Commerce raiding

tlb wrote:

Relax wrote:In other words to make this a problem as described in the books, we have to be using computing power/software from the early 1990's here on earth and even then this is not true in the defensive situation as it is not a high ECM environment where one must have multiple bands on standby due to jamming/spoofing requirements.

That seems a very harsh assessment. They had a very futuristic control system that could completely handle multitudes of pods against the expected threat. But were hit with a totally unexpected threat, that reduced them to a much more manual process. This is similar to the satellites that needed reprograming in OBS; except nothing here needed reprograming, instead they had to send out the threat information to the pods on something closer to a one for one basis.

Not how engineering works. Either it functions or it doesn't. Mycroft is an ADDITION to, NOT THE system. FTL vrs Light speed has nothing to do with it. Bandwidth required for this launch is ~near zero. Its missile serial numbers x--> y, listening to a broadcast on already existing channel(ALL missiles are listening for authorization codes) attack position radius, alpha, gamma all with same upload of ships in question look like (THIS), with ECM of (THAT) 1st serial missile repeat numbers (every 8 in this case) go for throat or stern. And since it is so far away there are ZERO updates possible anyways MK23E Apollo will be doing all the ECM anyways.
###GO LAUNCH###
ONE channel, any LAC could have done it.

DW's entire "control links" fantasy is pure baloney as soon as you have more than a handful of missiles. You have literally a hundred missiles if not a thousand with IDENTICAL attack profiles

The only possible way you can talk about this subject canonically is you shove your head in a bucket of water and blow bubbles out your ass

Relax wrote:

tlb wrote:That seems a very harsh assessment. They had a very futuristic control system that could completely handle multitudes of pods against the expected threat. But were hit with a totally unexpected threat, that reduced them to a much more manual process. This is similar to the satellites that needed reprograming in OBS; except nothing here needed reprograming, instead they had to send out the threat information to the pods on something closer to a one for one basis.

Not how engineering works. Either it functions or it doesn't. Mycroft is an ADDITION to, NOT THE system. FTL vrs Light speed has nothing to do with it. Bandwidth required for this launch is ~near zero. Its missile serial numbers x--> y, listening to a broadcast on already existing channel(ALL missiles are listening for authorization codes) attack position radius, alpha, gamma all with same upload of ships in question look like (THIS), with ECM of (THAT) 1st serial missile repeat numbers (every 8 in this case) go for throat or stern. And since it is so far away there are ZERO updates possible anyways MK23E Apollo will be doing all the ECM anyways.
###GO LAUNCH###
ONE channel, any LAC could have done it.

DW's entire "control links" fantasy is pure baloney as soon as you have more than a handful of missiles. You have literally a hundred missiles if not a thousand with IDENTICAL attack profiles

The only possible way you can talk about this subject canonically is you shove your head in a bucket of water and blow bubbles out your ass

That assumes that the missiles floating in their pods already know where they are in the system so that they can be given an absolute location reference and aim themselves at it. (And, of course, assumes that missiles don't work the way RFC has declared they do)

That also assumes you don't want any acknowledgement back from the missiles that they got the signal. Otherwise your multicast launch signal generates a vast number of individual acks which might be stepping all over each other.

And of course even with your scheme lightspeed vs FTL does matter. Even if the bandwidth required was near zero FTL gets that signal there 62 times faster -- so all the missiles get it sooner and thus can launch sooner.




But assuming missiles will work the way RFC says they will, yes Mycroft is an add-on. So, yes, the Apollo control missile had FTL without Mycroft -- over about 4-5 lightminutes in the case of the Mk23E (possibly a bit longer for a dedicated system defense variant).

If the pods are further away from the control fort than that then a Mk23E's can't talk FTL to it without at least one Mycroft relay extending its FTL range.

