Starship Construction Techniques In The Honorverse ...

kzt wrote:It's pretty pointless to spend mass and money engineering for an extremely rare failure that will kill everyone on the ship and destroy all the cargo. Particularly when >99% of the time the failure will occur in hyper, which means the chance of the hull being recovered is approximately nil.

It's like requiring that a 747 be able to survive structurally intact if it flies into a skycraper.

More like requiring a 747 to remain intact if a tactical nuke goes off inside it IMO.

Roguevictory wrote:

kzt wrote:It's pretty pointless to spend mass and money engineering for an extremely rare failure that will kill everyone on the ship and destroy all the cargo. Particularly when >99% of the time the failure will occur in hyper, which means the chance of the hull being recovered is approximately nil.

It's like requiring that a 747 be able to survive structurally intact if it flies into a skycraper.

More like requiring a 747 to remain intact if a tactical nuke goes off inside it IMO.

Pretty much.
Now if it turns out that your normal construction techniques happen to survive that (even briefly); great.

Presumably you had some other reason to make such a ludicrously strong structure and surviving compensator failure is just an side-benefit.

As the saying goes, "Never say never."

In this case, I think we can say quite resoundingly: Never gonna happen. 500g-1000g at a jerk rate of... ????? No way on large structures. The MMI becomes insane.

I was thinking more of a slight or partial comp failure. Or perhaps a compensator "brown out" where time is available to dump the acceleration. Then we have the acceleration rate using just thrusters for docking and such or perhaps for short planet to planet hops. HB

HB of CJ wrote:I was thinking more of a slight or partial comp failure. Or perhaps a compensator "brown out" where time is available to dump the acceleration. Then we have the acceleration rate using just thrusters for docking and such or perhaps for short planet to planet hops. HB

Doesn't work that way. Word of Weber - compensators either work or don't work, and there is no warning before they fail.

If at all physically possible, I think it would be desirable for the ship to remain intact if the compensator failed at high speed. In one piece, it would be easy to observe and avoid the ship or perform interceptions if necessary.

If the ship separated into pieces, then you'd have a rapidly expanding cloud of debris moving through the system at at sizable fraction of c. Though maybe the reactor going would reduce it to small enough pieces not to especially hazardous.

noblehunter wrote:If at all physically possible, I think it would be desirable for the ship to remain intact if the compensator failed at high speed. In one piece, it would be easy to observe and avoid the ship or perform interceptions if necessary.

If the ship separated into pieces, then you'd have a rapidly expanding cloud of debris moving through the system at at sizable fraction of c. Though maybe the reactor going would reduce it to small enough pieces not to especially hazardous.

Yes, and it would only take a few hours or days at most for that cloud of debris to leave the system and no longer be a problem. The probability that the debris would endanger anything is miniscule. And, as noted earlier, the probability of a compensator failure in the first place is also miniscule. Building ships against the possibility of a compensator failure endangering a system facility is like prohibiting airflights over the Arctic for fear that a jet might crash on an Inuit village.

kzt wrote:

HB of CJ wrote:I was thinking more of a slight or partial comp failure. Or perhaps a compensator "brown out" where time is available to dump the acceleration. Then we have the acceleration rate using just thrusters for docking and such or perhaps for short planet to planet hops. HB

Doesn't work that way. Word of Weber - compensators either work or don't work, and there is no warning before they fail.

From the Pearls:

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/site/entry/Harrington/143/1

SWM wrote:

noblehunter wrote:If at all physically possible, I think it would be desirable for the ship to remain intact if the compensator failed at high speed. In one piece, it would be easy to observe and avoid the ship or perform interceptions if necessary.

If the ship separated into pieces, then you'd have a rapidly expanding cloud of debris moving through the system at at sizable fraction of c. Though maybe the reactor going would reduce it to small enough pieces not to especially hazardous.

Yes, and it would only take a few hours or days at most for that cloud of debris to leave the system and no longer be a problem. The probability that the debris would endanger anything is miniscule. And, as noted earlier, the probability of a compensator failure in the first place is also miniscule. Building ships against the possibility of a compensator failure endangering a system facility is like prohibiting airflights over the Arctic for fear that a jet might crash on an Inuit village.

Plus in some ways the expanding high velocity debries cloud is less dangerous than a ship, with wedge intact, that will continue to accelerate until it's going faster than any manned ship can intercept (above the rad shielding limits). Which makes recovering the ship to look at any hypothetical black box problematic. It has to be on a vector where another ship can match vectors with it below 0.8c and then you've got to disable it's wedge (energy fire against it's nodes?) to kill acceleration and only then can you board. Compensator failure is more likely on warships than merchants (because warships are pushed harder and take more damage) and more likely at high accel than at low; so odds are if a warship goes dutchman due to a compensator failure you can't intercept and your choices are try to kill it with missiles or just watch it go.



The debris cloud can be blocked by sidewalls or rolling wedge (or tugs sweeping it away from planets) and it's no longer accelerating. The ship had a big destructive wedge and has to be dodged or killed with missiles or energy fire. So even a freighter can handle high frac-c debris heading for it, but you need a fairly powerful warship (or system defense pods) to quickly stop an out of control ship headed the wrong way (though that's a very low probability event; odds are either the debris or the ship will transit the system without hitting anything important)

Jonathan_S wrote:Plus in some ways the expanding high velocity debries cloud is less dangerous than a ship, with wedge intact, that will continue to accelerate until it's going faster than any manned ship can intercept (above the rad shielding limits). Which makes recovering the ship to look at any hypothetical black box problematic. It has to be on a vector where another ship can match vectors with it below 0.8c and then you've got to disable it's wedge (energy fire against it's nodes?) to kill acceleration and only then can you board. Compensator failure is more likely on warships than merchants (because warships are pushed harder and take more damage) and more likely at high accel than at low; so odds are if a warship goes dutchman due to a compensator failure you can't intercept and your choices are try to kill it with missiles or just watch it go.



The debris cloud can be blocked by sidewalls or rolling wedge (or tugs sweeping it away from planets) and it's no longer accelerating. The ship had a big destructive wedge and has to be dodged or killed with missiles or energy fire. So even a freighter can handle high frac-c debris heading for it, but you need a fairly powerful warship (or system defense pods) to quickly stop an out of control ship headed the wrong way (though that's a very low probability event; odds are either the debris or the ship will transit the system without hitting anything important)

Actually there is a safeguard in Modern ships to drop the wedge automatically in the case where the compensator fails - of course the comp has to fail first, so there will be a couple seconds of Human jelly inducing acceleration before the wedge collapses, but it does keep the ship from screaming across the system unmanned.

From AAC - The destruction of Kuzak's Flagship:

Yet another hit slammed into HMS King Roger III. It stabbed deep, ripping through the wounds two of its predecessors had already torn. It breached the flagship's core hull, tearing its way into central engineering, and the superdreadnought's inertial compensator suddenly failed.
The emergency circuits shut down her impellers almost instantly, but "almost instantly" wasn't good enough for a ship under six hundred and twelve gravities of acceleration.
The ship sustained only moderate structural damage; none of her crew survived.

Oh, and if a practically new, state of the art SD sustains "only" moderate structural damage, there is no way any Freighter, who has to fear a Pinnances's laser, is built to survive a comp failure.