New Manty ship ideas.

Hey everyone.

I've been thinking about the mobile fort idea and in my opinion it doesn't bear enough advantages to justify.

To the advantages:
1. It's mobile (obviously ^^)
2. It packs a bigger punch than for example a SP (Size and all) and there is more storage space, which leads to a bigger arsenal.
3. It's harder to destroy (also because of size)

To the disadvantages:
1. Like it has been stated with a tonnage and size that big, the mobility would be reduced to a number which is around 100gees. Compared to the several thousand of gees a normal warship bring to the table, it has a astronomical high response time to threats and its low velocity makes it easily avoidable by enemies. So as a defense solution its more logical to put more firepower in instead of engines.
Also, because these ships are not hyperspace capable (again size) they make no good attack units because they can't really leave the system they where build in.
2. Another disadvantage would be the building and personell cost, as well as the number of personell needed to maintain operations.
3. Because of its low velocity it has nearly no possibilities to avoid an attack. As a result it would be easy to hit without them really picking up on it. Fire a missile so it gets starting velocity, than diactivate the drive so no signature comes up (or use the spider drive *I think* that was used against the orbital stations before). Defense picks missiles up late -> antimissile defense to late to be useful -> only defense is energy range. (i guess the LACs could help there...)

I've just started rereading the series, so if I forgot to consider some new technology please remind me ^^.

And back to topic of new ship ideas:
I've been thinking about the ships that manage the defenses and attacks of several other ships(?moriarty system?) as there only purpose.
So my idea was to build a ship, that tries to access the enemy systems remotely (if possible) and feed it false input, shut systems down, etc. Kind of like a hacker.

Hope you have some feedback for me

Timeonit

Theemile wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:One remembers forts being immobile until Trevor's star smaller forts. They had bubble sidewalls that wouldn't allow them to move, hence early on they were susceptible to bomb attacks.

Forts could always move - they have wedges and use Grav plats (not compensators) and are limited to ~100 Gs. Their movement allows them to not be a "Fixed point" which can be blind fired upon. However, when they use the bubble sidewall, they have to drop the wedges and become immobile - gaining them 360 x360 fieds of fire and losing the impenetrability of theirl wedges.

I got the impression that the pre-war Grayson forts may have been immobile.

I know that they didn't have bubble sidewalls because "Grayson doesn’t know how to generate spherical sidewalls" [HotQ], and the book did go on to say that "their forts don’t have any passive anti-missile defenses."
If they had wedges and sidewalls they'd have least have some passive defense if the wedge was up (at the expense of limited their arc of weapons engagement).

But yes every 'modern' pre-war fort was capable of movement.

Timeonit wrote:Hey everyone.

I've been thinking about the mobile fort idea and in my opinion it doesn't bear enough advantages to justify.

[snip]
To the disadvantages:
1. Like it has been stated with a tonnage and size that big, the mobility would be reduced to a number which is around 100gees. Compared to the several thousand of gees a normal warship bring to the table, it has a astronomical high response time to threats and its low velocity makes it easily avoidable by enemies. So as a defense solution its more logical to put more firepower in instead of engines.
Also, because these ships are not hyperspace capable (again size) they make no good attack units because they can't really leave the system they where build in.

Two quick corrections.
1 - Even with the newest compensators we haven't seen any ships hit 1000g yet; IIRC a dispatch boat doing "almost 800gs" at what was probably 90% accel is the fastest we've seen. Still there's a big enough gap between 100g and 600+g.
2 - There's no known reason you couldn't mount a hyper generator on a fort sized ship; so it should be capable of entering hyperspace. You'd also need a different hull shape to include Alpha nodes if you wanted it to be able to use wormholes and grav waves; but again we don't know of a max size limit for those.

But I agree the disadvantages outweigh the advantages for this Monitor-type vast, ponderously sluggish, ship.

Oh, yeah, sry about that.

I meant KPS which in this case would have been several thousand Meters per second *lol* .

To the hyperspace capability. You're right again, but on the other hand can Manticore build a hyper generator big enough to equip a fort? Is that just a question of size or is that technologically impossible (at the mom)?

Timeonit wrote:<snip>
To the hyperspace capability. You're right again, but on the other hand can Manticore build a hyper generator big enough to equip a fort? Is that just a question of size or is that technologically impossible (at the mom)?

A limit on the hyper equipment has never been noted - only the Compensator drop off at ~8.5 Mtons has been the limiting factor in hyper ships.

Larger ships have been bandied about the bar several times - Either Death Stars like the above or massive tow/transporter ships designed to move damaged ships or move constructed station chunks from system to system. However, none have been seen in text or mentioned by David, outside the forthcoming Malign Leonard Detweiler class.

Another limitation on Construction is the upper mass size of wormholes; we know this varies varies from one wormhole to another with the ceiling of the Manty junction being the highest. The Mass limit on some smaller wormholes may be as low as ~20 Mtons at a time, which would limit the universal usability of a 40 Mton behemoth.

One would assume the only hyper limit was the 32-36 SD transition in a terminus, but whether that is a general hyper or terminus limit one doesn't know.

How about building prison ships or prison containers for all the millions of Sollie prisoners.

One would assume the only hyper limit was the 32-36 SD transition in a terminus, but whether that is a general hyper or terminus limit one doesn't know.

Of course we know. Theemile just said what it was. All wormholes have a ceiling on tonnage for simultaneous transit.

I don't think prison ship are a very good idea.
The only advantage in my opinion would be that you can move the prison.
On the other hand, you need a crew, there is maintenance, supply etc. Next are the prisoners rights to be met.
You'd need that on a planet, too. But food for example can be produced on site, security can have family close...
Lastly I think it is a security risk to put prisoners permanently on a spaceship. In case of a breakout, they could take over the ship and flee directly to their home planets.

Timeonit wrote:I don't think prison ship are a very good idea.
The only advantage in my opinion would be that you can move the prison.
On the other hand, you need a crew, there is maintenance, supply etc. Next are the prisoners rights to be met.
You'd need that on a planet, too. But food for example can be produced on site, security can have family close...
Lastly I think it is a security risk to put prisoners permanently on a spaceship. In case of a breakout, they could take over the ship and flee directly to their home planets.

If you are going to be telling everyone what happens by sending them the unaltered tapes anyway why not send the million plus crews back to Sol system. They are not going to be able to say anything new, the media will be all over them, and they are not going to add anything to the moral of any of the other service persons. Nor will they be eager to get out and get on another ship any time soon.

Have the cats and capturers question them first and keep the interesting ones.

The hybrid CLAC and pod-layer has already been done. One such ship was Honor Harrington's last starship command.

A CLAC has a heavily armoured core and broadsides dotted with hangar bays. A SD(P) has heavy armour wrapped around a hollow core.

If you want both capabilities, you need to give up most of the armouring and end up with half a LAC wing and half a SD(P)'s pod load.

On paper, that's not such a bad idea. If all the LACs are Katanas, the hybrid would have less combat sustainability for greatly improved missile defense.

One of the problems comes back to the reduced armour. This is going to be a fragile vessel, even comparing with the CLAC. A SD(P) takes about 250 missile hits to be mission-killed. The hybrid would probably be closer to 150, maybe 100 and chances of a golden BB would be higher, not to mention the LAC bays are the first things to be damaged.