FTL missiles

Jonathan_S wrote:I basically agree with the rest of your post so I'm just quoting the bit I wanted to respond to.

Roguevictory wrote:And if memory serves they would only need to picket the alpha band because any such weapon would have to stay in alpha band long enough to recharge the hyperdrive if dropped from a higher band. Unless you fit the pods with multiple hyperdrives which both increases cost and power demand.

Actually the description of Honor's convoy coming into Grayson in HotQ makes it sound like you can do a continuous transition down through multiple hyperbands.

The Honor of the Queen: Ch 5 wrote:Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

This isn't totally definitive, but given the cycle times for SDs 4 minutes seems too quick for even a CA to recycle its generator after discharging it in a jump; much less the much larger freighters that were in company.


Now I'm not sure if you can abort halfway through or if you're locked in once you start the drop, but if you want to do a smooth drop from say the Delta bands to n-space you appear to be able to. (Not sure it works the same way going up )

Oops. It has been a while since I read any of the novels Ashes of Victory.

Jonathan_S wrote:I basically agree with the rest of your post so I'm just quoting the bit I wanted to respond to.

Roguevictory wrote:And if memory serves they would only need to picket the alpha band because any such weapon would have to stay in alpha band long enough to recharge the hyperdrive if dropped from a higher band. Unless you fit the pods with multiple hyperdrives which both increases cost and power demand.

Actually the description of Honor's convoy coming into Grayson in HotQ makes it sound like you can do a continuous transition down through multiple hyperbands.

The Honor of the Queen: Ch 5 wrote:Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

This isn't totally definitive, but given the cycle times for SDs 4 minutes seems too quick for even a CA to recycle its generator after discharging it in a jump; much less the much larger freighters that were in company.


Now I'm not sure if you can abort halfway through or if you're locked in once you start the drop, but if you want to do a smooth drop from say the Delta bands to n-space you appear to be able to. (Not sure it works the same way going up )

aparently not. Also from HotQ: “Too high. We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin.” Since there is 8 hyper bands and 24 hours per day, trueman spend an average of 3 hours per band. at 4 minutes per translation, that would be 360 sub bands.

Of course, the fact that her engineer "played with his spanners" could mean that he tweaked his equipment to translate faster and there could have been even more sub bands to navagate.

darrell wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually the description of Honor's convoy coming into Grayson in HotQ makes it sound like you can do a continuous transition down through multiple hyperbands.

This isn't totally definitive, but given the cycle times for SDs 4 minutes seems too quick for even a CA to recycle its generator after discharging it in a jump; much less the much larger freighters that were in company.


Now I'm not sure if you can abort halfway through or if you're locked in once you start the drop, but if you want to do a smooth drop from say the Delta bands to n-space you appear to be able to. (Not sure it works the same way going up )

aparently not. Also from HotQ: “Too high. We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin.” Since there is 8 hyper bands and 24 hours per day, trueman spend an average of 3 hours per band. at 4 minutes per translation, that would be 360 sub bands.

Of course, the fact that her engineer "played with his spanners" could mean that he tweaked his equipment to translate faster and there could have been even more sub bands to navagate.

Going upwards, sounds to be more acceleration limited rather than the drive. Once you're in hyper, it's really how fast can you accelerate your ship (and if you have sufficient shielding) to keep pushing higher. Changing bands drops your velocity by about 90%, so if it applies both down and up, you'd have to keep accelerating to get back to the velocity you were at and then move higher.

But the only time the hyper generator seems to really be 'cycle' limited is after you've totally exited hyper and you want to jump back into it. The other way seems to be perfectly fine. By the most recent books, using a ship beyond the hyper limit to "call in your reinforcements" seems to be a standard trick and the only real delay is in them receiving the call, and updating their tactical data. Task Groups and whole fleets are then appearing mere minutes after the messenger arrives, and that doesn't really correspond with the 4 minute frame of superdreadnoughts finishing their hyper-cycle, ready for another jump.

darrell wrote:This isn't totally definitive, but given the cycle times for SDs 4 minutes seems too quick for even a CA to recycle its generator after discharging it in a jump; much less the much larger freighters that were in company.


Now I'm not sure if you can abort halfway through or if you're locked in once you start the drop, but if you want to do a smooth drop from say the Delta bands to n-space you appear to be able to. (Not sure it works the same way going up )

aparently not. Also from HotQ: “Too high. We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin.” Since there is 8 hyper bands and 24 hours per day, trueman spend an average of 3 hours per band. at 4 minutes per translation, that would be 360 sub bands.

Of course, the fact that her engineer "played with his spanners" could mean that he tweaked his equipment to translate faster and there could have been even more sub bands to navagate.[/quote]
I suspect it took 4 days to bounce off that wall because they had been in the upper sub-bands of Theta pushing for every minuscule incremental advantage and finally pushed too hard. I don't think it takes 4 days to climb to the Theta band.

I admit to not being aware of primary text-ev on this point. But I will point out that the few times we've gotten both transit time and transit distance the numbers don't allow for much time getting into the higher bands.


The example I have handy is one about Streak Drives back from when we were calculating the velocity multipliers for the Kappa bands. But in Storm from the Shadows there's a quote that it would take 5 days for a Streak courier to cross the 60 ly from Beowulf to Mesa.

The c multiplier in the lower bands isn't high enough for that statement to be true if it took it 4 of those days to reach the top of the current military hyperbands before it could even get into Iota and then Kappa. But there have been other time/distance pairs given for hyper travel and none of them appear to allow for much time to climb to the band you'll be cruising in.

