ERIM

Relax wrote:
1) Size of missile is directly proportional to its capacitors run time. Or close enough.

2) Just because an impeller missile ring is CAPABLE of running for 60s on max does not mean you must supply 60s at max power settings.

3) Since this is a DDCM, using 30s of power followed by a BALLISTIC phase, followed by another 30s of power would be equivalent to OLD STYLE CM's. They were all of 12tons. The only addition would be a 2nd impeller ring which obviously WOULD increase the tonnage. I gave an absurd 50tons to this DDCM even though the old CM was 12tons and ran at full power for 60s. Newer CM's run at full power for 75s at 130,000g. I see no reason why one could not run at half power(65,000g) for 90s for your first stage of CM or 30s@130,000g just like normal, or simply use all 60s of capacitor power available and never use the 2nd stage at all for close in work.

Doesn't this imply a pretty linear use of power vs runtime? Someone did suggest (and I'm sorry I forget who) that a significant fraction of the total power used during the entire 1-3 minutes of a missile's impeller lifetime might be spent in the initial surge of wedge activation (before the power siphon effect started offsetting much of the power consumption).

If that turns out to be accurate, a missile that had sufficient power to run a single drive for 60 seconds couldn't some close to running a pair of drives for 30 seconds each.
No real text-ev that I can recall on missiles; though ships certainly need extra power for wedge initiation.

Pearls, wedge initiation was ??? ~50% of total energy required. Brings up the question:

Wedge initiation for ballistic phase: I have argued before that RHN/RMN cap MDM's could not have ballistic phases, but actual text states otherwise: when folks are talking duplicating Apollo for its range. MoH I believe or ART. I had long since argued that capacitor missiles could not go ballistic because they could not restart due to the limitation you are bringing up. Got BANG BANG, shot down.

Another aspect of the DDM or MDM was a thing invented called a "baffle" that somehow transferred wedge initiation power between stages. Off-hand this would seem to indicate it recharges drained capacitors by wedge power going down before next stage. Therefore the initial wedge power problem is circumvented.

Of course we also have discussion in the books of capacitor birds being "stacked" before lighting off their drives, so if wedge initiation had to have its power from the ship, then WHERE is this energy being stored while waiting another 'x' seconds to "stack" capacitor missile salvos? The capacitors are already full up. Stored in the impellers themselves?

Dunno Johns S. I was in your camp on this subject for a long time till actual text-ev was pointed out to me disagreeing with me. I will go looking for it. Maybe someone else already has their thumb on it.

No, the baffle keeps the active from tearing up the inactive rings.

The main reason the first generation of MDMs were so big was because they needed capacitors large enough to hold over three times the energy that single drive missiles needed. Three times the standard energy containment is three initiations and three full run times, plus add a little more to keep the computer alive during a ballistic phase.

kzt wrote:No, the baffle keeps the active from tearing up the inactive rings.

? Not in a book. Hmm part of a pearl or from a Honorcon? Don't recall.

Relax wrote:

kzt wrote:No, the baffle keeps the active from tearing up the inactive rings.

? Not in a book. Hmm part of a pearl or from a Honorcon? Don't recall.

HOS IIRC. Yup.

"The most critical breakthrough was what Sonja Hemphill and some of Gram’s other team leaders had dubbed simply “the baffle”—essentially, a very carefully designed generator which would project a tame plate of focused gravity to shield adjacent, inactive impeller rings from an active one. Doing it in a way that didn’t slice the missile body into divots the moment it came online had turned out to be…moderately tricky, and they still hadn’t quite licked the problem, but current results were promising. Very promising, actually…in an incremental, God-why-does-this-take-so-long, work-your-butt-off sort of way. And if they could only make the baffle work, all the rest of it was simply fiddly bits. Difficult, challenging, and expensive fiddly bits, perhaps, but still only fiddly bits; he was confident of that."

kzt wrote:HOS IIRC. Yup.

"The most critical breakthrough was what Sonja Hemphill and some of Gram’s other team leaders had dubbed simply “the baffle”—essentially, a very carefully designed generator which would project a tame plate of focused gravity to shield adjacent, inactive impeller rings from an active one. Doing it in a way that didn’t slice the missile body into divots the moment it came online had turned out to be…moderately tricky, and they still hadn’t quite licked the problem, but current results were promising. Very promising, actually…in an incremental, God-why-does-this-take-so-long, work-your-butt-off sort of way. And if they could only make the baffle work, all the rest of it was simply fiddly bits. Difficult, challenging, and expensive fiddly bits, perhaps, but still only fiddly bits; he was confident of that."

NICE PULL!

So, that is why the MALIGN went with a grafted CM on "top" of the normal missile. Keep those impeller rings far distant from one another.

Brings up another question: How far do they have to be apart? By placing the impeller rings close together what are the true benefits? I would think changing from one wedge to the next, it takes time for the wedge to start/stop initiation so if the impeller rings are close together they get to save a lot of energy as the 2nd set of impeller rings does not have to PULLUP an entire new wedge, rather only a slight portion.

Gets back to: How much energy is required to start the wedge after a ballistic phase.

So, if one eliminated the Laser head on the MK-16 DDM, how much would it actually weigh? 50 tons? 45% reduction? Seems about right judging by missile dims and if density remains constant throughout the missile... How much greater accel would an MK-16 w/o laser head actually be able to go when tweaked to its new tonnage?

I don't think acceleration in the honorverse is mass based at all. Empty freighters don't accelerate faster then full freighters. I think it's all based on the shape and depth of the field.

kzt wrote:I don't think acceleration in the honorverse is mass based at all. Empty freighters don't accelerate faster then full freighters. I think it's all based on the shape and depth of the field.

Acceleration is set by the impellers. Why I stated "tweaked".

I think your getting confused about some things Relax. The statement is that a wedge's power draw after activation is reduced. Not that it generates power.

Brining up a second wedge still means supplying 100% of the power to do so from capacitors. Thats why you can have a ballistic stage on capacitor fed MDM's.

Second the baffle protects the other nodes from the output of the running nodes. It in no way allows you to have two active at once.

Third, this slipped my mind till now but as evidenced by what happened to kuzdak's ship at manticore, (and others that suffer compensator failure at various points), the various sides cannot build missiles strong enough to take the full g load n their own structure. They're at least partially reliant on a compensator to make it all work. That means a larger missile would have a lower acceleration.

Fourth, the above probably explains messa's use of a CM as a second stage, i doubt they can have 2 drives without using a baffle, but if their compensator tech is behind the curve, (as we know it is), they couldn't hope to put two full drives on without a serious loss of componsator ability due to the larger size and thus a loss of acceleration. But they could still be better enough than sollie standards to hold their own with a more modest size increase.

A ballistic coasting CM sounds fine in theory but given the above point about wedge activation taking most of the power isn't going to be significantly smaller than a CM that can cross it fully powered. In addition it's still possible for the attacking missiles to pull a detour that takes them out of range of the coasting CM's if the range is right.