Technical questions re military hardware.

Hanuman- if you don't have the books electronically, you should consider grabbing what you can. You can use several different programs to search them. This would allow you to find some of your answers without the delay of waiting for us to answer. As wasted said, this is all in the books in fine detail. I honestly don't know how you could have read the book and missed it, but :shrug:

Wastedfly- don't be a dick. If you keep acting like one, Duckk might do something about it.

dreamrider wrote:Hanoman,
Ask anything you want.
Some of us will try to be friendly and considerate.

dreamrider

Thank you, dreamrider. I generally try to stay updated on everything, but there really is a load of technical stuff in the series that I do not always understand, or it is detailed in one of the books but only mentioned in others, so when I'm reading about something it is not always so easy to remember exactly WHERE it was explained in detail, or even if it was.

So, thank you for understanding.

Duckk, I'm sorry for being the cause of any unpleasantness. Please see my last post to dreamrider for WHY I started this thread. It really wasn't so that I can take advantage of anyone or anything like that...

No worries. I want this board to be a place where people can learn if they choose to make the effort. I have no problems with people asking for information.

Duckk wrote:No worries. I want this board to be a place where people can learn if they choose to make the effort. I have no problems with people asking for information.

Thank you.

Dafmeister wrote:

hanuman wrote:Here is my next question, re dispatch boats.

I've just finished rereading Mission of Honor. After the Yawata Strike Mr Weber writes that the dispatch boat sent to recall Honor from Haven made the journey from Trevor's Star in only six and a half days, while the boat informing Manticore of the attack on Grayson's shipyards made the run between Yeltsin's Star and Manticore in four days.

Now why would that be, when the distance between Trevor's Star and Haven is several times the distance between Manticore and Yeltsin's Star?

Most likely explanation is that there's one or more big, powerful grav waves between Trevor's Star and Haven to catch a lift on, while the waves between Manticore and Grayson aren't as convenient.

Unless the wave between Manticore and Grayson forces you to dive into lower bands I don't see how grav waves are going to make much difference. (And the numbers don't work for that; see below)

Yes a grav wave going your way will give you roughly a roughly 10x acceleration boost (not to mention fuel savings). But your dispatch boat's particle shielding tops out at the same 0.6c. So once you hit that you're cruising at constant velocity; and any accel advantage is useless.

With no grav wave assist a dispach boat that can pull 700g will hit top speed after only about 18 hours. Ok, you can do that in 1.8 hours with a grav wave, assuming the system you're departing is located in one; but the further you have to go to reach the grav wave the less time it'll save you.(And you don't save anything on the far end because the energy loss from dropping hyper bands decelerates you; the ship's accel is irrelevant for slowing down at the end of the hyper journey) But that's it; just a useful grav wave can't explain more than 16.2 hours saved; no mater how many lightyears the trip is.

(Again, unless the boats need to drop out of the highest bands and reenter them later; doing that kills most of their velocity so you cold get another roughly 16 hour saved each time you need to reenter the Theta band where there's a grav wave handy)

-----
Ok, I originally was writing this up with a parenthetical admission that I was too lazy to crunch the transit time numbers for the Manticore - Grayson run. But as I was about to hit submit I decided I really did want to see; so I rewrote the post with this addition.

The hard part was actually digging up the distance references. the best I found for Trevor's Star to Haven is actually an outer limit (since I don't know how far off the direct line Hera is) but I failed to quickly find a better one.

"Hera System was just over sixty light-years from Trevor's Star . . . and barely thirty light-years from the Haven System itself" [AAC]

Grayson is 30 light-years from Manticore [EoH]

So call the two trips 90 ly and 30 ly.
Just taking that raw distance, it should take a ship cruising at top speed in the Theta bands 10.9 and 3.6 days respectively. It's tight to reach Grayson in "under four days for a dispatch boat" once you factor in acceleration time; you really do need a handy grav wave to shave some hours off; plus a boat pre-positioned by the hyperlimit.

But the Trevor's Star to Haven run is way out - that time is more like a 53 light-year transit. Now, that's not impossible from the At All Costs quote; it simply requires that Hera be a fair bit off the direct line. However it does make one of the exchanges in House of Steel decidedly odd.

House of Steel: I Will Build My House of Steel wrote:the closest edge of Havenite-claimed space is still better than two hundred and fifty light-years from the Manticore Binary System. [snip] Oddly enough, however, neither Mr. Lebrun nor the rest of the Opposition leadership seemed to be aware that that meant the People’s Republic is now less than fifty-four light-years from Trevor’s Star.

But if the Haven System itself is basically that far away that doesn't seem very alarming. (We do know they've been gobbling up systems by this point; but getting the numbers to add up seems to require that they weren't, yet, gobbling in the direction Trevor's Star)

(The one possibility that might reconcile these apparent discrepancies is that 0.6c is just an average particle shielding limit for a warship in hyper. In areas of very low particle density you can go faster. If the Trevor's Star to Haven path is low density areas you could go farther in the allotted transit time)

Jonathan, it's worth rereading Storm from the Shadows, particularly the scene where Helen has to calculate the route.

Some grav waves limit you to the lower hyper bands - can't remember if RFC explained why.

There are also times when you need to travel more slowly to avoid the rogue waves, e.g The Selker Shear.

hanuman wrote:

Duckk wrote:You can get the older books here:

http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/

Thank you, Duckk. Doesn't Mr Weber lose a lot of money that way?

crewdude48 wrote:
Actually, I suspect that he makes a lot of money that way. The first taste is free, but if you want the new stuff, you gotta shell out the dough. It is the same principle as drug dealers use, and I have never seen one of them go out of business.

What an analogy!
Ditto dude. Love is a drug, and I love the series.

cthia wrote:

crewdude48 wrote:
Actually, I suspect that he makes a lot of money that way. The first taste is free, but if you want the new stuff, you gotta shell out the dough. It is the same principle as drug dealers use, and I have never seen one of them go out of business.

What an analogy!
Ditto dude. Love is a drug, and I love the series.

Gotta wonder about his life experiences