Leonard Detweiler SD size

Pulled out quotea to get around stack limit.

Kytheros wrote:That might or might not be a size limiting factor on the Lenny Dets/spider drive ships - how big can you make a bubble sidewall?

Quite big.

Kytheros wrote:Well, if if you could bubble something the size of a moon, you'd still have difficulties if you wanted to move it, and building a ship half the size would still take forever.

However ... I think there's textev somewhere that implies that Hephaestus/Vulcan/Weyland had (bubble) sidewall generators. Although, I'm not entirely sure when that bit is from, so who knows how big they were at the time.

Still, the limits on bubble sidewall generation are probably not the primary size constraints on Lenny Dets (presuming they have bubble sidewall capability).

HMSS Hephaestus has a bubble sidewall right up until she was destroyed per the following quote from the fourth from the last paragraph of Chapter 28 in Mission of Honor.

One moment, the Manticore Binary System was going about its routine business, peacefully and calmly. The next moment, eighteen powerful grasers ripped through Her Majesty's Space Station Hephaestus like demons. There was absolutely no warning. No time to bring up the station's spherical sidewall, or to evacuate, or don skinsuits, or set internal pressure security. There was no time at all as that devastating wave of destruction struck like a chainsaw hitting an egg.

The third to the last paragraph in Chapter 28 of Mission of Honor stated her size.

It stretched over a hundred and ten kilometers along its central spine, and tentacles reached out in every direction, some of them the better part of forty or even fifty kilometers long in their own right. It boasted a permanent population of over nine hundred and fifty thousand. By the time transients, ship crews, field trips by visiting school children, and other visitors were added, the station's total population on any given day was certainly upward of a million, and probably close to twice that on most days.

Somtaaw wrote:

Honor of the Queen wrote:"I don't think they could have turned Blackbird into any kind of real fortress," Matthews said quickly. "Not unless they can generate a sidewall bubble around a moon eight thousand kilometers in diameter." He looked questioningly at Honor, and she shook her head.

Well we know 100% that they could not bubble Uriel's moon, site of Blackbird Base during HotQ. And we also know none of Hades' moons with their moon-side missile launchers got bubbles either.

So more or less guaranteed, there won't be any of the "Dahak" style planetoid ships in Honorverse, at least for a few thousand years beyond the current technology. But that still leaves exactly how big the bubble can get, and we have no empirical data on where larger spherical bubbles are weaker than smaller ones. Or we'd have data on more fort sizes, bigger forts for the Manticore Junction, smaller for where it goes, etc.

So the max size of a bubble generator is somewhere between 110km by 50ish km and a little moon (with or without a new crater by blown into it by an unarmed freighter).

1) The only practical limit to ship size is cost. If you wanted a 50-kilometer-long ship for example, assuming similar density and a bit stubbier geometry than an SD, it would have 125.000 times the mass. Yes, that is a single ship an order of magnitude more massive than the entire Solarian fleet combined. No, you don't have the money to build it.


2) Bubble sidewalls, wedges, normal sidewalls; they all prevent the spider drive from being used through them. They don't prevent maneuverability via other means. Suggested method: spider-drive drones towing your ship with tractors through gunports in sidewall

Belial666 wrote:1) The only practical limit to ship size is cost. If you wanted a 50-kilometer-long ship for example, assuming similar density and a bit stubbier geometry than an SD, it would have 125.000 times the mass. Yes, that is a single ship an order of magnitude more massive than the entire Solarian fleet combined. No, you don't have the money to build it.


2) Bubble sidewalls, wedges, normal sidewalls; they all prevent the spider drive from being used through them. They don't prevent maneuverability via other means. Suggested method: spider-drive drones towing your ship with tractors through gunports in sidewall

1) Paul Krugman would probably find that a good idea as a Keynsian work program.

2) Sort of limited maneuverability I suppose.

We don't yet know what the LD's have besides the Spider Drive and the ability to launch Graser Torps from internal magaiznes with tubes.

No other weapons advancements unveiled--yet.

It is also very likely that an LD that gets located by even something like a modern SLN/RHN/IAN BC is going to be at least damaged. Guessing that the GA is possibly going to come up with something that is going to be able to at least tell ships that a Spider Drive is active somewhere near, that begins to make life hairy for said LD. Brings to mind the scene from one of the Star Trek films where the command comes" Target that explosion......"

If an LD does turn out to be SD size, then it will take quite a bit of killing but I suspect that the GA would initially find it quite adequate to start with giving it enough damage to knock out it's drive (all those external skegs give it even more surface area to hit than a standard SD) and once you make it unable to get to hyperspace, the job turns into a combination of keeping it damaged and pulling all the sensor reading possible off it for later analysis.

Of course, the Alignment might just decide to use a bunch of the Graser Torps without the graser and substiture a rather large wight payload with really powerful impeller tied onto it. First you run the GT propulsion sleds at highest practical Sider Drive speed in from way outside the hyper limit and then- allowing enough time to come on-line prior to atmosphear entry- shut off the Spider Drive and fire up the impeller at maximum accelaration.
Does the Alignment really care about committing EE violations on Manticore, Haven, Grayson and the Alderman's at this point?

Brigade XO wrote:Of course, the Alignment might just decide to use a bunch of the Graser Torps without the graser and substiture a rather large wight payload with really powerful impeller tied onto it. First you run the GT propulsion sleds at highest practical Sider Drive speed in from way outside the hyper limit and then- allowing enough time to come on-line prior to atmosphear entry- shut off the Spider Drive and fire up the impeller at maximum accelaration.
Does the Alignment really care about committing EE violations on Manticore, Haven, Grayson and the Alderman's at this point?

