MILSPEC-555: "EVACUATING A PLANET"

The question becomes "what system?". A system like Manticore and you have two habital planets in the same system and two habital planets one wormhole jump away. Given that, the lifting power of all military and civilian spacecraft and how many you can stack in a ship that doesn't need to be hyper capable you can actually move a lot of people. We have solid numbers for moving the population of Cerberus outsystem and the lift capacity required. If we have to use hyperspace to get the population somewhere safe, it makes it harder but still...

Let me reread to get some numbers together for the shipping, and professor do we have a second habital planets insystem or if not, how far away is the nearest habital planets via hyperspace?

I think Honorverse towers are pretty heavily tied into the city. Utilities and stuff. They would need to be specially designed for them to be pulled into space. A tower that is self sufficient enough and equipped with grav plates and so forth could survive. Heck, install enough contra-grav and a nice presser on the bottom and the tower could just launch itself into space! Add a hyperdrive, a relatively weak impeller and you could just go fly to another planet!

Actually, now that I think about it, an impeller might be cheaper than grav plates. No need for a compensator either. Just float along at one gee.

Also I don't think the towers actually use contra-grav to stay standing.

Weird Harold wrote:

Walks Alone wrote:Stop me if I'm being stupid, but could the towers themselves be used as lifepods?

That's certainly a better suggestion than trying to land a starship.

(Of course, the minor detail that I suggested pretty much the same thing might have influened my support. )

HOLD THAT THOUGHT

IT IS THE TWO MINUTE WARNING!
IT WILL SAVE AT LEAST ONE PERSON!
LAND THAT MOTHER FUCKER SOLDIER!

THAT'S AN ORDER!!!!!!




Can she get any people off is all that matters. I don't care if she has to limp on in, on half a node. If Fearless can fight it out for hours against a Battlecruiser while bruised and raped, surely a ship can survive a planned landing. And let's make one thing perfectly clear gentlemen. If she gets only 1 person off, it would have been worth it!

Movable towers, even if it wasn't quite as easy as the press of a button, would be a boon for urban planning too... you can construct towers in a central location and then deliver them where needed, if a tower is in an inconvenient spot, you can move it out of the way, and you might even be able to move an entire city in the event of some kind of disaster, whether its moving towers out of a danger zone, or moving them into it as temporary housing.

eristone wrote:The question becomes "what system?". A system like Manticore and you have two habital planets in the same system and two habital planets one wormhole jump away. Given that, the lifting power of all military and civilian spacecraft and how many you can stack in a ship that doesn't need to be hyper capable you can actually move a lot of people. We have solid numbers for moving the population of Cerberus outsystem and the lift capacity required. If we have to use hyperspace to get the population somewhere safe, it makes it harder but still...

Let me reread to get some numbers together for the shipping, and professor do we have a second habital planets insystem or if not, how far away is the nearest habital planets via hyperspace?

That's the spirit. Let's get these people off this godforsaken rock.

I was thinking about Cerberrus as well and I think they jury-rigged the life-support.

In Handout #2, I mentioned that evacuation will be system specific. I've been tackling Manticore. Manticore will utilize every planet possible to temporarily accept people.

Surely Torch will accept Manticorans and iinm, they've got plenty of room.

Walks Alone wrote:Movable towers, even if it wasn't quite as easy as the press of a button, would be a boon for urban planning too... you can construct towers in a central location and then deliver them where needed, if a tower is in an inconvenient spot, you can move it out of the way, and you might even be able to move an entire city in the event of some kind of disaster, whether its moving towers out of a danger zone, or moving them into it as temporary housing.

Certainly gives a new meaning to mobile home.

I really like the proposal. Remember, we are setting the cornerstone and foundation of this mission. Perhaps future planets can even adopt their dwellings in this fashion to be self-evacuable. It might even earn them a tax credit. Before this is all said and done, I would imagine many different methods will be employed collectively.

