Flight times within the Star Kingdom

I've looked and looked and can NOT find this simple bit of information. I'm sure it's somewhere that I've missed or overlooked and I'm a bit ashamed to even be asking, but . . . what are the flight times within the three "original" stars of the Kingdom?
I mean Manticore A, Manticore B, and Basilisk.
Thus, the flight time from:
Manticore to Sphinx, Manticore to Gryphon, Sphinx to Gryphon, and all of the above to Basilisk.
I realize the time is VERY variable based on Gs pulled and all, but if you, kind responder/reader were to even point me to a mention of the flight times as mentioned in the canon, I'd be in your debt. Thank you.
Sak

Saknussem wrote:I've looked and looked and can NOT find this simple bit of information. I'm sure it's somewhere that I've missed or overlooked and I'm a bit ashamed to even be asking, but . . . what are the flight times within the three "original" stars of the Kingdom?
I mean Manticore A, Manticore B, and Basilisk.
Thus, the flight time from:
Manticore to Sphinx, Manticore to Gryphon, Sphinx to Gryphon, and all of the above to Basilisk.
I realize the time is VERY variable based on Gs pulled and all, but if you, kind responder/reader were to even point me to a mention of the flight times as mentioned in the canon, I'd be in your debt. Thank you.
Sak

IIRC, it was something like 19 hours for Home Fleet(in OBS) to reach Basilisk. However, we don't know exactly where Home Fleet was when they got the Zulu signal.

All of those planets mentioned move relative to each other. There would be times when the distance is very short, other times when it's enormous. Manticore and Sphinx, for instance, orbit the same star, much as Earth and Mars orbits Sol.

At their closest, Earth/Mars are only 56 million km apart. At their furthest, they're over 400 million km apart. The same applies to any planetary system, obviously with different distances.

Then you have the same issue happening with the Wormhole junction - it orbits Manticore-A as well. A little bit in At All Costs describes some of the geometry problems Home Fleet's CO has to live with.

munroburton wrote:

Saknussem wrote:I've looked and looked and can NOT find this simple bit of information. I'm sure it's somewhere that I've missed or overlooked and I'm a bit ashamed to even be asking, but . . . what are the flight times within the three "original" stars of the Kingdom?
I mean Manticore A, Manticore B, and Basilisk.
Thus, the flight time from:
Manticore to Sphinx, Manticore to Gryphon, Sphinx to Gryphon, and all of the above to Basilisk.
I realize the time is VERY variable based on Gs pulled and all, but if you, kind responder/reader were to even point me to a mention of the flight times as mentioned in the canon, I'd be in your debt. Thank you.
Sak

IIRC, it was something like 19 hours for Home Fleet(in OBS) to reach Basilisk. However, we don't know exactly where Home Fleet was when they got the Zulu signal.

All of those planets mentioned move relative to each other. There would be times when the distance is very short, other times when it's enormous. Manticore and Sphinx, for instance, orbit the same star, much as Earth and Mars orbits Sol.

At their closest, Earth/Mars are only 56 million km apart. At their furthest, they're over 400 million km apart. The same applies to any planetary system, obviously with different distances.

Then you have the same issue happening with the Wormhole junction - it orbits Manticore-A as well. A little bit in At All Costs describes some of the geometry problems Home Fleet's CO has to live with.

I've never heard that the Junction orbits Manticore-A. I remember reading that the Junction exists in a (fixed?) relationship with Manticore-A, which creates the cone shaped resonance zone extending from the Junction to the star (Manticore-A).

I also remember David posting about how around the (in-universe) time of the Stephanie Harrington novels (or the initial survey of the system--not sure which), that the binary system stars were near the point of greatest separation, with the result that the gravity problems in the system (notices to astrogators?) were also relatively quiescent. At the current time the stars are much closer together, with increasing gravitic ?turbulence? making hyper navigation more difficult. He said that when the stars have their closest approach in the future, Manticore-B will acquire its own resonance zone, and that the gravitic ?turbulence? will be at its height, with definite problems with hyper navigation, and possibly also normal space navigation.

But even when he posted all that, I never got the impression that the Junction orbited Manticore-A. In fact, now that I'm remembering (correctly I hope) some other posts (Pearls?) one reason why forts have to have impeller drives is that the Junction doesn't orbit Manticore-A and the forts drives are used for station keeping to keep them at the Junction (their natural inclination is to orbit the star).

Just to add another dimension A & B orbit each other.

There is a map of this somewhere.

Saknussem wrote:I've looked and looked and can NOT find this simple bit of information. I'm sure it's somewhere that I've missed or overlooked and I'm a bit ashamed to even be asking, but . . . what are the flight times within the three "original" stars of the Kingdom?
I mean Manticore A, Manticore B, and Basilisk.
Thus, the flight time from:
Manticore to Sphinx, Manticore to Gryphon, Sphinx to Gryphon, and all of the above to Basilisk.
I realize the time is VERY variable based on Gs pulled and all, but if you, kind responder/reader were to even point me to a mention of the flight times as mentioned in the canon, I'd be in your debt. Thank you.
Sak

The closest straight text-ev I can recall was back in Field of Dishonor where it covered a n-space trip from Manticore to Grypon

Field of Dishonor wrote:Unfortunately, they couldn't get to Gryphon from Hephaestus. The components of the Manticore Binary System were just past periastron, but the G0 and G2 companion stars were still almost eleven light-hours apart. Nike's pinnaces would have required two and a half Manticoran days to make the trip, which was twice their maximum life-support endurance with full troop loads.

