Hyperspace & n-space

HB of CJ wrote:I am not so sure about flying right through a star while in hyper because the star is not there. While the star may not be there physically, one might think the AFFECTS of the star upon hyper would preclude ANY starship from getting to close to one while in hyper.

The book series has certain rules about flying around. One is grav waves. Probably caused by the interactions of millions, (billions?) of star systems, black holes, singularities, rogue planets, etc.. Another is the hyper limit. Again flat space required for hyper.

So ... lots of fun for the astrologer. Probably meant to resemble the navigator on old sailing ships, combined with the present computer generated best steaming courses for todays ships. Consider space kinda like our worlds oceans. Very dynamic. Yikes!

Edited by HB. Very dynamic to include winds, gales, storms, big waves, bigger waves, rogue waves, tidal waves, reefs, shoals, shallows, sea monsters, water spouts, lightning, lee shores, safe ports, any ports, floating debris, etc. and so on. More yikes!

However we're told that ships in hyper need to use inertial navigation because there's nothing for them to take sights off of. If stars out enough interference into hyper to make it dangerous to overfly them then you'd expect sensors to be able to see it. But if they could do that then you'd be able to navigate by tracking the pattern of stars you fly past - and also yo wouldn't have risk of going too deep inside the hyperlimit if you can see the star's signal; you'd be able to measure your distance away.

I seem to remember a discussion in one of the books about bad things happening if you crossed the hyperlimit a little bit in the alpha band. If you crossed too much, 1/3 of the hyperlimit radius from the star I believe, then it was bug splat on a wall. Since the hyper limit of stars is a few AU at most and stars are generally light years apart (63k+ AU per light year), you don't run into stars much. With the bad sensor ranges in hyperspace, you can not get a read on more than one star to make a map as you go. I don't remember if this applied to all bands or just the alpha band.

Kizarvexis wrote:I seem to remember a discussion in one of the books about bad things happening if you crossed the hyperlimit a little bit in the alpha band. If you crossed too much, 1/3 of the hyperlimit radius from the star I believe, then it was bug splat on a wall. Since the hyper limit of stars is a few AU at most and stars are generally light years apart (63k+ AU per light year), you don't run into stars much. With the bad sensor ranges in hyperspace, you can not get a read on more than one star to make a map as you go. I don't remember if this applied to all bands or just the alpha band.

I thought I remembered that only applying if you tried to exit hyperspace within the hyper limit.

However, while looking for a statement I thought I'd remembered RFC making about not having anything in hyper to use as navigation fixes I instead stumbled across a flat statement in the pearls saying stars do affect the lowest hyper bands.

runsforcelery wrote:Any star's gravity well produces a discernible distortion, or "ripple" effect, in the lowest hyper-space bands. These ripples are not normally sufficient to make problems for a starship simply passing through the hyper-space which corresponds to the normal-space location of the star, although such ships can occasionally encounter severe grav-wave turbulence if they get too close to the star. This ripple effect grows more pronounced as the mass of the star goes up, and the curve climbs quite steeply once you get into the stellar giant classes.

(So I clearly got that wrong)

Maybe ships simply don't use them for fixes because then they'd be stuck in the Alpha bands (far slower than the bands they normally cruise). And the sensors are short ranged enough I'd think you'd need to basically plot your course star by star, constantly correcting any intertial nav drift, to get any benefit. If you need a nav fix you couldn't see enough ripples from stars to replot your position from within hyper - you'd need to drop to n-space.


Though that still doesn't explain why it's so hard to calculate an exit virtually on top of the hyper limit. It seems that from the lowest Alpha band the ship's warshawski sensor should easily be able to spot even minor turbulence from the star and give you extremely accurate range. After all its looking the compressed hyper equivalent of a mere few dozen light minutes of n-space...
(But maybe it's very hard to tell the relatively fixed turbulence caused by a main sequence star from other random turbulence?...)

IIRC, about 0.1% of stars are B class,which are quite big. About 0.7 percent are A or B, which are still pretty big and visible from a long way out. So you could use this to verify your navigation if you didn't want to drop all the way to real space. But the simplest plan would be to drop to alpha where there shouldn't be a star, look around to verify you are not really unlucky, then drop to real space to totally verify your position. There is a significant velocity loss, but over a long run it isn't that big a deal.

The percentage of accuracy that honorverse ships are supposed to be capable of is pretty enormous. Getting within a light hour at a distance of 50 light years is roughly comparable to circumnavigating the globe with dead reckoning and coming within 250 feet of your start point. So they probably don't need to do this much.

If i recall correctly that even at best there will be drift in you arrival point that drift is based on distance traveled threw hyper. A one kilometer drift for every million kilometers traveled can add up quickly when you consider the distance between stars. Not really a problem since most ships will aim for a point well out side of the hyper limit of a system. They also tend break up a travel route to multiple smaller jumps rather then go all at once.

The only real reason to reenter n-space very close to the limit is reduce the response time that a defending force has to react to an attack.

Jonathan, thanks for the RFC quote. That actually answers my question quite nicely.

If we think about the analogy of space-time as a sheet, with the stars and other gravity-affected objects as balls causing dips in that sheet, and then add the hyperspace bands as additional layered sheets on top of the n-space sheet, then it makes sense that the first however many additional layers will still show the balls. Eventually, however, the balls will no longer show when a new layer is added.

Does that sound about right?

Runs for Celery has created a rich future environment indeed. We eager readers could imagine how navigation in the Honorverse would/could be so very important.

Future history space may be very dynamic. Nothing stays settled in place. Everything is moving relative to other stuff. The navigator might ask the computer for a course.

Then that good navigator looks at the hyper space course the computer has selected and quickly says .... "I don't think so. Computer ... did you update at all?"

So then the good navigator, (there are only good navigators, the rest are dead!) re plots a safer course through all the aforementioned rocks, shoals and space monsters. Yikes!