Bellerophon

darrell wrote: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.

Will take days to cool down to close background (they are in a vacuum), and the plasma capacitors are very hot themselves.

kzt wrote:

darrell wrote: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.

Will take days to cool down to close background (they are in a vacuum), and the plasma capacitors are very hot themselves.

how do you know?

a micro fusion reactor would be hotter than a plasma capacitor and they manage to make it "cool" enough to put it into recon drones.

They use the mysterious heat dumping through the wedge effect. Which is hard to do if you have no wedge.

My guess is that system defense long term pod stealth employs the thermal masking and directional radiating tech to either try to hide in the sun and/or closest sufficiently radiating body, or cast all the heat towards a sufficiently close celestial object. If you're aiming the heat at something close enough with a sufficiently narrow detection arc, enemy recon drones have to get really up close and personal to spot them. Most people's pods can't actually get that close.

Plus, I'm not sure how much heat gets out from the grav pinch fusion plants - containment is based on the grav fields and there is a vacuum between the fusing plasma and the rest of the containment chamber. However useable power is extracted and converted is presumably an extremely efficient process.
The rest of the pod's systems would not be creating much heat, unlike a ship, with all kinds of other systems that create heat as a byproduct and humans.


And, y'know, space magic technology.

Armour that can't be cut and something that can cut anything including armour. The argument that armour can't be cut through is bogus. Text from the books tells us, repeatedly that a wedge can cut through anything. We also know that a wedge can be made really small. Small enough that a person fired missile can have a wedge and punch through a shuttle or aircar. Also a practice missile with full wedge can be held in check by a tractor beam.

So what to do? Small wedge boring out missile tubes. Small wedge cutting internal armour. Remove missile auto feeds, replace with purpose made parts for new missiles. No big deal. May take a couple month to do the whole refit but it isn't very hard to do. Plus the text tells us that Haven SD's had lots of room when refit with Grayson pre More Automation systems. So you want more heavily automated systems, put into space which is easy to cut through.

Let alone refit crews have cutting lasers atleast as powerful as laser missile heads, sustained over a longer time, such laser heads can cut through any armour gutting any ship yet somehow in a yard can't cut through armour in a year. I think not.

Bellerophon's can be refit in Silesian yards (dispersed) after a brief prep time. Latest tech just needs knowhow, which is known and available. Silesian yards can be tooled up and within a decade can build fully capable dreadnaughts and much sooner can be building missiles, more than enough for everyone.

Refit in this case means gutted and fully redesigned and rebuilt. Why? The Nike is woefully incapable in ten years as MDM's are in everyone's possession. The Nike is awesome now, but in 10 years it is as capable as Honors CL vs Whitehavens' SD. Surprise it once, then doomed. With reduced crew levels of modern ships. The Nike will be the new Light/Heavy "Cruiser" We can lose the whole Light heavy cruiser ship distinction, the Saganami C the new Tincan and the Roland the new Frigate if not Ferret LAC. LAC will be Katana Anti missile ships. Belleraphone the Battleship/Battlecruiser.

Skimper, please do all of us a favor and:

1: Go back and re-read all the descriptions of things getting shredded by wedges over the course of the series.

2: Go back and re-read the parts of SVW discussing Nike's repairs.

3: Write 'The Honorverse is not populated exclusively by morons' on a piece of paper, tape it to a wall, and beat your head against it until it penetrates your skull, if that is physically possible.

Then please put those together and reflect on the concept that if people in the honorverse do, or don't do, something in a particular way, there's probably a reason for it. If it were possible to use *wedges* as *cutting gear* (which might just be your most insane idea ever, and that's saying something ), then why the hell would everyone talk about the difficulties and time-consuming aspects of cutting armor as a significant limitation on refits? You do not get to make up the rules for how the honorverse works!

Lord Skimper wrote:Armour that can't be cut and something that can cut anything including armour. The argument that armour can't be cut through is bogus. Text from the books tells us, repeatedly that a wedge can cut through anything. We also know that a wedge can be made really small. Small enough that a person fired missile can have a wedge and punch through a shuttle or aircar. Also a practice missile with full wedge can be held in check by a tractor beam.

