What's the chance of a Streek Drive Super Dreadnought?

Weird Harold wrote:SDs will eventually get Streak Drives, but existing SDs can't be retrofitted and new SDs are too expensive to build just for streak capability because it doesn't add any combat capability.

I agree that nobody is likely to build a new SD class solely to add Streak drive.

But we know that Haven and Beowulf both want fully modern (read Apollo-capable) SD(P)s, and even Manticore (who just finished a python lump of them) it looking at 4th gen SD(P) designs with further enhanced survivability. So it seems from what we've been told in the books there will be a steady stream of new build SD(P)s for the GA.

Since that's already the case it makes sense to reserve room to retrofit them with Streak drives once it becomes available and tested.



Whether it makes sense to retrofit current Apollo capable SD(P)s would depend on a lot of factors we don't know (basically boiling down to how much yard time would it take to retrofit a GA varient of the Streak Drive and how much would have to be pulled out to do so) And since we don't know the actual size of current hyper drives, don't know if the GA streaks will also be double the size of the GA hyperdrives, don't know where the current hyper generator is located, nor what's around it, we've got no way to more that blindly guess at the level of effort.

The unbelievably best case for upgrading would be a hyper generator adjacent to the pod pay surrounded by store-rooms. You could cut in from the pod bay, minimizing the amount of armor to deal with, and stores can be fairly easily located elsewhere giving great flexibility on what to give up to gain that volume.

The worst case would probably be buried center-line inside the forward impeller ring, and taking up most of that diameter. That would mean lots of high power circuitry, lots of armor cofferdams, and no room to expand the volume without redesigning the impeller rooms to be flatter (and consequently) wider.

But those are just two, off the top of my head, extreme examples. If it's as easy as the former it probably makes sense to refit it onto SD(p)s the next time they're in for a major overhaul. If its as hard as the later it's not worth the trouble, just eventually build a 4th+ gen SD(P) to replace it.

Weird Harold wrote:SD(P)s don't need a streak drive because they are not used as quick response forces. Ship types that do operate as quick response forces do need streak drives.

Just skimming the topic but this part stuck out and made me laugh a bit.

Every second a SD(P) spends in hyperspace is a second it isn't either on the defensive somewhere, or launching an attack against someone else's defenses. I seem to recall a quote in the books to the effect of "Every SD in transit might as well not exist"

I also seem to recall honor was spending months at a time in transit launching deep strike raids near the end of the havenite war. For only a few days in system at their targets destroying stuff...

How much more damage could she have done with a 40% reduction in transit time?

Yes most of her ships were smaller than SD(P) but that was only because for the most part they didn't have the SD(P) to give her.

And the war with the Sollies is going to be even more deep raids. Not a systematic system by system advance.

They need to shatter the league, not occupy it.

Which all adds up to giving every military ship a streak drive as soon as they possibly can. Likely starting with the ships that can project the most destructive force onto their opponents. Which leads me to guess that SD(P)'s will be at the top of the list for retrofits. Yes you lose their combat power for months while they get upgraded, but after that they have a 40% reduction in speed which almost doubles your offensive power. Which, lets face it.. is far cheaper than building a comparable number of new SD(P) from the ground up...

Chyort wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:SD(P)s don't need a streak drive because they are not used as quick response forces. Ship types that do operate as quick response forces do need streak drives.

Just skimming the topic but this part stuck out and made me laugh a bit.

Every second a SD(P) spends in hyperspace is a second it isn't either on the defensive somewhere, or launching an attack against someone else's defenses. I seem to recall a quote in the books to the effect of "Every SD in transit might as well not exist"

I also seem to recall honor was spending months at a time in transit launching deep strike raids near the end of the havenite war. For only a few days in system at their targets destroying stuff...

How much more damage could she have done with a 40% reduction in transit time?

Yes most of her ships were smaller than SD(P) but that was only because for the most part they didn't have the SD(P) to give her.

And the war with the Sollies is going to be even more deep raids. Not a systematic system by system advance.

They need to shatter the league, not occupy it.

