The ultimate weapon

Jonathan_S wrote:...Actually it would need to operate twice. Exiting hyper is a completely separate event that requires a separate activation of the hyper generator. You don't need a hyper generator to remain in hyper -- see the LACs and shuttles moving back and forth between Wayfarer and Artemis during HAE. You just need a working one, fully powered, to change bands, enter, or exit...

kzt wrote:David has also said you can't have two active hyper generators at the same time. So no.

Why would it need one? It only needs one for the moment it needs to drop back out. The gun projects it into hyper.

You can't "project" anything into hyper. There is exactly one way to get across the alpha wall, and that's with a hyper generator boosting itself and what is enclosed inside its field.

Duckk wrote:You can't "project" anything into hyper. There is exactly one way to get across the alpha wall, and that's with a hyper generator boosting itself and what is enclosed inside its field.

And then you apparently have to cycle it into a different mode to drop out of hyper, which has been stated to take tens of seconds at minimum.

Oh and to add to the fun if the system you're in happens to lie within a grav wave that extends down to the Alpha bands you not only need a hyper generator to get into, and the back out of hyper) but you need at least 1 sail (deployed) before entering hyper or you're instantly shredded by the 'wave.

So not one do you need a full ring of Alpha nodes but you need time for them to activate and project a sail (another 10s of seconds) before activating the hyper generator (the first time).

This thing keeps getting bigger, more complicated, more of a power hog, and slower to use (and more impossible) the more we poke at it.


All to try to pop a warhead through hyper at a target. (Which presumably would have equivalent tech and could be popping defensive fire into hyper to block or nuke incoming warheads)

This could be a use for those pesky SL SD. Pop the compensator, take out all the missiles, controls, etc... Keep the sidewalls. Fire the whole ship as one BIG missile. Put a grav control system in it and fire it remotely. Could even fire it through hyperspace. 24000 square metres of end cap add as many grazers as you can

It is immune to counter missiles. Use bucklers with firing ports. Without a compensator you can achieve 5000 10000 maybe 50000 g acceleration. Could even use the it can't be named to really surprise someone. 1 million klick range first fore shots as you go by at 250,000 km fire the broadside followed by stern grasers. With the It can't be named dropping the sidewalls. With the broadside. Full powered continuous dazzlers and all the EW. Best thing is it is reuseable. Plug the tubes with more grasers and you have 50 to 100 graser broadsides 12 to 15 at each castle. And they are reuseable. Add a fission pile for each graser. Both broadsides can fire at two or more ships at the same time.

Lord Skimper wrote:This could be a use for those pesky SL SD. Pop the compensator, take out all the missiles, controls, etc... Keep the sidewalls. Fire the whole ship as one BIG missile. Put a grav control system in it and fire it remotely. Could even fire it through hyperspace. 24000 square metres of end cap add as many grazers as you can

It is immune to counter missiles. Use bucklers with firing ports. Without a compensator you can achieve 5000 10000 maybe 50000 g acceleration. Could even use the it can't be named to really surprise someone. 1 million klick range first fore shots as you go by at 250,000 km fire the broadside followed by stern grasers. With the It can't be named dropping the sidewalls. With the broadside. Full powered continuous dazzlers and all the EW. Best thing is it is reuseable. Plug the tubes with more grasers and you have 50 to 100 graser broadsides 12 to 15 at each castle. And they are reuseable. Add a fission pile for each graser. Both broadsides can fire at two or more ships at the same time.

aside from a few little problems like its hyper ability is useless where people actually fight 95% of the time - inside the hyper limit.
Oh and adding buckler walls requires complete replacement of impeller nodes.
And trying for tha kind of accel you want would cause internal systems to tear apart unless you totally rebuilt everything to handle the accel.
Oh and you can't just plug a missile tube with a graser- the mounts aren't physically compatible like that.

But you know otherwise yeah you could waste a year or so gutting, automating, and rebuilding those obsolete pieces of junk just to see their canned defenses fail to keep them from being torn apart by missile pod strikes.

Hello,

Nelson Mandela: The word is my weapon

Duckk wrote:You can't "project" anything into hyper. There is exactly one way to get across the alpha wall, and that's with a hyper generator boosting itself and what is enclosed inside its field.

It doesn't say that anywhere. Then I guess hyperspace travel was never invented! since no planet-bound lab was ever able to 'project' anything into hyper-space to discover it or gain data from it, and without it they couldn't travel inter-stellar outside generational/cryo-ships, to be outside the limit
Wormholes 'project' into and out of hyperspace. They don't have a 'hyper generator' turning on and off, and, I guess you are saying that there is some 'magic' shield around a star system.

