Hamilcar Barca

This thread will probably end up being full of spoiling spoilers, so be warned.

So, the ship that took the colonists to Safehold in the first place was named the Hamilcar. I'm wondering if we can tease out some fun historic associations between the story of the ship and the story of the man.

Up until the latest snippet (last chance to not be spoiled, stop reading now) everyone had thought that Langhorne sent the Hamilcar into the sun as soon as Safehold's terraforming was complete and the colonists were offloaded. However, the Spanish portions of Kohdy's diary made it clear that the Hamilcar was still functional at least 6 years after Kau-yung's death.

Hamilcar Barca is less famous than his son. Of course, it's tough to beat Hannibal. I'm going to be glossing over a lot of Punic history, instead dropping various factoids that struck me as interesting echoes of stuff from the War of the Angels.

Hamilcar first came to prominence as commander of the Carthaginian forces in Sicily. He took command of a mutinying army, and punished the mutineers by murdering, drowning or exiling many of them. He then waged a war of attrition with invading Romans, which ended up a guerilla war.

After Hamilcar's army came home, Carthage faced a large rebellion sparked by their inability to give soldiers their back pay.

Hamilcar is the one who added Iberia (Spain) to the Carthaginian Empire. One huge advantage in the early conquest of Spain was securing the silver mines in Sierra Morena.

Hamilcar died in southern Spain, in a siege on a small town. The conquest of Iberia was incomplete, but it created a training ground for the standing Carthaginian army would provide a launching pad for Hannibal's famous invasion of Italy across the Alps.

Hamilcar the ship may or may not have dived into the sun. If it didn't, then perhaps it can be used as the base for building humanity's first warship in the new age, which will be the launching pad for the war against the Gbaba.

If they have industry on that ship, i wonder what it might have been building all these centuries, stockpiling for the angels return?

SYED wrote:If they have industry on that ship, i wonder what it might have been building all these centuries, stockpiling for the angels return?

That depends... If they chose to do a travel out 500 years at relativistic speeds and then return, so that their clock time away is less than 1000 years, then they might have been gone, subjectively for very little time at all. I googled a relativistic time calculator... It says that 0.9c gives you a 15% time compression. 0.995c gives you about 1000% time compression making the 1000 year trip feel like 100 years. 0.99995c gives you a 10 year trip...

I also, while I was in the calculating mindset, worked out the math on accel. 200g accels gets you to c in about 42 hours. I assume that their ships are much like the honorverse, and can probably sustain around 400g's without going full-military.


If they chose to go into a long period orbit like a comet that returns every 1000 years (this would be a lower energy solution, thus harder to detect by the Gbaba), then they have much more time to do something, but they have no opportunity to mine raw materials, and would presumably run out of consumables long before the 1000 years are up.

MTO wrote:That depends... If they chose to do a travel out 500 years at relativistic speeds and then return, so that their clock time away is less than 1000 years, then they might have been gone, subjectively for very little time at all. I googled a relativistic time calculator... It says that 0.9c gives you a 15% time compression. 0.995c gives you about 1000% time compression making the 1000 year trip feel like 100 years. 0.99995c gives you a 10 year trip...

I also, while I was in the calculating mindset, worked out the math on accel. 200g accels gets you to c in about 42 hours. I assume that their ships are much like the honorverse, and can probably sustain around 400g's without going full-military.

If they chose to go into a long period orbit like a comet that returns every 1000 years (this would be a lower energy solution, thus harder to detect by the Gbaba), then they have much more time to do something, but they have no opportunity to mine raw materials, and would presumably run out of consumables long before the 1000 years are up.

We actually have no textev on the speeds that the TF ships could attain. We know they couldn't catch the speedy Gbaban scouts, but when the TF wanted to travel from star to star, it used hyperspace.

So there's no evidence that the TF could achieve or needed relativistic speeds. The mass vs. energy curve going to infinity when you try to accelerate to near the speed of light (where you really get the benefits of time dilation) is just a bit daunting when it comes to fueling a ship! Since you can't orbit anything at those speeds, the Hamilcar would end up several hundred light years from Safehold before the 1000 years were up.

At that point, depending on the rules of hyperspace in the Safehold universe, which is not the Honorverse, the Hamilcar might have to slow down before entering hyperspace, and we have no clue what sorts of inertial compensators the TF ships had or didn't have, and what their capabilities were. If it could jump straight to hyper regardless of its velocity and it could change direction there with no great energy cost, it might emerge in the vicinity of Safehold still moving at .9c or more, and I'm dubious that slowing a ship from that speed is a stealthy process. (And IIRC, emerging from hyper at .9c in the Honorverse if it were possible would be a Very Bad Thing...)

I still think an elliptical orbit with the crew taking turns in cryo is the best bet for keeping the advances of age at bay, while remaining in the area of Safehold in case something comes up - such as a call for help from the CoGA using the Key of Schueler...

my idea was the angels sleeping under the temple, had the industrial nodes working while they slept, so they would be well provisioned for any eventuality after they awoke.

Time dilation can also occur in a blackhole gravity well before passing the event horizon without as much wear and tear on ship systems and fuel. Granted we know of no nearby blackholes but that doesn't preclude RFC from not sharing that info later.

Iirc the Dungeon Master gave us an info dump where he said TF ships of the day were limited to about .3c, and I want to say that in that one or another he said the Hamilcar had, in fact, been disposed of.

If the Hamilcar indeed went into the local sun, I wonder where the Hannibal is?

Undercover Fat Kid wrote:Iirc the Dungeon Master gave us an info dump where he said TF ships of the day were limited to about .3c, and I want to say that in that one or another he said the Hamilcar had, in fact, been disposed of.

I believe the first is correct. As for the Hamilcar, what he has said is that it is gone. He has not explained what happened to it; it could mean that it was destroyed as originally intended, or that it was sent elsewhere, or that it is in hiding. Neither Merlin nor OWL know what happened to it, either.

McGuiness wrote:We actually have no textev on the speeds that the TF ships could attain. We know they couldn't catch the speedy Gbaban scouts, but when the TF wanted to travel from star to star, it used hyperspace.

No argument! I was suggesting things that maybe could have happened...

So there's no evidence that the TF could achieve or needed relativistic speeds. The mass vs. energy curve going to infinity when you try to accelerate to near the speed of light (where you really get the benefits of time dilation) is just a bit daunting when it comes to fueling a ship! Since you can't orbit anything at those speeds, the Hamilcar would end up several hundred light years from Safehold before the 1000 years were up.

yes. My suggestion was go 500 years at something very close to c, then turn around and come back. That would mean they would go something close to 500 light years away before they turn around.
I am never really sure about the actual energy needs. RFC's imagined method for accelerating ships in the honorverse is probably something that violates the laws of thermodynamics... Anyhow, its moot. As was said, top speed is apparently 0.3c, not nearly fast enough to be useful.

I still think an elliptical orbit with the crew taking turns in cryo is the best bet for keeping the advances of age at bay, while remaining in the area of Safehold in case something comes up - such as a call for help from the CoGA using the Key of Schueler...

Given the .3c limit, there's not many alternatives. Its really just a question of which orbit you choose.