Git your pencils out and design me a ship!

cthia wrote:Love this thread. Not technical enough myself to lay down specs for the Shewolves of the S&S to follow, but I can certainly add my own wish list. Which has been an SD(P)(LT). That's an SD(P) with true LAC towing capability. Can an SD(P) be realistically engineered to naturally tow its own set of LACs with next-gen all powerful reengineered LAC-specific tractors?

From everything we know, this ought to be possible. We know from as far back as The Honor of the Queen that towing LACs through hyper is possible, of course. In that case it took three tractors each, and apparently a BC isn't big enough for the LACs to fit inside the compensator field since they were talking about acceleration problems. On the other hand, Weber has stated that LACs *can* fit inside the compensator field of something BB sized or larger, so really at that point all you need is enough tractor capability, and that shouldn't present any insurmountable problems.

The real questions are probably going to be more about the issues Weber talks about in that infodump regarding blocking sensors/communications/weapons. Honorverse ships just don't have *that* much empty space on their outsides that isn't already used for stuff, mostly sensors and whatnot (much of the art doesn't show a lot of those things), and LACs are big. But given how large SDs are, you probably could transport a squadron or two on the outside without *too* much trouble, assuming you had enough tractors and were ready to eject them on a moment's notice. It's mentioned in At All Costs that havenite SD(P)s only have 20 tractors (and from HotQ you need 3 per LAC), and manty SD(P)s probably don't have as many considering the internal tractors on their pods, so you'd need to add a fair number of extra tractors, but you can probably do that.

IMO it's more of a question of whether the GA would decide that it's worth doing, especially given that while an SD might be able to haul the LACs around, it can't really service or rearm them without proper docking bays. It might work to ferry LACs to and from a specific target, but it's hard to use it to give an SD its own 'organic' LAC complement due to those sorts of practical limitation.

MuonNeutrino wrote:From everything we know, this ought to be possible. We know from as far back as The Honor of the Queen that towing LACs through hyper is possible, of course. In that case it took three tractors each, and apparently a BC isn't big enough for the LACs to fit inside the compensator field since they were talking about acceleration problems. On the other hand, Weber has stated that LACs *can* fit inside the compensator field of something BB sized or larger, so really at that point all you need is enough tractor capability, and that shouldn't present any insurmountable problems.

The real questions are probably going to be more about the issues Weber talks about in that infodump regarding blocking sensors/communications/weapons. Honorverse ships just don't have *that* much empty space on their outsides that isn't already used for stuff, mostly sensors and whatnot (much of the art doesn't show a lot of those things), and LACs are big. But given how large SDs are, you probably could transport a squadron or two on the outside without *too* much trouble, assuming you had enough tractors and were ready to eject them on a moment's notice. It's mentioned in At All Costs that havenite SD(P)s only have 20 tractors (and from HotQ you need 3 per LAC), and manty SD(P)s probably don't have as many considering the internal tractors on their pods, so you'd need to add a fair number of extra tractors, but you can probably do that.

On thing that the books haven't (as far as I can recall) address is whether its possible to tow a tractored object through a grav wave (or rather to tow one not capable of generating at least on sail - we did see the injured ships of the attack on Helen Zilwiki Sr's convoy get towed clear).

And based on the descriptions I'd be a bit surprised if something, even something towed close enough to be within the ship's compensator field, would survive the grav turbulence of a 'wave without sails of its own to stabilize it...
(Though the first of the infodumps Duckk pointed to implies that if you were tight enough to the ship to be considered "limpeted onto the hull" you might survive traveling through a 'wave. The second only addresses escaping into hyper - not into a 'wave)


But if LACs (or pods for that matter) can't be towed through a grav wave your operational flexibility would be seriously impaired if you relied on towing over strategic distances...

Jonathan_S wrote:On thing that the books haven't (as far as I can recall) address is whether its possible to tow a tractored object through a grav wave (or rather to tow one not capable of generating at least on sail - we did see the injured ships of the attack on Helen Zilwiki Sr's convoy get towed clear).

I don't think it's been stated explicitly, but we do have this bit from HotQ regarding the towing of LACs:

...they could boost the lighter vessels into hyper space... No LAC crew could survive the sort of acceleration ships routinely pulled in hyper for the simple reason that their inertial compensator would pack up the instant they tried it.

That seems to me to imply that they must be considering towing them through a grav wave, because that's when ships pull inordinately high accelerations in hyper. If they weren't going to be using a grav wave, they could just have the LACs fly over under their own power once they were in hyper.

Also, again circumstantial but I don't think Weber would suggest that LAC towing/limpeting was a viable idea (even if suboptimal) if you couldn't use grav waves, simply because of how he's stated that trying to avoid all grav waves makes traveling through hyper so slow and circuitous and generally a pain.

