Bellerophon

Jonathan_S wrote:

Kytheros wrote:Startup for micro-fusion plants is massively different from capacitor charging or starting of a regular missile, Also massively different from energy weapons, both beams and energy torpedoes.

I would guess that a capacitor powered missile it charged by electricity; but a micro-fusion powered missile (to save space and squeeze the tiny fusion plant in) isn't capable of cold-starting and has to get fed near critical plasma from another fusion reactor. (We know the pods for fusion powered missiles have their own onboard reactors, so those could "jump=start" the missiles. But in tubes you'd need (super high density) plasma feeds that the conventional missiles didn't. So you either have to pipe that from the ship's main fusion reactors, or put smaller "local" reactors near the tubes to jump=start the missiles.
Neither is a minor refit operation. (Plus of course the results if a fusion bird with it's reactor hot suffers damage in the tube is much worse than if it happens to a capacitor bird; that's why fusion tube designs have such extensive additional armor cofferdaming around their tubes. Even emergency refits probably wouldn't be willing to forgo that; lest a single hit chain reaction across all the tubes of a broadside)

Yeah, there are reasons RFC made refitting to fusion powered missiles is far from trivial.

The biggest factor is power. Capacitor missiles are charged in missile storage and take several hours or days to get the charge required for 3 minutes of operation. fusion powered missiles must get a massive power charge to start the reactor.

To illistrate, for a capacitor drive missile a 1 kw charger over 3 days will provide the power for 1,44 million watts over three minutes.

By comparision, the micro fusion reactor may provide 2,000,000 watts power but require 500,000 watts to power up.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Kytheros wrote:Startup for micro-fusion plants is massively different from capacitor charging or starting of a regular missile, Also massively different from energy weapons, both beams and energy torpedoes.

I would guess that a capacitor powered missile it charged by electricity; but a micro-fusion powered missile (to save space and squeeze the tiny fusion plant in) isn't capable of cold-starting and has to get fed near critical plasma from another fusion reactor. (We know the pods for fusion powered missiles have their own onboard reactors, so those could "jump=start" the missiles. But in tubes you'd need (super high density) plasma feeds that the conventional missiles didn't. So you either have to pipe that from the ship's main fusion reactors, or put smaller "local" reactors near the tubes to jump=start the missiles.
Neither is a minor refit operation. (Plus of course the results if a fusion bird with it's reactor hot suffers damage in the tube is much worse than if it happens to a capacitor bird; that's why fusion tube designs have such extensive additional armor cofferdaming around their tubes. Even emergency refits probably wouldn't be willing to forgo that; lest a single hit chain reaction across all the tubes of a broadside)

Yeah, there are reasons RFC made refitting to fusion powered missiles is far from trivial.

Honorverse capacitors that supply energy to weapons, impeller nodes and fusion reactors are plasma capacitors. The only electrical capacitors in the Honorverse are used in electronics (molycircs).

Launcher design: PODs vs. tubes

darrell wrote:The biggest factor is power. Capacitor missiles are charged in missile storage and take several hours or days to get the charge required for 3 minutes of operation. fusion powered missiles must get a massive power charge to start the reactor.

To illistrate, for a capacitor drive missile a 1 kw charger over 3 days will provide the power for 1,44 million watts over three minutes.

By comparision, the micro fusion reactor may provide 2,000,000 watts power but require 500,000 watts to power up.

To move 100 tons at approximately 45000 gravities for three minutes your energy estimates are off by more than 15 orders of magnitude.

Vince wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:]I would guess that a capacitor powered missile it charged by electricity; but a micro-fusion powered missile (to save space and squeeze the tiny fusion plant in) isn't capable of cold-starting and has to get fed near critical plasma from another fusion reactor. (We know the pods for fusion powered missiles have their own onboard reactors, so those could "jump=start" the missiles. But in tubes you'd need (super high density) plasma feeds that the conventional missiles didn't. So you either have to pipe that from the ship's main fusion reactors, or put smaller "local" reactors near the tubes to jump=start the missiles.
Neither is a minor refit operation. (Plus of course the results if a fusion bird with it's reactor hot suffers damage in the tube is much worse than if it happens to a capacitor bird; that's why fusion tube designs have such extensive additional armor cofferdaming around their tubes. Even emergency refits probably wouldn't be willing to forgo that; lest a single hit chain reaction across all the tubes of a broadside)

Yeah, there are reasons RFC made refitting to fusion powered missiles is far from trivial.

Honorverse capacitors that supply energy to weapons, impeller nodes and fusion reactors are plasma capacitors. The only electrical capacitors in the Honorverse are used in electronics (molycircs).

Launcher design: PODs vs. tubes

whoops. I forgot about that infodump. (Since to books aren't that specific and I read them more often than the pearls). Still the plasma necessary to jump start a fusion reactor is probably more energetic than what a capacitor can handle.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Kytheros wrote:Startup for micro-fusion plants is massively different from capacitor charging or starting of a regular missile, Also massively different from energy weapons, both beams and energy torpedoes.

I would guess that a capacitor powered missile it charged by electricity; but a micro-fusion powered missile (to save space and squeeze the tiny fusion plant in) isn't capable of cold-starting and has to get fed near critical plasma from another fusion reactor. (We know the pods for fusion powered missiles have their own onboard reactors, so those could "jump=start" the missiles.

