Two questions about details in Toll of Honor (minor spoiler?

Hi,

Although I think this does not qualify as spoilers in "Toll of Honor": If you haven't read the first 60% of the book, you may want to skip this post till later.

I have two questions about the planning of the attack on Samson-4, which I can't get around. I'm just at the point where they brief for the attack (or the simulation of the attack), Brandy is attaining the conference call.

1) As far as I remember, big planets like gas giants are heavy enough to have their own hyper limit. This ought to prevent the Peeps' ships from "just hypering out" without racing outside the hyper limit first, and the attackers have higher velocity as the peeps ships are in orbit. As this is not mentioned in the text, why is this "gas giant" without its own hyper limit?

2) As the aim of the attackers is to retain as much speed as possible, why didn't they first translate down to the lowest alpha band, then accelerate to the speed limit, followed by a single translation from lowest alpha to normal space, instead of doing a crash translation from delta bands? As far as I remember, each band costs some 90% of speed, so while crashing through several bands might make them appear earlier by a few hours, in this case, the remaining speed after translation seems to be the critical parameter, not appearing a few minutes earlier.

As I've not finished the book yet (but I soon will): If those questions will be answered in the remaining 3rd of the book, just point out that it will.

markusschaber wrote:Hi,

Although I think this does not qualify as spoilers in "Toll of Honor": If you haven't read the first 60% of the book, you may want to skip this post till later.

I have two questions about the planning of the attack on Samson-4, which I can't get around. I'm just at the point where they brief for the attack (or the simulation of the attack), Brandy is attaining the conference call.

1) As far as I remember, big planets like gas giants are heavy enough to have their own hyper limit. This ought to prevent the Peeps' ships from "just hypering out" without racing outside the hyper limit first, and the attackers have higher velocity as the peeps ships are in orbit. As this is not mentioned in the text, why is this "gas giant" without its own hyper limit?

2) As the aim of the attackers is to retain as much speed as possible, why didn't they first translate down to the lowest alpha band, then accelerate to the speed limit, followed by a single translation from lowest alpha to normal space, instead of doing a crash translation from delta bands? As far as I remember, each band costs some 90% of speed, so while crashing through several bands might make them appear earlier by a few hours, in this case, the remaining speed after translation seems to be the critical parameter, not appearing a few minutes earlier.

As I've not finished the book yet (but I soon will): If those questions will be answered in the remaining 3rd of the book, just point out that it will.

I don't recall them getting answered later in the book.

Yeltsin's Uriel was an enormious gas and had a hyper limit of only 5 LM. Samson-4 should be even less - but it was clearly less than 30 LS (since IIRC that's the range White Haven's force wanted to emerge at)

But even so, unless the Peep ships were orbiting very far out its hyperlimit should have been a factor. From a standing start, at 400g it'd take about 36 minutes to move even half a light minute (~9 million km)


As to your second point, yes, if they'd spent the time in the Alpha bands to work back up to 0.6c they'd have lost only 92% of that; whereas if you look at the Speed by Hyper Band chart you can see that dropping from the Delta bands should have cost them over 99% (specifically 99.93%) of their velocity.


Did the editors fix the final velocity?
In the pre-release version it was listed as 1,324 KPS -- which is actually far, far too high. If they'd had 0.6c in the Delta bands (the max possible) they'd carry a mere 132.96 KPS into normal space.
To get 1,324 KPS from an achievable starting velocity they'd need to already be down in the Beta bands (but at barely more than half their maximum possible velocity).
Conversely if they'd been at 0.6c in the Alpha bands they'd have carried over a far more impressive 14,390 KPS

Jonathan_S wrote:Did the editors fix the final velocity?
In the pre-release version it was listed as 1,324 KPS -- which is actually far, far too high. If they'd had 0.6c in the Delta bands (the max possible) they'd carry a mere 132.96 KPS into normal space.
To get 1,324 KPS from an achievable starting velocity they'd need to already be down in the Beta bands (but at barely more than half their maximum possible velocity).
Conversely if they'd been at 0.6c in the Alpha bands they'd have carried over a far more impressive 14,390 KPS

No, those numbers are still there in the Kindle version.

Jonathan_S wrote:Did the editors fix the final velocity?
In the pre-release version it was listed as 1,324 KPS -- which is actually far, far too high. If they'd had 0.6c in the Delta bands (the max possible) they'd carry a mere 132.96 KPS into normal space.
To get 1,324 KPS from an achievable starting velocity they'd need to already be down in the Beta bands (but at barely more than half their maximum possible velocity).
Conversely if they'd been at 0.6c in the Alpha bands they'd have carried over a far more impressive 14,390 KPS

Still seems not to be fixed:

Toll of Honor, Chapter 33, epub wrote:Sixth Fleet’s ops plan had called for it to enter normal-space on a course directly toward the Samson System’s primary and thirteen light-minutes outside its 21.12 LM hyper limit. That would have put it 9,464,000 kilometers—about thirty light-seconds—from the Havenite fleet base, headed toward it. Saldaña had gotten their n-space base heading exactly right; unfortunately, that was of far less importance than the distance to their target, and White Haven’s ships had reentered n-space forty-two light-seconds from their objective. That added over 3,000,000 kilometers to their range to target, and they’d shed well over ninety-nine percent of their base velocity in the course of their translation, which gave them a current normal-space base velocity of a grand and glorious 1,324 KPS.