Somtaaw wrote:Daryl wrote:Before the LACs had a bow shield their safe top speed probably was slower than most ships, even if they got there quicker.
Not really, they just had crap drive nodes, which resulted in crap wedges, which resulted in crap acceleration, all of which derived from having crap fusion cores providing low amounts of power. The presence/absence of bow walls has virtually no effect on how fast/slow an Honorverse ship can do, they have low-end particle screens that stop very small micrometeorites and dust from destroying ships.
Prior to Manticore's Ghost Rider program, everyone built LAC's like mini-warhips, with mini bells and whistles so it continued to resemble other warships, with mini broadsides. Then Manticore came out with Ghost Rider, which spawned the upgraded nodes and Manticore went back to the drawing board on LAC's to create the first-generation monsters known as Shrike's.
Actually, they just had crap nodes. Why they made the choice to have crap nodes is beyond my understanding, as it seems to be a form of false economy. The only reason I can think of is that the naval designer was given an arbitrary tonnage limit for a LAC (anything larger than this limit would be considered a corvette--another, much larger, non-hyper capable naval unit), so in order to meet this arbitrary tonnage limit, they chose to use smaller, less powerful nodes.
Any LAC that uses fusion is using a grav-fusing power plant. And David has said that the smallest size you can build one of those is the same size that a destroyer uses, which is the smallest ship that can use all of that power. Any smaller vessel (LAC, frigate, dispatch boat, mail courier) using that fusion plant has excess power available to it, so it would seem to make sense that you would have nodes that would fully use some of that excess power.
Citizen Vice-Admiral Tourville talking to his People's Commissioner (Honeker) about the technical details of how LACs are powered:
Ashes of Victory, Chapter 13 wrote:"But like you, I was thinking about the hardware side of his report and wishing the Board had been given a chance to see it before it issued its official conclusions," the citizen admiral went on. "Not that it would have convinced the doubters . . . or even me—fully, I mean—I suppose. It just doesn't seem possible that even the Manties could squeeze a fusion plant, and a full set of beta nodes, down into a LAC hull and then find room to cram in a godawful graser like the one Diamato described, as well!"
"I've never really understood that," Honeker said, admitting a degree of technical ignorance no "proper" people's commissioner would display. "I mean, we put fusion plants into pinnaces, and isn't a LAC just a scaled-up pinnace, when all's said and done?"
"Um." Tourville scratched an eyebrow while he considered the best way to explain. "I can see why you might think that," he acknowledged after a moment, "but it's not just a matter of scale. Or, rather, it is a matter of scale, in a way, but one in which the difference is so great as to create a difference in kind, as well.
"A pinnace has a far weaker wedge than any regular warship or merchantman. It's enormously smaller, for one thing, not more than a kilometer in width, and less powerful. The little hip-pocket fusion plants we put into small craft couldn't even begin to power an all-up wedge for a ship the size of a LAC. Which is just as well, because they use old-fashioned mag bottle technology and laser-fired fusing that's not a lot more advanced than they were using back on Old Earth Ante Diaspora. We've made a hell of a lot of advances since then, of course, in order to shoehorn the plants down to fit into pinnaces, but the way they're built puts a low absolute ceiling on their output.
"Even the biggest pinnace or assault shuttle comes in at well under a thousand tons, though, and a worthwhile LAC has to be in the thirty- to fifty-thousand-ton range just to pack in its impellers and any armament at all. Remember that courier boats in the same size range don't carry any weapons or defenses and just barely manage to find someplace to squeeze in a hyper generator. A LAC may be smaller than a starship, but it still has to be able to achieve high acceleration rates (which means a military grade compensator), produce sidewalls, power its weapons—and find places to mount them—and generally act like a serious warship, or else people would simply ignore it. Which means that, like any starship, LACs need modern grav-fusing plants to maintain the power levels they require. And there are limits on how small you can make one of those."
The citizen vice admiral twitched a shrug.