Also, the control missile isn't necessarily sitting in the pod with its FTL transceiver turned on. For one thing the emitter side seems problematic -- it appears to be a much less powerful, greatly scaled down, but more rapidly variable impeller node; and impeller nodes require safety clearance around them to avoid shredding things. So firing up an FTL emitter while it's buried in a launch tube within a pod... could be bad. But even the receiver side might not be active until the pod tells the missile to warm up. And certainly normal flatpack pods have no reason to carry FTL transceivers of their own -- they're fired of quite close to the ship that launched them. A system defense pod might carry FTL transeivers -- but that'd push up the size, cost, and complexity compared to concentrating that capability into the Mycroft relays you already need scattered around the system.

Unless all the Mycrofts get destroyed (something they didn't really expect) they'd be able to use lightspeed signals to wake up and provide initial targeting info to all the nearby pods, and then after the missiles launch switch over to relaying the FTL fire control from the control fort to the Apollo control missiles.

Jonathan_S wrote:Also, the control missile isn't necessarily sitting in the pod with its FTL transceiver turned on. For one thing the emitter side seems problematic -- it appears to be a much less powerful, greatly scaled down, but more rapidly variable impeller node; and impeller nodes require safety clearance around them to avoid shredding things. So firing up an FTL emitter while it's buried in a launch tube within a pod... could be bad. But even the receiver side might not be active until the pod tells the missile to warm up. And certainly normal flatpack pods have no reason to carry FTL transceivers of their own -- they're fired of quite close to the ship that launched them. A system defense pod might carry FTL transeivers -- but that'd push up the size, cost, and complexity compared to concentrating that capability into the Mycroft relays you already need scattered around the system.

The Apollo Mark 23E cannot have anything turned on, because their reactors are NOT running while sitting in the pods. However the system defense pod DOES have a running reactor and communication equipment and it is the one to receive and acknowledge commands. When it gets the launch command, it fires up the missiles' reactors and gives them the information. Any serial numbers involved are of the pods and not the missiles.

You may have missed that I mentioned Hermes buoys could be used to overcome the light speed problem, but they would be slower in use because less intelligent.

Mycroft may be an add-on in the same sense that a graphical user interface is an add-on to a computer. The GUI adds ease of use and computing power to get certain things done easier and faster. Those things could still be done when the GUI has been killed, but it will be slower and may be clumsier.

PS: I expect the flat pack pods only have capacitors, and not reactors, to power communications and start the missiles.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Also, the control missile isn't necessarily sitting in the pod with its FTL transceiver turned on. For one thing the emitter side seems problematic -- it appears to be a much less powerful, greatly scaled down, but more rapidly variable impeller node; and impeller nodes require safety clearance around them to avoid shredding things. So firing up an FTL emitter while it's buried in a launch tube within a pod... could be bad. But even the receiver side might not be active until the pod tells the missile to warm up. And certainly normal flatpack pods have no reason to carry FTL transceivers of their own -- they're fired of quite close to the ship that launched them. A system defense pod might carry FTL transeivers -- but that'd push up the size, cost, and complexity compared to concentrating that capability into the Mycroft relays you already need scattered around the system.

The Apollo Mark 23E cannot have anything turned on, because their reactors are NOT running while sitting in the pods. However the system defense pod DOES have a running reactor and communication equipment and it is the one to receive and acknowledge commands. When it gets the launch command, it fires up the missiles' reactors and gives them the information. Any serial numbers involved are of the pods and not the missiles.

You may have missed that I mentioned Hermes buoys could be used to overcome the light speed problem, but they would be slower in use because less intelligent.

Mycroft may be an add-on in the same sense that a graphical user interface is an add-on to a computer. The GUI adds ease of use and computing power to get certain things done easier and faster. Those things could still be done when the GUI has been killed, but it will be slower and may be clumsier.

PS: I expect the flat pack pods only have capacitors, and not reactors, to power communications and start the missiles.