So what to do? Small wedge boring out missile tubes. Small wedge cutting internal armour. Remove missile auto feeds, replace with purpose made parts for new missiles. No big deal. May take a couple month to do the whole refit but it isn't very hard to do. Plus the text tells us that Haven SD's had lots of room when refit with Grayson pre More Automation systems. So you want more heavily automated systems, put into space which is easy to cut through.

Let alone refit crews have cutting lasers atleast as powerful as laser missile heads, sustained over a longer time, such laser heads can cut through any armour gutting any ship yet somehow in a yard can't cut through armour in a year. I think not.

Bellerophon's can be refit in Silesian yards (dispersed) after a brief prep time. Latest tech just needs knowhow, which is known and available. Silesian yards can be tooled up and within a decade can build fully capable dreadnaughts and much sooner can be building missiles, more than enough for everyone.

Refit in this case means gutted and fully redesigned and rebuilt. Why? The Nike is woefully incapable in ten years as MDM's are in everyone's possession. The Nike is awesome now, but in 10 years it is as capable as Honors CL vs Whitehavens' SD. Surprise it once, then doomed. With reduced crew levels of modern ships. The Nike will be the new Light/Heavy "Cruiser" We can lose the whole Light heavy cruiser ship distinction, the Saganami C the new Tincan and the Roland the new Frigate if not Ferret LAC. LAC will be Katana Anti missile ships. Belleraphone the Battleship/Battlecruiser.

You ... can't bore out a missile tube. Missile tubes are a part of the missile launcher. Missile launchers employ extensive grav tech to chuck missiles out at 50000+ gs. You just can't bore out a launcher.
You'd have to rip it out and replace with a brand new one. And new missile feeds, storage, and handling equipment. And that's only if you're using a missile that's very close in size and tech. Replacing capacitor missile gear with equipment for microfusion missiles is a significantly larger change.


"Refitting" a ship that has internal capacitor missile tubes to micro-fusion missile tubes would be a massive endeavour. It would take longer, cost more, and be less efficient than building a brand new ship designed to use microfusion missiles from the beginning.



Sure, armor can be cut through ... but it's a time consuming process to do it carefully enough that you don't cause collateral damage and can readily replace things.
Cutting with a wedge would be a little like doing surgery with a chainsaw - opening things up is easy ... but trying to put the aftermath back together is a whole lot harder.
When you're using a wedge as a weapon, you don't actually care about keeping what you're shooting at intact and in a useable condition.
If you're working on a ship, one assumes you also want that ship back. I suppose you could run something through wedge-based cutters if you're chopping it up to feed into a recycler for scrap, but then you're after the raw materials, not the ship.


Silesian yards aren't up to handling superdreadnoughts.

Silesia is also still a fairly corrupt mess. There is absolutely no way that Manticore is using Silesia for producing its high tech advantages anytime soon. That's just asking for the specs to be spread to the MAlign and the League. Manticore wants to keep its secrets, y'know, secret.

Manticore's latest tech doesn't just need the specs and know-how. It also requires cutting edge hardware, that's several generations more advanced than anything in Silesia. Silesia would have to build the tools to build the tools to build the tools, several times over.


The RMN has absolutely zero need for the Bellerophons.
The RMN has no need for missile production in Silesia - Manticore has missile production lines up and running at Trevor's Star.
Manticore was two years away from having rebuilt all on its own, without any outside help whatsoever, something like six months of extensive amounts of Beowulfian help ago.

Actually, in a universal MDM environment, the Nike is still pretty good. It has Keyhole, and plenty of DDMs. Where the Nike would start to fall down would be a universal Apollo environment. I suspect that that's quite a ways off, and by which point, Apollo will have been further miniaturized, and available for the Mark-16
What's not so good are the lighter ships. They need, at minimum, the defensive aspects of Keyhole, and if possible, the lightspeed offensive aspects. The minimum ship size for that is probably also large enough for conventional broadside DDM tubes.
The one thing you're probably right about is loosing the light/heavy cruisier distinction, at least for a while.

Kytheros wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Armour that can't be cut and something that can cut anything including armour. The argument that armour can't be cut through is bogus. Text from the books tells us, repeatedly that a wedge can cut through anything. We also know that a wedge can be made really small. Small enough that a person fired missile can have a wedge and punch through a shuttle or aircar. Also a practice missile with full wedge can be held in check by a tractor beam.

