How To Abandon Ship?

Look, it is utterly illogical. A ship exploding in a giant ass fusion fireball with all of its associated secondary explosions(nuclear warheads etc) is MANY orders of magnitude greater than the puny measly bomb pumped laser heads which supposedly can kill a missile pod of missiles from several thousand kilometers away..... right...

So, those escape pods have to have utterly MASSIVE compensators in them otherwise the humans inside get turned into a very thin goo paste at the back of said missile pod because the accelerations required to get clear of a such an immense blast and out to at minimum 10,000km in a mere couple of seconds is well, in a mere word, astronomical.

Very quick math, did not check...

10,000,000m = 1/2 accel(~10m/s^2)(10s^2)
So, accel is a "mere" 5000G's...

They better have the universes most efficient handwavium thrusters to get back to planetary orbit... in an escape pod

Oopsies, but they only have said acceleration to ends of sidewalls at best... So, 10km, not constant accel to 10,000km. Good luck.

Relax wrote:Look, it is utterly illogical. A ship exploding in a giant ass fusion fireball with all of its associated secondary explosions(nuclear warheads etc) is MANY orders of magnitude greater than the puny measly bomb pumped laser heads which supposedly can kill a missile pod of missiles from several thousand kilometers away.

One question that I have is how long the wedges persist as the ship dies, milliseconds? If there is a residual wedge, then the blast may be confined to a plane and the life pods need to accelerate perpendicular to that plane (generally away from the enemy). Not knowing, just saying.

We are back in shadowy
territory.
We do know that with the capital ships, at least, there is a lot of things/distance to travel to get from anything in the cores out to where the pods and boats are. So if the ship is already sufficently damaged a lot of people are not going to get out- at best they are going to keep working on damage control to shut stuff down like fires and the power plants if the ship has already struck.
If you have to cut your way up to those parts of the ship where pods/boats are located then that's what you have to do. It takes time and if your ship is already hammered then there is a lot of things not working like lifts or any other manner of powered transport within the ship.

I do remember conversations about propigation of radiation in space and relative lack of effects of blast if your not in contact with a ship's hull or actualy caught in the "fireball" of a fusion plant loseing containment.
Just how likely that missile warheads are likely to explode unless they have been armed is another question. Dangerous with their own radiation, sure. Likely to cook off in the magazines does't appear to worry any of the navies we have seen. The drives of the missiles are not powered up till they are almost ready to be fired so they are just essentialy inert.

So, the further away you are from your ship and anything being fired at it, the relativly safer you are. I have to believe that life pods have some reasonable level of passive radiation shielding (modern Honerverse technology) because they are designed to be fired out into space, which presumes some level of radiation, and are going to also be somewhat rugged enough to survive the probable emergency landing on some planet in an inhabited system. Your talking atmospheric entry and "landing" in some form to put it on the ground without killing the occupants. If they were in good shape and properly mainteined before being launched, there are fairly tough pods.

Unless somebody is deliberatly shooting at life pods, you are ever so much better getting blased out (withing at least mil-spec parameters of acceleration for humans) and leaving the close vicinity of your ship before something like a reactor loseing containment or other internal explosions compleatly destorys the ship.

I'd argue the most dangerous thing on the ship is a running micro-fusion plant. But since that is only powered up at the launcher and the launcher is designed to protect the ship in case of reactor failure the likely effect is only rendering the ship combat ineffectual. It can probably still move.

The plasma capacitors for the older missiles are loaded in the magazines. They are probably significantly less powerful, but are much deeper in the hull where the destruction will be far greater for the yield.

The fusion reactor in the pods is armed at the rear of the pod bay, so a hit there could basically blow the rear of the ship off as 6 of them explode.

And David has this web of plasma conduits running around the hull full of multi-million degree 100,000 bar plasma. Any of those will be one hell of a blow torch deep inside the hull.

kzt wrote:

tlb wrote:Example(s), please. Do we know how far away the warheads exploded for the example(s) you cite? If this is always a problem, then Loren Pechtel was right.

Based on the commentary in the text, very vulnerable. Enough that you'd use long range kind of unguided missiles to force the other side to use or lose them.

Except at BoM, because reasons.

But at work I can't look up examples, but they are not hard to find.

Yeah, pods are very vulnerable to missiles exploding at great distances (which makes no sense to me. One missile at tens of thousands of kms shouldn't do anything. I was worried about 100,000 missiles.

And the only missiles that were vulnerable to being killed at the BoM were the planetary defense ones that were never fired. Firing on them meant firing near a planet and neither side wanted to risk starting a fight that involved missiles near planets.