Which all adds up to giving every military ship a streak drive as soon as they possibly can. Likely starting with the ships that can project the most destructive force onto their opponents. Which leads me to guess that SD(P)'s will be at the top of the list for retrofits. Yes you lose their combat power for months while they get upgraded, but after that they have a 40% reduction in speed which almost doubles your offensive power. Which, lets face it.. is far cheaper than building a comparable number of new SD(P) from the ground up...

Yes, as Nathan Bedford Frorrest said, its called "Get there first with the most men."

Often misquoted as "git thar fustest with the mostest," or "Getting there firstest with the mostest."

Castenea wrote:

Bernd wrote:I have a question does anyone know if the GA got a complete tech specks for the Streek drive or only the mathematics behind the drive? I know they have the drives inventor but do they have a set of Blueprints or only the theory behind the drive. If they only have the math then I expect at least a year for a prototype drive and then a year of testing to make sure the bugs are out. Then you start by building courier ships followed by a Roland B or C class ship for fast scouting missions and more field testing. I say we are 3-5 years from BC and above class ships having a Streek drive ship.

I think you are pessimistic about how quickly the Streak drive can be used, due mostly to the wartime reduction in testing. Radar basically went from lab bench test systems in ~1938 to large inplace coastal systems by 1940, to ship board and air craft systems in general deployment in 1945. Several ASW systems went from a bright idea to general deployment in less than a year.

But given that I doubt that Simoes has blueprints for the drive memorized, even if he does have the theory behind the generator. I doubt that even with the war rush, the new version of the generator can be built and installed in a test ship in under 3 mo. Also can you see our favorite tech witches not trying to improve on any toys they get their hands on?

Remember, in the Honorverse, there are expert software systems that are called AI, though the celery god has indicated that they are not true AI, the computational capability of said computers is immense.

Once the physics fundamentals are introduced into the physics modules of expert modeling systems, blueprints for streak drive capital ships would only be a few months away. Then the war gamers would have their several months of modeling time to figure out how best to protect the new equipment. what sort of safety protocols, etc.

Then you have to build one or two, and learn while building. After the one or two initial builds are complete, you put live crews in them and test them, and get input from flesh and blood crews about what they like and what they don't.

Then you tie it all together in a bow, and send it over to the big shipyards and let them take over.

CLACs had a development timeframe of around five years wartime, from initial concept to first live action, if I remember right.

Cheopis wrote:CLACs had a development timeframe of around five years wartime, from initial concept to first live action, if I remember right.

CLACs were a revolutionary design concept for the honorverse and it took a bit of fighting to get them approved/refined/implemented.

The Streak Drive is just a double sized hyper generator... Not trying to diminish the time took inventing the thing or the hurdles involved with doubling the size of your hyper generator in existing ships... But it wont take anywhere near as long to upgrade something than it takes to invent it from scratch the first time.

With podlayers finding space should be even easier.(Assuming there isn't some honorverse physics that totally screw with my assumptions)
Worst case, assuming you cant expand your existing hyperdrive room... You just stash it at the bottom of a pod bay, wall it in with armoring, reroute control runs, and then turn the old hyperdrive room into a pool...

n7axw wrote:I guess, Harold, that given the way that the arguments have played out here, my vote is for the strategic speed for the SDPs. Remember the the League is only a short term opponent.

SD(P)s will get Streak Drives eventually. My only argument has been that it isn't a priority over the smaller classes which can be retrofitted, which Manticore needs more of NOW, and can make better use of the speed.

Chyort wrote:

Cheopis wrote:CLACs had a development timeframe of around five years wartime, from initial concept to first live action, if I remember right.

CLACs were a revolutionary design concept for the honorverse and it took a bit of fighting to get them approved/refined/implemented.

The Streak Drive is just a double sized hyper generator... Not trying to diminish the time took inventing the thing or the hurdles involved with doubling the size of your hyper generator in existing ships... But it wont take anywhere near as long to upgrade something than it takes to invent it from scratch the first time.

With podlayers finding space should be even easier.(Assuming there isn't some honorverse physics that totally screw with my assumptions)
Worst case, assuming you cant expand your existing hyperdrive room... You just stash it at the bottom of a pod bay, wall it in with armoring, reroute control runs, and then turn the old hyperdrive room into a pool...

