Dragon's teeth missiles

This may be a matter of "just because" but I wondered how a dragon's teeth missile might work. A dazzler is easy to figure out. But a dragon's teeth, not so much. What I know is that when active it shows as nine additional missile traces for a total of ten. There was also an off hand mention in UH during the Hyapatia battle that those ten can be picked off, "wasting" a cm, what I'm not sure of is if that means one of those singular ten, or if it's the projecting missile (and all ten) that David describes as a cm being wasted on that interception count. Or if he means one (or more) of those ren. Probably all ten, although it would certainly be interesting if it was the second case.

Also, HOW do you think the missile accomplishes the proliferation of it's signal? THAT, I fear, is one of those hand wavium things that we just can't know. It WOULD be interesting to find out what David thinks it does. Especially as he'x worked out so much of the other techy thingx over the years, like the ftl grav com for instance.

Oh well, let's see what comes up for this thread. (If snything)

Mycall4me wrote:This may be a matter of "just because" but I wondered how a dragon's teeth missile might work. A dazzler is easy to figure out. But a dragon's teeth, not so much. What I know is that when active it shows as nine additional missile traces for a total of ten. There was also an off hand mention in UH during the Hyapatia battle that those ten can be picked off, "wasting" a cm, what I'm not sure of is if that means one of those singular ten, or if it's the projecting missile (and all ten) that David describes as a cm being wasted on that interception count. Or if he means one (or more) of those ren. Probably all ten, although it would certainly be interesting if it was the second case.

Also, HOW do you think the missile accomplishes the proliferation of it's signal? THAT, I fear, is one of those hand wavium things that we just can't know. It WOULD be interesting to find out what David thinks it does. Especially as he'x worked out so much of the other techy thingx over the years, like the ftl grav com for instance.

Oh well, let's see what comes up for this thread. (If snything)

If the dragon's teeth missile is able to generate the decoy signals far enough from itself then a CM could well just go screaming through empty space without ever making wedge to wedge contact with the dragon's teeth missile -- that would cause it to waste its shot and leave the decoy active to try to fool the next wave of CMs (assuming it didn't burn out before then). (Though, depending on how tightly you'd sequenced you attack waves, the CM might have enough drive time remaining to get redirected towards a missile in the next salvo (assuming that dazzlers hadn't managed to jam its fire control link and prevent that targeting update from getting through)

But you're right that we don't know how it generates the spurious missile wedge signatures. Given where they appear in the timeline I'd assume it is somehow related to Manticore's improving control of high repetition rate grav transmission (as seen in improved FTL comms) and grav shielding (as seen in the improved directionality of those coms) -- and that it's somehow using an overpowered (and short lived) transmitter to narrowly broadcast signals that look like the emissions from a missile's wedge.

Could it be an equivalent to our multiple warhead missiles? Fires off ten submunitions in all directions (but still on the main path) that scream their heads off?

Daryl wrote:Could it be an equivalent to our multiple warhead missiles? Fires off ten submunitions in all directions (but still on the main path) that scream their heads off?

I thought about that, but it doesn't seem too likely to me. Having room for nine sub munitions that also have the power to not only keep up with it's "mother" but to also have the additional power to spoof the attacking cm's.

Mycall4me wrote:

Daryl wrote:Could it be an equivalent to our multiple warhead missiles? Fires off ten submunitions in all directions (but still on the main path) that scream their heads off?

I thought about that, but it doesn't seem too likely to me. Having room for nine sub munitions that also have the power to not only keep up with it's "mother" but to also have the additional power to spoof the attacking cm's.

Yeah - to start with they'd each need their own wedge capable of the same 46,000/92,000 g as an MDM (though they'd only need maybe 5-10 seconds, at most, of endurance).
Otherwise it'd be trivial to tell them apart after a second because the decoys would be the "wedges" that stopped accelerating, and were instead coasting balletically. (So falling further and further behind the attack and jammer missiles)

I don't think there's any way to stick even one such powered decoy into an RMN MDM; much less 9.

Jonathan_S wrote:it'd be trivial to tell them apart after a second because the decoys would be the "wedges" that stopped accelerating, and were instead coasting balletically. (So falling further and further behind the attack and jammer missiles)

Hmm - let me crunch some numbers and see how bad a ballistic decoy would be.

Let's run two profiles - one a longish (pre-Apollo) range attack at 40 million km, and one at a shorter 25 million km (which is actually inside powered DDM range)

Looking at just the last 60 seconds; 60 seconds being activating the decoys just as the CMs launched.

