Post from David, there's something weird where he couldn't respond:
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kzt wrote:Power cords, lack thereof. - This is really more general pod issues. I understand the plot related reasons, but this is just absurd. Particularly as you don't need to run the reactor as the ship in in zero g. Metal industrial velcro (hook and loop) would work just fine.
Mismatching the SD and BC(P) loadouts when you have them operating together.
Pod, missile and drone reactors being started by pouring in plasma at roughly stellar core temp from the main reactors Who thought that having these run all through the ship was a good idea?
So if you can only start the reactors used in the pods by connecting them to a ships fusion reactor and then those reactors only run for a week before needing extensive refurbishment then how do pods positioned for system defense work?
So lets talk about how a LAC can tow two million tons of pods at 700g in total stealth...
Is this issue with power cords about why every square centimeter of every Manticoran warship isn't covered with pods 24/7?
Honorverse captains aren’t going to cover their hulls in pods and just leave them there for several reasons, including the fact that they probably won’t need them and also including the fact if they stay on the hull of the ship too long
they stop working.
I do not recall for certain, but I believe that in one of the books we discussed the reason that it had been impossible to mount multiple sets of impeller nodes aboard the same missile body prior to King Roger’s research programs. If I am wrong about that, suffice it to say that an active impeller node exerts a “warping” effect on any
other (but inactive) impeller node in its immediate vicinity. One of the critical components in a ship’s impeller nodes are the tuners that keep them in phase so that they are all working together to generate the impeller wedge rather than destroying one another. That’s also a reason that the alpha nodes are part of the impeller wedge; bringing them into the circuit and engaging their tuners with those of the beta nodes around them protects them from the warping effect. What Project Gram managed to do was to come up with a shield, mounted between the impeller nodes of a multidrive missile and impervious to the warping effect. It’s not a simple process, it requires a substantial power input and not
just the physical material of the shield, but it works.
If a missile pod is left exposed indefinitely to an impeller wedge, its nodes will degrade. That doesn’t mean it will happen immediately, or in the first 48 hours, or even necessarily the first week, but it
will happen eventually. It’s other electronic components and mollycircs will also degrade. The process can be slowed by using a system-defense pod rather than a standard ship-launched variant, but those are bigger and bulkier, so you could get less of them into the same amount of space. Even for them, there is an absolute limit as to how long a pod can be left “strapped” to the exterior of a ship, however.
In addition, system-defense pods differ from standard ship-launched pods in a couple of ways, which is the main reason they are substantially larger than shipboard pods.
I know that you think the notion of piping plasma around the interior of the ship is lunacy. Unfortunately, there’s no other way to provide the necessary power densities, so Honorverse ship designers just had to figure out how to deal with it. It’s a hazard, oh, yes indeed! It is, however,
necessary, and this is one reason that Honorverse ships continually monitor their power systems and automatically shut down any conduit that shows
any sign of instability, fluctuation, or — God help us all — breach. We’ve had instances in the books where a conduit blows (usually because of battle damage or a power surge) with catastrophic results, but Honorverse tech is good enough to reduce the threat to manageable levels. (Note that this is one of the reasons why there are such differences between civilian grade and mil-spec hardware in the Honorverse. Merchantships
do not require those sorts of power densities to support things like, oh, broadside grasers, missile tube grav drivers, massive point defense suites, and stuff like that there.
System-defense pods, however, can’t be attached to a warship’s plasma conduits. Because of that, they need to be large enough to contain their own separate fusion plant in which fusion is initiated using lasers to provide the power budget for the rest of the pod’s functions and the missiles aboard it. They are also deployed with solar panels to keep the capacitors for the lasers which initiate fusion “topped off” and to power all of the standby systems that keep the pod tied into the system-wide defense net. In addition to that, however, they are also built with highly efficient radiation shielding, because they are going to be exposed to solar radiation — in some cases, very
intense solar radiation, in other cases much less intense radiation — for months at a time. Shipboard pods don’t have that radiation shielding, which means that pods carried indefinitely on the hull of a starship are not protected against radiation when the wedge is down. This is not a huge factor in pod longevity, but it
is a factor.
The main way in which launching a Mark 16 or a Mark 23 differs from earlier versions of MDM (or the Mark 14 extended range missile) is that these are the first missiles which use onboard fusion plants rather than plasma-charged capacitors. Honorverse capacitors are, indeed, charged with more of that “stellar core temperature plasma” you hate to see them piping around. Again, we are talking about energy densities. The capacitors are far bulkier for the same power levels because — as I’m sure you’ll agree — the containment requirements for a plasma-filled “battery” are a bit extreme. In the case of a Mark 16 or a Mark 23, fusion is initiated aboard the missile before it launches. In the case of a capacitor-fed missile, the plasma is already stored and ready for use. What makes firing a Mark 16 so . . . interesting is that you’re bringing up a lightweight fusion reactor, with much less robust shielding and containment than a capacitor, inside the tube before you launch it. The Mark 16 is new enough when Aivars Terekhov heads off to the Talbott Sector that this is still a very nervous-making moment. By the time we get to
Uncompromising Honor, it’s pretty much old hat and the designers' assurances that the containment vessel is fully up to the demand has been validated in hundreds or thousands of launches, so nobody worries about it a lot.
Nobody worried about the mini-fusion plants in the
pod launched missiles, because if one of the reactors blew in that case, all you lost was the pod. If it blew in the tube, you pretty much lost the ship. The fact that the system-defense pods have the onboard capacity to
produce the plasma required by their grav drivers and by their missiles is the real reason that they can be left deployed for such lengthy periods of time. They don’t have to carry still more capacitors around with them to provide the “startup charge” provided to a ship-launched pod from the launching ship’s onboard systems.
Now, getting back to the extension cords. If that was the only issue — providing power to the “mooring point” — it’s a nonissue. The Honorverse has broadcast power. All you’d need to do would be to provide the ship with the additional broadcast capacity, and if anyone in the Honorverse thought that it was a huge tactical factor, I’m sure they would. Of course there is a limit to the amount of power a given ship can broadcast or (for that matter) supply through “extension cords.” And to be completely honest, most ships’ power budgets are not designed to provide scads of power indefinitely to external systems. Sorry about that, but the balance between power demand and power supply is one more of those compromises that BuShips has to balance whenever they produce a new design. Besides, even if I provided onboard power connections to seven bazillion missile attachment points, you’d only be upset because I had all those additional plasma conduits compromising the ship’s safety!
I believe that you and I have already wrestled a fall or three over the intermixing of Mark 16s and pre-Apollo MDMs. I’ve stated the reasons that the Royal Manticoran Navy opted to do that repeatedly, I thought they were valid then, I think they are valid now, and the Royal Manticoran Navy agrees with me,
so I’m not going to revisit that issue.
And I don’t recall off the top of my head – not saying there wasn’t one, just that I don’t recall it — an instance in which a Shrike towed 2,000,000 tons of pods at 700 gravities. A Shrike’s maximum acceleration rate is only about 640 gravities and 2,000,000 tons of pods would be somewhere in excess of 670. I don’t really think I’ve had
anybody towing that many pods without Shannon Foraker’s donkeys. A Shrike is about 20,000-22,000 tons, and it can easily tow four or five times its own mass at moderate percentages of its maximum acceleration rate without compromising its stealth capability, so 35-40 Mark 23 pods would be easy. Considerably heavier loads could be towed (assuming sufficient tractor capacity). Can you give me textev where I have them towing numbers much greater than that, under stealth, at an acceleration higher than 400 gravities? I’m not saying that I haven’t done it; only that I don’t
remember doing it and that if I did, I had committed a tactical faux pas.