Uh, guys, before going on about how easy it is going to be to duplicate it, please consider:

Mission of Honor, chapter 4 wrote:The streak drive represented a fundamental advance in interstellar travel, and there was no indication anyone else was even close to duplicating it. For centuries, the theta bands had represented an inviolable ceiling for hyper-capable ships. Everyone had known it was theoretically possible to go even higher, attain a still higher apparent normal-space velocity, yet no one had ever managed to design a ship which could crack the iota wall and survive. Incredible amounts of research had been invested in efforts to do just that, especially in the earlier days of hyper travel, but with a uniform lack of success. In the last few centuries, efforts to beat the iota barrier had waned, until the goal had been pretty much abandoned as one of those theoretically possible but practically unobtainable concepts.

But the Mesan Alignment hadn't abandoned it, and finally, after the better part of a hundred T-years of dogged research, they'd found the answer. It was, in many ways, a brute force approach, and it wouldn't have been possible even now without relatively recent advances (whose potential no one else seemed to have noticed) in related fields. And even with those other advances, it had almost doubled the size of conventional hyper generators. But it worked. Indeed, they'd broken not simply the iota wall, but the kappa wall, as well. Which meant the voyage from New Tuscany to Mesa, which would have taken anyone else the next best thing to forty-five T-days, had taken Anisimovna less than thirty-one.

Also, Dr. Simoes has never dealt with the streak drive hardware. He's a pure math-jockey hyper-physicist. I'm not even sure he knows it's twice the size of a conventional hyper-drive.

Jonathan_S wrote:I agree that nobody is likely to build a new SD class solely to add Streak drive.

That is essentially the heart of my argument.

Jonathan_S wrote:But we know that Haven and Beowulf both want fully modern (read Apollo-capable) SD(P)s, and even Manticore (who just finished a python lump of them) it looking at 4th gen SD(P) designs with further enhanced survivability. So it seems from what we've been told in the books there will be a steady stream of new build SD(P)s for the GA.

Unless the space requirement and those unknown "other advances in unrelated fields" can be predicted well enough to build in retrofit capability, those Bolthole Specials for Haven and Beowulf aren't going to get Streak Drives because they'll probably be in service before the GA is through with R&D. By the time a Streak Drive is available Beowulf, Haven, and Manticore will have made even more substantial investment in Slow SDs which may or may not be upgradeable.

Jonathan_S wrote:Whether it makes sense to retrofit current Apollo capable SD(P)s would depend on a lot of factors we don't know (basically boiling down to how much yard time would it take to retrofit a GA varient of the Streak Drive and how much would have to be pulled out to do so)

The consensus seems to be that Upgrades to SDs are impractical because of armoring and coffer-damming -- much the same argument given why the captured SLN SDs aren't worth anything.

That is another reason I think smaller ships should get priority for streak drives; They can be retrofitted faster and cheaper than SDs and can make better use of the increased speed.

Chyort wrote:Which all adds up to giving every military ship a streak drive as soon as they possibly can. Likely starting with the ships that can project the most destructive force onto their opponents. Which leads me to guess that SD(P)'s will be at the top of the list for retrofits.

As noted several times, the armoring and coffer-damming of SDs make an upgrade impractical -- unless the GA version isn't twice as big as existing Hyper-generators.

IOW, there won't be any retrofits of SDs.

I agree that every military ship will eventually get a Streak Drive or be retired in favor of a new-build with better combat capability which happens to have a Streak Drive.

Weird Harold wrote:They can be retrofitted faster and cheaper than SDs

Says who? The smaller the ship, the less extra volume you have to work with and the harder it is to include something that you may have trouble specifying exact size for.

Weird Harold wrote:and can make better use of the increased speed.

Bullshit.

Weird Harold wrote:IOW, there won't be any retrofits of SDs.

Unless the drives turn out not nearly as large as expected, there will few or no retrofits period.

Weird Harold wrote:That is essentially the heart of my argument.

And it wont matter much as new build SDs is essentially guaranteed anyway. Question is how long it takes before someone can figure out how to build the streakdrive hardware.

Pricetag of the streakdrive will be of zero importance.