Hyper bands and sub-bands

I always thought of the bands like RPMs and gears. Get to a certain RPM range(Velocity Multiplier) and you could go no faster till you went to the next gear(Hyper band).

So some ships can only get to a certain Velocity Multiplier in a band (low to mid) while other can get to the higher part of a band or change gears to the next band.

Jonathan_S wrote:It makes sense that the various subbsnd to have very nearly the same "inflation factor", but based off what Alice Truman pulled in HotQ racing back from Grayson I assume they aren't identical. If they were she wouldn't have "bounced off the Iota wall".

I assume after taking out the safety interlocks she took to very fastest sub band in the Theta bands (however minor a benefit that was)


Also on a slightly different track, there's an info dump that says that DDs are useful for scouting adjacent sub bands while escorting a convoy.

I always interpreted bouncing off the iota wall as meaning that she tried (briefly) to enter the iota band, foolishly.

Dca wrote:I didn't want to treat "sub-bands" as an artistic flourish, but that seems about as plausible as anything my imagination fills in. Doesn't seem like his style, though.

If so much is invested in system wide gravitic arrays in n-space, why aren't there any sitting in the lower hyper bands? Ripple propagation / detection is "somewhat lower" in hyper, but I'd still think it would be worth doing. Not only to make it harder to sneak into a system coming down from higher bands, but to tell when someone is sneaking away, coming up from n-space.

The turbulence in hyperspace means that the maximum range of gravitic detection of even something as powerful as a grav wave is 20 light-minutes. There's no point in using a full array in hyperspace--it won't get you anything more than a single detector on a ship. And the range (at least in the lower bands) is not nearly as long as that in normal space. The arrays in Manticore can reach light-months out. A detector in the eta band (the highest band warships normally go) would detect something large (and not stealthy) at maybe 20 light-minutes, which is equivalent to 85,880 light-minutes in normal space, or just under two light-months. If someone approached in the Alpha band, a detector would only catch them the normal-space equivalent of 20 light-hours out. The Manticore array has a longer range than you can get in hyperspace.

SWM wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:It makes sense that the various subbsnd to have very nearly the same "inflation factor", but based off what Alice Truman pulled in HotQ racing back from Grayson I assume they aren't identical. If they were she wouldn't have "bounced off the Iota wall".

I assume after taking out the safety interlocks she took to very fastest sub band in the Theta bands (however minor a benefit that was)


Also on a slightly different track, there's an info dump that says that DDs are useful for scouting adjacent sub bands while escorting a convoy.

I always interpreted bouncing off the iota wall as meaning that she tried (briefly) to enter the iota band, foolishly.

I don't think that's the case, since it's 'known' that no ship can survive translating into the iota bands (hence the surprise of the streak drive). We know that Truman ordered her engineer to pull all the safety interlocks on Apollo's hyper generator; I think the system ran away on them and they were just barely able to stop it carrying them through the iota wall.

Dafmeister wrote:

SWM wrote:I always interpreted bouncing off the iota wall as meaning that she tried (briefly) to enter the iota band, foolishly.

I don't think that's the case, since it's 'known' that no ship can survive translating into the iota bands (hence the surprise of the streak drive). We know that Truman ordered her engineer to pull all the safety interlocks on Apollo's hyper generator; I think the system ran away on them and they were just barely able to stop it carrying them through the iota wall.

I didn't mean to imply that Alice deliberately tried to enter the iota band. I just meant that the ship almost did go through that barrier, but didn't make it.

KNick wrote:There is the problem of getting that information to someone in time for it to do some good. There is no way for direct information transfer across a hyper wall. It requires a physical messenger. With a minimum of a six minute time lag for a hyper-generator to come up from stand-by, any information you could send would be irrelevant because the incoming ship would already be in normal space with it's own signature and out-bound would be long gone.

Keeping a hyper generator online is the normal case for long-distance travel, I'd expect something similar here if it's really all that important. Besides, time isn't so much of the essence here. Time is of the essence for higher-speed translations, but there's no need for a super-detector array to tell you about those. The point of these detectors is to detect someone trying to sneak in quietly, and therefore slowly.

SWM wrote:The turbulence in hyperspace means that the maximum range of gravitic detection of even something as powerful as a grav wave is 20 light-minutes....

Yeah, that sounds about right from the Wayfarer's fight in HAE. But I read http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/157/1 "Grav pulse coms do work in hyper, but the range is reduced somewhat." They don't really say what that "somewhat" might be, but I'd have thought more than 20 light-minutes. And http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/153/1 "A hyper footprint, on the other hand, is detectable at far greater distances than any impeller wedge simply because the "ripple" a starship produces as it actually enters or leaves hyper is much more of a roaring cataract."

So I'm not sure exactly where things stand at this point.

Dca wrote:So I'm not sure exactly where things stand at this point.

And I think that is how David likes it.

Browne wrote:I always thought of the bands like RPMs and gears. Get to a certain RPM range(Velocity Multiplier) and you could go no faster till you went to the next gear(Hyper band).

So some ships can only get to a certain Velocity Multiplier in a band (low to mid) while other can get to the higher part of a band or change gears to the next band.

But that's not how DW has described "velocity multipliers" at all. He has given us tables that show one such multiplier for each Greek-letter-named group of bands, rather than giving us ranges of those multipliers. So that suggests that all of the Alpha sub-bands have either exactly identical "multipliers", or that the range within the Alphas is so narrow as to be unworthy of showing it as more than a single value. (Repeat the previous sentence for Beta, Gamma, etc.)

It all depends on the model for why different bands have different "multipliers" in the first place. The basic model I've internalized is that the inflation that characterized the Big Bang for some reason was strongest in n-space, substantially weaker on the other side of the Alpha Wall, and successively a bit weaker as each additional wall is crossed. For some reason, rather than each sub-band being slightly less inflated than the one before, there are discrete quantum levels that each must be taken in a jump as a wall is crossed.

It's also not certain that these "multipliers" must be invariant throughout our galaxy, much less the entire universe. The numbers DW has given us may just be the average known for explored space, and an additional complication for hyper navigation.

Dca wrote:"Grav pulse coms do work in hyper, but the range is reduced somewhat." They don't really say what that "somewhat" might be, but I'd have thought more than 20 light-minutes.
...
So I'm not sure exactly where things stand at this point.

Not only is their range reduced, but their effect would be as well, because the difference between Alpha and n-space is a factor of 62x, but moving from Alpha to Beta provides far less of a speed improvement.

TheMonster wrote:But that's not how DW has described "velocity multipliers" at all. He has given us tables that show one such multiplier for each Greek-letter-named group of bands, rather than giving us ranges of those multipliers. So that suggests that all of the Alpha sub-bands have either exactly identical "multipliers", or that the range within the Alphas is so narrow as to be unworthy of showing it as more than a single value. (Repeat the previous sentence for Beta, Gamma, etc.)

You're probably right. But I'd point out that the table might be an oversimplified average. After all the other table we got, Acceleration by Ship Mass, is... It implies that all BCs from 500,000-1,499,999 tons could accelerate at 500 g, but add one more ton and you're in the BB bracket and accel drops to 470 g.

Over simplified. Instead the accel in each row applies only to the smallest tonnage listed and there's a fairly linear drop off in accel as you increase tonnage towards the next row in the table.


Again, we've no way to know if some similar simplification was used in the hyper band speed table, just that it might not be impossible that it was.