Hutch wrote:REFIT of Current SD(P)'s with Streak Drive - I am in concurrence with Dafmeister on this,first Bolthole has to 'reverse engineer' the Streak Drive based on what Simoes knows, along with improvements that Manti/Grayson/Haven tech can contribute, and we simply don't know how long that will take. Might be a few months, might take a year or more. And then once you have it, you have to do the engineering and specs to put it into the SD(P), reserve the dock space and personnel to do the refit, and get the ships back from the lines (meanwhile you have to be building new ships, to keep up fleet strength).
It all comes down to resources and costs, and with both Manticore and Grayson out of the SD-building business for several years at least and the costs of moving along a war with the SL and eventually the MAlign, I think the Invictus/Medusa ships will eventually be like the Sphinx and Gryphon classes, still powerful but no longer top of the class.
Heh, eventually everything gets replaced. But a 40% transit time reduction will magnify your offensive power by an equal amount. So even if the cost is relatively expensive, it makes sense to upgrade, if at all possible/practical. For defensive it is less useful, because they are mostly sitting stationary waiting for a threat to arrive. With the Mycroft system, when it finally gets fully installed, mobile ships could be reduced even more for offensive operations as well i would imagine.
Hutch wrote:As for the ships building in Haven now, depending how much Simoes knows about the size and the on-board location of the Streak Drive (he's a lab rat, not an engineer), ships that are early enough in the building process can be modified to provide space to accomodate the Streak Drive, even if it is not fully developed yet. These ships will be designed with ease of retrofit already in mind (and with cost/time already planned for).
Eventually, all SD's coming out of the yards at Haven (and eventually, Manticore, Grayson, and probably Erewhon) will have Streak Drives--Guess we'll call them SDP(F)ast Ships.
Agree completly, although i assume Simoes knows a bit more
Hutch wrote:Small Ships vs Large Ships. We know from textev that Streak Drives can go into dispatch boats and ships as large as a BC (Asimonova's 'yatch', IIRC). And on economies of scale, it will probably be easier to refit 10 dispatch boats or DD's with versions of the Streak than one BC or SD--not so much armor in the way, and if you have to build new to accomodate, smaller ships can come of the line a lot faster and in larger numbers than the bigger ships. So refit or new build, smaller ships are more likely to be in action with the streak drive than SD's.
The tops and bottoms are effectively unarmored. They were using this fact way back on the original nike. So armor is something of a wash i would assume.
Hutch wrote:And while the point of being able to do 40% more mission-tasks is important, having your ships shuttling back and forth to Haven for refit is also going to impede operations...and probably leave you with mixed squadrons, some (Fast) and some not.
I can see some of the RnD being done out in haven... But Beowulf is going to be adding keyhole 2 to everything haven builds for the near future because their techbase isn't up to it.
I would guess Beowulf would be the one doing any retrofits with a streak drive involved. So transit times would be reduced. And at the end of the day a retrofit should be faster than building a new SD from scratch.
But until the books arrive we are all pretty much guessing, so who knows.
Unless RFC feels like giving some clarity(Hah!
)
George J. Smith wrote:Chyort wrote:Snip...
We know the streak drive is roughly double the size of a standard drive... Any ship still at an early stage of construction could be modified to double or a touch more of the space required. Thus you are sure you have room to upgrade down the road... You don't always have to make an entire new generation just for an upgrade, as long as you plan on upgrading from the start.
My bold
We the readers know and so do the Malign, but the GA does not know, so how are they going to make allowance for the size of something they don't know about?
T&R
GJS
I am assuming Simoes should know at the very least in general terms. Although i assume he knows more than that. But that point seems up for debate in this thread. Heh
Still, long before you have a working prototype you should have some understanding of approximately how large it is going to be. Either way, when simoes tells them, if he knows, or when they discover it on their own, immediately after all ships still under early construction should be modified to include it.
drothgery wrote:Hornblower wrote:If I understand it correctly, a hypergenerator of a dispatch ship is much smaller than one of a SD. Probably the streak drive increase the size proportionally.
I'm pretty sure RFC has said standard (and conventional military) hyper generators do not scale up proportionally to mass; the hyper generator is well over half the mass of a dispatch boat, but it's a rather small percentage of a ship of the wall or a freighter.
Even ignoring the Pod bay aspect of SD(P). SDs typically have a greater percentage of... Lets say customizable space. Be it for admiral only gyms or whatever. I can see them finding space easier than something like a destroyer. But i could well be wrong. *Shrugs*
Tenshinai wrote:Chyort wrote:
The reason they have dispatch boats isn't for the hours/days they shave off transit times because of their acceleration advantage... it is because they can build hundreds if not thousands of them for the same price as a SD. Which means their SD's are not stuck in transit trying to deliver messages.
If for some reason they have to pick between using a streak drive on a courier boat, or an SD(P)... I have a sneaking suspicion they will pick the SD(P) every time. Because it can also bring harm to the enemy that much faster in addition to messages.
I don't know why they would hit that kind of a bottleneck though. I assume they would do both at the same time.
Very likely yes. The only big difference would be that of build times, allowing smaller ships to be finished earlier.
Agree, but i can see them retrofitting SD(P) at the same time as they build new smaller ships. Which negates some of the build time debate.
And the smaller you go ship wise, the less likely you are to retrofit and the more likely you are to just build new ones. Dispatch boats for example i don't see being upgraded considering exactly how tightly packed they already are, but building a new one from the ground up should be relatively fast.
SWM wrote:Chyort wrote:Heh, agree... But RFC has talked about what the detection ranges are eventually going to be, in his roundabout fashion. And i vaguely recall it being highly limited. So being able to do course corrections up to the last second with apollo could matter a great deal.
Using a single apollo launch seems to me like a decent method to get an eyeball into the right place in a hurry as well. For when you cant wait for an RD to maneuver into position.
Besides, the Sollies don't have the spider drive... So less missiles and more kills works well on them in the mean time.
Here I think you are making a mistake. Yes, RFC has discussed the range at which Mesa, with specialized sensors and knowing what they were looking for, could detect a Spider drive. That range is
1 light-second. There is no need to use Apollo FTL control at that range--don't even need to use single drive missiles. Just use grasers!
Unless the detection range can be extended hundreds of times more than 1 light-second, Apollo missiles are completely irrelevant against Spider drive ships.
In the books yes, but i seem to recall it being brought up on the forums here some with some vague number about future GA detection ranges.. (i want to say low light minutes, but it has been a long time so don't quote me as fact)
Jonathan_S wrote:I'd quibble that it's not worth pulling an Apollo Invictus off the line solely to retrofit a streak drive.
Depends entirely on the length of the retrofit. Something we can only guess at.
Jonathan_S wrote:That said since they've already determined that it's not worth it to upgrade pre-Keyhole podlayers to Keyhole (or Keyhole II) that put the original Medusa/Harringtons quite low on any streak drive upgrade list, only slightly ahead of legacy SDs. So I don't expect to ever see any of those upgrades, but I'm not so sure about eventual upgrades to the newer Apollo capable units.
I seem to recall before the battle of manticore(a long time ago, true) about how they were talking about why home fleet hadnt been upgraded to keyhole 2 yet. Something along the lines of, they wanted to, but couldn't afford to have the ships put into dock while outnumbered so badly.
I dont recall however, them officially writing off the older ships for upgrades at a later date... If you are right however i would agree, any SD that doesn't have/will never have apollo, shouldnt get a streak drive.