"Of course, the designers can cut some corners when they design a LAC. For one thing, they don't try to build in a power plant which can meet all requirements out of current generating capacity. Ton-for-ton, LACs have enormous capacitor rings, much larger than anything else's, even an SD. They're a lot smaller in absolute terms, naturally, given the difference in size between the ships involved, but most energy-armed LACs rely on the capacitor rings to power their offensive armament, and a lot of them rely on the capacitors even for their point-defense clusters. And not even a superdreadnought has enough onboard power generation to bring its wedge up initially without using its capacitors. Just maintaining it once it is up, even with the energy-siphon effect when it twists over into hyper, requires a huge investment in power, and initiating the impeller bands in the first place raises the power requirement exponentially. So even when they're not doing anything else, most warships tend to have at least one fusion plant on-line to charge up their capacitor rings . . . and, of course, a LAC only has one power plant, and just keeping it up and running requires its own not insubstantial power investment.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.
Tourville seems to be contradicting David, at least on the power available to a LAC, when he says:
"Of course, the designers can cut some corners when they design a LAC. For one thing, they don't try to build in a power plant which can meet all requirements out of current generating capacity."
David on
Fission/fusion power reactors:
Fission/fusion power reactors wrote: The second type of fusion plant is much larger than anything which could be crammed into a pinnace, and it also has much higher input energy requirements of its own. It's really bigger and more powerful than most destroyers require, but anything else would fall short of the destroyer's energy requirements. The problem before the Graysons came along with their advanced fission technology was that the only real choice a LAC designer had was to go ahead and figure out how to cram a destroyer-sized fusion plant into a hull which was maybe 25% the size of the larger vessel. Even without the Warshawski sails, that put an enormous squeeze on the internal volume of the LAC, which helps to explain why it was impossible to squeeze in a really effective armament while simultaneously producing a "light attack craft" which was ridiculously over- powered.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.
An example of a navy that
somehow (in a 15,000 ton LAC) chose not to skimp on LAC nodes, but still had LACs with much weaker wedge strength than a starship's, but with starship level acceleration in normal space, using old-style (non-Grayson) inertial compensators, is Nuncio:
The Shadow of Saganaimi, Chapter 19 wrote:Abigail Hearns sat in the copilot's seat on the flight deck of the pinnace tractored to the hull of the Nuncian Space Force light attack craft. Although NNS Wolverine—named for a Pontifex species which bore remarkably little resemblance to the far smaller Terran predator of the same name—dwarfed the pinnace, she was tiny compared to any true starship. In fact, at barely fifteen thousand tons, she was less than five percent the size of Hexapuma, yet she was one of the more powerful units of Nuncio's fleet.
And, Abigail thought, remembering a night sky speckled with the brief, dying stars of deep-space nuclear explosions, she's not that much smaller than the LACs we had when Lady Harrington took out Thunder of God. There's a certain symmetry there, I suppose . . . if this works out.
Wolverine sat motionless in space relative to Nuncio-B, holding her position while Pontifex—and HMS Hexapuma—moved steadily away from her at an orbital velocity of just over thirty-two kilometers per second. Five other LACs sat with her, all that could reach her present position before she'd stopped in space, holding position on minimal power, and let her homeworld move away from her. They were packed to the limits of their life-support capacity with two companies of Nuncio Army troops who, Commodore Karlberg had assured Captain Terekhov, were fully qualified for boarding actions and vacuum work. She hoped Karlberg was right, although if everything went well, it probably wouldn't matter one way or the other.
***Snip***
She looked down at the chrono once more and nodded as it came up on the five-hour mark since her remote arrays had detected the intruders. Five hours in which Pontifex had moved over half a million kilometers, taking Hexapuma with it. If the bogeys had managed to put one over on Hexapuma and get a recon drone into space headed to intercept the planet at the time they themselves would approach the hyper limit, its course would take it far enough from Wolverine's present position to make anything as weak as a LAC's impeller signature invisible to them. And since Bogey One and Two themselves were still far beyond shipboard detection range of the planet—
"Stand by for acceleration in three minutes," Captain Einarsson's voice said in her earbug.
The three minutes ticked past into eternity, and then the six LACs and their pinnace parasites went instantly to five hundred gravities of acceleration.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.
