same very bad habit in light of such a stealthy and ruthless opponent who ignores the traditional rules of war by their operational tactics and MO.

Against a super stealthy spider a commanding officer on the spot may come to question whether or not he should always have pods rolled. However, such a drastic change in tactics could bite them on the ass if they were to lose all rolled pods to a stealthy attack.*

Par for the course for warped brains, huh.

* Which prompts me as the lead-in for a post in another thread.