Flat pack pods specifically have fusion reactors to have sufficient power for their tractors. In Sys Def mode, their reactors can run for about a month before they need refueling and refurbishment. The pod reactors are fed live plasma when leaving the pod bay or ammunition ship to spin up the reactor. The Missile reactors are fed live plasma from the pod reactor to spin up their reactors, just like they are done in ship missile tubes.

tlb wrote:I expect the flat pack pods only have capacitors, and not reactors, to power communications and start the missiles.

Theemile wrote:Flat pack pods specifically have fusion reactors to have sufficient power for their tractors. In Sys Def mode, their reactors can run for about a month before they need refueling and refurbishment. The pod reactors are fed live plasma when leaving the pod bay or ammunition ship to spin up the reactor. The Missile reactors are fed live plasma from the pod reactor to spin up their reactors, just like they are done in ship missile tubes.

Thanks for setting me straight. I probably should not guess.

Theemile wrote:Flat pack pods specifically have fusion reactors to have sufficient power for their tractors. In Sys Def mode, their reactors can run for about a month before they need refueling and refurbishment. The pod reactors are fed live plasma when leaving the pod bay or ammunition ship to spin up the reactor. The Missile reactors are fed live plasma from the pod reactor to spin up their reactors, just like they are done in ship missile tubes.

But were they running? A month between maintenance visits implies a lot of visits, which means the boats making them are quite visible to all visitors to the system, if the reactors running all the time don't make them visible in the infrared anyway. That means your missile shoals are all very visible to an attacker.

Why would the Silver Bullets have needed to track FTL transmissions to find the Mycrofts, then? Yes, they fired on the Mycrofts, not the pods, but if our hypothesis is right that the Mycrofts need to be sufficiently near the missile pods for the system to work, the SB wouldn't have needed near that much effort.

It's more likely the pods were on "battery power" and running only minimum systems, not their reactors.

Theemile wrote:Flat pack pods specifically have fusion reactors to have sufficient power for their tractors. In Sys Def mode, their reactors can run for about a month before they need refueling and refurbishment. The pod reactors are fed live plasma when leaving the pod bay or ammunition ship to spin up the reactor. The Missile reactors are fed live plasma from the pod reactor to spin up their reactors, just like they are done in ship missile tubes.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But were they running? A month between maintenance visits implies a lot of visits, which means the boats making them are quite visible to all visitors to the system, if the reactors running all the time don't make them visible in the infrared anyway. That means your missile shoals are all very visible to an attacker.

Why would the Silver Bullets have needed to track FTL transmissions to find the Mycrofts, then? Yes, they fired on the Mycrofts, not the pods, but if our hypothesis is right that the Mycrofts need to be sufficiently near the missile pods for the system to work, the SB wouldn't have needed near that much effort.

It's more likely the pods were on "battery power" and running only minimum systems, not their reactors.

Beowulf had the system defense pods and not the flat pack pods, but that does not alter the substance of your questions. One possible answer is that there are many more pods than there are Mycroft units and since the weapon on the Silver Bullet explodes after three seconds of operation, then you would need to send perhaps an order of magnitude more SBs to blunt the defense. Admittedly these weapons could be much dumber, just looking for heat signatures instead of FTL transmission.

If they had gone that way, it is not clear how the effects would be different. On the one hand many fewer missiles might have launched, but they would have gotten off the mark much sooner and with much better instructions.

When you say "battery power" what are you thinking? The hand launched units might have something that we would recognize as a battery, but when you get to missiles in space the choice is between reactors or capacitors. The SB's went with capacitors, since they did not have use of the mini-reactor.

A problem with the mini-reactor is that it has radiation output that is damaging to humans. So how does the maintenance and refueling work? Done with robots? Does that mean that reactor equipped pods are no longer recoverable after a certain period of use?

tlb wrote:A problem with the mini-reactor is that it has radiation output that is damaging to humans. So how does the maintenance and refueling work? Done with robots? Does that mean that reactor equipped pods are no longer recoverable after a certain period of use?

