Honorverse ramblings and musings

cthia wrote:Squeezing Compensator Efficiency

Ok you guys. Slow down for the snotty. Max accel of an SD is currently 600+ Gs, IIRC. An SD double the size would reduce the accel significantly < 300 gravities? Because 300 Gs would still be an impressive acceleration for that much firepower.

Upthread, Jonathan gave a figure of 1g lost for every 2500 tons over the plunge. That's 400g for another million tons. The 16 mton superduperdreadnaught would have practically no acceleration that the compensator would still handle: you're down to what the grav plates can make up, maybe 150g to the extent you can work under 5g accel, or 50g for 1g operations.

So - think 50g normal accelerations and 150g burst for anything that large. If you want it hypercapable, you'd have to build it still with the cigar hull form instead of the freer arrangements fortresses can adopt. At that speed, you may well become vulnerable to stealthy munitions that can sneak into laserhead range for shots the sidewalls won't intercept.

Regarding the compensator thing, because all warships are the slightly flattened spindles with hammerheads... couldn't they up that volume slightly without really changing the field by just 'fattening' up the ship?

Remove that tapering, or if that's absolutely necessary mechanic for the wedge itself, then if you fattened it up a bit, and then just have an almost vertical 'drop' to have the required thin section for your nodes, then do the standard hammerhead flare? Wouldn't that mildly increase warship displaced tonnage, without significantly decreasing compensator function?

It may be simpler and easier from an engineering stand point to build the entire ship being covered by the compensator rather then just parts of the ship.

A practical explanation may be that the superstructure of a ship can not handle it sections being under different accelerations well.

Somtaaw wrote:Regarding the compensator thing, because all warships are the slightly flattened spindles with hammerheads... couldn't they up that volume slightly without really changing the field by just 'fattening' up the ship?

Remove that tapering, or if that's absolutely necessary mechanic for the wedge itself, then if you fattened it up a bit, and then just have an almost vertical 'drop' to have the required thin section for your nodes, then do the standard hammerhead flare? Wouldn't that mildly increase warship displaced tonnage, without significantly decreasing compensator function?

The problem is that a full ship's wedge reportedly creates a heck of a grav shear when it comes online. The taper from the nodes towards the middle of the ship is needed (as I understand from things RFC has dropped over the years) to keep the hill from intruding into the turbulent grav start-up zone where the wedge initialization would shred the hull.
I assume the hull taper is already pretty close to maxing out the safe zone; fatten it much and you risk tearing up the hull there whenever you start the wedge...

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Regarding the compensator thing, because all warships are the slightly flattened spindles with hammerheads... couldn't they up that volume slightly without really changing the field by just 'fattening' up the ship?

Remove that tapering, or if that's absolutely necessary mechanic for the wedge itself, then if you fattened it up a bit, and then just have an almost vertical 'drop' to have the required thin section for your nodes, then do the standard hammerhead flare? Wouldn't that mildly increase warship displaced tonnage, without significantly decreasing compensator function?

The problem is that a full ship's wedge reportedly creates a heck of a grav shear when it comes online. The taper from the nodes towards the middle of the ship is needed (as I understand from things RFC has dropped over the years) to keep the hill from intruding into the turbulent grav start-up zone where the wedge initialization would shred the hull.
I assume the hull taper is already pretty close to maxing out the safe zone; fatten it much and you risk tearing up the hull there whenever you start the wedge...

Perusing the ship profiles, the taper gets much sharper with (1) larger units, and (2) later units. This suggests that the required taper doesn't scale directly with increased volume (maybe it varies with cross-section?) and that they've been able to tighten up the tolerances with time and development.

The amount you can get back with a tighter taper isn't all that pronounced though. The naval architects will all worship at the altar of efficiency with the devotion of fanatics, but there's not that much we can expect them to get in terms of tonnage there. They may get (by comparison with volume) a wee bit more in broadside area and they're sure to use that, but I'm also sure they can find some use for the taper surface area too - and maybe more such use the more the tapered area faces outward instead of at the inside of the hammerhead. If that's the case, then there's cause not to minimize the taper every bit as much as can be.

Speaking of usable surfaces though: LAC bay hatches on CLAC's. Should we assume they're covered with fire control links, sensors, etc.? I don't recall any mention, and I suppose there may be some sense by some designer that they're just there to be armored hatches, but broadside surface area going to waste is offensive and I'd think avoidable in this case.

JeffEngel wrote:

cthia wrote:Squeezing Compensator Efficiency

Ok you guys. Slow down for the snotty. Max accel of an SD is currently 600+ Gs, IIRC. An SD double the size would reduce the accel significantly < 300 gravities? Because 300 Gs would still be an impressive acceleration for that much firepower.