So what to do? Small wedge boring out missile tubes. Small wedge cutting internal armour. Remove missile auto feeds, replace with purpose made parts for new missiles. No big deal. May take a couple month to do the whole refit but it isn't very hard to do. Plus the text tells us that Haven SD's had lots of room when refit with Grayson pre More Automation systems. So you want more heavily automated systems, put into space which is easy to cut through.

Let alone refit crews have cutting lasers atleast as powerful as laser missile heads, sustained over a longer time, such laser heads can cut through any armour gutting any ship yet somehow in a yard can't cut through armour in a year. I think not.

Bellerophon's can be refit in Silesian yards (dispersed) after a brief prep time. Latest tech just needs knowhow, which is known and available. Silesian yards can be tooled up and within a decade can build fully capable dreadnaughts and much sooner can be building missiles, more than enough for everyone.

Refit in this case means gutted and fully redesigned and rebuilt. Why? The Nike is woefully incapable in ten years as MDM's are in everyone's possession. The Nike is awesome now, but in 10 years it is as capable as Honors CL vs Whitehavens' SD. Surprise it once, then doomed. With reduced crew levels of modern ships. The Nike will be the new Light/Heavy "Cruiser" We can lose the whole Light heavy cruiser ship distinction, the Saganami C the new Tincan and the Roland the new Frigate if not Ferret LAC. LAC will be Katana Anti missile ships. Belleraphone the Battleship/Battlecruiser.

You ... can't bore out a missile tube. Missile tubes are a part of the missile launcher. Missile launchers employ extensive grav tech to chuck missiles out at 50000+ gs. You just can't bore out a launcher.
You'd have to rip it out and replace with a brand new one. And new missile feeds, storage, and handling equipment. And that's only if you're using a missile that's very close in size and tech. Replacing capacitor missile gear with equipment for microfusion missiles is a significantly larger change.


"Refitting" a ship that has internal capacitor missile tubes to micro-fusion missile tubes would be a massive endeavour. It would take longer, cost more, and be less efficient than building a brand new ship designed to use microfusion missiles from the beginning.



Sure, armor can be cut through ... but it's a time consuming process to do it carefully enough that you don't cause collateral damage and can readily replace things.
Cutting with a wedge would be a little like doing surgery with a chainsaw - opening things up is easy ... but trying to put the aftermath back together is a whole lot harder.
When you're using a wedge as a weapon, you don't actually care about keeping what you're shooting at intact and in a useable condition.
If you're working on a ship, one assumes you also want that ship back. I suppose you could run something through wedge-based cutters if you're chopping it up to feed into a recycler for scrap, but then you're after the raw materials, not the ship.


Silesian yards aren't up to handling superdreadnoughts.

Silesia is also still a fairly corrupt mess. There is absolutely no way that Manticore is using Silesia for producing its high tech advantages anytime soon. That's just asking for the specs to be spread to the MAlign and the League. Manticore wants to keep its secrets, y'know, secret.

Manticore's latest tech doesn't just need the specs and know-how. It also requires cutting edge hardware, that's several generations more advanced than anything in Silesia. Silesia would have to build the tools to build the tools to build the tools, several times over.


The RMN has absolutely zero need for the Bellerophons.
The RMN has no need for missile production in Silesia - Manticore has missile production lines up and running at Trevor's Star.
Manticore was two years away from having rebuilt all on its own, without any outside help whatsoever, something like six months of extensive amounts of Beowulfian help ago.

Actually, in a universal MDM environment, the Nike is still pretty good. It has Keyhole, and plenty of DDMs. Where the Nike would start to fall down would be a universal Apollo environment. I suspect that that's quite a ways off, and by which point, Apollo will have been further miniaturized, and available for the Mark-16
What's not so good are the lighter ships. They need, at minimum, the defensive aspects of Keyhole, and if possible, the lightspeed offensive aspects. The minimum ship size for that is probably also large enough for conventional broadside DDM tubes.
The one thing you're probably right about is loosing the light/heavy cruisier distinction, at least for a while.

tl;dr - Skippy lights birthday cake candles with a flamethrower.

kzt wrote:They use the mysterious heat dumping through the wedge effect. Which is hard to do if you have no wedge.

They have gravitational widgits with quantum efficiency generate no heat.

phillies wrote:

kzt wrote:They use the mysterious heat dumping through the wedge effect. Which is hard to do if you have no wedge.

They have gravitational widgits with quantum efficiency generate no heat.

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