New Manty ship ideas.

Lord Skimper wrote:No you don't need a yard to do this, you do what the Grayson's do, just backwards. Now obviously no missiles or powered energy weapons would be on ships with prisoners. One wouldn't want them getting ideas.

The Graysons still needed yards. What they did not need were slips. You still need somewhere building the parts and tools that you need, providing facilities for the workers, workers themselves, etc.

Werrf wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:No you don't need a yard to do this, you do what the Grayson's do, just backwards. Now obviously no missiles or powered energy weapons would be on ships with prisoners. One wouldn't want them getting ideas.

The Graysons still needed yards. What they did not need were slips. You still need somewhere building the parts and tools that you need, providing facilities for the workers, workers themselves, etc.

Yes but in this case you get all the tools from Beowulf and you have the trained crews already and the parts already exist, they just happen to be on the wrong ship. Taking them off the ship frees up the parts.

What else is there that is new that may or may not work.

How about a micro hyper drive for short jumps, possibly inside the hyper limit. Perhaps for an LAC no Warshawski sail, just a plasma rocket that jumps into and right out of hyper space.

Lord Skimper wrote:What else is there that is new that may or may not work.

How about a micro hyper drive for short jumps, possibly inside the hyper limit. Perhaps for an LAC no Warshawski sail, just a plasma rocket that jumps into and right out of hyper space.

It is physically impossible in the Honorverse to enter or leave hyper space inside a hyper limit. At best, you just can't do it, at worst, "Bad Things" happen.

Bad Things is a term used by David Weber and/or other persons. For an example of Bad Things relating to attempting to translate (in the Honorverse) from hyper space to normal space inside a hyper limit:

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:Karen Lowe was an excellent astrogator, but a hyper voyage this long provided a great deal of scope for minor astrogation errors to produce major results. Overshooting their intended n-space translation point wouldn't be all that terrible . . . unless, of course, they overshot it too badly. A ship which attempted to translate out of hyper inside a star's hyper limit couldn't. As long as it made the attempt within the outer twenty percent of the hyper limit, all that happened was that it couldn't get into n-space. If it made the attempt any further in than that, however, Bad Things happened. Someone had once described the result as using a pulse cannon to fire soft-boiled eggs at a stone wall to see if they would bounce. Lester Tourville rather doubted they would, and even if he was wrong, it was a proposition he had no desire at all to test firsthand.

Boldface is my emphasis.

Lord Skimper wrote: Yes but in this case you get all the tools from Beowulf and you have the trained crews already and the parts already exist, they just happen to be on the wrong ship. Taking them off the ship frees up the parts.

No, the crews are dead. All the shipyard workers are deceased. They are pining for the fjords, or befit of life. In conclusion, they are dead Jim.

kzt wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote: Yes but in this case you get all the tools from Beowulf and you have the trained crews already and the parts already exist, they just happen to be on the wrong ship. Taking them off the ship frees up the parts.

No, the crews are dead. All the shipyard workers are deceased. They are pining for the fjords, or befit of life. In conclusion, they are dead Jim.

They're not dead yet! In fact, they're feeling much better.

Lord Skimper wrote:What else is there that is new that may or may not work.

How about a micro hyper drive for short jumps, possibly inside the hyper limit. Perhaps for an LAC no Warshawski sail, just a plasma rocket that jumps into and right out of hyper space.

How about a Stargate, placed on a planet, that allows instantaneous travel between planets? Or a ship built out of a giant space whale? Or a time machine, bigger on the inside, that looks like a 1950's police box?

Werrf wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:What else is there that is new that may or may not work.

How about a micro hyper drive for short jumps, possibly inside the hyper limit. Perhaps for an LAC no Warshawski sail, just a plasma rocket that jumps into and right out of hyper space.

How about a Stargate, placed on a planet, that allows instantaneous travel between planets? Or a ship built out of a giant space whale? Or a time machine, bigger on the inside, that looks like a 1950's police box?

One thinks even in David Webers universe these thing just wouldn't ever work even if they would work in our own universe, and I'm not saying they would.

However given that a recent and formerly impossible thing in hyperspace is now called the streak drive. One might find a much lower slower band that one can only enter for a few seconds. A quick jump something all other hyperdrives go right by. A micro jump that one bounces off of the lowest slowest band never quite getting there immediately forced back into n-space. Only appearing a few seconds later much further along than one otherwise would have been. given that it wouldn't get into the lowest band it might work inside the hyper limit. Might only work inside the hyperlimit.

You build the ship for the intended role, not the other way around.
This is the same for civilian ships as it is for military.