I have confidence in man's will to survive and his inventiveness in the face of danger.

quite possibly a cat wrote:I think Honorverse towers are pretty heavily tied into the city. Utilities and stuff. They would need to be specially designed for them to be pulled into space. ...
...
Also I don't think the towers actually use contra-grav to stay standing.

To use a tower as a lifeboat, severing it from "the grid" is pretty much a given. Cutting it into multiple pieces that can fit into a freighter pretty much seals the deal on separating it from "the grid."

If properly designed, a mega-tower would have emergency power in sectors; maybe 50-100 floors/sector, maybe more, maybe less.

Towers don't need contra-grav to remain standing, but the contragrav units that built them weren't destroyed when they finished.

A tower would need to be sealed for vacuum, and maybe reinforced, (especially if you have to cut it into sections,) but that would probably be a tower-by-tower preparation decision. Old lighthouses weren't designed to be moved -- they were usually designed to be immovable as possible -- yet preservation societies all over the world have moved lighthouses -- and museums and cabins and monuments, ad nauseum. Not being designed to functions as lifeboats should be no bar to using them as lifeboats.

Weird Harold wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:I think Honorverse towers are pretty heavily tied into the city. Utilities and stuff. They would need to be specially designed for them to be pulled into space. ...
...
Also I don't think the towers actually use contra-grav to stay standing.

To use a tower as a lifeboat, severing it from "the grid" is pretty much a given. Cutting it into multiple pieces that can fit into a freighter pretty much seals the deal on separating it from "the grid."

If properly designed, a mega-tower would have emergency power in sectors; maybe 50-100 floors/sector, maybe more, maybe less.

Towers don't need contra-grav to remain standing, but the contragrav units that built them weren't destroyed when they finished.

A tower would need to be sealed for vacuum, and maybe reinforced, (especially if you have to cut it into sections,) but that would probably be a tower-by-tower preparation decision. Old lighthouses weren't designed to be moved -- they were usually designed to be immovable as possible -- yet preservation societies all over the world have moved lighthouses -- and museums and cabins and monuments, ad nauseum. Not being designed to functions as lifeboats should be no bar to using them as lifeboats.

OMG we got hundreds of obsolete Solly SDs just floating in orbit, lets finally admit there's a better use for them than just sending them t the breakers

cthia wrote:Can she get any people off is all that matters. I don't care if she has to limp on in, on half a node. If Fearless can fight it out for hours against a Battlecruiser while bruised and raped, surely a ship can survive a planned landing. And let's make one thing perfectly clear gentlemen. If she gets only 1 person off, it would have been worth it!

At best that’s only a third the question.
1) can a ship land itself on the planet and have a reasonable probability on taking off agian successfully?
2) is there time for that ship to make multiple evacuation trips, and if so can it stand up to repeated groundings?
3j is such an action actually a quicker way to board than using a stream of countergrav shuttles picaces, or cutters? (Include that landing will likely be a slower process as a starships isn’t built for it and it’s flight computers aren’t programmed to help, that you’ve got to deal with getting people across the radioactive molten ground its thrusters would create, and that you’d have to concentrate the entire evacuee load at that one spot, where normal small craft pickups can go where the people are for minimal extra expended time)


But I’m still trying to understand what kind of planet killing disaster you’d know about only a year or so in advance, yet be unable to handle other than through complete evacuation. If you knew about it ten years out you could build evacuation ships. If you knew about it 3 weeks out most systems wouldn’t have time to get any outside help.

pappilon wrote:OMG we got hundreds of obsolete Solly SDs just floating in orbit, lets finally admit there's a better use for them than just sending them t the breakers

Warships do famously have lots of redundant life support to have enough left after battle damage. Let’s assume they can temporarily handle 5x their normal 6000 person crew (I think it’s more like 3x but let’s be generous). A hundred of them could then move 3 million people - (Though if you want repeat trips you need a thousand or so each to fly them back, letting you evac only 2.5 million each trip).
Just 500 trips or so to evacuate Manticore. /sarcasm