What happens in Hyperspace near a Star?

Joat42 wrote:Here is how I understand it: A hyperspace-band determines the factor how much faster you are accelerating compared to n-space. That does not translate to that distances are shorter in hyperspace, but it means that 1g acceleration in hyperspace is comparable to 1500g's in n-space or whatever the factor is for a particular hyper-band. That also means that the distances between 2 stationary objects translating into hyperspace will still be at the same distance. If this was not the case and distances really change when translating that would also mean that things would change size and the distance advantage would disappear. We can with some certainty tell that is not happening in the books, because we know ships can exist in hyper with a broken generator which means it doesn't protect against changes in physical distance which otherwise would have interesting effects if it broke.

The hyperlimit is mostly determined by a stars spectral class, so if you drop out of hyper and take a reading of a stars distance and spectral class you know with some certainty where the hyperlimit is and can then use the hyper-log to travel to a safe distance before dropping into n-space to get better readings so you can nail down more exactly where the hyper-limit is.

More Than Honor: The Universe of Honor Harrington wrote:Once a vessel enters hyper, it is placed in what might be considered a compressed dimension which corresponds on a point-by-point basis to "normal-space" but places those points in much closer congruity.

Joat42 wrote:The hyperlimit is mostly determined by a stars spectral class, so if you drop out of hyper and take a reading of a stars distance and spectral class you know with some certainty where the hyperlimit is and can then use the hyper-log to travel to a safe distance before dropping into n-space to get better readings so you can nail down more exactly where the hyper-limit is.

Joat42 wrote:Hmm, if distances are shorter in hyper it should have some interesting physical manifestations on physical matter which doesn't seem to be the case.

Of course, it may be that the geometry of hyper is wonky so movement is shorter between points but only on a macro-scale because otherwise anything translating from n-space to h-space would suddenly loose an incredible amount heat-energy because of the now smaller distances the atoms and molecules are moving. It would also have some really interesting effects on chemical reactions in general.

Or does the movement on the atomic level makes things burst into flames when translating up? Ugh.. My head hurts now..

Jonathan_S wrote:Now there are possible reasons even if hyperspace compression is uniform; that aren't described in the books or even fully fleshed out in the tech bible.

We know, from the HotQ description of Honor's little convoy to Grayson than you can drop from hyper to n-space in a continuous transition without having to wait in each hyper band for your generator's capacitors to recharge. If the same is true upward then a departing merchant ship would have their choice of 4 separate major bands to initially climb to (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) and they might routinely pick their band at random move a ways out and then if necessary finish climbing to their cruise band.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Joat42 wrote:Hmm, if distances are shorter in hyper it should have some interesting physical manifestations on physical matter which doesn't seem to be the case.

Of course, it may be that the geometry of hyper is wonky so movement is shorter between points but only on a macro-scale because otherwise anything translating from n-space to h-space would suddenly loose an incredible amount heat-energy because of the now smaller distances the atoms and molecules are moving. It would also have some really interesting effects on chemical reactions in general.

Or does the movement on the atomic level makes things burst into flames when translating up? Ugh.. My head hurts now..

That's probably a core function of the hypergenerator and also why its cycle time is proportional to the ship's mass (which is proportional to the volume): it needs to create a "warp bubble" around the ship to take it intact from band to band and to n-space. Otherwise, you'd scatter or compress your atoms on transition. That's assuming the bits not so protected transitioned at all, of course.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Now there are possible reasons even if hyperspace compression is uniform; that aren't described in the books or even fully fleshed out in the tech bible.

We know, from the HotQ description of Honor's little convoy to Grayson than you can drop from hyper to n-space in a continuous transition without having to wait in each hyper band for your generator's capacitors to recharge. If the same is true upward then a departing merchant ship would have their choice of 4 separate major bands to initially climb to (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) and they might routinely pick their band at random move a ways out and then if necessary finish climbing to their cruise band.

My reading of the sequential downshifting is that stars have hyper limits that extend further from the star in higher bands - if the alpha limit is 10 LM, the beta-alpha transition might have a limit of 16 LM, the beta-gamma transition might be 22 LM, etc. such that the ship has to shift downward at each limit in a proper deceleration profile to hit their transition to normal space at the correct location. This would give a bit of time in each band for the generator to recharge for a couple minutes before the next translation.

The inverse being that a ship leaving the system could only translate up to the alpha band at the system's hyper limit because they'd still be inside the beta hyper limit.

Overall, I think the spacial compression thing might not have had all the ramifications worked out when it was first written. Ships translating in a group could very easily translate into each other's wedges as the spacing between them drops by a factor of 62 on the first translation. So a formation of ships moving with 1000 km spacing suddenly drops to 17 km and boom.

The Honor of the Queen wrote:“Mark!” DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless’s hyper generator became a basso growl.
Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

Joat42 wrote:Yeah, but you can exist in hyper without the generator which means the generator is only there for the translation. So the distance shortening effect in hyper can only work on a macro-scale otherwise Bad Things™ would happen to any object in hyper without the generator, and I don't see how that would work with our current understanding of space-time physics.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Joat42 wrote:Yeah, but you can exist in hyper without the generator which means the generator is only there for the translation. So the distance shortening effect in hyper can only work on a macro-scale otherwise Bad Things™ would happen to any object in hyper without the generator, and I don't see how that would work with our current understanding of space-time physics.

I didn't mean that it would be needed for existence, only during the transition. You need that bubble of space around the ship so that the metric of space is retained from n-space to alpha and from one band to the next. But once you're there, the hyper generator can turn off and your atoms will not suddenly compress or fly apart.