why the honorverse would be full of dead planets

Vince wrote:FYI: Light leaving the sun can reach the orbit of Pluto in 5 hours.

So a light month is way beyond the effective boundaries of the solar system. Thanx for the heads up. nice to have high friends in all sorts of places.

So, accelerate a freighter to .7c far enough from the system in question so it doesn't gets detected. Dump the payload and expect it to hit a planet lightdays/month away?

That's some extreme precision targeting...

Joat42 wrote:So, accelerate a freighter to .7c far enough from the system in question so it doesn't gets detected. Dump the payload and expect it to hit a planet lightdays/month away?

That's some extreme precision targeting...

It's well within the capabilities of honorverse astrogation. Hell, it wouldn't even be particularly hard for us, right now.

no precision targeting needed if the cloud of whatever is big enough, the calculation somewhere was that 1 kg of mass had about 6 MT tnt equivalent energy at 0.6 lightspeed, think a cloud 1 million killometers across of 1 million tons, thats 1 billion kg, if 10 000kg hit thats .. the whole side of a planet on fire

its not a sniper shoot its a shootgun shoot

This in general is a grey area of the Honorverse. The wedge technology is a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, or a perpetual motion machine.
In our universe there is no free lunch. No matter how much energy you put in you get less back, due to entropy. Here you can get massive amounts of free energy.
Using this approach I would have actually used a super hard and shielded smaller projectile and accelerated it to where tau brings in relativist effects, thus a 1000kg item at 0.96C ends up weighing millions of tons with enormous energy, but presents a small radar cross section.

WeirdlyWired wrote:I'm kind of a dumb Lib Arts grad, so I have no idea how far past earth's orbit a light month is but I'm guessing it's a bit farther than Pluto's orbit by a factor of at least 100 (probably closer to 10,000). That's quite a lot of sensor reach, even for passives. Not sure how much "faster" faster than light even is. Except that Manty ghost rider FTL is not instantaneous.

Again, Manticore and I believe most other major planets have kilometer large passive arrays that can detect FTL signals from hyper emergence over a lightmonth or more (a lightmonth is 1/52nd of the way to Alpha Centauri, or alternatively 103x the distance to Pluto)

In the honorverse, in n-space, an FTL signal travels 62 times faster than light. (They travel at the speed of light in the next higher hyperband, and the ALpha band's speed of light is 62x faster than normal space's) So an FTL signal from a lightmonth out will reach the system arrays in 11.6 hours.

WeirdlyWired wrote:So basically you're saying a ship would have to start out about half way from Alpha Centauri and accelerate flat out, translate down to N-space kill the wedge and coast in?

Not exactly. Translating up or down hyperbands always bleeds off velocity (see the table) - so dropping from alpha to n-space robs you of 92% of your velocity. And a merchant can only work up to 0.5c in hyper; so it would arrive in n-space coasting at 0.04c (or 11,991 kps - fast but vastly short of the relativistic speed the original poster wanted for their sandcasting.

Star Knight wrote:

Tim wrote:As for the "in the future humans don't think like that". PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE............

Pretty much

SNIP

Uhm no, not really. Nobody will bother. They wont look for you, let alone dispatch someone to look after you. This isnt Manticore, this is Earth, they dont care.
They'll assume you have some engine trouble and decide to make the trip in nspace.
Or they just think that you are too incompetent to try a short hyperjump after you screwed up your inital jump.
In any case you would call them anyway if you are in real trouble. So why bother.

But once you turn over and start slowing back down lots of red flags should be going off.

Nothing will go off, if anyone notices it will be lost in the usual chatter before anyone notices.
We are dealing with Solarian Level bureaucracy here.
There is no way in hell some odd behaviour detected by the Gravitic Array agency will result in the deployment of a hypercapable vessel within a couple of hours.

.

I rather think that you are underestimating the local bureaucracy. They dont care much what goes on far, far away, but I'd guess that they are pretty efficient on planet and in the near earth environment. When you have a highly populated planet - which has stayed that way for centuries - then clearly they do many things right and efficiently - maybe out of old habbits etc.

So they probably have a v efficient set of traffic wardens on the surface

By analogy I'd suspect the same in space - after all they really won't want stray freighters banging into orbital structures by mistake [leaving aside this doomsday scenario]

The E wrote:

Joat42 wrote:So, accelerate a freighter to .7c far enough from the system in question so it doesn't gets detected. Dump the payload and expect it to hit a planet lightdays/month away?

That's some extreme precision targeting...

It's well within the capabilities of honorverse astrogation. Hell, it wouldn't even be particularly hard for us, right now.

Oh, you can aim it correctly - but will it stay on course during unpowered flight?

On another note, if you are using sand some of the grains will hit something and turn into plasma etc and any grains hitting that plasma will also turn into plasma etc etc. That means that the density of sand reaching the target will become less.