Upthread, Jonathan gave a figure of 1g lost for every 2500 tons over the plunge. That's 400g for another million tons. The 16 mton superduperdreadnaught would have practically no acceleration that the compensator would still handle: you're down to what the grav plates can make up, maybe 150g to the extent you can work under 5g accel, or 50g for 1g operations.

So - think 50g normal accelerations and 150g burst for anything that large. If you want it hypercapable, you'd have to build it still with the cigar hull form instead of the freer arrangements fortresses can adopt. At that speed, you may well become vulnerable to stealthy munitions that can sneak into laserhead range for shots the sidewalls won't intercept.

The non-contiguous element withstanding, still manageable.

"Captain, I need sections XXX thru XXX evacuated and decompensated stat, to effect repairs on sections ZZZ thru ZZZ."

It'd be a matter of the field being flexible in that manner. I'm not certain it is, but worth the question.

Of course, this solution could kill trapped and inaccessible crew unable to be quickly evacuated.

Dont forget complexity. one device, creating a field for the whole ship? or many smaller devices, each having to cover one or two rooms, and interfering with each other at the edges?

pnakasone wrote:
Repairs, maintenance, and damage control of every thing on a ship.

cthia wrote:I'm sure it doesn't work this way, and I'm even more sure that someone has already considered it. But, just in case, (and to suffer bringing my-mere-mortal self up to speed should you not mind), concentrating effort on the first limiting factor from above 1)volume overhead - since current ship designs enjoy a significant decrease in manned crew and since compensator efficiency depends on the two items above, why can't a double sized SD be designed where only the necessary areas of a ship are brought under compensator effect -- manned and computer sections? Since humans and computers are what seems to be effected. Why does the volume of the entire ship have to be covered? Design a new generation SD where only the crew and computers are contained within sections that will be under compensator effect. As akin to when less than 100 % of early ships were pressurized or 'spin-gravitized'.

Am I barking up the wrong gravity well?

2 words

STRUCTURAL FAILURE

you have one point in a structure with no force on it and the point next to it is under 608G s of acceleration - or in a Grav wav, ~3000 Gs of stress. and its on - and it's off - on - off - on - off.

Eventually something is going to break - pretty spectacularly - and at the wrong time.

In the spin section ships, the entire ship was compensated - the spin was to add 1G (or so) to certain areas of the ship for human comfort - this was before grav plates existed to add the 1G for univerisal Human hability in 1 G.

Theemile wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm sure it doesn't work this way, and I'm even more sure that someone has already considered it. But, just in case, (and to suffer bringing my-mere-mortal self up to speed should you not mind), concentrating effort on the first limiting factor from above 1)volume overhead - since current ship designs enjoy a significant decrease in manned crew and since compensator efficiency depends on the two items above, why can't a double sized SD be designed where only the necessary areas of a ship are brought under compensator effect -- manned and computer sections? Since humans and computers are what seems to be effected. Why does the volume of the entire ship have to be covered? Design a new generation SD where only the crew and computers are contained within sections that will be under compensator effect. As akin to when less than 100 % of early ships were pressurized or 'spin-gravitized'.

Am I barking up the wrong gravity well?

2 words

STRUCTURAL FAILURE

you have one point in a structure with no force on it and the point next to it is under 608G s of acceleration - or in a Grav wav, ~3000 Gs of stress. and its on - and it's off - on - off - on - off.

Eventually something is going to break - pretty spectacularly - and at the wrong time.

In the spin section ships, the entire ship was compensated - the spin was to add 1G (or so) to certain areas of the ship for human comfort - this was before grav plates existed to add the 1G for univerisal Human hability in 1 G.

I agree structural failure would be a real copper-plated Ransom of a concern, as also opined by pnakasone some five posts upwind.

I initially considered it before I suggested such a thing, but assumed this would be a new design that would take this problem into account, with plenty of extra volume to reinforce where necessary -- and because textev already gives a total failure at damaging only fragile systems (computers, etc.) and humans. If going from 600+ Gs of compensation to virtually nil in a second doesn't damage the structure, I think we're off to a good start. No?

Plus, treat the effected areas as deep-sea divers facing the "bends." To prevent the "structural bends" decrease decompensation gradually.

Learn from life.

Considering it, new ship designs can incorporate a mechanical damping system, shocks in the spirit of rail couplings inbetween cars on trains which endure a similar problem albeit on a much smaller scale. But the concept...