We don't know.
We don't know how radioactive it remains once it's shut down -- the Honorverse does have those magical projected rad shields; maybe they're good enough to keep the reaction from irradiating the reactor. And its fusion so there won't be long lived decay products like a fission reactor would have after being shut down.

For that matter we don't know if those rad shield might be good enough to allow a worker to safely perform physical maintenance on a radioactive object.


Still, my guess would be robots or waldo units -- with the rad shielding sufficient to safely bring the mini fusion reactor aboard and into a maintenance room, and the human in a different room monitoring or remotely performing the maintenance.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:Not how engineering works. Either it functions or it doesn't. Mycroft is an ADDITION to, NOT THE system. FTL vrs Light speed has nothing to do with it. Bandwidth required for this launch is ~near zero. Its missile serial numbers x--> y, listening to a broadcast on already existing channel(ALL missiles are listening for authorization codes) attack position radius, alpha, gamma all with same upload of ships in question look like (THIS), with ECM of (THAT) 1st serial missile repeat numbers (every 8 in this case) go for throat or stern. And since it is so far away there are ZERO updates possible anyways MK23E Apollo will be doing all the ECM anyways.
###GO LAUNCH###
ONE channel, any LAC could have done it.

DW's entire "control links" fantasy is pure baloney as soon as you have more than a handful of missiles. You have literally a hundred missiles if not a thousand with IDENTICAL attack profiles

The only possible way you can talk about this subject canonically is you shove your head in a bucket of water and blow bubbles out your ass

That assumes that the missiles floating in their pods already know where they are in the system so that they can be given an absolute location reference and aim themselves at it. (And, of course, assumes that missiles don't work the way RFC has declared they do)

That also assumes you don't want any acknowledgement back from the missiles that they got the signal. Otherwise your multicast launch signal generates a vast number of individual acks which might be stepping all over each other.

And of course even with your scheme lightspeed vs FTL does matter. Even if the bandwidth required was near zero FTL gets that signal there 62 times faster -- so all the missiles get it sooner and thus can launch sooner.

0m*62X rate of comms = how much saved time again?

DEFENSE MISSILE PODS SITTING IN ORBIT. HELLO? 4 stages... can go forever, you know THOSE missile pods? Also you know an "update" 15 minutes old is useless in a single wave attack right? Regardless if you can cut comms time lag by 1000X... SINGLE uh hem, SINGLE wave. FLT comms is only useful if you have multiple FOLLOW UP waves and can better tell your missiles orientation of ships in question, ECM patterns used, possible damage to tell false images, etc. For what Beowulf did against the SLN BC's it did not matter that Mycroft was not there. Did not matter at all.

All the rest you typed is hand wringing short sightedness as ALL of that worrying is why you hire engineers and address ALL of that THAT before hand.
Its already taken care of beforehand in base programming for launch sequencing of ANY number of pods/missiles in a MULTITUDE of scenarios including: SNAFU's. Pretending you are going to do this "long hand" on the fly is beyond laughable.

Now if you wish to VIOLATE base programming as JOE 6 Pack LT, as all of a sudden Joe 6 pack LT big shot believes they are better than a team of engineers sitting down hashing out failure scenarios over weeks/months and testing ... uh You and RFC are in a class all alone then. Of course he also writes Joe 6 pack LT can, in an exercise, miraculously reprogram on the fly faultlessly... Put down Hollywood, and rejoin reality please. No, Star Trek is not reality. Give you a hint, no control consoles do not explode sparks either.

tlb wrote:
(SNIP!)
(re: reactor in system pods)
A problem with the mini-reactor is that it has radiation output that is damaging to humans. So how does the maintenance and refueling work? Done with robots? Does that mean that reactor equipped pods are no longer recoverable after a certain period of use?

There are fusion reactions that don't involve free neutrons, thus no induced radioactivity, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion (IIRC, somewhere in the pearls of Weber is a statement that they are used in the Honorverse).