Implenting Case Lacoon I & II after Oyster Bay

Pff, why military drives.
I tell you, Streak Drive is the way to go!
No seriously, the first thought i had when i read about the new Mesan drive tech was something like "gee, with that the Mantis cant kiss their wormhole revenue goodbye".

thinkstoomuch wrote:

bafoote wrote:Back to Lacoon 1/2

The 12x time in shipping.
...snip...

Another stupid thought that may have been addressed previously. If it has please point me to it, I would be appreciative.

In response to the twelve times transit times for people that do not have access to the wormholes. Why not fit military grade Hyper Generators. It will not get you back all 12 times but will get you back 2 to 2.5 the time if using the Eta or Theta bands.

Previously it was not economic sense but if you can make 2 to 2.5 times the number of trips that will change the money equation significantly. From the way that the merchant ships are constructed may be a simple change that does eat some cargo space between the larger generator and additional people to maintain it.

Like I said stupid thought that came to me as I was rereading some past posts.

T2M

The streak drive is only moderately faster, and takes even more tonnage than military drives. Note that the MA still uses Manticoran wormholes whenever they think it is safe to do so.

Military impellers, compensators and hyperdrive, as an aside, are significantly more mass and at least twice expense of commercial grade drives (two stress bands, not just one, and beta nodes added to the rings, where commercial ships only have alpha nodes).

It's also likely the reason military ships can access higher hyperspace bands is that if they screw up, it only blows out a single alpha node, instead of the entire ring, plus they care spares etc for repairs that a merchie might not carry.

Refitting to military spec isn't a minor refit, and it also has a permanent cost to your tonnage and in long term maintenance. It's usually only done by governments for military logistics as part of their overall war spending.

That means not so likely for a normal merchant, but might be an option for government subsidies where trade is crucial to the local economy and/or something a really big cartel might start doing.

solbergb wrote:...snip...

It's also likely the reason military ships can access higher hyperspace bands is that if they screw up, it only blows out a single alpha node, instead of the entire ring, plus they care spares etc for repairs that a merchie might not carry.

Refitting to military spec isn't a minor refit, and it also has a permanent cost to your tonnage and in long term maintenance. It's usually only done by governments for military logistics as part of their overall war spending.
...snip...

I am not entirely sure about the 1st paragraph above as what I am suggesting is similar to what Hemphill had done to ships. This was shown in IEH for the mission where Honor is captured. Which I had not remembered prior to your post. Thank you for sparking that.

Which unfortunately leads to the second point about needing the governments to support it. I knew it was too simple of an idea not to have been shot down already. I was basing it more on the layout of the Solarian Freighter in SoS. Though Hemphill's idea might of have been a subconscious pusher for it.

Thanks for inspiring more thoughts/considerations,
T2M

If you thought that you would lose access to wormholes for a timescale of many years, and if you were dependent on resources far enough away, it might make economic sense to make freighters with military grade rad shielding and drives. The installation, maintenance, and use costs are a many times than the cost for commercial grade ships, so it would require some pretty serious need to be economically worthwhile. It would come down to a calculation which will be different for each system--is the cost of running faster ships less than the cost of longer transit times. Either way, that cost would be passed to the consumer, of course, so economic disruption would still follow, but it would work if it were a matter of survival.

If you are a Sol manufacturer of X and your biggest customer is in New Berlin, then yeah, consider signing a long term deal and invest in the ships to reduce the number of ships you need, and to enhance survival in this new era.

One consideration would be whether it was cheaper to upgrade and arm merchant ships or just do traditional convoy operations, re-adjusting your trade schedules to slower paces.

In our world, this is a common tradeoff, if you consider air freight vs land/sea freight. Some freight is worth the extra expense, most of it can go slower as long as you rework your production lead times to adjust to the new reality.

We went through this kind of realignment a couple years back when fuel prices went through the roof. Suddenly it made more sense to ship stuff by slow boat rather than air, although the prevalence of just in time inventory management does introduce challenges when you slow transport times.

Something I have compiled over the last couple of days. There are a lot of options that I didn't realize when I read them in particular about the Mariannae the Combine ship.

If you are Interested,
T2M

Characteristics of shipboard drives. Use grade and readily available tech in the Honor-verse as of 1905 and all is an approximate maximum in the numbered paragraphs. Quote about Hemphill’s fast transports is at the bottom. The Jessick combine ship in SoS is another example of a fast transport with improved Hyper generator and shielding but standard impellers. quoted as well. As far as what makes sense economically that is going to be another discussion about time/distance, cargo type and available options.