But the transit time through hyper would be way shorter.

I'll take a shot at crunching some numbers in a bit.

Jonathan_S wrote:But the transit time through hyper would be way shorter.

I'll take a shot at crunching some numbers in a bit.

Ok, that was a surprisingly painful experience. I ended up having to break the transit from Manticore to Gryphon into 8 separate segments and in some cases guess and fit numbers in excel (since my math, and googling, skills broke down trying to figure the exact time it takes to cover a distance under acceleration when you have a non-zero starting velocity; having t and t^2 both in the mix - ug. Been too long since the relevant math classes)

(And then I had to redo it because I'd screwed up and used 0.03c as the safe velocity to enter hyper; not 0.3c; so I didn't need to decelerate to be below the safe speed to enter hyper)

In any case the segments were
1) Accelerate from Manticore towards the hyper limit
2) Decelerate, if necessary, so you're no more than 0.3c at the hyper limit
3) Enter the Alpha bands (and take the energy bleed-off penalty)
4) Accelerate to no more that 0.6c
5) Cruise the rest of the distance to Manticore-B, if any.
6) Drop to normal space (and take the energy bleed-off penalty)
7) Accelerate in-system towards Gryphon
8) Decelerate to a stop at Gryphon

I didn't do the extra work to see the transit time in the higher bands; too see which was optimal for such a short trip. I also didn't allow for any time to flip the ship, bring up the wedge, navigational uncertainty, or other miscellaneous overhead.

[Edit: and I did it as a straight line travel. If Manticore and/or Gryphon were't aligned correctly you'd either need to travel farther to the hyper limit or you've have built a velocity vector in the wrong direction and have to counteract it once across the relevant hyper limit]

All said (and assuming I didn't make a horrible error) it'd take a ship (at 500 g) 28.37 hours to make that same trip that would have been 2.5 [edit 2: days] for a pinnace through n-space.
[edit 3: yep; horrible error. I somehow completely failed to apply the Alpha space distance shrinkage. With that in and re-figured you never exceed 0.16 c and the whole trip takes about 8 hours]

Looking at the timestamps it seems to have taken me roughly an hour to figure all this.

0.3c isn't the maximum safe speed to enter hyper. It's the maximum speed, and it isn't very safe at all IIRC. For a commercial trip you would want to be going slower than that, though exactly how much slower is not very clearly stated. Not that this necessarily means you have to change anything in your calculations.

kzt wrote:0.3c isn't the maximum safe speed to enter hyper. It's the maximum speed, and it isn't very safe at all IIRC. For a commercial trip you would want to be going slower than that, though exactly how much slower is not very clearly stated. Not that this necessarily means you have to change anything in your calculations.

Ok "safe" wasn't the best phrase; it's the highest speed at which you don't disintegrate attempting to enter hyper.

But accelerating at 500g from Manticore to the closest point on the hyper limit you're "only" doing about .14c.

(Oh, and my calculations also skipped any and all relativistic effects; whew that's a lot of disclaimers )

Jonathan_S wrote:<<SNIP>>
All said (and assuming I didn't make a horrible error) it'd take a ship (at 500 g) 28.37 hours to make that same trip that would have been 2.5 weeks for a pinnace through n-space.


Looking at the timestamps it seems to have taken me roughly an hour to figure all this.

Minor quibble. The time for the pinnace trip should have been 2.5 days, not weeks.

KNick wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:<<SNIP>>
All said (and assuming I didn't make a horrible error) it'd take a ship (at 500 g) 28.37 hours to make that same trip that would have been 2.5 weeks for a pinnace through n-space.


Looking at the timestamps it seems to have taken me roughly an hour to figure all this.

Minor quibble. The time for the pinnace trip should have been 2.5 days, not weeks.

Well that's embarrasing; especially since I'd posted the relevant quote only a couple pages before.

Also, I realized that I screwed up a major component of my calculation. I forgot to shrink the distance between the two systems by 62x to account for being in the Alpha Bands

So that totally change things because the ship never got up to 0.6c cruising speed, and crossed the distance sooner, so it carried less velocity back into n-space, which changed the Gryphon rendezvous calculations...

What a screw-up.
As partial self-inflicted punishment I went ahead and used the corrected spreadsheet to further figure how long it'd take if you jumped up to the Delta bands for the same trip (paying way more in the way to velocity loss penalties climbing and descending; but getting a vastly higher distance shrinkage)

It would cut the time from 8 hours to 6.17 hours. (Most of which is n-space acceleration on each end)