Just a few Bits on the Battle of Spindle-Or other battles

Hutch wrote:Well, a couple more items got my brain (such as it is and what there is of it) thinking, so I'll add them here...

And while all that was being arranged, her destroyers—all five of them—had accelerated off in pursuit of the nine hulked SDs. Five old-style destroyers could easily have found the boarding parties for search-and-rescue operations aboard nine superdreadnoughts. Whether or not her five Rolands were up to the task was another question.

I've never quite figured that out. Five of her most manpower-weak ships going to search SDs?

Somtaaw wrote:I would guess that the limitation to less-than-full evacuation potential was due to battle damage. The life pods have to be somewhere other than the boat bays, probably along the top and bottom of the ship. And sidewalls may have bent one or two of the missile laserheads just enough to graze the ship.

And odds are also good a shuttle bay would also have been hit on one (or more) of the SDs. SD's are supposed to have 'enhanced' docking capabilities compared to non-waller, as a WAG I'd say that means their boat bays are larger, proportionally speaking. Larger bays means larger hit box, and a bomb pumped laser hitting a boat bay is going to make a big bang, with all that hydrogen fuel, and the possibility of boat armaments being near at hand.


Just my thoughts on the subject.

Hutch wrote:Well, a couple more items got my brain (such as it is and what there is of it) thinking, so I'll add them here...

Mission of Honor, Chapter 23 wrote:And while all that was being arranged, her destroyers—all five of them—had accelerated off in pursuit of the nine hulked SDs. Five old-style destroyers could easily have found the boarding parties for search-and-rescue operations aboard nine superdreadnoughts. Whether or not her five Rolands were up to the task was another question.

Hutch wrote:I've never quite figured that out. Five of her most manpower-weak ships going to search SDs? Alone? What if they found 300-400 survivors on one of the hulks? Or some 'fight-to-the last' Sollie crew on a SD Graser targeted 1-2 of the Rolands?

I would have sent Scotty's Sag-C's with them; his advantage in acceleration combined with the fact that Crandall had made turnover and was decelerating means he could have caught up, and his 150 Marines per ship could have been a major help (and given the rescuers parity in the number of ships deployed). Therekov and Oversteegen, along with the LAC's, had more than enough firepower to overcome any action by the Sollies.

Bill Woods wrote:You're right — they should have sent one or more of the CLACs along, to dump the recovered Sollies on. Also, they're decelerating the hulk at a dangerously high rate — and needlessly so.

Mission of Honor, Chapter 24 wrote:The ship—or, rather, the battered hulk which had once been a ship—was under an apparent gravity of about 1.2 g. The wreckage had been rotated perpendicular to its line of flight, putting the decks and deckheads back where they ought to be, and Tristram was playing tugboat to slow what was left of the Babbage down. In many ways, Abigail would have preferred to remain in microgravity. It would have made getting about faster and simpler, not to mention avoiding the stress the deceleration was putting on damaged structural members. And she was well aware that the deceleration might actually be life-threatening for survivors under some circumstances. Unfortunately, the wreck's velocity of almost eighteen thousand kilometers per second had already carried it past Flax. It was now hurtling across the inner system at roughly six percent of light-speed, bound for a fatal encounter with the gas giant Everest in just under twenty hours. It was extraordinarily unlikely, given Tenth Fleet's limited manpower, that the SAR parties would be able to completely search ships as mangled and torn as Babbage and her consorts in that time. Which meant they had to be slowed down somehow.

Bill Woods wrote:It's an implausible coincidence that the ship's trajectory lines up with a second planet, but even if it does, just tug it sideways for a bit, so it misses. Really, why bother to decelerate it at all? Once all personnel and useful data are recovered, just let the hulk go flying off into deep space.