1) Those equipped with commercial grade engineering equipment. Not even the topof the Delta bands ~1,000 c apparent velocity, accel ~200 g’s. N-space speed .6c. Hyper speed .5 c.

2) Those equipped with military grade hyper drive, commercial grade impellers. Using ETA bands like the Hemphill fast transports ~2,000 c apparent velocity. Accel ~200 g’s. N-space speed .6 c. Hyper speed .5 c.

3) Those equipped with military grade hyper drive, and military grade impellers. ~2,500 times the speed of light apparent velocity. Accel ~400 g’s. N-space speed .6 c. Hyper speed .5 c.

4) Those equipped with military hyper drive, impellers, radiation and particle shielding. N-space speed .8c. Hyper speed .6 c. I think it needs to have weapons of some sort to deal with objects too big for the screens to handle at least on the forward end.

5) A mishmash of all the above in different ways. Give people enough options and they will start doing weird stuff including (especially) with weapons. For example if possible military grade particle shielding on a commercial base. Based on the quote from SoS the Marianne was definitely one of these with a generator only allowing one more band access.

Quote from IEH Chapter 7 about Hemphill’s fast transports. wrote:
The Joint Navy Military Transport Command, composed of midsized ships and normally assigned to the delivery of high-priority, time-critical cargoes (or delivery to potential combat hot spots), was the result. And as part of the same move to speed and streamline the transportation process, the ships designated for JNMTC use had been taken in hand by navy shipyards—Manticoran or Grayson, as available slips permitted—for overhaul. Time was too tight for their civilian grade inertial compensators and impellers to be altered, but they’d received light sidewalls and missile defense systems, upgraded sensors and rudimentary electronic warfare systems, and military hyper generators to permit them to reach as high as the eta bands. Since most merchantmen were designed to cruise no higher than the delta bands, their up-rated generators virtually doubled the sustained apparent velocity JNMTC ships could attain.

Quote from SoS Chapter 40 about the Marianne wrote:
Fortunately, Marianne’s sensor suite was good enough for Egervary to be sure there weren’t. In fact, her sensors were far more capable than any legitimate merchantship—especially one that looked as decrepit as she did—ever carried. Nor was that the only unusual thing about her. The four-million-ton freighter might look like a tramp whose owners routinely skimped on maintenance, but she had a military-grade hyper generator and particle screening. Her acceleration was no greater than that of other merchantmen her size, but she could reach the Epsilon Bands and sustain a velocity of .7 c once she got there, which gave her a maximum apparent velocity of over 1,442 c, thirty-two percent faster than a “typical” merchie. He would have liked to have military-grade impellers and a military-grade compensator, as well, but those would have been almost impossible to disguise and would have cut massively into her cargo capacity. And if he couldn’t have those, at least her designers had provided her with eyes and ears as good as most military vessels boasted, which was at least equally important to a ship which had to operate covertly.

The problem with installing military grade impellers and drives is the extensive rebuilding involved. You would basicly have to rebuild the entire ship. Remember what they had to do to Wayferer IIRC they could only enhanse the sidewalls and added a second fusion plant deep inside the hull because the one that the ship was built with was to close to the hull for ease of maintance.

As I recall, the Wayfarer did not get military-grade impellers or hyper-generator. The lesser improvements that they put in took months to install, not counting testing time. From Honor Among Enemies:

Her biggest weakness was that it had been impossible to upgrade her drive without literally tearing her apart and starting over. She'd been built originally as a fleet collier and equipped with light sidewalls, which had been upgraded as far as possible, and Vulcan had also managed to upgrade the radiation shielding inside those sidewalls, but in many ways, she was a LAC on the grand scale.

So it appears that it is not possible to rebuild a civilian ship to a military-grade drive without completely rebuilding. The best you can do is improved (probably military grade) rad shielding.

Yup impeller rooms for a double wedge needed.

Yup, new compensator and grav plates for increased acceleration needed.

I assume from that quote that the rad shielding is seperate from anything else, but is expensive to get that last 0.1c over civilian grade shielding.

Yup, need real sidewall generators, though I bet a double wedge increases the sidewall by 2x, maybe its a square root or squared function in Davids mind for sidewall effectiveness when used in conjunction with a double impeller wedge verses a civilian single wedge.

I have never seen sidewall strength described this way, just based on wedge strength. Maybe its linear with wedge strength, erm total wedge strength.

Stirs the pot and watches it swirl