Somtaaw wrote:Going upwards, sounds to be more acceleration limited rather than the drive. Once you're in hyper, it's really how fast can you accelerate your ship (and if you have sufficient shielding) to keep pushing higher. Changing bands drops your velocity by about 90%, so if it applies both down and up, you'd have to keep accelerating to get back to the velocity you were at and then move higher.

Except ships can transit up or down at very low speeds. Your forward velocity has nothing to do with your ability to change hyper bands (though as you said changing bands does bleed away velocity). Well, with the sole exception that if you're above 0.3c and try to go from n-space to hyper you catastrophically fail to do so.

Incidentally the bleed-off rate decreases the higher the band is you're accessing; through of course it's cumulative. You "only" lose 52% velocity moving up or down between Eta and Theta bands.
See the chart from the pearls: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/95/0

Uh, it requires zero, nada, zilch acceleration in a hyper band to reach the next band. It only requires a magic beans hyper generator...

We only know that said hyper generator requires ~5min to change from normal space to the alpha. We have zero, nada, zilch information on time required to change hyper bands once in hyper space. It is sorta implied I would postulate. Nor do we know if sub bands require extra time either. Personally, I would say, "NO" to extra time required in sub bands of say the delta hyper band. At most, I would go with the need for ~5min to change between the alpha and beta band for instance, same as from normal to alpha.

There was a crash through the hyperbands that was very hard on the crew. Emergency use only. Presumably using a slow transition prevents damage and or keeps the crew on their feet and not heaving.
http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Hyperspace

Slowing only happens going up, going down ships slow down to prevent crew nausea. A Missile made for hyper space or an unmanned missile barge could come screaming out of hyperspace.

Lord Skimper wrote:Slowing only happens going up, going down ships slow down to prevent crew nausea.

Nope, textev explicitly says dropping from hyper to N-Space bleeds off speed.

ETA Textev:

More Than Honor
The Universe of Honor Harrington
(1) Background (general) wrote:The major problem limiting hyper speeds was that simply getting into hyper did not create a propulsive effect. Indeed, the initial translation into hyper was a complex energy transfer which reduced a starship's velocity by "bleeding off" momentum. In effect, a translating hypership lost approximately 92% of its normal-space velocity when entering hyper. This had unfortunate consequences in terms of reaction mass requirements, particularly since the fact that hydrogen catcher fields were inoperable in hyper meant one could not replenish one's reaction mass underway. On the other hand, the velocity bleed effect applied equally regardless of the direction of the translation (that is, one lost 92% of one's velocity whether one was entering hyper-space from normal-space or normal-space from hyper-space), which meant that leaving hyper automatically decelerated one's vessel to a normal-space velocity only 08% of whatever its velocity had been in hyper-space. This tremendously reduced the amount of deceleration required at the far end of a hyper voyage and so made reaction drives at least workable.

Jonathan_S wrote:

darrell wrote:This isn't totally definitive, but given the cycle times for SDs 4 minutes seems too quick for even a CA to recycle its generator after discharging it in a jump; much less the much larger freighters that were in company.


Now I'm not sure if you can abort halfway through or if you're locked in once you start the drop, but if you want to do a smooth drop from say the Delta bands to n-space you appear to be able to. (Not sure it works the same way going up )

Jonathan_S wrote:aparently not. Also from HotQ: “Too high. We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin.” Since there is 8 hyper bands and 24 hours per day, trueman spend an average of 3 hours per band. at 4 minutes per translation, that would be 360 sub bands.

Of course, the fact that her engineer "played with his spanners" could mean that he tweaked his equipment to translate faster and there could have been even more sub bands to navagate.

I suspect it took 4 days to bounce off that wall because they had been in the upper sub-bands of Theta pushing for every minuscule incremental advantage and finally pushed too hard. I don't think it takes 4 days to climb to the Theta band.

I admit to not being aware of primary text-ev on this point. But I will point out that the few times we've gotten both transit time and transit distance the numbers don't allow for much time getting into the higher bands.


The example I have handy is one about Streak Drives back from when we were calculating the velocity multipliers for the Kappa bands. But in Storm from the Shadows there's a quote that it would take 5 days for a Streak courier to cross the 60 ly from Beowulf to Mesa.

The c multiplier in the lower bands isn't high enough for that statement to be true if it took it 4 of those days to reach the top of the current military hyperbands before it could even get into Iota and then Kappa. But there have been other time/distance pairs given for hyper travel and none of them appear to allow for much time to climb to the band you'll be cruising in.

Apollo was able to climb to the top of the theta band in one day, not 4 days. Jonathan_S referred to the quoted text from The Honor of the Queen "We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin." Thereby proving your point (before you made it) that it doesn't take 4 days to climb all the way to the top of the theta band.

It may or may not be possible to climb all the way to the top of the theta band (iota wall) in less than a day, but it definitely can be done in one.

noblehunter wrote:I'd see them more like SMBHAWKS from Starfire. FTL capable pods that would fire normal missles after dropping from hyper at point blank range or from an unexpected direction. That would let the tech deal with some of the softer obstacles of Honorverse FTL. Still not feasible even if possible though. Apollo can do something fairly similar even if it takes longer.

SMBHawks were programmed based on reconnaissance through the warp hole. Considering that other than wormholes, travel between stars is NOT instantaneous, there would be no point to sending a missile that far without guidance. As for sending them through a wormhole, the transport would need to have a Warshawski (?sp) sail (weight given in other postings) and would disrupt the wormhole for a period of time. And you still wouldn't have any reconnaissance of the destination.