Mission of Honor, Chapter 23 wrote:"That poses some obvious difficulties for my boarding parties—difficulties which might well provoke the sort of incident we've both just agreed should be avoided—and I've been giving some thought to ways those difficulties might be alleviated. By my staff's calculations, the combined small craft and escape pod capacity of your superdreadnoughts should suffice to remove approximately five thousand of your personnel from each ship."

Hutch wrote:Wait, what? You have a crew that, by textev, is over six thousand and you only have the capability to remove five? What do you do in an emergency, tell the crew "All hands abandon ship....except for you folks in Section twenty-seven through forty-one." Not a good thing for morale.

Bill Woods wrote:Heh.

Vince wrote:In order to generate a miss, where a projectile is on a trajectory with a velocity that will impact a target, there exist two ways to change its velocity so that it will miss the target.

A) You can change the directional component of the velocity left/right/up/down so that the projectile will miss the target.

B) You can change the speed component of the velocity by accelerating/decelerating so that the projectile will miss the target. This will only work for targets that are:

1) Moving relative to the projectile.

And

2) NOT moving directly towards or away from the projectile. Planets move as they orbit the local star while ships traveling to/from the local star's hyper limit are moving in/out system. This means that planets move laterally (left/right) from the point of view of a ship traveling (in from/out towards) the hyper limit of the local star.

I'm going to guess that the fastest, safest way to make SLN Charles Babbage miss the gas giant Everest, combined with the need to clean up the debris of the battlefield, was to slow it down. This made Charles Babbage cross Everest's orbit after the planet had moved laterally clear of the ship's trajectory.

SWM wrote:

Vince wrote:In order to generate a miss, where a projectile is on a trajectory with a velocity that will impact a target, there exist two ways to change its velocity so that it will miss the target.

A) You can change the directional component of the velocity left/right/up/down so that the projectile will miss the target.

B) You can change the speed component of the velocity by accelerating/decelerating so that the projectile will miss the target. This will only work for targets that are:

1) Moving relative to the projectile.

And

2) NOT moving directly towards or away from the projectile. Planets move as they orbit the local star while ships traveling to/from the local star's hyper limit are moving in/out system. This means that planets move laterally (left/right) from the point of view of a ship traveling (in from/out towards) the hyper limit of the local star.

I'm going to guess that the fastest, safest way to make SLN Charles Babbage miss the gas giant Everest, combined with the need to clean up the debris of the battlefield, was to slow it down. This made Charles Babbage cross Everest's orbit after the planet had moved laterally clear of the ship's trajectory.

Absolutely correct. In fact, it turns out that changing the velocity (i.e. applying acceleration forward or backward parallel to the direction of motion) is often the easiest way to change the orbit (and orbital intersection point) of an object in orbit. Decelerating actually makes sense from a physics perspective.

Vince wrote:In order to generate a miss, where a projectile is on a trajectory with a velocity that will impact a target, there exist two ways to change its velocity so that it will miss the target.

A) You can change the directional component of the velocity left/right/up/down so that the projectile will miss the target.

B) You can change the speed component of the velocity by accelerating/decelerating so that the projectile will miss the target. This will only work for targets that are:

1) Moving relative to the projectile.

And

2) NOT moving directly towards or away from the projectile. Planets move as they orbit the local star while ships traveling to/from the local star's hyper limit are moving in/out system. This means that planets move laterally (left/right) from the point of view of a ship traveling (in from/out towards) the hyper limit of the local star.

I'm going to guess that the fastest, safest way to make SLN Charles Babbage miss the gas giant Everest, combined with the need to clean up the debris of the battlefield, was to slow it down. This made Charles Babbage cross Everest's orbit after the planet had moved laterally clear of the ship's trajectory.

SWM wrote:Absolutely correct. In fact, it turns out that changing the velocity (i.e. applying acceleration forward or backward parallel to the direction of motion) is often the easiest way to change the orbit (and orbital intersection point) of an object in orbit. Decelerating actually makes sense from a physics perspective.

