Can Big Honorverse Starships Ground On planets? ...

Rincewind wrote:

saber964 wrote:What RFC is describing is an assault shuttle getting ready to land. Pinnaces and assault shuttle's (cutters?) are the only small craft that can land on a planet. IIRC pinnaces and shuttle's are about the size of RW jumbo aircraft like the 757 and 747.

In point of fact cargo shuttles are much bigger. In On Basilisk Station a cargo shuttle was described as being much bigger than a pinnace.

The passage is as follows:

The mammoth counter-grav cargo shuttle looked like an insect as it nuzzled alongside its Manticoran-registry mother ship. The customs pinnace tubed to it looked more like a microbe...

As can be seen, although the shuttle was described as an insect the pinnace was described as a microbe, thus implying the shuttle is much, much bigger.

It would make sense actually as otherwise can you imagine the number of shuttle flights it would require to load a single 4 megaton freighter.

Don't forget that OBS was written before The Great Resizing. Therefore, not only the big warships, but also the small parasite craft - pinnaces, cargo shuttles, assault shuttles, and cutters - are smaller than described in the earlier books pre-TGR.

In fact, the pinnace (the Mk-28 Condor, as well as the updated Condor II) are about 30 meters long, or less than half the length of a 747. Cutters are about half the length of a pinnace, and cargo shuttles, and presumably assault shuttles, are between 50-100% larger than pinnaces. This is for the RMN, though - relative sizes may differ for other star nations.

Now that Evergreen is out of the running, the only canon sources are the books themselves and what BuNine puts out. Click the links in my sig if you haven't seen my work for BuNine yet. We have the Condor, the Dakota (cutter) and the ships you see on my Deviant Art pages, more or less done. The pinnace and cutter *are* done, but detailing still remains for the warships (most of the external detailing is done, but not added to the current crop of renders yet, as there are still some things being worked on). No size changes for them are forthcoming.

The limiting factor, at least for warships, is the size of the boat bays. Looking at my images, you can see why there isn't much room in there for pretty much anything larger than a double-sized pinnace in the larger ships. OTOH, if merchies carry any parasite craft, they may well be much bigger - we haven't gotten that far yet.

TBH, I honestly don't think merchies carry much more than civilian-grade pinnaces, and probably only one or two, as their crews aren't large enough to warrant more than that - a Mk-28 can carry around 200 personnel, provided they are wearing nothing more bulky than skinsuits and are packed in like sardines. That's probably double the number of crew on a merchie.

My opinion is that cargo shuttles for unloading merchies come from the receiving planet, and not from the merchant ship, in which case, they can be any size needed to get the most cargo down or transferred in the fewest trips.

MaxxQ wrote:Don't forget that OBS was written before The Great Resizing. Therefore, not only the big warships, but also the small parasite craft - pinnaces, cargo shuttles, assault shuttles, and cutters - are smaller than described in the earlier books pre-TGR.

In fact, the pinnace (the Mk-28 Condor, as well as the updated Condor II) are about 30 meters long, or less than half the length of a 747. Cutters are about half the length of a pinnace, and cargo shuttles, and presumably assault shuttles, are between 50-100% larger than pinnaces. This is for the RMN, though - relative sizes may differ for other star nations.

Now that Evergreen is out of the running, the only canon sources are the books themselves and what BuNine puts out. Click the links in my sig if you haven't seen my work for BuNine yet. We have the Condor, the Dakota (cutter) and the ships you see on my Deviant Art pages, more or less done. The pinnace and cutter *are* done, but detailing still remains for the warships (most of the external detailing is done, but not added to the current crop of renders yet, as there are still some things being worked on). No size changes for them are forthcoming.

The limiting factor, at least for warships, is the size of the boat bays. Looking at my images, you can see why there isn't much room in there for pretty much anything larger than a double-sized pinnace in the larger ships. OTOH, if merchies carry any parasite craft, they may well be much bigger - we haven't gotten that far yet.

TBH, I honestly don't think merchies carry much more than civilian-grade pinnaces, and probably only one or two, as their crews aren't large enough to warrant more than that - a Mk-28 can carry around 200 personnel, provided they are wearing nothing more bulky than skinsuits and are packed in like sardines. That's probably double the number of crew on a merchie.

My opinion is that cargo shuttles for unloading merchies come from the receiving planet, and not from the merchant ship, in which case, they can be any size needed to get the most cargo down or transferred in the fewest trips.

Textev puts a Solly merchant crew at about 50-strong. Manticoran crews are closer to half that. In HAE, the Hauptman cartel captain had his ship's crew evacuate aboard a shuttle of some sort.

I suspect you're correct in that the majority of cargo shuttling are provided by in-system assets. However, every freighter would still have to have the equivalent of a forklift strapped to the back of a lorry, just in case they end up somewhere that doesn't have adequate port facilities.

I believe we have multiple examples of textev stating freighters do in fact carry cargo shuttles. HAE has the bulk of a crew abandoning ship in one to get away from pirates.

Honor Among Enemies, Prologue wrote:Sukowski watched his display and let a long sigh of relief ooze from his lungs as a small, green dot appeared upon it. The shuttle was one of Bonaventure's big, primary cargo haulers, with a drive as powerful as most light attack craft's. Unlike a LAC, it was totally unarmed, but it shot away at over four hundred gravities, slower than its pursuer but twice as fast as its mother ship. The pirates must be pissed to see the crew they'd hoped to make man their prize for them escaping, but Bonaventure and her shuttle were still outside their powered missile envelope, and there was no way they'd go chasing after a mere shuttle with a six-million-ton freighter to snap up. Besides, Sukowski thought bitterly, they'd no doubt planned for exactly this contingency. They'd have their own engineers aboard to manage Bonaventure's systems.

