Where where the Beowulf Super Dreadnoughts built?

quite possibly a cat wrote:I stand corrected on the impellers!

There are a lot of bands, but you don't just go straight from N-space to the delta bands. You go N-space to Lowest Alpha band. Similarly you go from the lowest Alpha band to N-space.

Honor of the Queen wrote:“Ready for translation, aye,” Chief Killian replied, and the helmsman’s hand hovered over the manual override, just in case the astrogator’s computers dropped the ball, while Honor leaned back to watch.
“Mark!” DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless’s hyper generator became a basso growl.
Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

quite possibly a cat wrote:There are a lot of bands, but you don't just go straight from N-space to the delta bands. You go N-space to Lowest Alpha band. Similarly you go from the lowest Alpha band to N-space.

Jonathan_S wrote:One correction, almost all forts have impellers. Even the first book, chapter 5, mentions this

On Basilisk Station wrote:the "forts" in the outer rings had to be able to move to fill in the gaps and mass upon an attacker. Their maximum acceleration rates were low, well under a hundred gravities, but their initial positions had been very carefully planned. Their acceleration would be enough to intercept attacking forces headed in-system, and their engines were sufficiently powerful to generate impeller wedges and sidewalls to protect them.

They don't have hyper generators, or Alpha nodes / warshaski sails, but they do have a single ring of Beta nodes which allows them their low acceleration (which is still far quicker than any 20th century manned vehicle)

Still you can't hang them out in hyper.

Jonathan_S wrote:

glott wrote:This mention of the Peeps using Solarian electronics in the first war reminds me of something I seem to remember reading. It was someone saying something like, "civilian Solarian electronics are better than what the SLN is using."

The implication being that either the SLN never bothered to update their electronic equipment or that they actually built new ships with outdated tech. If the later, probably, because of kickbacks or some other form of graft.

Actually bureaucracy and military standards are more than enough to make military electronics lag behind civilian ones. It constantly the case in the US military, and probably all other militaries. Even if the electronics were cutting edge when the plane, ship, etc is designed by the time you get the first one built they're a couple years behind civilian electronics, and then you can't risk breaking changes so you keep making the planes or ships with that same exact electronics fit for years (as it gets more and more out of date) until you finally design a midlift electronics upgrade and over years bring the entire fleet up to not as obsolete tech.

But its even worse because the military (and to a lesser extent space hardware) requires electronics that work in conditions of temperature, shock, and particle emissions far in excess of what a civilian chip needs to handle. Ruggedizing the electronic components is a slow and costly process so even if you take a cutting edge chip by the time you've made it rugged enough for military use and started manifacturing them it's several years obsolete (and then it gets incorporated into a design that's again years away from initial production that will probably be getting cranked out for over a decade).

Its inevitable that anything the military takes from the civilian side will be obsolescent by the time it makes it into a deployed military device.



But the SLN was even worse, because their computer code was woefully underutilizing the basic hardware. So not only were their computers and electronics lagging behind what the civilian sector could do (for all the reasons mentioned above) they weren't even using what they had effectively. (In the Torch books the People's Navy in Exile, hardly the sharpest knives in the drawer, got major improvements from ex-SLN hardware by basically copying and pasting the St. Just ceasefire era Havenite computer programs onto the SLN computers. Not optimized at all for the hardware yet still significantly more effective than the theoretically optimized SLN software.