MDM at 40 million km, 422 seconds (and if the decoy was ejected now and proceeded ballistically)
T= 0, 40,140,134 km, 190,238 kps
T-05. 39,194,581 km, 187,984 kps (5,635 km behind at T=0)
T-10, 38,260,298 km, 185,730 kps (22,540 km behind at T=0)
T-20, 36,425,542 km, 181,222 kps (90,160 km behind at T=0)
T-30, 34,635,866 km, 176,714 kps (202,860 km behind at T=0)
T-45, 32,035,877 km, 169,952 kps (456,435 km behind at T=0)
T-60, 29,537,318 km, 163,190 kps (811,440 km behind at T=0)

MDM at 25 million km, 334 seconds (and if the decoy was ejected now)
T= 0, 25,144,722 km, 150,567 kps
T-05. 24,397,521 km, 148,313 kps (5,635 km behind at T=0)
T-10, 23,661,590 km, 146,059 kps (22,540 km behind at T=0)
T-20, 22,223,538 km, 141,551 kps (90,160 km behind at T=0)
T-30, 20,830,566 km, 137,043 kps (202,860 km behind at T=0)
T-45, 18,825,633 km, 130,281 kps (456,435 km behind at T=0)
T-60, 24,333,282 km, 123,519 kps (811,440 km behind at T=0)

And what should have been obvious, if I'd just stopped to think about it first, is that the distance the ballistic decoy falls behind the accelerating missile depends solely on the missile's acceleration (46,000g). Their base velocity at time of separation doesn't matter a whit.

But, yeah, it should be blatantly obvious that a ballistic decoy trying to pretend to be another missile just isn't one. It gets left behind far, far, too quickly -- and I don't think any signal generation trickery can fool grav sensors into thinking it's 10s or 100s of thousands of km closer than it actually is.

We know ships use target acquisition radars and we know that those can be fooled. Is it possible that it is the radars that the Dragon's Teeth missiles mess up? Could it be that even the largest gravitic array on a ship is not precise enough to use in targeting (unlike the massive arrays that detect planetary approach)?

tlb wrote:We know ships use target acquisition radars and we know that those can be fooled. Is it possible that it is the radars that the Dragon's Teeth missiles mess up? Could it be that even the largest gravitic array on a ship is not precise enough to use in targeting (unlike the massive arrays that detect planetary approach)?

Hmm, I'm looking through the books and they do seem non-specific as to which sensors the dragon's teeth are fooling.

Saying things like:
"the Dragon's Teeth, each loaded with enough false emitters to appear as an entire salvo of attacking missiles, ought to do a pretty fair job of completely swamping their victim's tracking capability." [SoS]
"The battlecruisers' tracking capacity was simply overwhelmed by the Dragon's Teeth's false images of incoming warheads." [SoS]
"Dragon’s Teeth came online as well, radiating hundreds—thousands—of false targets" [MoH]
"Dragon’s Teeth came online as well, radiating hundreds—thousands—of false targets" [ART]
"EW platform which could generate ten totally convincing false missile signatures" [UH]
"electronic ghosts generated by the Dragon’s Teeth" [UH]

I'd assumed that CMs would want warshaski detectors; since that would let them track incoming missiles in near-realtime; rather than the slow radar returns from missiles that might be closing at over 0.7c. (Of course grav sensors couldn't be their only sensor, since they do have to be able to sweep for missiles that have gone ballistic)
But maybe it isn't possible to squeeze a grav sensor into something as small as a CM. (Or at least not a useful one)

We do know that ships observe missile launches via grav sensors - but you could be right that those can't provide a precise enough location of each target (especially in the noise of an entire salvo of missiles screaming in) to be useful in directing CMs. So maybe they do rely entirely on passives plus radar/lidar sensors on both ship and CM for point defense targeting.

Jonathan_S wrote:We do know that ships observe missile launches via grav sensors - but you could be right that those can't provide a precise enough location of each target (especially in the noise of an entire salvo of missiles screaming in) to be useful in directing CMs. So maybe they do rely entirely on passives plus radar/lidar sensors on both ship and CM for point defense targeting.

If they don't have gravitic sensors aboard and are relying on EM sensors instead, then the Dragon's Teeth interference is also EM. But we don't need to know what it is: if you can make a small enough sensor of some type that fits a CM, then the RMN can make something that can emit the same type of energy in a bigger missile body of a Mk16 or Mk23.

How it works... I will take this particular passage:
"the Dragon's Teeth, each loaded with enough false emitters to appear as an entire salvo of attacking missiles, ought to do a pretty fair job of completely swamping their victim's tracking capability." [SoS]
(emphasis mine)

They are actively emitting something in the direction of the CMs. They distinguish from the Dazzlers that the latter emit a huge spike of what probably is white noise that swamps detectors completely. It's very likely that it's not focused at all, probably expanding hemispherically if not omnidirectionally. Instead, the Dragon's Teeth must be using its power generation capability in a focused and shaped manner, so it fools sensors in a specific direction and for a much longer time. The most likely method I can think of is that the multiple Dragon's Teeth missiles work together as a long baseline interferometry emitter, so they actually create images together in the receptors on the CMs and motherships that look like multiple missiles are there. That's probably very directional, as outside a narrow cone, the interference would not line up and you'd just have a fuzzying of some areas of space instead of a rather sharp of a missile that isn't there.

As an Electronic Warfare missile, this really depends on the characteristics of the sensors. That means a radically different sensor would not be fooled, despite receiving that energy input, because it would make no sense to the processing suite behind it.