Quotes reordered to avoid embedding limit.
Lord Skimper wrote:Limpet LAC no compensator.
dreamrider wrote:
Why would you say that? It has the highest acceleration in the HV. Of course it has a compensator.
dreamrider
MaxxQ wrote:I'm not sure - and I'm not going to check out the rest of his post to see the rest of the context - but I *think* he means that limpeted LACs fall outside the carrier ship's compensator field.
Maybe, maybe not. We have textev of a pinnace (which, granted, is a helluva lot smaller than a LAC) being carried on the hull of a ship, and of course, all those pods. However, pinnaces and pods *may* be the limit of what can be limpeted.
Jonathan_S wrote:In Cauldron of Ghosts the (small) freighter Hali Sowle was able to carry two Nat Turner-class frigates tractored to her hull.
Those are bigger than LACs and there was no indication that she had to hold her acceleration down; leading me to assume that they were inside her compensation field.
(And for what it's worth I don't recall any specific text-ev that a freighter's compensation field stops immediately beyond her hull)
Here is the text that is being referred to:
Cauldron of Ghosts, Chapter 11 wrote:But now, unfortunately, a hitch had developed. The Hali Sowle, it turned out, did not have an internal topology that leant itself to carrying the frigates inside its hull. Furthermore, being a merchant ship—and an old one, at that—it did not have the capability to operate the long-range drone sensor platforms that were critical to its mission. The compromise that had been decided upon was that the Hali Sowle would carry a support and communications module in its cargo hold that did have that capability. Both of the frigates would be tractored to the hull of the Hali Sowle, riding the racks which had been built to transport external cargo canisters back when the freighter’s designers had thought they were building an honest merchantman.
Italics are the author's, boldface & underlined text is my emphasis.
What we have is something of a contradiction, in that the Masadan LACs moved to Yeltsin's Star in The Honor of the Queen had to be towed astern of a destroyer (1 LAC) and a Sultan class battle cruiser (2 LACs), experiencing the full uncompensated acceleration that was being applied. One of the LACs had a tank come loose from its internal mounting points which caused serious damage to the LAC, essentially mission-killing it even before it could be put into action.
I would guess that DD
Principality and BC
Thunder of God didn't have any way to safely tractor a Masadan LAC tight in against the hull of the DD or BC.
However in Cauldron of Ghosts, we have two
Nat Turner class frigates being tractored to the hull (
using the racks designed to transport external cargo containers) of the
Hali Sowle, (a smallish tramp freighter described in Torch of Freedom as: "massing slightly over a million tons").
I think the underlined text is key to two points:
1) If you don't have a purpose built external hull rack, you are limited to the relative size of what can be safely tractored against the hull of the ship that is the carrier. Textev that might support this interpretation, from the smallest to the largest:
a) In Shadow of Saganami, a Nuncio LAC tractored both a RMN pinnance
with personnel onboard and a sensor drone against its hull. No mention of purpose built external racks.
b) In Echoes of Honor, PRH BBs tractor 11 missile pods tight in against their hulls. PRH BCs tractor 2 missile pods inside their wedges, but the text doesn't explicitly state the pods were against their hulls as it does for the BBs, just that the pods were tractored inside their wedges where they would have no effect on their acceleration curves. No mention of purpose built external racks.
2) The inertial compensator field of the carrying ship extends beyond just the external hull. Textev that seems to support this:
a) The crew of the RMN pinnance in Shadow of Saganami did not experience any felt acceleration (other than the pinnance's internal gravity) while being tractored against the Nuncio LAC. No mention is given of the pinnance's compensator until it maneuvers (on the main reaction thrusters) free from the LAC.
b) The two
Nat Turner class frigates in Cauldron of Ghosts were tractored by the
Hali Sowle and "settled them into their jury-rigged nests on her flank." Admittedly the Honorverse standards of jury-rigging might exceed present day design and build standards, but why bother describing the nests as jury-rigged?
c) It is at least implied the same two
Nat Turner class frigates in Cauldron of Ghosts were manned when the
Hali Sowle brought up its wedge and accelerated to 175 gravities. (No mention of the frigate crews being transferred to the
Hali Sowle after the frigates locked a personnel tube to the freighter, just that the pressure checks were satisfactorily completed and then the frigate captains gave the go ahead to the
Hali Sowle.
