Loren Pechtel wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:Well a ship is supposed to cut its wedge to indicate surrender, which should happen about the time you abondon ship - losing the wedge would drop all the sidewalls.
But even if the wedge stayed up the sidewalls are 10 km off each beam so it’s unlikely a pod would be shot out with enough force to cover 10 km before exiting the rear of the wedge. (Because once your far enough out to clear the compensator field, normally maybe a km or less, the ship zips away from you at several hundred gravities of acceleration. And a buckler wall seems a limit problem as it is about the diameter of the ships max width - so unless you bale straigh out the aft of the ship any course that clears the aft hammerhead would also clear an aft buckler wall.
Seems to me about the only way you could hit a sidewalk while abandoning ship is if they were dumb enough to cut accel to zero, leave the wedge and sidewalls up, and the ship survived long enough for the pods to drift 10 km into an intact sidewall. ,
I disagree. Pods have to be leaving the ship at great speed.
1) At Hell we saw that when a ship goes up in a big boom the flash is hot enough to severely damage nearby ships. That means it's utterly unsurvivable to a mere pod.
2) We have people getting off ships just before they explode. I'm not recalling the world, but it was 4 SLN BCs that at missile salvos. With roughly 30 seconds of warning there were survivors--that means that less than 30 seconds of flight time of a pod is sufficient to get considerably farther away than the ships were at Hell. While we don't have the numbers it almost certainly has to be beyond sidewall range--why would they park ships close enough together that nobody could bring up their main drive? It's not like they didn't have space to spread out farther than that and I can't imagine a warship captain boxing themselves in like that without reason.
"Drift" probably wasn't the right word; that does have a connotation of lazy movement whereas I just meant largely without further acceleration not that they had minimal initial velocity.
At Hades Farnese was "less than six hundred kilometers" from the exploding battlecruiser. To get even that far away in the 30 seconds you specified you'd need at least 135 gees of acceleration.
(I'm assuming that the pod launcher can't throw a 10 man pod at the 72,000 km/h it would take to cover that distance without further accel) That's a fairly hefty drive, and the description of life pods in HAE doesn't
seem to include allowance for that.
Honor Among Enemies wrote:The number of people who could expect to get out of a ship lost to battle damage would be low, but someone almost always made it—unless the damned ship blew up, of course—and ships could be lost to other causes. That was what the pods were for. In deep space, they were little more than life support bubbles fitted with transponders which both sides were supposedly duty bound to pick up after an engagement, but they were also designed to be capable of independent atmospheric entry if there should happen to be a habitable planet handy when disaster struck.
At Steilman's direction, Showforth had built and Stennis and Illyushin had installed an unobtrusive little box in the circuits which monitored Pod 184. When the time came, that box would be turned on, and it would continue to report that the ten-man pod was exactly where it was supposed to be, with every system at standby, when, in fact, it was somewhere else entirely.
A drive at least half the power of an old LAC's and the energy to run it seems like a lot of functionality to be covered by "little more than". And the quote seems to imply people don't escape when the ship blows up - which could include anybody in nearby pods when it blows. However most ships don't explode like that - when you abandon ship you'd scram the reactors and drop the wedge. The hulk might get blasted apart by more fire from the enemy but once the fusion reactors are safed it's not going to catastrophically explode wiping out everybody nearby.
But also remember that at Hades Farnese had "Only her standard, station-keeping particle screens were up, and those were intended mainly to keep dust from accumulating on her hull. They had never been intended to deal with something like this". We don't know how much more effective the full rad shields, uses to ward off relativistic particles, would have been - and I could much more easily see lifepods "little more" including heavy rad shields than including a powerful impeller drive.
But yes, if a ship kept its wedge and sidewalls up a pod accelerating straight out from the broadside couldn't accelerate at more than ~6% as hard as the ship, for the worst case - an SD, or it would hit the sidewall before exiting the aft end of the wedge. But then with that kind of accel you could just aim for the open end of the wedge - no reason to aim yourself at a sidewall.
