[Space] Adapting "Honorverse" Concepts to GURPS

[doulos05]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I think AI better and cheaper than any I've seen evidence of in the Honorverse is possibly present day, and if not will be with us in a couple decades at the outside. They have a really enormous dependency on centralized, human-directed fire control.

Yes, but look at what they use it for. The use human directed fire-control to make intuitive judgments about which targets to prioritize. They don't seem to direct fire for each individual missile, it seems instead they lock in their priority targets and warhead selection and let the computer sort of which bay fires at which target at which time. In each of the situations I can recall where the fire control teams feature, they are executing pre-configured firing patterns (programs) and designating targets for said programs (variables). In other words, the fire control teams are ordering expert AI systems to allocate weapons fire given the constraints of targets they have selected.

Also note that whenever a fire control team is forced to adapt/react to the tactical situation without computer assistance (like the religious fanatics on that Sultan class over Grayson), they regularly under-perform expectations (by a large margin) indicating that the computers are doing far more heavy lifting than you're giving them credit for. Before you say, "They weren't a trained crew." The book explicitly states that their lack of training meant they were doing by hand all the ECM and ECCM decision making that the computers were supposed to do.