Somtaaw wrote:We don't actually know what happens to a ship, other than the description of: "firing a soft-boiled egg at a brick wall" That would actually imply something along the lines of instantaneous destruction/disintegration of the ship, probably explosively coming apart. And that's for anything doing it within the inner 80% of the hyperlimit zone.
But since the outer 20% area of a hyper limit is also, that would also imply it's also impossible to translate within the inner 80%. It's almost contradictory information, but it's clear that translating inside that hyperlimit, either you can't or Bad Things Happen, and eliminate any possibility of hyper deployed Alpha-band crossing weapons, whether bomb, missile, or Unmanned Armed Vehicles.any ship that tries to translate in the outer 20%, cant
Coloration was from Vince in the Hyper torp thread, and I'm just too lazy to strip it back out, since it highlights exactly what we need to see.Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:Karen Lowe was an excellent astrogator, but a hyper voyage this long provided a great deal of scope for minor astrogation errors to produce major results. Overshooting their intended n-space translation point wouldn't be all that terrible . . . unless, of course, they overshot it too badly. A ship which attempted to translate out of hyper inside a star's hyper limit couldn't. As long as it made the attempt within the outer twenty percent of the hyper limit, all that happened was that it couldn't get into n-space. If it made the attempt any further in than that, however, Bad Things happened. Someone had once described the result as using a pulse cannon to fire soft-boiled eggs at a stone wall to see if they would bounce. Lester Tourville rather doubted they would, and even if he was wrong, it was a proposition he had no desire at all to test firsthand.
Actually, the text is not contradictory at all. Consider the three scenarios of a starship in the alpha band of hyper space attempting to translate to normal space:
1) Ship is outside the hyper limit, attempts to translate to normal space, successfully translates to normal space.
2) Ship is inside the hyper limit, but is not any further inside the limit than 20% of the distance from the hyper limit towards the celestial object generating the hyper limit (measured in normal space). Ship attempts to translates to normal space, is unsuccessful in its attempt and remains in hyperspace. The crew realizes they overshot the hyper limit and abort the attempt.
3) Ship is inside the hyper limit, but has gone past 20% of the distance from the hyper limit towards the celestial object generating the hyper limit (measured in normal space). Ship attempts to translates to normal space, is unsuccessful in its attempt, remains in hyperspace. Simultaneously, Bad Things happen.
Note: Bad Things happening in the Honorverse are usually if not always, accompanied by violent discharges of energy. As in: "An Earth-shattering KA-BOOM."