I have seen no text stating that 'nothing can be projected into hyperspace' - the fact that there are wormholes disproves this, as they 'project' other things (ships) into and out of hyper. You need a system to 'open a hole into hyper' to send something through. For a starship, this is produced by sails and a hyper-generator that it takes with it so it can get back out again. one in, the generator is not used to 'maintain' position in hyper, it is used to accelerate and decelerate between bands and back down to N-space. This is shown by the fact that when a ship looses power (and thus the generator) or the generator is destroyed, while in hyper, the ship doesn't just drop out of hyper, as it would if the generator was needed to maintain position in hyper.
moving between N-space and H-space requires 'opening a hole and slipping through,' this means a 'hole' of adequate size. For a starship, this means a huge hole big enough to get through, it is also accelerating past c at the same time. There is a major difference between the mass and structural strength of a multi-thousand ton starship and a multi-hundred pound projectile. The requirements needed to project a small object is much less than what is needed to project (which is what we're doing with the generator) a starship, into and out of hyper - that's BASIC physics. there is also a major difference in stresses between the two, meaning that the projectile can be designed to withstand infinitely more gravitational stresses (which is what causes ships to be 'ripped apart' when transitioning inside the 'hyper-limit') than any starship. would there be a 'hyper-limit' for using the weapon, sure, but it would definitely be much further in, depending on the design of the projectile.
would it take miutes for the projectile to transition...well, let see... it takes a 150 car train, traveling down a steep slop, several minutes to slow down and stop, so, I guess it takes several minutes for a motorcycle to slow from the same speed ... oh wait ... no it doesn't, it only takes a second or two ... why would that be? MASS, again BASIC physics, the starship requires longer because of it's MASS... which the projectile does not have!

MAD-4A wrote:

Duckk wrote:You can't "project" anything into hyper. There is exactly one way to get across the alpha wall, and that's with a hyper generator boosting itself and what is enclosed inside its field.

It doesn't say that anywhere. Then I guess hyperspace travel was never invented! since no planet-bound lab was ever able to 'project' anything into hyper-space to discover it or gain data from it, and without it they couldn't travel inter-stellar outside generational/cryo-ships, to be outside the limit
Wormholes 'project' into and out of hyperspace. They don't have a 'hyper generator' turning on and off, and, I guess you are saying that there is some 'magic' shield around a star system.

The hyperdrive was invented ~700 years after the first sublight colony ship left Earth.

The 'magic' you speak of is gravity. Stars make quite a lot of it.

MAD-4A wrote:Wormholes 'project' into and out of hyperspace. They don't have a 'hyper generator' turning on and off, and, I guess you are saying that there is some 'magic' shield around a star system. I have seen no text stating that 'nothing can be projected into hyperspace' - the fact that there are wormholes disproves this, as they 'project' other things (ships) into and out of hyper.

1) Yes wormhole are described as

Honor Among Enemies wrote:Although it was called a "wormhole" by spacers and the public, astrophysicists decried the misuse of that term. It wasn't totally inappropriate, but in effect the Junction was a crack in the universe where a grav wave even more powerful than one of the "Roaring Deeps" had breached the wall between hyper-space and normal-space. For all intents and purposes, it was a frozen funnel of h-space, and not a calm one, for the grav wave twisting endlessly through it was extremely potent.

. But even they have always been found beyond the hyper limit of a star (usually way beyond).

2) There's never been a hint that anything less powerful than a wormhole can project mater through the Alpha without entirely crossing. (Ships can, when outside the hyper limit formed by the mass of the star or nearby Jovian or wormhole termini, but only when they and their hyper generator cross together)

3) Ships still need a hyper generator to enter a wormhole. (And a sail to avoid being torn apart on approach by it's grav eddies) So even wormholes, while they project gravity across the alpha wall don't allow object w/o hyper generators to cross.

MAD-4A wrote:You need a system to 'open a hole into hyper' to send something through. For a starship, this is produced by sails and a hyper-generator that it takes with it so it can get back out again.

Sail are NOT needed to enter hyper. Survey ships used hyper for centuries before the invention of sails; heck before the invention of impeller drive. All you need to enter hyper is a hyper generator (and to be outside any hyper limit).

What you do need sails for is to survive entering and traveling along a) a grav wave or b) a wormhole. But if you stick to the rifts (the majority of hyper tha lies outside any 'wave) you never need (or could even use) sails.

MAD-4A wrote:moving between N-space and H-space requires 'opening a hole and slipping through,' this means a 'hole' of adequate size. For a starship, this means a huge hole big enough to get through, it is also accelerating past c at the same time. There is a major difference between the mass and structural strength of a multi-thousand ton starship and a multi-hundred pound projectile. The requirements needed to project a small object is much less than what is needed to project (which is what we're doing with the generator) a starship, into and out of hyper - that's BASIC physics.

No ships do not 'accelerate past c'. This isn't Star Wars or Star Trek where you stream out from psuedo-acceleration as you jump to hyper.

Ships only lose velocity entering (or leaving) hyper - they're never accelerated by it. The table from MtH shows that entering or leaving hyper cuts your pre-transfer velocity by 92%. (And heck if you try to transfer into hyper at above 0.3c your ship goes *poof* and everybody dies.

First a useful anti-ship projectile weapon in the honorvers is going to be at least multi-tons, not just hundreds of points (at the start of the series capital missiles were around 80 tons and the warhead was probably at least a few of them).

But more important you didn't explain why if, as you claim, effective hyper limit must vary by size of opening a 38,000 ton dispatch boat and a 8,500,000 ton (more than 200x larger) SD(P) don't have different hyper limits. If lighter ships could enter or leave hyper closer to the star that absolutely should have come up as a tactical consideration.
But nothing in the books ever talks about anything affecting the size of a hyper limit except the mass of the object at it's center.

And if, as it seems, the inability to enter/leave hyper is caused by the spacetime curvature of that object's mass it would make sense that just as acceleration of an object (in vacuum) in a gravity field isn't affected by it's own size/mass that the ability of a hyper field to have a 'flat' enough surface to work also isn't influenced by it's own mass.