OOPS

tlb wrote:Or just "drop sidewalls and fire"?

Upon further reflection, I don't think there would've been any sidewalls to interpose. Superdreadnoughts don't line up side-by-side - they go nose-to-tail, vertically stacked. The StateSec broadsides would've been pointed towards Giscard/Tourville's flagships.

Those would've all been spinal shots. Straight through the targets' longest axis, stem to stern.

cthia wrote:True. Harkness destroyed Tepes. But he did it in a round-about fashion, using a pinnace's wedge. IOW, he hacked the pinnace's systems? And not the ship's systems, per se. Correct?

Exactly. He used the pinnace's wedges. Why couldn't Shannon use an RD's wedge?

cthia wrote:True. Harkness destroyed Tepes. But he did it in a round-about fashion, using a pinnace's wedge. IOW, he hacked the pinnace's systems? And not the ship's systems, per se. Correct?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Exactly. He used the pinnace's wedges. Why couldn't Shannon use an RD's wedge?

As I wrote earlier, they physically damaged the pinnacle's sensors to bypass the interlock that should have prevented the wedge from coming up. All systems that can generate wedges should have such interlocks, therefore someone would had to have gotten a RD that had been damaged onto each of the StateSec's SD's.

Galactic Sapper wrote:And why shouldn't the scuttling system be based primarily if not solely on the reactors? They are by far the most energetic system on board and the most destructive when they blow. To get anywhere near the same destructive power from the ship's warheads you'd have to gang fire dozens of them at precisely the same instant, since they're all jammed in the magazines as densely as possible, meaning only a couple meters between warheads. The speed of light from the high energy photons released from a nuclear bomb indicates you'd have to time each explosion within a few nanoseconds of each other to prevent non-detonation fratricide between the warheads. Possible with the tech in universe, but tricky to pull off and unnecessary when you have something much better on hand.

Only if you can control the precise form in which the containment is dropped. Otherwise, it's a chaotic event. If the containment drops asymmetrically, then the majority of the hot plasma will be directed in one direction and not the other. You'd get a half-destroyed ship.

Most likely the scuttling system uses the reactors as the main charge or as the secondary charge set off by a system designed to cause containment to fail. To mix universes for a second, the self destruct systems in Star Trek ships were designed to create antimatter containment failures first and only afterward trigger other systems as a backup. The self destruct wasn't containment failing on its own but a specific charge designed to induce containment failure. We may be looking at something similar here.

The big difference between an anti-matter annihilation event and a fusion bottle letting go is that anti-matter doesn't stop being anti-matter after a while in vacuum, but hot plasma cools down. Anti-matter reactions are self-sustaining while fusion are self-extinguishing. Regardless of how you drop the anti-matter containment, the anti-matter will eventually meet matter and annihilate. The majority of the ship isn't blown up by annihilation, but by the high-energy photons that the first annihilations create. Whereas in fusion, with the temperature of the plasma dropping, fusion stops and all you have left is high-energy hydrogen, helium, lithium, etc. that make a lot of damage as it expands.

In a controlled scuttling event, it's possible the reactors are fed an overwhelming amount of plasma to turn the reaction up, just short of melt-down, so there's enough plasma mass and it's hot enough to vaporise the rest of the ship when containment does go down.

BTW, given that the Honorverse is based on gravitational technology, it's possible that their fusion is enabled by gravitation, not temperature. That might make for much safer reactors. But then we might not have the big booms of containment failure.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:BTW, given that the Honorverse is based on gravitational technology, it's possible that their fusion is enabled by gravitation, not temperature. That might make for much safer reactors. But then we might not have the big booms of containment failure.

My understanding is that the fusion reactors on ships use artificial gravity containment and compression, while the much smaller fusion plants on shuttles use laser compression and heating.

The new micro fusion reactors are the result of miniaturization of the artificial gravity process and probably have not been used outside of missiles because of secrecy concerns.

cthia wrote:I like your logic, but it brings us right back to the suddenness of the explosions. Containment failure is usually an inexorable march towards destrucion, not a sudden jump. But the nature of the explosions does denote reactor involvement.

Normally - when you're trying to resist the containment failure. But the ship fusion reactors use gravitically/electromagnetically compressed (GRAVMAK) plasma; and if you can simply turn those off you'd instantly lose containment and with no gravity well or EM field restraining the plasma it'd instantly and catastrophically explode out through the physical shell of the reactor.

So if you wanted to build in the ability to scuttle via reactors it'd be perfectly doable to design the reactors to support that.

OTOH it's also conceivable that they'd instead be designed to make it as hard as possible to for them to ever fail - even under deliberate action (possibly even to the extent where they can do what Chernobyl failed to; safely balance power reduction with safe containment -- powering the safety systems using only the remaining reactor power all the down way to cold metal)

And we simply don't know which way the Haven reactors were designed.

tlb wrote:The new micro fusion reactors are the result of miniaturization of the artificial gravity process and probably have not been used outside of missiles because of secrecy concerns.

They are used on recon drones too. Exactly the same module. You can't use them on ships because 'radiation', but it's trivial for a ship to rework a used RD reactor when there are no spares because 'plot'.

tlb wrote:The new micro fusion reactors are the result of miniaturization of the artificial gravity process and probably have not been used outside of missiles because of secrecy concerns.

kzt wrote:They are used on recon drones too. Exactly the same module. You can't use them on ships because 'radiation', but it's trivial for a ship to rework a used RD reactor when there are no spares because 'plot'.

I do not remember any story where RD's were reworked, except OBS:

"Once you've completed it, I want you and your department to begin stripping the sensor heads from the missile bodies in order to fit them with simple station-keeping drives and astrogation packages." This time Santos looked up quickly, her composure noticeably cracked. "I imagine we can do the job by swapping the sensor heads into standard warning and navigation beacons. If not, I want a design for a system that will work on my desk by thirteen hundred."

PS. I was trying to differential between unmanned and and manned craft, so I was including drones in my unclear "missile" comment.

tlb wrote:PS. I was trying to differential between unmanned and and manned craft, so I was including drones in my unclear "missile" comment.

Maybe before Ghost Rider, but even then, a Recon Drone that has a very leaky reactor will show up in your sensors. It's leaking in the EM spectrum, after all.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:The new micro fusion reactors are the result of miniaturization of the artificial gravity process and probably have not been used outside of missiles because of secrecy concerns.

kzt wrote:They are used on recon drones too. Exactly the same module. You can't use them on ships because 'radiation', but it's trivial for a ship to rework a used RD reactor when there are no spares because 'plot'.

I do not remember any story where RD's were reworked, except OBS:

"Once you've completed it, I want you and your department to begin stripping the sensor heads from the missile bodies in order to fit them with simple station-keeping drives and astrogation packages." This time Santos looked up quickly, her composure noticeably cracked. "I imagine we can do the job by swapping the sensor heads into standard warning and navigation beacons. If not, I want a design for a system that will work on my desk by thirteen hundred."

PS. I was trying to differential between unmanned and and manned craft, so I was including drones in my unclear "missile" comment.

It's been discussed alot on the board, David said it was basically a refueling and replacement of a couple wear items. From David's response, the wear itemsare small, can be carried in bulk, and could actually be manufactured o ship if necessary.

convenient, of course.