Bill Woods wrote:No it doesn't. Going at 0.6 c, orbits look a lot like straight lines. Decelerating at 12 m/s2 adds about 2000 seconds to the time to reach the planet. It'll take 400 hours to decelerate it to rest. If the planet's orbital speed is ~10 km/s, the distance at closest approach will be changed by all of 0.2 e9m.
Alternatively, if the ship accelerates sideways at a mere 1 m/s2, after 20 hours, it'll be displaced by more than 2 e9m — ten times as far, for less than a tenth the effort.

As for "the need to clean up the debris of the battlefield," there's no need to do anything — just wait a few days and it'll have gone far away.

Mission of Honor, Chapter 24 wrote:The ship—or, rather, the battered hulk which had once been a ship—was under an apparent gravity of about 1.2 g. The wreckage had been rotated perpendicular to its line of flight, putting the decks and deckheads back where they ought to be, and Tristram was playing tugboat to slow what was left of the Babbage down. In many ways, Abigail would have preferred to remain in microgravity. It would have made getting about faster and simpler, not to mention avoiding the stress the deceleration was putting on damaged structural members. And she was well aware that the deceleration might actually be life-threatening for survivors under some circumstances. Unfortunately, the wreck’s velocity of almost eighteen thousand kilometers per second had already carried it past Flax. It was now hurtling across the inner system at roughly six percent of light-speed, bound for a fatal encounter with the gas giant Everest in just under twenty hours. It was extraordinarily unlikely, given Tenth Fleet’s limited manpower, that the SAR parties would be able to completely search ships as mangled and torn as Babbage and her consorts in that time. Which meant they had to be slowed down somehow.

Vince wrote:

Bill Woods wrote:No it doesn't. Going at 0.6 c, orbits look a lot like straight lines. Decelerating at 12 m/s2 adds about 2000 seconds to the time to reach the planet. It'll take 400 hours to decelerate it to rest. If the planet's orbital speed is ~10 km/s, the distance at closest approach will be changed by all of 0.2 e9m.
Alternatively, if the ship accelerates sideways at a mere 1 m/s2, after 20 hours, it'll be displaced by more than 2 e9m — ten times as far, for less than a tenth the effort.

As for "the need to clean up the debris of the battlefield," there's no need to do anything — just wait a few days and it'll have gone far away.

Major astrogation failure!

You dropped a decimal point (or at least a zero after the decimal point and before the six). Charles Babbage's speed was 18,000 kps, or about 6% of c, which equals 0.06c, not 0.6c:

Brigade XO wrote:"As for "the need to clean up the debris of the battlefield," there's no need to do anything — just wait a few days and it'll have gone far away."

That is just the problem they are also dealing with. Decelerating the SD also means that it hasn't gone kiteing off out of the system takeing the rest of the surviving crew with it to let them die of injuries, suffocation, cold or continuing destruction of parts of the ship from fire/explosions and structural failure. It is not that RMN wants to "clean up" the mess of the ship, it is going to get survivors off and not have the whole mass (and their own ship) running out of the system at .6C. The longer it takes you to compleat your search, the farther away you are from home and you really do still need to get home- with the SLN surviors you find. So you slow the ship down, and probably bring it to rest so you can deal with the mess and then you can let the hulk sit out there if don't have a use for it.

There is no way that RMN is going to just abandon any SLN survivors.

Eventualy the SD is just one more bit of junk on the navigation charts untill someone reclaims the hulk for scrap.

Bill Woods wrote:Braking the ship to rest will take over 400 hours — that's over two weeks! And then if you want to bring it back to the inner system.... The SAR effort needs to be done, of course, but it better be finished well before that. As earlier noted, a single destroyer's away team seems inadequate to the task.

Letting the hulk and associated smaller bits go flying off into deep space seems sufficient to clean up. Space is big. Nobody's going to trip over a piece who wasn't looking for it. As for scrapping it, I understand that there are several hundred others available with few better uses, which can drive themselves to the boneyard.