New Manty ship ideas.

SWM wrote:You asked in another thread what physics had to do with anything. You clearly do not understand. You ignore both real physics and the physics of the "new" technology David Weber introduced for the Honorverse. You simply cannot blather any old idea that comes into your head, without paying attention to the rules of Weber's Honorverse, and expect to be taken seriously.

* A picowatt is an extremely tiny amount of power
* There is no such thing as a paser
* There is no such thing as a partial alpha band
* Sails only draw power from grav waves, not from normal hyperspace
* David specifically eliminated the concept of a massively powerful spinal-mount beam weapon in http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/77/1
* According to the text and the Pearls (which you obviously still haven't read), what you get when you turn the power of the impellers into a beam is a grav lance; unfortunately, a grav lance won't cut through anything--all it can do is overload certain forms of gravitic technology, such as sidewalls, but not an impeller wedge.

You clearly do not actually care to understand the universe that David Weber has created. You ignore the Pearls, even when they specifically talk about the concept you propose. You propose concepts which contradict the text and infodumps. If you simply want to blather nonsense, I can suggest a number of forums and websites. There is no point in discussing anything about the Honorverse with you as long as you continue to blatantly ignore basic concepts which we have pointed you to repeatedly. All you are doing is wasting our time, and I refuse to waste any more of it on you.

Annachie wrote:I was thinking of a type of ship that might be needed.


With Mike about to (likely) capture Mesa, and with Houdini likely to not be complete, there's a chance that they might capture someone with partial knowledge of Houdini.

Enough to give the GA partial information on Darius or the twins at least.


Which means that te GA might want a heavily armoured, though not necessarily heavily armed, survey ship. Something that has a great chance of surviving a transit of a bridge that is hostile, but not fortified like the Manticoran junction.
That could then run away and return via hyperspace with data, or even lurk a while in stealth while Ghost Rider platforms have a good look, then return.

Highly specialised and not many oppertunities to use.

Uroboros wrote:Ahem, I hate to actually disagree with anything you said, but... Paser actually does exist. It operates on similar principles as a laser, but it's still in the experimental stages from what I've read thus far. Nor did I understand it very well, mostly just skimmed over it.

http://www.cern.ch/accelconf/e96/PAPERS ... EP129G.PDF‎

Annachie wrote:I was thinking of a type of ship that might be needed.


With Mike about to (likely) capture Mesa, and with Houdini likely to not be complete, there's a chance that they might capture someone with partial knowledge of Houdini.

Enough to give the GA partial information on Darius or the twins at least.


Which means that te GA might want a heavily armoured, though not necessarily heavily armed, survey ship. Something that has a great chance of surviving a transit of a bridge that is hostile, but not fortified like the Manticoran junction.
That could then run away and return via hyperspace with data, or even lurk a while in stealth while Ghost Rider platforms have a good look, then return.

Highly specialised and not many oppertunities to use.

You come through the terminus. You have no impeller wedge. You cannot drop your Warshawski sails and reconfigure to wedge until you are clear of the grav wave running through the terminus. This takes anywhere from about 20 seconds to as much as 3 minutes, depending on the terminus. (Actually, it can take even longer for some termini because the nature of their internal stresses imposes a very, very low transit velocity.) Until you're clear of the grav wave, none of the ships you plan on launching away from the mothership can bring up their wedges, either, nor can they survive in the gravity wave without using Warshawski sails of their own, which means that the instant they separate from the mothership and began attempting to move independently, they get ripped apart by the aforesaid gravity wave, without even worrying about what any defenders might do to them.