And SoS has the scene where Norbrandt receives her arms shipment from the Jessyk freighter - I doubt there was much interest in getting planetside help unloading that cargo from the freighter.

MaxxQ wrote:My opinion is that cargo shuttles for unloading merchies come from the receiving planet, and not from the merchant ship, in which case, they can be any size needed to get the most cargo down or transferred in the fewest trips.

I suspect that the smaller the freighter, the more likely it carries at at least one cargo shuttle; smaller freighters would tend to service less developed worlds and have more need of "organic" cargo handling ability.

SharkHunter wrote:I think the whole Torch line of books wold imply that a smaller ship can. Impellers can be used in atmosphere -- otherwise the impeller missiles used by Kevin Usher in SVW and by Edward Martin in Flag in Exile, etc. wouldn't work. That plus Echoes of Honor makes it seem likely that a small ship can land. The key sequence I'd look at is the Assault boat having to shoot down the courier ship in the attack on Camp Cheron before they could pull out of range.

[snip]
Thoughts?

I don't really see what you're drawing your conclusions from - the only instance of a hyper-capable vessel parked on a planet I'm aware of was Cathy's yacht in the ARC of 'From the Highlands', and that was edited out in the official release.
A high-end private yacht seems like the most likely vessel to be capable of landing - small, and used by people in a hurry for whom money is no object. So if those can't land, I don't see what could.

In Echoes of Honor, the dispatch boat was sitting in orbit, with some of the crew shuttled down to the surface for a break. Assault shuttles have impeller wedges for use outside the atmosphere, but we know from plenty of scenes that they use wings/turbines/counter-grav otherwise.

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From Nordbrandt's second delivery in SoS, we know that the shuttle on a Jessyk 'freighter' can carry a bit over 1000 tons.

FLHerne wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:I think the whole Torch line of books wold imply that a smaller ship can. Impellers can be used in atmosphere -- otherwise the impeller missiles used by Kevin Usher in SVW and by Edward Martin in Flag in Exile, etc. wouldn't work. That plus Echoes of Honor makes it seem likely that a small ship can land. The key sequence I'd look at is the Assault boat having to shoot down the courier ship in the attack on Camp Cheron before they could pull out of range.

[snip]
Thoughts?

I don't really see what you're drawing your conclusions from - the only instance of a hyper-capable vessel parked on a planet I'm aware of was Cathy's yacht in the ARC of 'From the Highlands', and that was edited out in the official release.
A high-end private yacht seems like the most likely vessel to be capable of landing - small, and used by people in a hurry for whom money is no object. So if those can't land, I don't see what could.

In Echoes of Honor, the dispatch boat was sitting in orbit, with some of the crew shuttled down to the surface for a break. Assault shuttles have impeller wedges for use outside the atmosphere, but we know from plenty of scenes that they use wings/turbines/counter-grav otherwise.

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From Nordbrandt's second delivery in SoS, we know that the shuttle on a Jessyk 'freighter' can carry a bit over 1000 tons.

Adding to the above:

There are tactical missiles which use wedges that are meters in size and last a few seconds. These are used for anti aircraft and anti-tank work in an atmosphere.

Note I said METERS. Not 100 KILOMETERS on a side and 30 kilometers from the ship required for a ship the size of dispatch boat.

A 1000 ton shuttle probably has a wedge a kilometer or so in size (but still much smaller than 10 KM missile wedge), or ~1% of 1% the size of a dispatch boat's .

Most of the objections to landing with a wedge would appear to be less applicable if there is a deep ocean under you. You might have an issue with large waves at the shoreline. Landing under impeller...if you can pull tends of gees for a long time, you can clearly land. Hopefully the vacuum seals are not water-soluble.

Now, when you fire up the impellers to take off again, the steam explosion may be a bit impressive.

My concern is what effect would such huge wedges, if any, have on the ozone layer?

phillies wrote:Most of the objections to landing with a wedge would appear to be less applicable if there is a deep ocean under you. You might have an issue with large waves at the shoreline. Landing under impeller...if you can pull tends of gees for a long time, you can clearly land. Hopefully the vacuum seals are not water-soluble.

Now, when you fire up the impellers to take off again, the steam explosion may be a bit impressive.

With any hyper-capable ship, the wedge is big enough to penetrate the bottom of the ocean on an Earth-type world. Even the wedge of a ship-killer missile would dig 4.4 miles below the surface of the ocean. A superdreadnought wedge would plow 220 kilometers below the surface of the ocean, or 130 miles. The Mariana Trench is only 6.8 miles deep.

For that matter, the upper part of the wedge would extend well above the atmosphere, into low planetary orbit.

Weird Harold wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:My opinion is that cargo shuttles for unloading merchies come from the receiving planet, and not from the merchant ship, in which case, they can be any size needed to get the most cargo down or transferred in the fewest trips.

I suspect that the smaller the freighter, the more likely it carries at at least one cargo shuttle; smaller freighters would tend to service less developed worlds and have more need of "organic" cargo handling ability.

I was thinking it would vary depending on where they'd be intended to go, but you're right it's mostly smaller freighters that trade out in the Verge.

In the more developed systems I suspect that the freighter is just contracted to deliver its cargo to a given station. Then the system's "organic" shuttles take care of any distribution from the stations around the planet.

But on less undeveloped worlds there may not be organic shuttles, or at least not enough to them to be sure that they'll be functional and available. So carrying your own makes sense. Heck on some worlds you might even need to hop around to multiple locations on the surface, delivering only parts of a container load to each, instead of dropping it at a central spaceport and letting their cargo companies handle "last mile" distribution.