Planetoid variants

On the size of a hyper capable ship, the Achuultani got the job done with ships less than 10 miles long. Quite a bit larger than what Dahak left on Earth but the fusion of the various tech bases would most likely bring the size down somewhat.
As to WHY you might want to go to carriers planetoids? The fleet needed to go after the enemy computers will be huge. Only three ways of getting that fleet exist. 1) salvage existing hulls, 2) recycle existing hulls into new ships and 3) mine systems for new material. Once you have the ships, you then need to crew them. A carrier planetoid could scout dozens of systems at once while a "conventional" planetoid can only go one place at one time.
And to be perfectly mercenary, if a division of parasites run into the Bad Guys, you still get some info, even if it's of a negative type, at far lower casualty rates. And if the division leaves a backstop ship(s) ala New Tuscany, then the chances of getting that needed info increases.

zuluwiz wrote:It's an interesting question: just how small could you make a hyper-capable ship? If it were small enough to be carried by a planetoid, well and good, if not, then you have a problem.

Well, the Achuultani have hyper-capable ships 20km long. That wouldn't fit in Dahak's parasite bays (or whatever) but it shouldn't be hard to fit into a class of planetoid designed for it.

cralkhi wrote:It seems like you can launch small things into hyper (hyper grenades, hyper missiles, that warp rifle that puts its targets in hyperspace) but for something to be able to carry its hyper generator with it, it has to be huge.

This triggered a random stupid thought. I wonder how far you could scale up the Achuultani style missile launcher - that externally applies the warp fields to an object (in this case their missiles)?

Could you, in a fit of insanity, scale it to the point where it could launch entire starships into hyper across interstellar distance? They'd be unable to reroute, but they wouldn't have to have a hyper generator of their own. (Even if you could get the throw mass up having the hyper field sustain for long enough without an onboard generator powering it is probably a massive stumbling block - missiles have to go a fairly short distance before dropping back to normal space on their target)

In a lot of ways, even if you could, it's a solution in search of a problem. Assuming you wanted to come home again you could only fly between systems that had these hyper-launch systems. And you'd need to be moving enough mass than it couldn't be done via the existing Mat Trans stations. The drawbacks are probably too significant to be worth it, even if the economies of scale worked out to buy fewer giant fixed hyper generators in your systems rather than mobile hyper generators in each of your freighters....

Jonathan_S wrote:

cralkhi wrote:It seems like you can launch small things into hyper (hyper grenades, hyper missiles, that warp rifle that puts its targets in hyperspace) but for something to be able to carry its hyper generator with it, it has to be huge.

This triggered a random stupid thought. I wonder how far you could scale up the Achuultani style missile launcher - that externally applies the warp fields to an object (in this case their missiles)?

Could you, in a fit of insanity, scale it to the point where it could launch entire starships into hyper across interstellar distance? They'd be unable to reroute, but they wouldn't have to have a hyper generator of their own. (Even if you could get the throw mass up having the hyper field sustain for long enough without an onboard generator powering it is probably a massive stumbling block - missiles have to go a fairly short distance before dropping back to normal space on their target)

So essentially just over-sized mat trans designed for ships, using Achuultani hyper missile technology, rather than Fourth Imperium personnel mat-trans technology?

In a lot of ways, even if you could, it's a solution in search of a problem. Assuming you wanted to come home again you could only fly between systems that had these hyper-launch systems. And you'd need to be moving enough mass than it couldn't be done via the existing Mat Trans stations. The drawbacks are probably too significant to be worth it, even if the economies of scale worked out to buy fewer giant fixed hyper generators in your systems rather than mobile hyper generators in each of your freighters....

Well, if you built a parasite battleship that was large enough to carry it's own hypercom, which we know was at least three times the mass of the Osirus in book 3, that would still be substantially smaller than some form of planetoid, and thus easier to apply Achuultani hyper missile tech to fling it intersteller distances.

With a hypercom, you could use it as a shotgun scout, if it finds something it could call in the centrally located battle globe fleets quickly, otherwise it calls in an all-clear and awaits a regular planetoid to come through to pick it back up in a few weeks/months.


Still a bit of a solution in search of a problem, but it may be easier to operate, than to build entire new networks of the Fourth Imperiums sentry satellites that detected the incursion circa book 1.


Would almost be even better used offensively. Setup your "missile platform" a few lightyears out, and use a hypercom while fighting the Achuultani central computer. Feed in coordinates, and the Battlecomp will rightfully assume it's reinforcement ships, rather than concluding they are incoming missiles. Especially since Imperium hyper tech works stupidly close to stars, even more so than Achuultani hyper tech, although Enchanach works even closer to stars as long as you're willing to blow it up.

Here's a planetoid variant based on the "How the Safehold Series WON'T End" idea - A planetoid Champion of Tomanak.

zuluwiz wrote:It's an interesting question: just how small could you make a hyper-capable ship? If it were small enough to be carried by a planetoid, well and good, if not, then you have a problem. On the subject of parasite warships going to another system, they would have to be carried there, and then would not be able to report, as they do not carry hypercom. I have wondered for some time if the stranded middies would have to build a ship to get out of the Pardal System, that being if they could not build a hypercom. Remember that the Dahak was stuck in Earth orbit for tens of thousands of years for lack of Hypercom parts, and I have always wondered why the middies could build a Hypercom when Dahak could not.

Dahak couldn't make a hypercom out of shipboard resources. In other words, he couldn't mine.

Any news on the sequel(s)?

cralkhi wrote:It seems like you can launch small things into hyper (hyper grenades, hyper missiles, that warp rifle that puts its targets in hyperspace) but for something to be able to carry its hyper generator with it, it has to be huge.

Actually hyper missiles have their own generators. Grenades and warp guns leave their targets in hyperspace, missiles have to come back into n-space to hit their targets.

Having said that, missile generators are single use things which spend only a few minutes in h-space so are probably a lot smaller than ones meant for use on ships.

Still I would imagine that you could make a hyper capable combat ship the size of Dahak's parasite ships, but it would probably have to sacrifice quite a bit of firepower to do so.