So let's say it takes one minute to clear the gravity wave, and then it takes another 4 minutes to bring up your parasite ships' hyper generators (you can't turn off the mothership's hyper generator until she's clear of the gravity wave, which is an extension of hyper-space into normal-space), so you have basically 5 minutes in which your ship is mother naked as far as any form of passive defenses other than armor are concerned and has to move on the exact exit vector imposed by the terminus. (You do remember my talking about the defined traffic lanes for the Junction, yes? I believe I started doing that in On Basilisk Station.) The hyper footprint when you come through is unmistakable and is enough, all by itself, to absolutely localize your ship, even if you had all the active EW and stealth systems in the universe covering you at the moment of your emergence (which they won't be), and your course from that point is 100% predictable until you clear the gravity wave and can begin maneuvering freely under impeller drive. The energy batteries (or the mines, which are basically the same thing as really, really, really big capital missile laser heads) know exactly where you are and where you will be at the instant they fire, without even the distortion of a sidewall to protect you, and they will tear you apart before you ever manage to launch the parasites. (And, by the way, I'd be interested in seeing the design which is going to permit you to launch these scores or hundreds of small, hyper-capable starships without sail or wedge fratricide wiping them all out.) If you do manage to clear the gravity wave, drop your mothership's Warshawski sails, switch off her hyper generator, separate the parasites, and somehow move them away from the mothership without their destroying one another with their impeller wedges, the defenses are still going to have a perfect track on you at the instant you separate and they're going to be firing light-speed weapons at insanely short (for the Honorverse) ranges at vessels which have to be so small and so lightly armored that a point defense cluster would eviscerate them.

SWM wrote:

Uroboros wrote:Ahem, I hate to actually disagree with anything you said, but... Paser actually does exist. It operates on similar principles as a laser, but it's still in the experimental stages from what I've read thus far. Nor did I understand it very well, mostly just skimmed over it.

http://www.cern.ch/accelconf/e96/PAPERS ... EP129G.PDF‎

Wow, fascinating! This isn't what Skimper was talking about, but I will gladly retract my statement that there is no such thing as a paser. I haven't finished reading the paper yet, but it's a really interesting phenomenon. At the time of the paper, it had not been tested physically, but what I can understand of the model (just the bare outlines, really), it seems plausible.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Annachie wrote:I was thinking of a type of ship that might be needed.


With Mike about to (likely) capture Mesa, and with Houdini likely to not be complete, there's a chance that they might capture someone with partial knowledge of Houdini.

Enough to give the GA partial information on Darius or the twins at least.


Which means that te GA might want a heavily armoured, though not necessarily heavily armed, survey ship. Something that has a great chance of surviving a transit of a bridge that is hostile, but not fortified like the Manticoran junction.
That could then run away and return via hyperspace with data, or even lurk a while in stealth while Ghost Rider platforms have a good look, then return.

Highly specialised and not many oppertunities to use.

I think that's going to fail for the same reasons any ship designed for wormhole assault will. There's too long a vulnerable period where you can't raise wedge or sidewalls and are stuck on a completely predicable course, and too many critical components have to be exposed and unarmored - like your impeller nodes.

Even a couple of CAs have a decent chance of laming a ship with heavier than SD armor given a few seconds close-range free shot at it while it's wedge can't be raised. And with more than a couple nodes blown you'll never get a wedge up; and there goes your chance to run.


Plus given that you've no way to know whats at the end of a wormhole, couple be nothing, a few LACs, a BC squadron with pods, 10+ SDs, or even (for an unexplored wormhole) some ship-eating astrographical phenomenon your most likely outcome is a dead survey ship and no more data...

Lord Skimper wrote:What about putting a hyperdrive / sail on a junction fort bubble shields up and sending it through. It will destabilise the terminus for a while but it will also be able to blast a hand full of battle cruisers into paste. Even if the hammerheads are outside the bubbleshield they could just be add-ons for sail support and expendable. The bubble shield doesn't require a wedge, as the older forts couldn't move, thus they had no wedge.

Of course if it is a black hole that is a different story.

The E wrote:Pretty sure that there were mentions of the forts having wedges as well. Just because you can't use them to move worth a damn doesn't mean it's a good idea to forego the protection offered by them.

The E wrote:Pretty sure that there were mentions of the forts having wedges as well. Just because you can't use them to move worth a damn doesn't mean it's a good idea to forego the protection offered by them.

On Basilisk Station wrote:Nonetheless, heavy losses could be anticipated in the inner fortress ring under the best possible circumstances, so the "forts" in the outer rings had to be able to move to fill in the gaps and mass upon an attacker. Their maximum acceleration rates were low, well under a hundred gravities,