kzt wrote:No, there is a hyper wall. it's the barrier between a hyper band and the one lower and higher. It is refered to by the name of the next higher band, so the alpha wall is the transition between real space and the alpha band. You can see this deep inside HotQ, when White Haven and what's her name are discussin their record setting trip back from Grayson. Oh, here is is.
"That wasn't a trap, Commander. On the other hand, I know perfectly well you didn't cut thirty hours off the old passage record without playing games with your hyper generator."
Alice Truman looked at him for several silent seconds. Lord Alexander—no, he was the Earl of White Haven, since his father's death—was known for a certain willingness to ignore The Book when it got in his way, and there was an almost conspiratorial gleam under the worry in his eyes.
"Well, yes, My Lord," she admitted.
"How high did you take her, Commander?"
"Too high. We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin."
Despite himself, Alexander flinched. Dear God, she must have taken out all the interlocks. No ship had ever crossed into the iota bands and survived—no one even knew if a ship could survive there.
You are right. Mostly, the hyper wall is almost always referred to by the name of the next higher band. Here is one of the few (only?) example(s) of the actual term "hyper wall" being used (by the author, not a character):
The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 5 wrote:The translation from n-space to hyper was speed critical—at anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apart—but the reverse wasn’t true. Which didn’t make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn’t a factor as far as hardware was concerned, but the effect on humans was something else again. Naval crews were trained for crash translations, yet there was a limit to what training could do to offset the physical distress and violent nausea, and there was no point in putting anyone—especially her merchant crews—through that.
“Ready to begin translation in forty-one seconds, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander DuMorne reported from Astrogation.
“Very well, Mr. DuMorne. The con is yours.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am. I have the con. Helm, prepare for initial translation on my mark.”
“Ready for translation, aye,” Chief Killian replied, and the helmsman’s hand hovered over the manual override, just in case the astrogator’s computers dropped the ball, while Honor leaned back to watch.
“Mark!” DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless’s hyper generator became a basso growl.
Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.
I believe that the convoy was in the delta bands when it began translating down, but I can't be sure. The convoy is mentioned as being in the delta bands 10 days at the end of chapter 4, with no other mention of which hyperspace band it is in between then and when they translated down to normal space.