Is it possible to use one as some sort of substitute for the other, sure, BUT you do it at grate risk and peril.
Like the government making deals to be able to use AIRLINERS for troop transports (or a UPS or FED EX air freight bird for cargo), you get capacity but not all the stuff you would get from the military bird. Like some electronic defenses. Like short (or relatively short) takeoff and landing capability, like a more robust ship that was "designed" with the anticipation that someone would try to shoot holes in it or shoot it down. So you fly your civilian airliners into airports that can handle them and work really really hard to suppress any hostile fire- not that you wouldn't do the same for the military craft but the civilian stuff is primarily built to different specifications and needs.

The merchant conversions in both WW I and WW II were primarily stopgap deals to fill specific needs. They ALL were compromises way beyond what has to be worked out in designing either a civilian or a military ship.

There is the not insignificant point that there were shipyards and manufacturing industries with basic experienced staff and the capacity to quickly expand those yards and work crews to do both the conversion of existing merchant ships and the heavy modifications to many "standard" designs to make them usable (and theoretically survivable some of the time) as various types of escort vessels.

You also have to look at they types of escort vessels you are talking about. For WW II, when you look at DDs and DE's, these were warships that were designed for more than "just" anti-submarine work. They were set up for anti-aircraft defense as well and were being armed with main guns that were generally as capable as the secondary armament of the newer capital ships AND they carried torpedoes- which gave them the potential (the torpedoes) to kill or severely damage an enemy capital ship. The lighter stuff, corvettes and lesser, were at best designed as anti-submarine platforms of greater or lesser utility (greater if they could perform the role in open ocean, lesser if it was restricted to coastal waters)

The early escort carriers were very hasty modifications of existing cargo ships (with all the vulnerabilities of those cargo ships) to provide primarily anti-submarine capacity for convoy work. The later ones were mini-carriers which traded total aircraft capacity and lighter hulls (total lack of armor and no where near as robust hull construction) for more numerous ships that could be spread around to more places. They were also just fast enough to be able to be faster than the convoys they were to work (and maneuver around them) but not fast enough to keep up with the actual warships starting with DDs and going up through the war generation of Cruisers, Battleships and Fleet Carriers.

Compromises. Thin skinned compromises. At this point neither Manticore nor Grayson can build any of them and are having to rebuild their ship, weapons and naval logistical base from scratch.

Lord Skimper wrote:One thinks even in David Webers universe these thing just wouldn't ever work even if they would work in our own universe, and I'm not saying they would.

However given that a recent and formerly impossible thing in hyperspace is now called the streak drive. One might find a much lower slower band that one can only enter for a few seconds. A quick jump something all other hyperdrives go right by. A micro jump that one bounces off of the lowest slowest band never quite getting there immediately forced back into n-space. Only appearing a few seconds later much further along than one otherwise would have been. given that it wouldn't get into the lowest band it might work inside the hyper limit. Might only work inside the hyperlimit.

Actually, the streak drive was not considered impossible. David actually told us early on that there was still research into reaching higher hyperbands. David put the rifle over the mantelpiece right from the beginning. So the streak drive was simply an extension of existing tech--in fact, it turns out not to be new tech, but simply a brute-force application of greater power with existing tech.

On the other hand, David has explicitly stated that transiting to and from normal space inside the hyper limit will not work. This is not at all the same situation as the streak drive, which David had explicitly set up as a possibility.

Perhaps you want to compare instead to the spider drive. But that comparison doesn't work either. David never said anything about whether an alternative drive to the impeller was possible. He didn't say it was possible, and he didn't say it was impossible. Unlike the streak drive, David did not put the rifle over the mantelpiece for the spider drive, and it came as a surprise. But it also doesn't break his established physics. A hyper transit inside the hyper limit breaks his established physics.

David is fairly careful about his physics. He doesn't always match it up correctly with real-world physics (much to the distress of us nit-picking physicists ). But once he establishes in-world physics, he will not break it unless necessary, and seldom without setting up in-world clues and explanations in advance. It is perfectly reasonable to speculate here about future breakthroughs based on possible clues or hints in the text or infodumps. But speculating about potential breakthroughs when there is no evidence at all, or specific evidence against, is pointless. If someone proposes time travel, what can anyone say in response that actually relates to the Honorverse except that there is no evidence to support it? If you propose the possibility of transiting inside the hyper-limit, what can anyone say that relates to the Honorverse except that David says it can't be done? Any further discussion is completely irrelevant to the Honorverse. At it's worst, this kind of speculation verges on fan-fic.