Quotes reordered due to embedding limit.
wastedfly wrote:A missile using same Capacitor tech, whom has not only a higher power output(acceleration), but also longer power endurance requirements is supposed to be LESS massive?
That is so bad I can't even laugh in derision.
Grashtel wrote:A wedge gets virtually 100% of its power from the siphon effect, not the capacitors or reactor hooked up to the nodes (work out the relativistic kinetic energy of an MDM at burnout, then work out what percentage of its mass would have to be reactor fuel even with a perfect fusion reactor). A higher acceleration and lower capacitor mass is very easily explained by a better use of it.
wastedfly wrote:Per pearl, ~60%. Not 100%. Warshawki sails on the other hand get 100% of their power. Probably what you were thinking of.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/144/1
" When the wall is bent, energy is siphoned across it from the "higher" hyper band on its other side. Hyper-space is an area of inherently higher energy levels, and the siphon effect could be considered a sort of strictly limited, primitive ancestor of the "core tap" in the Mutineers' Moon Universe. The initial power for the wedge has to come from internal sources -- current generation and stored power. Once the initial energy investment is made, something like 60% of the energy necessary to maintain and power the wedge is drawn through the "siphon" effect. "He then goes on that the MAJOR power drain is the compensator field(acceleration of mass negation). So, total power required is initial wedge initiation, compensator power instantaneous built into the nodes themselves multiplied by the duration.
Old 12 ton CM's were roughly 100,000g x 60s. New 130kg x 75s.
Compensator field strength went up by roughly 33%.
Duration increased by 25%.
Add it up = roughly 60% more power.
If one wished to push forward missile node advancements to the point where effectively old CM's and new are same tonnage due to amazing breakthroughs, ok. But smaller? Last we knew, per HotQ and SVW, the new compensator from Grayson was slightly less efficient powerwise but allowed greater overall acceleration. Assuming that this tech transferred to missiles at all.
Anyways.
Actually The Honor of the Queen and The Short Victorious War say that the original Grayson compensator was
more efficient, not less, from a power standpoint. It was more bulky and massive, due to the components they were limited to, prior to joining the Manticoran Alliance.
Although your point about whether any of this inertial compensator technology transferred to missiles (which use a much more limited
inertial compensator effect that is a consequence of the missile's
impeller node design) is definitely relevant (and a question that we don't have an answer for, either as text evidence, or a post by David in the Pearls or on this forum, unless it is in A Call to Duty
which I haven't yet read).
Here's the relevant quotes:
The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 14 wrote:Grayson fusion plants were four times as massive as modern reactors of similar output (which was why they still used so many fission plants), and their military hardware was equally out of date—they still used printed circuits, with enormous mass penalties and catastrophic consequences for designed lifetimes—though there were a few unexpected surprises in their mixed technological bag. For example, the Grayson Navy had quite literally invented its own inertial compensator thirty T-years ago because it hadn’t been able to get anyone else to explain how it was done. It was a clumsy, bulky thing, thanks to the components they had to use, but from what he’d seen of its stats, it might just be marginally more efficient than Manticore’s.
The Short Victorious War, Chapter 4 wrote:Constanza adjusted her power settings slowly, eyes intent on her panel while Honor watched her own readouts with equal intensity. Her mind always tended to drift to the inertial compensator at moments like this. If it failed, Nike's crew would turn instantly into something gruesomely reminiscent of anchovy paste, and Honor's ship had been chosen to test BuShips's newest generation compensator. It was an adaptation of the Grayson Navy's, which hadn't been calculated to inspire confidence in all hands, given that Grayson's general technology lagged a good century behind Manticore's, but Honor had seen the Graysons' system in action. It had been crudely built and mass-intensive, yet it had also been undeniably efficient, and BuShips claimed not only to have exterminated every possible bug but to have tweaked the specs even further, as well. Besides, the Navy hadn't had a compensator failure in over three T-centuries.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.