d) Go back to the underlined text from Cauldron of Ghosts above: "the racks which had been built to transport external cargo canisters back when the freighter’s designers had thought they were building an honest merchantman." Some points here:
i) The ship designers thought they were building an honest merchantman. That meant they designed the ship to civilian, not military standards of strength.
ii) The racks that were built to transport external cargo canisters were designed and built to the same civilian standards.
iii) Even if the racks and the external cargo canisters were capable of dealing with a compensator field that doesn't extend past the hull at all, or only a very short distance so that only part of the rack and its external cargo canister is enclosed in the field, leaving the rest of the rack and canister to experience 175 gravities of acceleration (in normal space, in hyper space in a gravity wave under Warshawski sail the acceleration would be approximately 1,685 gravities) I simply cannot believe, even in the Honorverse, that
civilian cargo (goods) could stand up to that amount of force applied to it, let alone part of that cargo experience no acceleration and another part of that same piece of cargo be experiencing over a hundred or thousand gravities of felt acceleration forces.
iv) Finally, David Weber has spoken on this subject (in an infodump, not in text):
Pearls of Weber LACs as Parasites wrote:From an email posted to Baen's Bar Honorverse dated September 5, 2004:
LACs as parasites [
T]he notion of LAC parasites. They're being called "battleriders" this time around, and the suggestion is that they could be transported on the exteriors of non carriers as a way to give, say, a cruiser a teeny LAC squadron of its own and also as a way to transport them to areas where they are needed without tying up carriers. There's also been a suggestion that it might be possible to build a modular LAC bay which could be loaded in and out of a standard freighter hold (and JMT freighters, in particular) to turn any freighter into a temporary CVE. Also, if the modular concept is feasible, could the modules then be operated independently or "strapped onto" another structure at their destination in order to create an instant "Henderson Field." There's no inherent reason why LACs couldn't "ride" the exterior of a larger vessel's hull. Well, no reason a
Manticoran LAC couldn't. A Havenite LAC doesn't have the onboard endurance to make it practical to [be] transported for any great distance with its crew on board, so there'd have to be additional personnel space sufficient to carry the LACs' crews, as well. There'd also be the fact that in the absence of a physical interlock system similar to that used in the CLAC fighter bays, you'd be up the creek in a hurry if the mooring tractors failed under acceleration. Whereas the loss of a missile pod tractored to the outside of a hull would be inconvenient, the loss of a LAC -- and its entire crew -- would probably be considered just a
tad more serious.
The numbers of LACs you could transport this way would not be large, unless you were using a very large ship, like a superdreadnought. I certainly wouldn't think that you could transport worthwhile numbers on anything much smaller than an old-style Havenite battleship. And carrying them that way would lead to all sorts of problems in the form of interference with sensors, communications links, weapons bays, etc. You'd have to have provision for launching the LACs in a hurry if you had to clear for action, and that
could be a problem, since you'd pretty much have to strike your own wedge long enough for the LACs to get clear and bring
their wedges up. In an "ambush" scenario, that could be inconvenient, to say the least.
Having said all of that, however, this might be a way to transport a small number of LACs -- replacements, let's say, for a LAC group which has taken combat losses -- to a forward base, or a way of recovering LACs after the [de]struction of or damage to their CLAC. Or, for that matter, if the LACs in question have to be gotten away into hyper faster than they can be reunited with their carriers. I don't see it as any sort of routine application, but
I don't see anything inherently impossible about it, since LACs are small enough to fit inside the compensator field of the ships to which they would be tractored.
There's nothing inherently impossible about the concept of modular fighter bays, and I've actually thought about it off and on. The system may eventually make an appearance in the series, but I'm still mulling over the question of whether or not I
want it to.
Italics and boldface is from the original Pearl. Underlined text is my emphasis.
And we have now seen the technique used in action in multiple books in the Honorverse, both with military and civilian Honorverse ships used as the carriers.
I think the question of "Does the inertial compensator field of an Honorverse spaceship extend beyond its hull?" can safely be answered: "Yes, it does."
