Rebuilding Blackbird for the GSN

Tenshinai wrote:More importantly, having the drive there is more important for the ability to put up a wedge for protection, than it is for moving it.

I can get behind the argument that fitting a wedge as a giant shield is a really good defensive measure. Whether it's possible to do it for stations that are actually useful as main industrial nodes is another discussion though; and I am going to assume that such minuscule amounts of acceleration do not represent a credible defense against c-fractional strikes.

Putting more than a small fraction of a gee acceleration on a construction site does create certain problems that don't happen on a ship or station. Since you can't use an inertial compensator, you either need to counter with grav plates or suffer the effects of acceleration. Not a problem on a ship or station. But a large part of ship construction happens in zero gee! Before you could start accelerating, you would have to batten everything and everyone down. Imagine if someone accidentally left a wrench loose when the yard suddenly needs to accelerate. At 10 gees, it could cause some damage. Now imagine a graser or generator is being installed and is not yet welded down.

I will agree that, in principle, it may be possible to create a shipyard with limited mobility. But in practice, I don't think a shipyard would be able to maneuver without a few days warning. It might be useful for shuffling yards around every so often in preplanned schedules, but it won't be useful in a tactical situation.

I would think that new orbital yards (and other structures) would have some sort of station-keeping thrusters that would be available to tweak the structure's position and make very minor changes in things like attitude.

Remember that with a yard and other orbital structures, you are just hanging something at a point in space relative to something else. If it is truly "orbital" then it is going around something in an orbit. One of the challanges with that is adding mass to the structure (including building a ship "in" the yard with the ship and all of its components attached to the Yard framework etc. One worker comming across from a work boat in a skin suit may may impart much energy or force to the yard but moving components weighing several thousand tons certainly will. Energy and inertia.

Bump the yard (or a ship building in it) strongly enough or enough times with small amounts of force and you ARE going to change its orbital forces. That is generally thought to be a BAD IDEA unless you have some way of offsetting a single or multiple/cumulitive forces acting on the yard or station.

If you really needed to or wanted to move a Grayson style disbursed yard, you would put one or more tugs on it and shift it….very slowly. You want to take into account the stresses you put on the framework, the structure, all the bits and pieces that you are going to be moving around. You could build the basic framework with admin, storage, work and other spaces in a location near to the fabrication points and move the basic yard to its operation locatin or you could tow all the pieces out to the sited selected and put them together. They you bring in what you need to build the ship and the people do that.

The E wrote:From the last time the topic of mobile shipyards came up:

Not even suggesting close to that. Just impeller drives, not hyperspace capability. Materials will still be delivered to the shipyard like before, not built from scratch from what the shipyard can pick up from its wanderings in hyperspace.

As I've already suggested in the thread on what to do with captured solly SDs. Gut the middle part and make them shipbuilding slips for BC and smaller warships. That one would leave you with a heavily armored mobile shipbuilding slip with SD grade sidewalls. All I'm suggesting is lose the armor, use less powerful propulsion system (it doesn't have to keep up with a fleet), lose the sidewall generators or use less powerful ones and well, build this from scratch, not get it from gutting a huge ship.

Here's how I see it.

Imagine a long tube (main support pillar if you want to call it). Say 2x as long as a BC. With modules at both ends that house the power plant/s, nodes, enviro systems, living quarters etc. Attach 2 building slips along its length, opposite each other. Add some more pillars to keep the building slips stable and maybe attachment points for the slip's control/management center, storage area etc.