Q99 wrote: ↑2018-06-27 11:36am
Patroklos wrote: ↑2018-06-27 09:21am Even more importantly, the argument here is you don't want to blind yourself during an attack because that sensory information is vitally important to intercepting and/or countering that attack. The USS Monitor was not shooting down incoming canon balls with its own cannon balls, so any "sensors" associated with its turret are irrelevant to this discussion. If you are not using your sensors for anything at the moment, there is zero downside to masking them or otherwise protecting them. In our situation, there is a cost/benefit analysis.
And the ships in this scenario aren't shooting down incoming heavy fire either, so your point?
The whole point of the proposed scenario is "you hide them when you would otherwise not be able to use them due to them being gone/blinded because the weaponry in this universe is good at doing that, so you resort to secondary methods when that's in effect." If you haven't gotten that point, you haven't been paying attention. If you aren't taking that into account, you aren't finding flaw in the scenario, you're rejecting the scenario outright.
"No, that won't work because I don't want things to work that way," is not the same as something being a bad idea
if it works that way.
You have obviously embarked on some tangent not relevant to the larger discussion going on in this thread.
The reason we are talking about sensors is because they are integral to point defenses, the subject of this thread. Point defenses are for close in defense, including shooting down incoming fire. If we are talking about the effects of incoming fire on sensors, and point defenses have no role in countering said fire, then there is no need to be discussing them here.
You seem to be talking about the vulnerability of point defenses as a system, not just the sensors, against main battery weaponry beyond the scope of threats they are designed to be a defense against. That's fine, but if your reaction to that is "hide my point defenses" instead or "harden my point defenses" then all you have done is signal to the enemy an easy way to incapacitate your point defenses and convert whatever threat they were designed to counter the king of the battlefield. And if that way to incapacitate them is so easy that this attack is basically 100% effective (necessitating you always hide them instead of just risk loss but with a good chance of still presenting a credible defense), those point defenses wouldn't exist in the first place.
Your scenario rests on the assumption you will always be facing weapons the point defenses are vulnerable to but can't counter, or weapons they can counter and won't be vulnerable to. This is of course stupid, any media relying on such a setup should be laughed at because it doesn't pass a second's worth of logical scrutiny. The reality is if there is a distinction between those two sorts of enemy weaponry you will be facing both concurrently, not giving you the luxury or tailoring your defenses so you are never in a sub optimal situation regarding vulnerability vs effectiveness. If there is not this distinction, dedicated point defenses won't exit. They will either be one and the same with the main battery, or the cost benefit analysis will lead you to invest your money in a better main battery system to get their first with the knock out blow before you enemy can hit you at all.
A more appropriate comparison, but still falls short. They didn't do that because they were worried about losing sensory information, they did that because they worried about a lance through the brain. Again, there is no "third party" here so the comparisons don't match. This is more akin to "I can't armor my engine bell, so I will never point it at the enemy when in effective weapons range."
Actually splinters was the big worry, and those wouldn't go through your brain. They'll just, y'know, hit your eyes and blind you.
You don't seem to understand the distinction being made here. Space ships, presumably, have a separation of function that does not exist in your knight scenario. Namely, crew and sensor or two different things. In a space ship I can lose a sensor, but the crew which is doing all sorts of other things effectively, are still around/alive to continue to do those other things. In the case of a knight crew and sensor are the same thing, and a knight with a splinter through his eye is the same thing as a space ship with a deceased/incapacitated crew. Its 100% useless.
So again, your comparisons are flailing and ill conceived.
Also it strikes me this is really nitpicky. "Gimmie historical examples of people hiding their ability to see for protection in combat! No, not that one..."
That was not the question that was asked of you. You were asked for examples of people doing what you proposed, which as far as I can tell never included "radar operator closing their eyes instead of looking at the sensor console." They have always involved the masking or other protection of a third party intermediary sensor platform (third part to the operator, not the ship), which has none of issues involved with a crew-as-sensor setup.
Why yes, it's not an exact comparison because it's eyes instead of sensors, but no historical model is going to perfectly model a futuristic model unless it's one that unrealistically is based directly off that (unless you're seriously suggesting that no future combat can do more than directly carbon-copy an old mode of combat? I hope not). It is a case where people would deliberately cut off their sight temporarily shortly before a clash so they can protect their sight so that they could then unprotect it and see clearly without the threat of splinters a moment later, which is exactly what was asked for, and which is a direct comparison to the scenario.