I don't think they want to mark themselves off as that far beyond the pale of civilized behavior that obviously this soon. It would make taking them seriously - very, very seriously - too important to too many people who can still either disbelieve stories about the Alignment entirely, or suppose that whatever this "Alignment" really is under all the inflated stories, it's nothing worse than one more power bloc or clique among others.

They haven't got much of the "that would be wrong!" or the "the SLN would kick our butts!" disincentives going on, or even the "you know, we could use a defeated Manticore alive" one. They do have the "best not to wake up all of humanity to what we really are" one still. It's enough.

Down the road, if they are too exposed, if they figure Plan B has to be smack non-Alignment humanity around so hard that only Mesan star lines survive to re-populate the rubble - oh yes, then the planet-smacking will begin.

Brigade XO wrote:Of course, the Alignment might just decide to use a bunch of the Graser Torps without the graser and substiture a rather large wight payload with really powerful impeller tied onto it. First you run the GT propulsion sleds at highest practical Sider Drive speed in from way outside the hyper limit and then- allowing enough time to come on-line prior to atmosphear entry- shut off the Spider Drive and fire up the impeller at maximum accelaration.
Does the Alignment really care about committing EE violations on Manticore, Haven, Grayson and the Alderman's at this point?

Apparently they do care. They were extremely careful during Operation Oyster Bay to avoid EE violation.

SWM wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Of course, the Alignment might just decide to use a bunch of the Graser Torps without the graser and substiture a rather large wight payload with really powerful impeller tied onto it. First you run the GT propulsion sleds at highest practical Sider Drive speed in from way outside the hyper limit and then- allowing enough time to come on-line prior to atmosphear entry- shut off the Spider Drive and fire up the impeller at maximum accelaration.
Does the Alignment really care about committing EE violations on Manticore, Haven, Grayson and the Alderman's at this point?

Apparently they do care. They were extremely careful during Operation Oyster Bay to avoid EE violation.

They don't care about the violations themselves, only other peoples responses to violations. If they could be assured that nobody would know it was them, they wouldn't care at all.

crewdude48 wrote:

SWM wrote:Apparently they do care. They were extremely careful during Operation Oyster Bay to avoid EE violation.

They don't care about the violations themselves, only other peoples responses to violations. If they could be assured that nobody would know it was them, they wouldn't care at all.

Operation Oyster Bay is the only time they could be certain that no one would know it was them, because no one had heard of them or seen any signs of them yet.

And it doesn't matter why they care. It is sufficient to say that they care.

The Alignment is running into a number of problems. Not the least of these problems is that the very carefull and long range plans for the removal of the SL as the nominal bastion of stability within Human occupied space and the conversion of it's member and controlled systems as breeding ground (literally) of the many lines of the Alignment is comming off the rails.

The Alignment has been identified at least enough that several of the major players both know if it's existence and are actively looking for it.

With the timetable for "The Plan" getting accelerated on the fly due to unanticpated events, further complications keep cropping up. Manticore refused to roll over and be absorbed by Haven then, instead of getting destroyed, reached not only a peace settlement, they became allies, driven by the new knowlege that "parties unknown" had been engineering all the problems to begin with.

What was supposed to be a long range event of Houdini to eliminate the links of Mesa to the still unknown Alignment has become a cluster......k of brutal operations to kill off massive amounts of people in covering the Alignment tracks while still withdawing nessisary people from Mesa.

At least three of the Alignment weapons and tech advantages are known if not yet understood. These were supposed to remain hidden from general knowledge for a long while yet.
Since Oyster Bay operation had to be moved up in an effort to cripple Manticore and Grayson sufficenlty to let Haven take them over and failed, not only are Grayson and Manticore still in the game but the THREE other Star Nations and/or alliances with similar tech capability are not only at full capaisity (and growing) in their strengths but are cooperating. That would be Haven, the Aldermani and the Maya/Erwhon alliance. The Leonard Detweilders were supposed to have been part of taking out Haven (presuming Haven had already consumed Manticore and others) which was supposed to be as badly off politically as the League. Hasn't worked out that way.

From what we have seen, Jack McBride is not the only Alignment member who has developed doubts. How many more - that make it to Darius or other "safe" locations- are going to have problems with what was done to move them away from the sacrificial decoy that Mesa appears to have been from the beginning.

JeffEngel wrote:Something occurred to me, and I wanted to check with the forum to see if there's a problem in the logic.

RFC has posted that the LD's are capital ships and that they are intended and expected to be able to stand up to other people's capital ships. "Stand up to" in terms of "blow away with impunity because they cannot be seen" isn't an impossible reading, but it has seemed forced. On the other hand, with no wedge, no sidewalls, no bubble wall, no buckers, and pokey speed, it's been hard to see how they can defend themselves effectively, or even run for it in many circumstances, if they are detected.

Here's where the question comes up: is there any reason they can't manage a stand-up fight, if it comes to that, on account of being just ridiculously huge, with far more armor, particle shielding, electronic warfare systems, active defenses, and possibly decoys, than any impeller drive starship?
...

It has been suggested as a possible answer before yes, by myself among others.
And i think it is fairly reasonable to assume they will be at least bigger than SDs.

Probably MUCH bigger.