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

darrell wrote: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.

No a fort is mostly armor. There is a joke in one of the tech articles produced by a Bu9 guy where he says (paraphrasing) "there is a word for ships that have enough armor to stop enemy weapons from doing damage. That word is 'fort'".

What about a Borg cube as the basis of the design

George J. Smith wrote:What about a Borg cube as the basis of the design

Well fitting a Impellar ring on a cube would be a feat.

But when the Grand alliance gets working spider drives I can see forts might get a significant redesign. And then a cube might work as well if you had a spider drive keel on each edge between 4 of the sides.

Duckk wrote:http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2928&p=61949

Don't suppose you could email this quote to Joe Buckley and have him archive it at his thefifthimperium.com site? Maybe then he would archive it? Should I send him a cookie?

I don't believe that a fort is mostly armor.

Honor Among Enemys wrote:But the maneuver's authors had assumed that since battleships were useless in fleet actions, the PN might throw them at the Junction from Trevor's Star for the sole purpose of whittling down the fortresses, instead. The umpires had calculated that the Peeps could have put roughly fifty through the Junction in a single transit. That was little more than thirteen percent of their total battleship strength, which meant—in theory—that they could do the same thing more than once if it worked . . . and for their sacrifice, the "Peep CO" in the war games "destroyed" thirty-one fortresses, or a quarter of the entire Junction Defense Force.

If peep battleships, which are missile heavy and fire BC missiles can kill more forts on a ton for ton basis in the case of a surprise attack, than I don't see how the forts can have much heavier armor than SD's.

kzt wrote:

darrell wrote: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.

No a fort is mostly armor. There is a joke in one of the tech articles produced by a Bu9 guy where he says (paraphrasing) "there is a word for ships that have enough armor to stop enemy weapons from doing damage. That word is 'fort'".

Duckk wrote:http://forums.davidweber.net/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.

Couldn't drag a 4 year old post out of the random access memory that is my brain...big smile

So you have a really long and honking fat spindle crammed with weapons and everthing needed for crew and sensors and really deep magazines (and perhaps several squadrons of LACs plus impellers to shift it slowly around.

I would say your size limiations are set by the maximum size and geometry to fit into whatever class of freighter/transport you have to be able to take the modules though a wormhole. Once you have that and start cranking out cookie-cutter copies of whatever the range of basic modules you need to make one compleat fort (and the body -vs the ends- of the spindle could include repeats of one or more of the body section modules) you start shipping them as needed. At that point you are not limited to the ends of the Manticore Junction wormholes. You can put forts by Spindle. You could sell forts to Idaho and Zunker though that is probably way beyond what Zunker can afford.

Brigade XO wrote:

Duckk wrote:http://forums.davidweber.net/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.

Couldn't drag a 4 year old post out of the random access memory that is my brain...big smile

So you have a really long and honking fat spindle crammed with weapons and everthing needed for crew and sensors and really deep magazines (and perhaps several squadrons of LACs plus impellers to shift it slowly around.

I would say your size limiations are set by the maximum size and geometry to fit into whatever class of freighter/transport you have to be able to take the modules though a wormhole. Once you have that and start cranking out cookie-cutter copies of whatever the range of basic modules you need to make one compleat fort (and the body -vs the ends- of the spindle could include repeats of one or more of the body section modules) you start shipping them as needed. At that point you are not limited to the ends of the Manticore Junction wormholes. You can put forts by Spindle. You could sell forts to Idaho and Zunker though that is probably way beyond what Zunker can afford.

Yeah, if you can get something through the junction, you have all the pre-requisites needed to move it anywhere.