The easiest way to stop an attack of this kind if you detect it is just to explode a bunch of nukes near the front of the grains, the plasma from the nukes will eat almost all the sand passing through that plasma in an self-sustaining reaction.

Jonathan_S wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:I'm kind of a dumb Lib Arts grad, so I have no idea how far past earth's orbit a light month is but I'm guessing it's a bit farther than Pluto's orbit by a factor of at least 100 (probably closer to 10,000). That's quite a lot of sensor reach, even for passives. Not sure how much "faster" faster than light even is. Except that Manty ghost rider FTL is not instantaneous.

Again, Manticore and I believe most other major planets have kilometer large passive arrays that can detect FTL signals from hyper emergence over a lightmonth or more (a lightmonth is 1/52nd of the way to Alpha Centauri, or alternatively 103x the distance to Pluto)

In the honorverse, in n-space, an FTL signal travels 62 times faster than light. (They travel at the speed of light in the next higher hyperband, and the ALpha band's speed of light is 62x faster than normal space's) So an FTL signal from a lightmonth out will reach the system arrays in 11.6 hours.

WeirdlyWired wrote:So basically you're saying a ship would have to start out about half way from Alpha Centauri and accelerate flat out, translate down to N-space kill the wedge and coast in?

Not exactly. Translating up or down hyperbands always bleeds off velocity (see the table) - so dropping from alpha to n-space robs you of 92% of your velocity. And a merchant can only work up to 0.5c in hyper; so it would arrive in n-space coasting at 0.04c (or 11,991 kps - fast but vastly short of the relativistic speed the original poster wanted for their sandcasting.

Well that and your standard merchy only has a max velocity of 0.6c, only military grade ships get upto 0.7c. Granted it doesn't seem like much of a difference between .6 and .7c, but I think there's larger difference than it appears to be.

isaac_newton wrote:I rather think that you are underestimating the local bureaucracy. They dont care much what goes on far, far away, but I'd guess that they are pretty efficient on planet and in the near earth environment.

You seriously just called solarian bureaucracy efficient?

isaac_newton wrote:When you have a highly populated planet - which has stayed that way for centuries - then clearly they do many things right and efficiently - maybe out of old habbits etc.

So they probably have a v efficient set of traffic wardens on the surface

In the Honorverse as in the real world you dont actually need efficient bureaucracy to run huge societies. Up to a certain point societies just works, with or without competent management on the top.

But this is beside the point. Of course they have a decent traffic control going on in the Sol System. Most of it is probably run by the transtellars themselves.

But its a huge step from 'our insystem traffic has to run smoothly' to 'we maintain Manticore grade gravitic arrays and jump on any sensor ghost just because it could be someone crazy'.
There is just no reason to bother with crap like that. Happens too rarely for starters. Even if you have bureaucrats which are semi competent to manage day to day operations - hit them with a once in a year event (if that) and they will most likely have no idea what to do about it:

'whaa, we've just detected a hyperfootprint a thmonth out, lets call someone to check it out'

So, who do we have to call? System Command? Battlefleet? Transtellar Traffic Control? I dont know. And im not looking this up. Im not even sure if this is my problem.

Do I even have the authority to call someone?
I'm just lowly watch officer, holding down the fort tonight. My boss comes in in the morning. Cant this wait? Oh yes it can, its an entire thmonth out!

Do we have procedures for this?
Guess there has to be a form to fill out for this. Where is it? How can i fastrack it? I have no idea. I have never done this, nobody ever showed me how to. It never happened before.

Do i really have to make the call?
I dont want to. Its the middle of the night. My boss isnt around. I'm not even sure who to call. And i dont know how. We never talk to those guys.

Is there really noone else to make the call?
Like my boss in the morning? Maybe those guys from gravitic array 2 can do it. They are on watch too!

Do i really have to push this up the chain of command? Nah, I'm not waking my boss up for this crap. And i'm sure as hell not calling his boss. I'm sure its nothing.
What can happen anyway? They'll call if there is a problem.

Do i really want to bother my superiors with this?
Nah I dont want to bother anyone. I just want to be left in peace while I'm waiting for my next promotion. I sure as hell dont want to issue any false alerts.

What happens if it turns out to be nothing?
I mean, sensor ghosts happen all the time, especially this far out. I'm sure if its a ship they'll just call in if they need help or anything. Let those guys at stellarcomm 1 handle it.

How do i cover my ass if it turns out to be a false alarm?
Chances are it's nothing. I dont want my name on this. I dont want to be responsible for dragging my boss out of bed and getting an entire ship underway for this. Are you crazy, do you know how much a hyperjump strains all those nodes? I dont want to have this on my resume!

Isn't it enough if i just file this away?
Yep, thats it. Nobody will bother anyway. Saw nothing.
Just another sensor ghost. Lets not check any further.
Phew. Coffee anyone?


Now thats bureaucracy for you