Forts, pre- and post-Buttercup and their manning req's

Kytheros wrote:Forts, like ships are both getting ever improving and increasing automation and growing in size. They're certainly not getting any smaller. My understanding is that Forts are, and always have, been large enough that they're far enough on the bad side of compensator efficiency curves that there's not a whole lot of difference between the acceleration a compensator can get you and grav plates can get you.


The latest generation forts that I remember being mentioned were 16 megatons. I think the pre-war Junction Forts were 10 or 12 megatons. Or, in other words, 50-60% larger than a Superdreadnought.

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Surprisingly, forts seem to be going DOWN in size. The old Junctions forts massed 16-20 Mtons, while the forts mass constructed for places like the Lynx terminus (Which I believe you were referencing above) massed 12 Mtons. However, we have never been told about the new junction forts or specifically what their design is.

A Manty Terminus defense has an advantage over other wormholes and the terminus; they specifically do not need to expect an attack against them through the Manticorian wormhole, as such an attack would need to fight through the Junction defenses first. So, While the junction has 2 types of forts - 1 group watching the emergence lanes and a 2nd dedicated to intercepting hyper assaults, a Terminus just needs to defend against hyper assaults.

So it's probable that the "Hyper guard" forts at the junction are a similar design to the Lynx forts, and the emergence lane forts, are a very different design.

You are also going to have a large number of missile weapons in a fort, both offense and defense. That would be to engage the enemy outside of energy range and defend against missiles.

The books have the forts -at least at the Junction- rotating in and out of duty stations. That would be similar to moving troop contingent up and Into the Line for a week or month and then swap them out with other units for several of the same time periods. While in the positions at the "front" you need to rotate your on-duty crew just as you would on a ship with the various watches. You ALWAYS need a certain number of people at their duty station on watch.

While you are going to have a wide variety of skills and training along with multiple primary jobs, very few people on the fort is going to have only one skill set and very few are not going to have some duty which is not combat related WHEN the fort has to engage in combat. Cooks and storekeepers don't just sit around if people are shooting at you.

We don't know if the earlier forts provided anything in the way of assistance for customs enforcement or that was handled from different locations. Much, possibly most, of the traffic though the Junction was just passing thought and might stop in the Manticore system or at any of the stations servicing the Junction (warehouse, passenger transfer, commercial trade, repair and maintenance) If crews attached to forts did get involed in custom's inspection it is quite possible that they would use a Marine contingent as backup. Even military skinsuits don't come close to a Marines in Armor to make a point or have to deal with a problem at a ship that needs to be boarded once a problem is found.

Marines are also used as security on Warships and I would expect that to also happen on a Fort.

David has said that the forts are modular. They can scale in size from SD sized to 30 million tons or anything in between.

Duckk wrote:David has said that the forts are modular. They can scale in size from SD sized to 30 million tons or anything in between.

I took the modular part to mean that they were essentially built in section, transported where they were needed and then put together. I also took that to allow for practical transport, not just from the fabrication yards but through the Junction. Towing stuff doesn't seem to be a good idea using the Junction. There would be practical maximum sizes to fit into existing or even specialy built transports and the various moduals would have to fit inside their transport.

Thing is, you are going to need moduals that should be close to the skin like the weapons and magazines and sensors, boat bays, impellers etc. Other stuff would be deeper, under variious layers of armor and storage.

My question is what does a Junction/Terminus fort look like? Do we have an image of a present Manticorian Junction fort? I understand they don't need to be spherical but the fat spindle shape of the Caravan Class freighter expanded up to 30,000,000 tons

It is certainly be possible to build modual sections for missile magazines, living quarters, power plants and any range of used and then connect them to one another and the things like enviornmental controls, power, communications, internal transport.

If you are building these things so the resulting fort is spherical, you are either going to have to do some sizing of moduals to fit along with or build in the curves or you would have a shell and then have an intersting time placing the various types and sizes of modules inside with a bunch of empty space.

Brigade XO wrote:If you are building these things so the resulting fort is spherical, you are either going to have to do some sizing of moduals to fit along with or build in the curves or you would have a shell and then have an intersting time placing the various types and sizes of modules inside with a bunch of empty space.

Why would you need smooth curves? The modules could fit together like Leggo(tm) blocks and the resulting fort could look pixelated and still be fully functional.

#1 We know almost nothing about forts
#2 We know they were assembled on the other side of the Junction
#3 We have been told they use impeller drive and or reaction drive
#4 One reason given for why forts are so more powerful is they do not have Impeller rooms. Impeller rooms are given as ~15%-20% of an SD by mass tonnage. Yes this flies in the face of #3
#5 We have been told that Forts do not have inertial compensators, thus saving more tonnage. They use Grav plates limiting the Forts to ~75G's or so.

If forts do not have impellers then they can be any tonnage one wishes. They can still have spherical(tubular) sidewalls. Sidewall strength typically on a ship is a function of its wedge strength which oh-by-the-way is created via its impellers, so how a spherical sidewall is so much stronger is a giant pile of handwavium.

