Next Bolthole devellopment

IIRC they are not completely sure as to exactly what happens to a ship when just the compensator fails. Most ships lost to compensator failure simply vanish without a trace. The rest have are likely to have been damaged in battle to the point that proving what damage was solely caused by compensator failure problematic.

I think you have the compensator confused with something else. There are some questions about the hyperdrive in some corner cars that you might be thinking of, but compensator failure is a well understood phenomena. Predicting compensator failure is not. The end of AAC had a ship with minimal damage and a crew turns to goo iirc.

kzt wrote:I think you have the compensator confused with something else. There are some questions about the hyperdrive in some corner cars that you might be thinking of, but compensator failure is a well understood phenomena. Predicting compensator failure is not. The end of AAC had a ship with minimal damage and a crew turns to goo iirc.

it is like the bug hitting the windshield. With inertial compensator 7oo kps accel has the real feel of 1G. Failure is to be standing still and being slammed by the aft bulkhead at 600kps. 9g is pretty fatal, this would be over 600g.

Yes I did poorly in High School Physics in 1967.

kzt wrote:I think you have the compensator confused with something else. There are some questions about the hyperdrive in some corner cars that you might be thinking of, but compensator failure is a well understood phenomena. Predicting compensator failure is not. The end of AAC had a ship with minimal damage and a crew turns to goo iirc.

And I want to say in one of the anthologies it talked about one of the old Royal Yachts that suffered a lcompensaor failure? But I'm pretty sure there was a mention ell before AAC that seemed to say that a ship suffering a compensator failure would happily keep accelerating along after smashing the crew to paste.

And that seems crazy. The crew smashed to death; yes. The hendreds of gees sustained by those ships significantly exceed the 48.5 gees John Snapp survived in mid '50s rocket sled experiment - and unlike him much of the crew isn't securely strapped into acceleration chairs. But the ship,should also rapidly start coming apart for all the reasons mentioned up-thread.

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:I think you have the compensator confused with something else. There are some questions about the hyperdrive in some corner cars that you might be thinking of, but compensator failure is a well understood phenomena. Predicting compensator failure is not. The end of AAC had a ship with minimal damage and a crew turns to goo iirc.

And I want to say in one of the anthologies it talked about one of the old Royal Yachts that suffered a lcompensaor failure? But I'm pretty sure there was a mention ell before AAC that seemed to say that a ship suffering a compensator failure would happily keep accelerating along after smashing the crew to paste.

And that seems crazy. The crew smashed to death; yes. The hendreds of gees sustained by those ships significantly exceed the 48.5 gees John Snapp survived in mid '50s rocket sled experiment - and unlike him much of the crew isn't securely strapped into acceleration chairs. But the ship,should also rapidly start coming apart for all the reasons mentioned up-thread.

Wasn't that in House of Steel, the anthology of Elizabeth Winton as a teenager; and they killed off the Queen by an explosive iirc, but where they did it, everybody (except the King) wrote it off as an unfortunate compensator accident.

And to be fair, if the ships are strong enough to survive rampant acceleration with zero compensator, then to use kzt's favourite comeback "space is big". Take one of the Royal Yachts which are going to be what, a mere 200-300 ktons as they're simply a luxuriously equipped dispatch boat right? Now, give it a nice predictable course somewhere, and then as part of your compensator failure, your course changes and you're far enough out that any possible response ships will take hours just to get to the location of an SOS distress call (if any were made)

Multiple hours, in a random direction at a random acceleration and zero living beings to turn on active sensors instead of the passives that are used 90-95% of the time... good luck finding that Yacht, without deploying the entire Home Fleet and LAC's, and yankee searching with active radar.


In the books, battle damaged compensators are almost always followed by the ship blowing up, whether from battle damage or the fusion reactors going up. Off hand, the most notable time a ship didn't sympathetically blow up would be that one time Caslet shot up a Warnecke destroyer, right before Wayfarer blew the cruiser and other destroyer away. And that destroyer tore it's front third off when the compensator failed, and the other two thirds did blow up I believe. Tearing itself in two is almost definitely from the same laserhead's that destroy the compensator destroying critical structural beams.

One of the Fearless's also took a rather lot of structural damage, which reduced their max acceleration. Their compensator was fine, but they couldn't accelerate at their nominal higher acceleration, which also lends credence that as long as the structural beams stay intact and where they're designed to be, the ship is incredibly strong and durable.

I fairly sure the story is "What Price Dreams", it covers the adoption of princess Adrianne by a treecat. part of her back story is the estrangement between king and princess since her mothers death, thought to be due to compensator failure .

there were allusions that it was sabotage (from the assains paid to try and kill Adrianne) but the ship hit something while doing about .6C and was destroyed so what exactly was responsible was never confirmed

Somtaaw wrote:And to be fair, if the ships are strong enough to survive rampant acceleration with zero compensator, then to use kzt's favourite comeback "space is big". Take one of the Royal Yachts which are going to be what, a mere 200-300 ktons as they're simply a luxuriously equipped dispatch boat right? Now, give it a nice predictable course somewhere, and then as part of your compensator failure, your course changes and you're far enough out that any possible response ships will take hours just to get to the location of an SOS distress call (if any were made)

Minor nit: Dispatch boats are in the 50-60kton range.

MaxxQ wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:And to be fair, if the ships are strong enough to survive rampant acceleration with zero compensator, then to use kzt's favourite comeback "space is big". Take one of the Royal Yachts which are going to be what, a mere 200-300 ktons as they're simply a luxuriously equipped dispatch boat right? Now, give it a nice predictable course somewhere, and then as part of your compensator failure, your course changes and you're far enough out that any possible response ships will take hours just to get to the location of an SOS distress call (if any were made)

Minor nit: Dispatch boats are in the 50-60kton range.

Oops I musta been thinking about something else halfway through that thought chain Something about the Tankersley I think, and Honor's runabout and must have bumped the Royal Yacht size.

With the Flight two cataphracts havong a higher accel than the Mark 17s and 23s, perhaps a faster at least first stage set of missiles and/or CMs.

MaxxQ wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:And to be fair, if the ships are strong enough to survive rampant acceleration with zero compensator, then to use kzt's favourite comeback "space is big". Take one of the Royal Yachts which are going to be what, a mere 200-300 ktons as they're simply a luxuriously equipped dispatch boat right? Now, give it a nice predictable course somewhere, and then as part of your compensator failure, your course changes and you're far enough out that any possible response ships will take hours just to get to the location of an SOS distress call (if any were made)

Minor nit: Dispatch boats are in the 50-60kton range.

I hate to argue with you MaxxQ, but the one published DB (The Havenite Fracture Class) we've seen is 39 Ktons. That was, of course, in the semi-canonical Jayne's RHN book by Pope/Burnside. Were you just ball parking to counter Somtaaw's space liner sized ship (SITS has the 3000 passenger Pegasus class liner at 300 Ktons), or is that an official ret-con?