You problem is they are not protecting their sight in the examples you provide, THEY ARE PROTECTING THEIR LIVES.
The task at hand is not hard to do, you are just displaying a breathtaking lack of knowledge of the subject. For example, its common for SAM systems to turn off their fire controls and search radars whenever they suspect there is some sort of HARM or other AA suppression effort underway. They do this even though SAMs can shoot down HARMs and wild weasel aircraft, but sense this is a situation or point-defense-concurrent-with-main-battery they make the analysis that its more important that they survive to shoot at bombers another day than to engage with an destroy point defense threats and hope the lack of a signal to home in on saves them. They don't always do this though, if there is a legitimate primary target they really want to kill or detect they will accept the risk and rely on their point defense. So this meats the criteria of an example, but its useless to your argument because a SAM site in the clutter of a forest or jungle or the ground generally has something no hard scifi space ship ever will that makes defense EMCON effective; stealth.
Using your flawed methodology, a much better example is bomber pilots in nuclear warfare. Knowing a nuclear blast could flash blind pilots, B-52s would put black out curtains over their windows once at altitude and fly on instruments. If they had to look outside for whatever reasons, they would use one eye periscopes to ensure they never went completely blind. This is of course not a point defense scenario, though, as bombers don't shoot down incoming ICBMs just like the USS Monitor didn't shoo down cannon balls...
Also, what does "third party" have to do with it? That's not part of the scenario, combat has been discussed between two sides either in duel or two larger forces.
Third party as in we are not talking about crew members staring out of windows and manually aiming their laser guns. Again, crew-as-sensor adds a lot more to worry about than sensor-as-third-party-inanimate-object. You are now talking about risking two vital components, or more accurately in most cases a vital component and a critical component. This shouldn't come as a surprise to you, but most defensive warfare revolves around the human component not getting killed...
Oh no, you certainly have not laid the 'hypothetical not-existed mod of warfare' as not a thing. I think we moved away from that to focus more on blinding, but we could put it back in no problem.
Its a done deal, but if you want me to school you up on it feel free to tell us your examples, real or imagined, of sensor-is-hole-in-armor that you want applied to the discussion.
In a hypothetical discussion of tech, it can work however we darn well want. That's not an assumption, it's a construct, and like I noted, the 'realistic' scenario in no way resembles the 'point defense with small guns firing at fighters' anyway, which is equally artificially constructed. Jub called my scenario 'flat earth,' but as I noted, the base scenario is the equally fictional 'hollow earth,' and actual 'solid ball of rock planet,' scenarios don't even get near this discussion.
Just because you can make it work however you want, doesn't mean its not incredible stupid and boring/bad story telling. You can make your space combat revolve around the weaponrization of bottled dog farts. Its your world man, you do you, but so far you are not justifying your ideas inside any circumstances either of you have provided.
You might not like the idea of tech working that way, but that's just saying you don't like the scenario, not how things would work in the scenario.
Your tech solutions do not make sense in any scenario so far provided.
Again no third party, they were not protecting their sensors but rather their soft, squishy lives. They may be one in the same in these circumstances but that's just because they are attached. Nobody was going to be like "well, I lost my life, but at least my eyes are still mint!"
So you think they'd do nothing at all to protect their sight-apparatuses if they were super vulnerable?
I said no such thing. I gave the scenarios where doing so and not doing so makes sense. It has to do with the character of the combat, such as whether defense is all or nothing, targets are staged in vulnerability (the specific incoming weapon can damage some things, but never damage others), or ablative in nature (damage is general, and wears uniformly over time, hit point style), and if the enemy has multiple damage modes it can employ.
Then we get back into whether you point defense is itself vulnerable, is it concurrent with your main battery, is it expendable from cost/benefit analysis, etc?
What you don't do, ever, is blind yourself when that weapon is your best defense against the thing doing the blinding in an all or nothing scenario (which is current real world naval warfare).
I don't think you know much on how combat works, your vehicle losing most of it's ability to see out often leads to a decrease to long-term survival.
Long term survival is irrelevant when you failed the short term survival test. This is how I currently practice modern warfare on the most advanced combat platforms humans have ever produced, as a data point.
"No one would ever spend effort to just protect sight in combat," is such a bizarre stance. I really don't know what to say.
In scenarios where protecting your sight and your life are one in the same (not in the logical follow on consequences sense, but in the this bullet will simultaneously blind and kill/incapacitate me sense), which is all the historical scenarios you brought up, are you really ever protecting your sight, or is that just part and parcel with protecting your life?
