|
Vince
Vice Admiral
Posts: 1574
Joined: Fri Apr 09, 2010 11:43 pm
|
n7axw wrote:A bit earlier this evening, I was browsing through "The Enemy in Extended Space: SLN or MAlign" thread where the question came up as to whether or not the LDs were podlayers. At least some of the posters throught not. But having reread Storm from the Shadows recently, I didn't think that was quite right. So I poked around and found the textev that seems to me to demonstrate that the LDs are indeed podlayers, although the quote below is refering to the Sharks rather than the LDs. However, since the Shark is a prototype for the LD, it stands to reason that what is true of the Shark would also be true of the LD.
Also, since there has been some confusion about whether or not the LDs have impeller drive, the textev cited below demonstrates that they do not have a wedge or impeller drive. I fimd myself wondering how they move in n space.
**********
Here is the quote SftS, chapter 40
"The Shark-class ships were much larger than Commodore Ostby’s and Commodore Sung’s Scouts. Any pod layer had to be, although these were still essentially prototype units in many ways, and they had only twenty-eight of them, divided betweedn Admiral Topolev’s Task Force One and Admiral Colenso’s much smaller Task Force Two. Substantially larger units with far more magazine space were on the drawing board, designs based in no small part on the experience Benjamin and his crews had acquired working with the ships under Topolov’s and Colenso’s command. Some of those larger units were already entering the firs phases of construction, for that matter. And again, Albrecht wished they’d been able to wait until those larger ships were available in greater numbers. But the key to everything was timing, and the two admrals had enough combat power for their assigned mission.
Albrecht wasn’t the military specialist Benjamin was, but even he could tell the Sharks looked subtly wrong. They were too far away for the naked eye to see, but the view screen’s magnification brought them to what seemed like arm-length and made it obvious that all of them lacked the traditional “hammerhead design of a military starship. Indeed the lines of their hulls were all wrong, in one way or another, as if their designers had been working to a completely different set of constraints from anyone else in the galaxy.
Which was precisely what they had been doing.
The strike ships turned slowly, and then, as one unit, they went loping away into the trackless depths of space. And that, too, was wrong. The light warping power of a starship’s impeller drive made the ship within it impossible to see, except from exactly the right angle. But there was no gravitic distortion around these ships, nothing to bend and blur light waves, because they didn’t use impeller wedges."
Discuss away...
Don
How a spider drive ship maneuvers when in normal space, and in hyper space but not in a gravity wave: Mission of Honor, Chapter 28 wrote:The ships which had mounted Oyster Bay, however, represented a radical departure from anything the galaxy had previously seen which was just as impressive, in its own way, as anything Manticore had accomplished. They weren’t a particularly graceful departure, of course. In fact, compared to any impeller-drive ship, they were squat, stumpy, and downright peculiar looking because, unlike the gravitic drives everyone else used, the spider generated no impeller wedge. Instead of using two inclined planes of focused gravity to create bands of stressed space around the pocket of normal-space which surrounded a ship, the spider used literally dozens of nodes to project spurs or spikes of intensely focused gravity. For all intents and purposes, each of those spurs was almost like generating a tractor or a presser beam, except that no one in his right mind had ever imagined tractors or pressers that powerful. In fact, at a sufficiently short range, they would have made quite serviceable energy weapons, because these focused, directional beams were powerful enough to create their own tiny foci—effectively, holes in the “real” universe—in which space itself was so highly stressed that the beams punched clear through to the alpha wall, the interface between normal-space and hyper-space.
No single beam would have been of any particular use. Powerful as it might be, it was less than a shadow compared to the output of even a single one of any starship’s beta nodes, far less an alpha node. It wasn’t even enough to produce the “ripple” along the hyper-space wall which Manticore used for its FTL communications technology. But it did lock onto the wall, and that provided the ship which mounted it a purchase point in deep space—one which was always available, anywhere, in any direction. And when dozens of those beams were combined, reaching out, locking onto the alpha wall and pulling in micro-spaced bursts, they produced something that was very useful, indeed.
The maximum acceleration the new technology could theoretically have attained was vastly lower than the acceleration theoretically attainable under impeller drive. After all, in theory an impeller wedge could be accelerated instantaneously to the speed of light. There were, however, a few shortcomings to that sort of acceleration, which was why theoretical acceleration rates had always been of far less interest to practical ship designers than the maximum rates which could be compensated for with sufficient efficiency to allow mere humans to survive without being turned into extremely thin layers of paste on the bulkheads.
And in that respect, even the spider drive’s lower theoretical maximum acceleration presented a definite challenge, given the fact that it produced no impeller wedge. Without a wedge, it also produced no convenient “sump” for an inertial compensator, and that meant the maximum survivable normal-space acceleration for a spider drive-equipped ship was limited by the ability of currently available grav plate technology to offset the consequences of acceleration. Unfortunately, grav plates were far less capable in that respect than inertial compensators, which had an inevitable effect on the maximum accleration a spider-drive ship could attain. It also meant that unlike impeller-drive vessels, a spider-drive ship’s decks had to be aligned perpendicular to its axis of movement rather than parallel, which was a large part of what produced its shorter, “squatter” hull form, not to mention requiring some significant rethinks about the way spacecraft designers had been arranging ship interiors literally for centuries.
Italics are the author's. When a spider ship is in hyper space and not in a gravity wave, the spider's tractor beams lock onto the wall of the next higher hyper band. -------------------------------------------------------------
History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.
|
