Technical questions re military hardware.

Jonathan_S wrote: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)

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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)

WLBjork wrote: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.

wastedfly wrote:

Amaroq wrote:According to House of Steel an Invictus-class SD(P) can hold 1074 missile pods before needing to reload. I don't know if those are flatpack pods though. I assume they are.

That number is before flatpack pods.

Numbers given in HoS are for initial production of the class.

For instance Medusa value is given as 492. That is its initial value. Due to all the changes in pod design, actual pods carried in 1922 are upwards of 700. An Invictus would tabulate around 1400-1500 pods. This would also increase BCP to around 500 pods.

Amaroq wrote:I guess my question of how exactly the "off-bore" targeting works could have gone in here as well? Lol.

kzt wrote:Makes no sense. You can use RCS to get the missile aimed at the right vector prior to wedge ignition.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Reestablishing the control links after the missiles flew by should actually be easier than the constant need to restablish them that a DD that's pulling the "spinning like a dervish" maneuver to pump out alternate broadsides down the same bearing. That's going to cut line of sight to your outbound missiles many times a minute as you spin.