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We can surmise that old style junction forts had quite a few Grasers for use against a mass transit. On the other hand would not Graser mines be better? If a Fort only has 75G to work with against an impeller ship with 400-500G, one is literally going to have to surround said volume with Graser Forts so one can get a shot before the Impeller ships race out of the junction and then leisurely take their time destroying said forts from long range with missiles. All these Grasers are absolutely useless against missile armed opponents hypering in. Why the books showed the RMN at the Junction sometimes and not in orbit around Manticore. So, said forts, must also have missiles and quite a few of them.

In IEH? or EoH? Later forts clearly were to be used with pods, but were not done building yet. These later forts should be able to be upgraded.

Anyways, speculate away.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2928&p=61949

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3107&p=68448

So no, you aren't going to get clear of the Junction even in the old days.

Relax wrote:#1 We know almost nothing about forts
#2 We know they were assembled on the other side of the Junction
#3 We have been told they use impeller drive and or reaction drive
#4 One reason given for why forts are so more powerful is they do not have Impeller rooms. Impeller rooms are given as ~15%-20% of an SD by mass tonnage. Yes this flies in the face of #3
#5 We have been told that Forts do not have inertial compensators, thus saving more tonnage. They use Grav plates limiting the Forts to ~75G's or so.

If forts do not have impellers then they can be any tonnage one wishes. They can still have spherical(tubular) sidewalls. Sidewall strength typically on a ship is a function of its wedge strength which oh-by-the-way is created via its impellers, so how a spherical sidewall is so much stronger is a giant pile of handwavium.

*****************************************************
We can surmise that old style junction forts had quite a few Grasers for use against a mass transit. On the other hand would not Graser mines be better? If a Fort only has 75G to work with against an impeller ship with 400-500G, one is literally going to have to surround said volume with Graser Forts so one can get a shot before the Impeller ships race out of the junction and then leisurely take their time destroying said forts from long range with missiles. All these Grasers are absolutely useless against missile armed opponents hypering in. Why the books showed the RMN at the Junction sometimes and not in orbit around Manticore. So, said forts, must also have missiles and quite a few of them.

In IEH? or EoH? Later forts clearly were to be used with pods, but were not done building yet. These later forts should be able to be upgraded.

Anyways, speculate away.

Forts have impeller rooms (containing the support machinery for each node), but only with beta nodes (and presumably in the case of the newer Manticoran forts, beta-squared nodes) to generate an impeller wedge to provide movement and the ability to interpose the wedge against enemy fire. What they don't have are alpha nodes (capable of being reconfigured from generating an impeller wedge to generating a Warshawski sail) and their associated impeller rooms. That's 16 impeller rooms that a fortress doesn't have compared to a SD.

David has said that a fort can have a single impeller ring. That cuts the number of impeller rooms for a fort's beta nodes (or beta-squared nodes) in half compared to a SD.

Finally, forts also don't have a hyper generator, while an SD does.

Vince wrote:Forts have impeller rooms (containing the support machinery for each node), but only with beta nodes (and presumably in the case of the newer Manticoran forts, beta-squared nodes) to generate an impeller wedge to provide movement and the ability to interpose the wedge against enemy fire. What they don't have are alpha nodes (capable of being reconfigured from generating an impeller wedge to generating a Warshawski sail) and their associated impeller rooms. That's 16 impeller rooms that a fortress doesn't have compared to a SD.

David has said that a fort can have a single impeller ring. That cuts the number of impeller rooms for a fort's beta nodes (or beta-squared nodes) in half compared to a SD.

Finally, forts also don't have a hyper generator, while an SD does.

And remember that Alpha nodes, and their supporting rooms are much more massive than Beta nodes (IIRC the 2 Alpha rings make up something like 2/3rds the mass/volume of a ship's impeller rings and rooms while being only being half the rings)
So a single beta ring propelled fort could shave off closer to 5/6th than 3/4 of the impeller displacement of a standard 2 Alpha +2 Beta starship.

An SD's impeller room has a sail to be able to accelerate on the order of 5,000 G's. With just standard grav plates you are looking at the order 100 G's, less than 200 G's for heavy duty grav plates.

5,000 G's for 15% of an SD's space would be less than 1% for a 100G-200G impeller room. Then you pull out the hyper generator and other simalar items.

An SD is about 45% weapons (4M out of 8.5m) a fort will be more than 75% weapons, so a 12M fort will be more than 9m weapons, so 50% bigger has more than twice the weapons tonnage.

Relax wrote:#1 We know almost nothing about forts
#2 We know they were assembled on the other side of the Junction
#3 We have been told they use impeller drive and or reaction drive
#4 One reason given for why forts are so more powerful is they do not have Impeller rooms. Impeller rooms are given as ~15%-20% of an SD by mass tonnage. Yes this flies in the face of #3
#5 We have been told that Forts do not have inertial compensators, thus saving more tonnage. They use Grav plates limiting the Forts to ~75G's or so.