Indeed. We've seen Shuttles and LACs operate in Hyper (Honour Amongst Enemies) in a rift region and the 'perceived' acceleration of ships in hyper doesn't increase, it's just that distances are 'squashed'.

Equally, Short Victorious War shows Peep ships towing one another clear - so you can tow an object in hyper if it can survive the acceleration (i.e. you'd need enough of a wedge/sail to survive the acceleration, even if you're not generating it yourself)

At the same time, not having access to Grav Waves does mean you're slow as [swearwords] when trying to get anywhere.

Plus it doesn't seem especially reliable. Yes, Thunder Of God had a part-trained crew (by 'modern naval' standards, and yes, they were making up the doctrine as they went along, but they still lost several LACs in transits, as I recall.

I also found comments comparing the regular Verge pirate to be the least technically capable of their ilk, and in many ways the rowboat-equipped pirates on Earth's coastal seas, and making the average Silesian pirate look like first-line naval units in comparison.

Pirates only tend to be as good as avoiding their opposition requires (since otherwise they'd do something else, like conquering the damn place). A verge pirate's worst case scenario is an OFS-attached Frontier Fleet destroyer or light cruiser, whilst a Silly pirate (a) has a realistic chance of being ex-military itself (albeit ex Silesian military), but must be prepared to go fishing in waters where it can expect to encounter Manticoran or Andermani escort ships.


Ultimately the Wayfarer/Arsenal Ship is the way forwards, I think. LACs are all well and good, but - if you've got competent crews - even locally built LACs are okay. Near-GA tech system-defence scale MDMs (i.e. big ones that come four or less to a pod) can have the range and speed to completely outrange and outgun anyone you can realistically expect to face (if you're starting from scratch and someone turns up with a Podnought division....I'm sorry, you lose).

The other thing you need is fire control, and sensor range. A fire control destroyer or light cruiser is one thing, but it's that last element - the ability to have long range FTL targeting data (you don't need to be able to feed it real-time to the missiles - just receiving it FTL yourself halves the lightspeed delay, and makes long range missile shots actually worthwhile).

So long-endurance passive sensor drones with FTL transmission capability - something like Fearless uses in First Yeltsin - is probably important to giving your arsenal ship the 'sniper' range to avoid having to make it that tough.

MuonNeutrino wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:On thing that the books haven't (as far as I can recall) address is whether its possible to tow a tractored object through a grav wave (or rather to tow one not capable of generating at least on sail - we did see the injured ships of the attack on Helen Zilwiki Sr's convoy get towed clear).

I don't think it's been stated explicitly, but we do have this bit from HotQ regarding the towing of LACs:

...they could boost the lighter vessels into hyper space... No LAC crew could survive the sort of acceleration ships routinely pulled in hyper for the simple reason that their inertial compensator would pack up the instant they tried it.

That seems to me to imply that they must be considering towing them through a grav wave, because that's when ships pull inordinately high accelerations in hyper. If they weren't going to be using a grav wave, they could just have the LACs fly over under their own power once they were in hyper.

Also, again circumstantial but I don't think Weber would suggest that LAC towing/limpeting was a viable idea (even if suboptimal) if you couldn't use grav waves, simply because of how he's stated that trying to avoid all grav waves makes traveling through hyper so slow and circuitous and generally a pain.

Not a bad point - why point out the "in hyper" part if it was just the normal 391.4 gees a Sultan-class could pull in n-space.

OTOH we know the LAC were being towed outside the BC's compensator field (or the tank couldn't have broken loose and
smashed through bulkheads. And without an active wedge of their own their own compensator wouldn't work at all (though RFC may not have locked that down in his mind that early in the series). And finally a Sultan-class BC can accelerate 16% quicker than even a modern old-style LAC (and possibly even more-so than a Masadan POS).

But ultimately, if it didn't have to drag the LACs through somewhere they couldn't go (a grav wave) then the whole towing scheme seems overcomplicated. Just have all the Masadan LACs manouver close enough on thrusters to jump them all into Hyper in one go - then, at the 327 gees (or less) they can safely pull lead them to Yeltson and repeat the trick to dump the whole brood into n-space at once. Even with the piddly endurance of an old-style LAC they should be able to make that short a hop manned and under their own power if you didn't have to cut through a grav wave.


I guess I'd agree that there's some indirect support that you might be able to tow something through a grav wave after all...

Just a nit, there cant possibly be a grav wave between Masada and Grayson. Remember, they've had several wars back and forth, and they didn't even have sail technology when they sent the original Masadan 'settlers' across.

If there were a grav wave, the Masadan's would have been wiped out without ever arriving, which clearly they have.