If you mean the second BoM I would assume Honor didn't show any pods within range of the SLN ships. All we know is she showed a huge number of them, not where they were.

Relax wrote:Look, it is utterly illogical. A ship exploding in a giant ass fusion fireball with all of its associated secondary explosions(nuclear warheads etc) is MANY orders of magnitude greater than the puny measly bomb pumped laser heads which supposedly can kill a missile pod of missiles from several thousand kilometers away..... right...

So, those escape pods have to have utterly MASSIVE compensators in them otherwise the humans inside get turned into a very thin goo paste at the back of said missile pod because the accelerations required to get clear of a such an immense blast and out to at minimum 10,000km in a mere couple of seconds is well, in a mere word, astronomical.

Very quick math, did not check...

10,000,000m = 1/2 accel(~10m/s^2)(10s^2)
So, accel is a "mere" 5000G's...

They better have the universes most efficient handwavium thrusters to get back to planetary orbit... in an escape pod

Oopsies, but they only have said acceleration to ends of sidewalls at best... So, 10km, not constant accel to 10,000km. Good luck.

I do agree with you but we have the repeated statement that warheads going off anywhere in the vicinity will get soft kills on missile pods. I doubt escape pods are shielded better than missile pods.

Loren Pechtel wrote:And the only missiles that were vulnerable to being killed at the BoM were the planetary defense ones that were never fired. Firing on them meant firing near a planet and neither side wanted to risk starting a fight that involved missiles near planets.

No I mean this, which the RMN responded to be ignoring it, because Reasons. And Plot.

"Sir, their acceleration's dropping," Captain Gwynett said.
D'Orville stepped across to her console, accompanied by Captain Ayrault, and she looked up at him.

"How much is it coming down?" he asked.

"Only about a half a KPS squared, so far, Sir."

"What the hell are they up to now?" Ayrault wondered aloud.

"Putting pods on tow, maybe," D'Orville replied.

"I suppose that could be it, Sir," Gwynett raid. "Their pods are almost as stealthy as ours are, and the recon platforms wouldn't be able to see them at this range. But those are superdreadnoughts. They'd have to have an awful lot of tractors to be able to tow so many pods they'd have to tow them outside their wedges."

tlb wrote:No, you misunderstand; we were talking about life pods in the context of abandoning ship, not missile pods. Here is the original quote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The only reason I would say the final crew shouldn't bail is life pods aren't shielded against the environment that will be outside their ships when the missiles arrive.

If they can't shield missile pods they can't shield escape pods, either.

tlb wrote:

Relax wrote:Look, it is utterly illogical. A ship exploding in a giant ass fusion fireball with all of its associated secondary explosions(nuclear warheads etc) is MANY orders of magnitude greater than the puny measly bomb pumped laser heads which supposedly can kill a missile pod of missiles from several thousand kilometers away.

One question that I have is how long the wedges persist as the ship dies, milliseconds? If there is a residual wedge, then the blast may be confined to a plane and the life pods need to accelerate perpendicular to that plane (generally away from the enemy). Not knowing, just saying.

Interesting and worth noting.

Your thought certainly makes sense to me, which is why on the previous page I admitted to assuming the boats/pods are, at the very least, launched perpendicular to the plane of attack.

If Relax' logic is correct -- and I really see no reason why it wouldn't be -- then what gives? This has been one thread where my understanding of what goes on gets worse as the thread continues. Without the author's input, I suppose we should take the prospect of abandoning ship with a few grains of salted pixie dust.

Grasping at straws, mind you, perhaps a soothing explanation to account for the "illogic" of it all is that the energy of the warheads is directed and focused, whereas the ship exploding is not directed, and that much of the energy is absorbed in the destruction of the ship. Images in my head of "Her back broke and she snapped in two," makes me see escaping radiation and blast fronts directed at the top of the ship through the wide opening between the two halves, thus possibly directed away from pods and boats. Albeit, debris should still be a problem from an exploding ship.

I would hedge any bet that the loadout of missiles would detonate with an exploding ship. Warheads are designed to go off under strict conditions. Thank goodness for "small" favors or I probably wouldn't be here, because my family lived way too close, at the time, to Goldsboro's broken arrow.

Current fusion bombs have high explosive around a fissionable core that sets off an A bomb, that then sets off the fusion material. My memory says that Honorverse bombs use a gravity field pinch to do that, this sounds reasonable. If so they would be quite difficult to set off by battle damage. You might have an accidental HE explosion, but not an accidental concentric gravity field.
As some say here, in space there is no medium to propagate blast effects, so my understanding is that within a relatively short distance from an exploding ship, radiation would be the main danger, and fusion gives off much less of that.