Which of course means that the 4 stage Mk23 system defense pods that David was talking about either don't work or are hot as stars in IR due to their running fusion reactor, which would make hiding them kind of tough.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:

darrell wrote:The biggest factor is power. Capacitor missiles are charged in missile storage and take several hours or days to get the charge required for 3 minutes of operation. fusion powered missiles must get a massive power charge to start the reactor.

To illistrate, for a capacitor drive missile a 1 kw charger over 3 days will provide the power for 1,44 million watts over three minutes.

By comparision, the micro fusion reactor may provide 2,000,000 watts power but require 500,000 watts to power up.

To move 100 tons at approximately 45000 gravities for three minutes your energy estimates are off by more than 15 orders of magnitude.

I said to illistrate and for comparison, I knew that I was not close to the actual.

most of the power for a wedge comes from hyperspace. In hades, 30 minutes reaction thrusters at 150G's used the same ammount of fuel that a BC would need to accelerate at 450G's for 120 days plus fighting.

3 times the acceleration times 120 days times 48 = 17,280. when we figure the added bunkerage for energy weapons grav plates, compensator and everything else, call it 20,000 to 1.

that would bring your factor of 15 orders of magnatude down to 10.5 orders. Even that is ridiculous. To charge the capacitors in missile storage over three days would require more energy than all the electricity produced in the entire world for each missile.

Silverwall wrote:You could not take a shipyard from South Korea which fabricates the ships to micrometric tollerances as separate pieces and drop it in Liberia and get good outcomes the people there do not have the education and background to use the computer controlled tools that do the cutting and shaping. These tools need serious computer knowhow to use correctly.

Nor could you drop it in the middle of the Congo jungle. Those are not advanced/computer using countries. Though I suspect there are some (high-ups/well-to-do) who could/do. You can however drop it in the middle of urban Brazil or ... India ... and teach the people there too .... oh wait, I believe someone already did! The Talbot cluster, and Silesia are both space faring people with a base education in starship/computer/advanced tech works. They would generally have to have a segment of the population who are educated enough to do the jobs, and those who are recruited would leave openings in their current positions for others beneath them to move up and get more advanced educations. giving these base jobs to those people would have a 2 fold benefit but both improving GA production and at the same time help those territories grow both in tech base and economically.

Jonathan_S wrote:Some of that stuff does seem pretty high tech, or at least Manticore's designs are better than most other peoples. Their CM tubes manage to operate at a cyclic rate something like 4-5 times quicker than the SLNs. Clearly not all CM tubes are identical.

That would have nothing to do with the tube, it would be the loaders, the tube is just that, a tube, with some attachments, plugs etc. The loading system is what determines its load rate. That's what makes VLS so wonderful, no load rate, it's just there.

Jonathan_S wrote:And gravitic arrays are your primary FTL sensors; quality of those arrays is a primary driver of how well your ships see. Hardly something you'd want to risk going 2nd rate on. Radars are less commonly used, but again they get used to cue point defense, so the best frequncy hopping, anti-jam, EMC resistant installations, capable of individually tracking hundreds to thousands of relativistic targets means it's that the radar's Manticore is used to are probably far in advance of what Talbott or Silesia are up to building.

And again, has nothing to do with the production. Do you think every worker in China pumping out cellphones has a doctorate in engineering? No, of-course not. When they start the job, they are giving 1-2 weeks training "this is what your doing, look at this, make sure it looks like this and has this on it, thin hold it like this and plug it in this slot like this." That's pretty much it. I worked Cellphone referb, did not need to know how to design a motherboard, just use a screw driver and tell the difference between "this part that's shaped like that" and "that part that's shaped like this". put "this one here and that one there then snap this down and put these screws in." not rocket science. The "Hi-tech" part is done elsewhere which determines what "this part" and "That part" were and were shaped like. once that's done assembly (for each component part and for the over all part) are relatively easy and doesn't require an advanced degree (which is why they don't require one).

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I would guess that a capacitor powered missile it charged by electricity; but a micro-fusion powered missile (to save space and squeeze the tiny fusion plant in) isn't capable of cold-starting and has to get fed near critical plasma from another fusion reactor. (We know the pods for fusion powered missiles have their own onboard reactors, so those could "jump=start" the missiles.

Which of course means that the 4 stage Mk23 system defense pods that David was talking about either don't work or are hot as stars in IR due to their running fusion reactor, which would make hiding them kind of tough.

I guess potentially the system defense pods (which could be bigger than those dropped by SD(P)s) could have a larger reactor in the pod that's capable of being cold started, and then used to jump-start the missile's reactors (which aren't). Then it only become red hot within, say, a minute of launching.

But in general we know that Honorverse tech is pretty magically immune to thermal detection - this is just a extreme example; but hardly the only offender

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:Which of course means that the 4 stage Mk23 system defense pods that David was talking about either don't work or are hot as stars in IR due to their running fusion reactor, which would make hiding them kind of tough.

I guess potentially the system defense pods (which could be bigger than those dropped by SD(P)s) could have a larger reactor in the pod that's capable of being cold started, and then used to jump-start the missile's reactors (which aren't). Then it only become red hot within, say, a minute of launching.

But in general we know that Honorverse tech is pretty magically immune to thermal detection - this is just a extreme example; but hardly the only offender

There is an easier way to do it. Put in a small capaicitor, say from one of the DD shipkiller missiles.

The capacitor will be able to run the sensors for a couple of days and still have the power to start the pods fusion reactor. Run the reactor for a couple of hours to recharge the capacitor, then go back to stealth mode.