That means the distance between Masada and Yeltsin's Star is almost certainly "clear" and you can simply run yourself upto a c-fractional speed, and simply coast between systems, albeit you'd probably want to be going into cryogenic stasis for the trip since it'll take years even subjectively.


But the Thunder of God/Saladin was the only critical part at the hyper entry and hyper exit, from the way hyper has slowly changed and evolved with the books. The Battle of Selker shows us that after getting into hyper, LAC's can pilot themselves around they're just stuck in whatever particular band they were deployed in.


Which actually, brings a whole new meaning to scouting your space actually. The sensor arrays that guard Manticore are upwards of 900km per side, and were able to detect the initial shark freighters exiting hyper at a light-month, but due to the extremely gradual transistion it appeared more like a sensor glitch. Having Ghost Rider drones deployed in the Alpha band and merely watching to extend their life exactly as described in Storm from the Shadows the GR drones that Tristram deployed were still active in New Tuscany almost 2 full weeks after they were deployed AND had kept an eye on everything that had happened. The only way to not get detected by the Alpha band deployed drones, would be blowing past them in a crash translation that guarantees a normal space array is going to see you.

locarno24 wrote:At the same time, not having access to Grav Waves does mean you're slow as [swearwords] when trying to get anywhere.

Just a nitpick. Dodging grav waves delays you because you have to detour. And dodging rogue ones is worse because you have to slow down enough to have reaction time once they pop up on your sensors.

But covering clear straightline paths having a grav wave saves you no more than a couple days regardless of the length of the trip. Sure you get roughly 10x the accel - but that just means you reach your max cruising speed a bit sooner. You spend most of the weeks long trip at full speed; limited by your particle shielding.

Somtaaw wrote:Just a nit, there cant possibly be a grav wave between Masada and Grayson. Remember, they've had several wars back and forth, and they didn't even have sail technology when they sent the original Masadan 'settlers' across.

If there were a grav wave, the Masadan's would have been wiped out without ever arriving, which clearly they have.


That means the distance between Masada and Yeltsin's Star is almost certainly "clear" and you can simply run yourself upto a c-fractional speed, and simply coast between systems, albeit you'd probably want to be going into cryogenic stasis for the trip since it'll take years even subjectively.


But the Thunder of God/Saladin was the only critical part at the hyper entry and hyper exit, from the way hyper has slowly changed and evolved with the books. The Battle of Selker shows us that after getting into hyper, LAC's can pilot themselves around they're just stuck in whatever particular band they were deployed in.

Well grav waves don't screw up n-space (except arguably for a few dozen km or less just past the 'doorway' of a wormhole terminus. So even if there was a grav wave all the way down to the Alpha bands it wouldn't have screwed up the sub-light colony ship from Grayson to Masada.

HotQ does seem to make it clear that there's no low band grav wave between Grayson and Manticore because with broken sails they talked about one of honor's ships being able to go no higher than the Gamma bands (which, along with the convoy description) leads me to suspect that Grayson is in, or very near, a grav wave that goes no lower than the Delta bands).
But that information doesn't seem to preclude Masada from being in a 'wave, or a 'wave being in the little bit of space hyper between those systems...

I have a new ship. Evolution. I suppose you could call it a Q ship, but really it is a replacement for the ships of the wall and with a civilian use.

DCC Defense Civilian Cruiser.

10M ton Big.

Broadside

Heavy telemetry &
Keyhole II dock under a false panel

90 CM
60 PD
2 SD Grasers
23 DD or LAC anti missile optimised Lasers

Chase with civilian shaped hammerheads

15 PD (SD strength)
3 Grasers

The middle 20% of the ship is a solid core with 80% the ends being hollow core. 2000-3000 pods. Whatever kind of pods you want. 6 pod bay doors at each end.

Pods are the new cargo containers.

Armour of BC strength. SD strength Armour doesn't matter any more as it can't protect a ship from a modern missile salvo. No one gets into energy range any more so who needs all that armour?

In war time you have a modern podlayer with lots of telemetry and pods. In peace time you carry a few Mk16 or ERM pods for defense. And lots of cargo pods. In port your freighter has energy weapons to prevent a port from seizing your ship and you can stop and unload pods where ever. Plus these ships will be fast and won't need escorts.

Each ship will also carry 1000 crew plus 500 marines and optionally 3500 business class passengers. Marines provide purser security duties when not being marines. Passengers could be prize crews or 4000 marines.

Pirates! Ha, good luck Mr. Pirate.

I'm sure they'll get right on that, once they figure out how to duplicate the Tardis' ability to fold space. Until that happens, none of that will remotely even begin to fit inside the hull you described, period.

Also, we don't have military vessels routinely acting as cruise ships because it's an incredibly moronic thing to do. Yeah, let's get a bunch of people poking around all sorts of top secret military hardware.

As for using these as armed "civilian" ships:

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