WLBjork wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:Redlining a LAC to 100% military power, or even trying to ride the compensator's safety margin to momentarily exceed 100% power (an Honor did on the CA HMS War Maiden during an emergency in Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington would be very dangerous) But also not something you'd ever be allowed to do in training.
Here's the bit I was referring to.
>>>HMS War Maiden's inertial compensator protested its savage abuse. More alarms howled as the load on the heavy cruiser's impeller nodes peaked forty percent beyond their "Never Exceed" levels. Despite her mangled after impeller ring, War Maiden slammed suddenly forward at almost five hundred and fifty gravities.<<<
Depends. If the "never exceed" limit was about 70% of max, then 140% of that takes you to about 98% of max.
Although I thought they limited themselves to 80% of max under normal circumstances.
On the other hand, "never exceed" may have been intended as max, although that would require something distinctly...unusual for WM to achieve without the compensator blowing.
Yeah, back in the day 80% max was the normal safe limit, so I can't see why never exceed would be 70%. In ceasefire-era or newer ships that's been raised to 90% as war experience pushing the limits showed that modern compensators were safer than though under higher than normal max accel.
But taking the approach that never exceed might mean 80% we start to do some number crunching.
We know that she peaked at 540 gees at 140% of never exceed, so that puts the never exceed accel at 385.7 gees. And if that's 80% then her full accel would be 482.1 gees. That's very low for a CA - the lowest we know about in the RMN is the much later, larger, Star Knight-class at 509.3 gees...
On the other hand she had taken compensator damage, so speculating that she'd lost 7-8% of her accel before Honor called for emergency power from the remaining nodes isn't totally out of line.
If we assume that it really is 40% above 100% power then she'd have had to take a
lot more impeller damage to manage "only" 540 gees. A small CA should have a book max accel of around 512-515 gees; so she'd have had to have suffered a 25% acceleration loss in order for a 140% of max power to result in just 540 gees.
Now if we go back to your speculation that never exceed was actually 70% on War Maiden then her actual 100% power accel would have to be 551 gees - way more than any known CA with pre-Grayson compensators.
In fact using the accel curve derived from the data points in HoS that max power accel would be impossible; extending the curve all the way down to 0 tons only reaches 550 gees. (And that's before you factor in whether she might have had acceleration loss from impeller damage)
I tried looking up what class HMS
War Maiden actually was, to get her official stats, and while the wiki claims that HMS
War Maiden is a Warrior-class CA (227,250 tons, 513.0 G max accel) the texts and pearls don't state her class; so I treat that wiki entry as suspect. And while I can't find anything in the story that actually directly
contradicts known facts about the Warrior-class, I have a hard time thinking that a ship 92% the size of a then modern Prince Consort would described as "either an awfully big light cruiser or decidedly on the small size for a heavy".
Anyway back to the math, we can rule out 70% as never exceed, 100% as "never exceed" requires too much impeller damage to get the observed final result for me to be comfortable with (not to mention making it damned miraculous that the compensator didn't instantly pack in and kill everyone. David did say in the Compensator Failure infodump that "The sump is a little elastic, which is how you can at least try to take a compensator beyond its rated top limit and maybe survive, as Honor did on her middy cruise. The odds of doing so are… poor." But 40% past does now seem extra crazy; especially on damaged nodes.
Which leaves us with 80% as "never exceed" which seems plausible (though required exceeding the compensators theoretical maximum; up to 112% of max, at least briefly). It'd be a stronger case if 540
had been 112% of the roughly 513-515 gees you might expect a small CA to make at 100% power; but the known impeller damage could account for that...
Anyway this was a fun little diversion of research and number crunching
