The Two General's Problem

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Couple questions. When a Streak Boat gets into hyper, how long does it take to climb into the higher bands?

A warship can see into N-space before it hypers in. Can a ship from the iota / kappa bands also see into N-space?

A ship in a higher band cannot see into a lower band even if each warship is not accelerating?

Nope, a warship can't see into n-space from hyper (from any hyper band) - in fact they can't see anything through any hyper wall, so they also can't see ships in other hyper bands.

Inability to see into n-space is why ships need the inertial navigation dead-reckoning hyper logs; they can't take sightings because even stars aren't visible from within hyper (much less smaller things like planet, ships, or wedges). If they weren't able to inertially navigate they'd have no way to know if they were about to emerge within a hyper limit or dangerously close to an outer plane.

That inability to see across hyper walls is also why the Paul Revere mousetrap trick can work (the fleet in hyper can't be seen by the fleet it's going to mousetrap) but also why a ship has to be waiting in normal space to carry the sensor data to the mousetrap fleet. Because they can't see into normal space they don't know the enemy fleet has arrive, its heading or composition, nor can they judge when and where best to emerge to trap it. All that info must be carried to them by someone watching the target fleet in normal space.



As for how long it take to climb; RFC hasn't offered firm numbers on that. But at least based on the narrative descriptions of diving back down the hyper bands (like Honor's convoy arriving a Yeltsin) it seems like it'd take somewhere between 30 seconds and several minutes per band to cover multiple bands. It certainly wasn't instant, but it also didn't seem prolonged. Now I don't think we know for sure whether it takes any longer to climb up than drop down; but I'd suspect it doesn't.

penny wrote:Thanks! Forever I was thinking that a ship can see from hyper into n-space but not vice versa. And I didn't realize a ship was taking tactical information to the ships waiting in hyper.

However, I know a fleet's coordinates cannot change much in the time it takes to hyper in, but a fleet's change in coordinates plus the inaccuracy of jumps should prove fatal on occasion.

Anyway, thanks for clearing that up... and tlb.

penny wrote:Can a ship drop out of hyper from any band directly into n-space?

Honor of the Queen wrote:The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

penny wrote:I assume that a ship making like a hole in space with all essential systems shut down do that inside the hyper limit or a ship(s) hypering in can hyper right onto the coordinates another ship(s) occupies. Making for lots of fun in the Darius System.

Jonathan_S wrote:So you don't need to stop in each band for the hyper generator to recharge; so in that sense it is direct.

But you do need to pass through each band (bleeding off velocity as you do so) on your way

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:So you don't need to stop in each band for the hyper generator to recharge; so in that sense it is direct.

But you do need to pass through each band (bleeding off velocity as you do so) on your way

But the text says 4 minutes pass between the Gamma and Beta band transitions, which is more than enough time for the hyper-generator to recharge.

Jonathan_S wrote:So you don't need to stop in each band for the hyper generator to recharge; so in that sense it is direct.

But you do need to pass through each band (bleeding off velocity as you do so) on your way

tlb wrote:But the text says 4 minutes pass between the Gamma and Beta band transitions, which is more than enough time for the hyper-generator to recharge.

Jonathan_S wrote:Hyper generator recharge seems to be more on the order of 10 minutes or so -- I'd assume in RFC's hyper generator modes (https://davidweber.net/posts/39-hyper-g ... s-of-.html) using the hyper generator would discharge it at least down to Routine Readiness, if not all the way to Powered Down.
And even from Stand-By Readiness, with the hyper generators fully charged, some quick math shows a 5 mton freighter like Honor was convoying would take ~2.68 minutes just to go from pressing the button to transitioning. I don't think the hyper generator could recharge in 1.32 minutes!!

So I feel, based on that and on the description of a steepening translation gradient, that this was a more continuous operation -- not a stop and start one.

Basically, without getting into the detailed numbers (which scale with the tonnage of the ship, from a minimum cycle time of 30 seconds for even a dispatch boat), an 8,000,000-ton superdreadnought requires 4 minutes to go from Stand-By to actual translation. That is, the absolute minimum time for that ship to translate into hyper would be 240 seconds.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Can a ship drop out of hyper from any band directly into n-space?

Depends on what you mean by "directly".

The best description we have is one I alluded to in a recent post, the arrival of Honor's convoy to Grayson

Honor of the Queen wrote:The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

So you don't need to stop in each band for the hyper generator to recharge; so in that sense it is direct.

But you do need to pass through each band (bleeding off velocity as you do so) on your way -- so if there was a ship within sensor range in any of those lower bands they'd see the convoy dropping through -- and if within weapons range could try to fire on it.

penny wrote:I always assumed stopping in each lower band enroute to n-space is because the human body cannot handle too much of a change in velocity... eardrums might pop, etc. So a more gradual decrease in velocity is needed. Similarly when using a lower gear to naturally brake when descending steep hills in an automobile.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:I always assumed stopping in each lower band enroute to n-space is because the human body cannot handle too much of a change in velocity... eardrums might pop, etc. So a more gradual decrease in velocity is needed. Similarly when using a lower gear to naturally brake when descending steep hills in an automobile.

No, a change in velocity means acceleration and the compensator works so that external acceleration is not felt. Ear drum popping is more due to a change in pressure; it is not that the plane is going slower, rather that it is going lower.

penny wrote:I always assumed stopping in each lower band enroute to n-space is because the human body cannot handle too much of a change in velocity... eardrums might pop, etc. So a more gradual decrease in velocity is needed. Similarly when using a lower gear to naturally brake when descending steep hills in an automobile.

tlb wrote:No, a change in velocity means acceleration and the compensator works so that external acceleration is not felt. Ear drum popping is more due to a change in pressure; it is not that the plane is going slower, rather that it is going lower.

penny wrote:I'm not saying you aren't correct, but that is not intuitive. There is no up or down in space, so pressure should not be a problem other than the loss of it onboard ship. But even in hyper space there should be no change in pressure with a change in bands. But, the author makes the laws and if the laws of the HV says so, then we have to honor it.

OTOH, if hyperspace does indeed represent an Einsteinian construct as I suggested, then a compressed spacetime just might also represent higher pressures between bands. Much as a WH would indicate rapidly rising pressures as one travels deeper within the WH away from the event horizon.

Anyway, the pressures that the MAN experiences has to be even worse.