What if: unmanned droneships against "Apollo"-carrying navy?

Jonathan_S wrote:But that's not an inherent problem with a high acceleration ship, it's just easier for them to get to stupidly high base velocities. You could do the same thing if you dropped your SD out of hyper far enough out to get long run-up to blow through the system at a significant fraction of c. (Except it would be worse because the extra time it would take to achieve that base velocity would give the enemy even more time to sneak forces within engagement range of your projected flight track)

Or just build up your velocity before you go into hyper. I can't remember exactly, but do you keep the same normal space velocity you had before entering hyper when you leave hyper? If so then you can get your velocity before hand, the problem then becomes how accurately you can enter and leave hyper as a fleet.

Zakharra wrote: Or just build up your velocity before you go into hyper. I can't remember exactly, but do you keep the same normal space velocity you had before entering hyper when you leave hyper? If so then you can get your velocity before hand, the problem then becomes how accurately you can enter and leave hyper as a fleet.

Nope.

Two big issues: First, if you are moving faster than .3C your ship is destroyed if you attempt to cross the alpha wall from normal space. Second, you lose 92% of your velocity every time you cross a wall in either direction.

kzt wrote:

Zakharra wrote: Or just build up your velocity before you go into hyper. I can't remember exactly, but do you keep the same normal space velocity you had before entering hyper when you leave hyper? If so then you can get your velocity before hand, the problem then becomes how accurately you can enter and leave hyper as a fleet.

Nope.

Two big issues: First, if you are moving faster than .3C your ship is destroyed if you attempt to cross the alpha wall from normal space. Second, you lose 92% of your velocity every time you cross a wall in either direction.

Yep. That said, that was exactly what they used to do before the invention of the impeller drive. They would accelerate as much as possible in normal space before jumping, to carry as much velocity across as possible. Apparently they considered it more fuel efficient or something.

SWM wrote:Yep. That said, that was exactly what they used to do before the invention of the impeller drive. They would accelerate as much as possible in normal space before jumping, to carry as much velocity across as possible. Apparently they considered it more fuel efficient or something.

It was implied that it had to do with the ramscoop fields working in normal space but not hyperspace.

kzt wrote:Nope.

Two big issues: First, if you are moving faster than .3C your ship is destroyed if you attempt to cross the alpha wall from normal space. Second, you lose 92% of your velocity every time you cross a wall in either direction.

Point of clarification - you lose 92% of your velocity every time you cross the Alpha wall in either direction.

(Every hyper wall has an associated velocity drop but the others are less than 92%; for example crossing from Alpha to Beta, or vis a versa, is only an 85% velocity drop)

kzt wrote:

SWM wrote:Yep. That said, that was exactly what they used to do before the invention of the impeller drive. They would accelerate as much as possible in normal space before jumping, to carry as much velocity across as possible. Apparently they considered it more fuel efficient or something.

It was implied that it had to do with the ramscoop fields working in normal space but not hyperspace.

That's right. I thought it was something like that but couldn't remember exactly. They built up as much speed as possible before jumping into hyper with full fuel tanks.

I could see the solarians going with drones to reduce manpower losses but I suspect they would approach it from a different perspective.

rather than building a "drone warship" that can accelerate at 10,000g build said drones that can accelerate as a manned craft several categories lighter. IE getting a SD that maneuvers as if its a destroyer, because it can accept an ~100g internal acceleration (after compensation) because its all automation. no humans to worry about being turned into jam.

next until they come up with their own version of keyhole or similar they use said drones as "sacrificial" launchers/point defense. IE they have their crewed ships stay well "behind" the drones and give the drones directions IE fire at ... maneuver like so etc. this gives them in many ways the best of both worlds, if they do have or get so they can build something like the 1st generation "one shot" missile mass drivers I could see these things also having quite large limited salvos followed up by more smaller salvos IE you build box launchers into /onto your hulls packed around your more normal state of the art multi load launchers with a lot of the life support, and crew supplies replaced with automation, and or munitions.

Guardiandashi wrote:I could see the solarians going with drones to reduce manpower losses but I suspect they would approach it from a different perspective.

rather than building a "drone warship" that can accelerate at 10,000g build said drones that can accelerate as a manned craft several categories lighter. IE getting a SD that maneuvers as if its a destroyer, because it can accept an ~100g internal acceleration (after compensation) because its all automation. no humans to worry about being turned into jam.

RFC has said that compensators don't work that way. If you exceed what they can do they just fail. So if the compensator for a ship of a given volume/mass can handle 500g then accelerating to 502g doesn't expose the ship to 2g; the compensator fails and the ship is subject to 502g.

You can use grav plates instead of a compensator; they do work with a scaling method.

I suspect though that there is a (not well defined) upper bound of how high an accel they can reduce. (Can't tell if the emergency accel of a spider ship at 310g actual is limited by the experienced 9g on the crews; or if that's where the grav plates would fail)

But if you took the MAlign super powered grav plates they use on their spider ships, those might (in theory; but like I said probably not in practice) turn a 2130g accel into an experienced 100g. Mission of Honor states that the first 150g experiences only 1g, then above that an additional 0.05g experienced per g of real accel. And 2100+g would have almost 3 times the accel of a current Mantie dispatch boat!! (Too bad that's unlikely to work - even if the league had access to those MAlign improved grav plates)

With the more normal grav plates, like Honor used at Cerberus, I don't have enough data points to be sure how they scale or any hint on their max ceiling. For Honor they turned 150g into 5g experienced (reduced it by 30x). If that's a universal ratio then they actually scale better than the Mesan ones at high accel. (Scaling factor of 0.033 vs 0.05; the Mesan ones just have a constant that makes them better at lower accels)

The E wrote:

Dilandu wrote:Well, the missiles are capable to go at thousands of "g". So, it's theoretically possible.

It's possible for missiles. Which have nowhere near as many moving parts as a starship has, which weigh only a few hundred tons each, and which generally do not have to maneuver all that much. I am quite sure that scaling issues prevent large ships with enormous accelerations.

You already mentioned the freighter from With One Stone; it sustained over 2000g for about 30 seconds or so, and Dominick estimated that the nodes (he didn't even consider the hull) would last a minute or two at that accel. Given that was a laden, structurally-unmodified civilian freighter, that's pretty conclusive evidence that structural integrity is simply not a problem.
The node burnout likelihood is far more of an issue, but 2min is only an order of magnitude or so from a useful max-accel period and it's still a freighter drive designed for a fraction of the accel of even existing warships. Designing impeller nodes for higher max power should be feasible - current ones have replacement times measurable in years and take a relatively small proportion of a large ship's mass; both of those could be traded-off significantly without a critical impact on the ship's utility.

More evidence that structural strength isn't much of a problem would be those LACs from HotQ - "No LAC crew could survive the sort of acceleration ships routinely pulled in hyper for the simple reason that their inertial compensator would pack up the instant they tried it." can't be referring to accel under impellers (because the LACs ought to be quicker than a BC in that case); the LACs must be being towed in a grav wave for at least part of the journey, complete with the multi-thousand-g accelerations involved.

There is a lot of absurd, crazy stuff in various places in the Honorverse. To run a ship at 2000g when it should instead be at 1g means you have made it 2000 times stronger then it needs to be. So the spine structural member you need to be a meter on a side for strength instead needs to almost 45 meters on a side. Each deck on the ship that would normally be 10cm thick to support the 30,000 ton fusion reactor is instead 200 meters thick to support the 60 million ton fusion reactor. This all tends to make the ship kind of useless....