How To Abandon Ship?

Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.

Theemile wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.

Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...

cthia wrote:Also, the ejection sequence does not have anything to do with how much time-to-holy-hell is left on the reactor. The reactor is going to blow when it damn well pleases and the ejection may not even clear the ship, let alone the radius of the sidewalls in some cases.

Vince wrote:Don't make the mistake of expecting a nuclear explosion (in this case, an Honorverse gravity fusion reactor) to correspond to a normal explosion. A normal explosion will cause any other available fuel to ignite, combust and/or detonate. A nuclear explosion will do the same, but will not cause any other fuel not already present at the site of the initial fusion reaction to undergo nuclear fusion and produce a nuclear yield. In order to produce a nuclear fusion reaction, either today or in the Honorverse (either in stars or hydrogen bombs), the hydrogen must be uniformly compressed and heated to a literally astronomical degree. If the compression isn't uniform, the hydrogen will escape and fusion will not occur. And explosions, once the initial nuclear yield occurs, are chaotic, not uniform.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Also, the ejection sequence does not have anything to do with how much time-to-holy-hell is left on the reactor. The reactor is going to blow when it damn well pleases and the ejection may not even clear the ship, let alone the radius of the sidewalls in some cases.

Actually it does. Ejection is only used as a last ditch attempt to save the ship; when there isn't time to cut the fuel feed to the reactor and the automatic shutdown failsafes haven't worked.

If the reactor wasn't just about to explode there would be time to cut the fuel and starve the fusion reaction - safeing the reactor without the damage and risk of blowing the side off the ship and then applying massive acceleration to an already unstable grav bottle.

SHUTDOWN

In a nuclear reactor, shutdown refers to the state of the reactor when it is subcritical by at least a margin defined in the reactor's technical specifications. Further requirements for being shut down may include having the reactor control key be secured and having no fuel movements or control systems maintenance in progress.

The shutdown margin is defined in terms of reactivity, frequently in units of delta-k/k (where k is taken to mean k-effective, the effective multiplication factor) or occasionally in dollars (the dollar is a unit equal to the change in reactivity needed to go from critical to prompt critical). Shutdown margin can refer either to the margin by which the reactor is subcritical when all control rods are inserted or to the margin by which the reactor would be shut down in the event of a scram. Hence, care must be taken to define shutdown margin in the most conservative way in the reactor's technical specifications; a typical research reactor will specify the margin when in the cold condition, without xenon. Under this specification, the shutdown margin can be simply calculated as the sum of the control rod worths minus the core excess.

Minimum shutdown margin can be calculated in the same way as shutdown margin, except that the negative reactivity of the most reactive control rod and non-scramable rods is ignored. This definition allows the reactor to be designed so that it remains safely shut down even if that most reactive control rod becomes stuck out of the core.

A reactor is in cold shutdown when, in addition, its coolant system is at atmospheric pressure and at a temperature below 100 °C (210 °F). This temperature is low enough that the water cooling the fuel in a light water reactor does not boil even when the reactor coolant system is de-pressurized.

Theemile wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.

Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...

PeterZ wrote:As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.

PeterZ wrote:[As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.

Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.

Theemile wrote:Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...

PeterZ wrote:As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.

cthia wrote:I wonder how that translates to point defense? If ports are always open for missiles then perhaps it is the same for point defense? And autocannons and lasers need a certain arc to perform adequately, which means a fairly large open port to accommodate the degree of movement?

The Short Victorious War, Honor Harrington's Navy, NAVAL DESIGN AND DOCTRINE wrote:Although no "holes" could exist in an impeller stress band, portals (known to naval spacers as "gunports") could be opened in a vessel's sidewalls to permit unobstructed fire of its own weapons. In theory, gunports represented dangerous chinks in its defenses; in practice, the targets were too small and fleeting—they were "open" only long enough for a shot to be fired through them—to be deliberately targeted. Nonetheless, it was not unheard of (though it was very rare) for a lucky shot to penetrate an open gunport.
Even a freak gunport hit, however, wasn't guaranteed to inflict damage. The maximum safe velocity in n-space was approximately .8 c for a ship with military-grade particle and radiation shielding, whereas merchantmen normally relied on much weaker—and less massive—shield generators, trading lower maximum speeds for greater cargo capacity. But speed wasn't the only reason military shielding was so much more powerful, for it was also used to fill the area between the sidewall and hull and could lessen or even negate the effect of a hit which managed to pierce the primary defense.

Theemile wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.

Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...

PeterZ wrote:As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.