Just how big IS a hyper drive

drothgery wrote:It seems like a minimum hyperdrive is about 10-20 Ktons, just going by the sizes of the smallest dispatch boat or yacht (30-40 Ktons) vs the smallest remotely modern LAC (about 20 Ktons). We also know hyper generator size does not scale linearly with tonnage of the entire ship; the hyper generator is a much smaller percentage of the mass of an 8 Mton SD or freighter than it is of a dispatch boat or frigate.

kzt wrote:Bigger than a breadbox.

We don't know any more unless I've forgotten something. There isn't even any real evidence that I recall that it scales with the size of the ship. It makes sense that it does, but it's highly unlikely to be linear scaling.

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 48 wrote:"So how bad is it?" Friede Butry leaned over, peering into the space uncovered by a removed cover plate. The inside of that space was filled with a lot of equipment whose precise purpose she understood only vaguely.
Andrew Artlett straightened up from the piece of machinery he'd been working on, squatted on his heels, and started wiping his hands with a rag. That was rather silly, really. The interior of a hyper generator—even one for a ship as small as a mere million tons—needed to be kept clean at all times. In fact, Andrew had washed his hands before starting to work on it as thoroughly as a surgeon washes his hands before undertaking an operation.
But old habits died hard. Andrew always thought of himself as what he called a "jackleg mechanic," and such stalwart and doughty souls by definition always had dirty hands that needed to be wiped clean.
"Pretty damn bad, Ganny. It could go out at any time."
"Why?" Butry glared at the housing. "Those damned things are supposed to be the next best thing to indestructible!"
"Well, they are . . . mostly," Andrew acknowledged. "Unfortunately, even a hyper generator has some moving parts, and this one"—he tapped a badly worn-looking rotorlike device longer than his arm—"is one of them. Worse, it's an important one of them. In fact, it's the stabilizer for the primary stage. If it goes down, you've got no hyper control at all, Ganny. Zip. And this sucker ought to have been changed out in a routine overhaul at least a hundred thousand hours ago. We really need to replace it, before we try to make another jump."
"It can't just be fixed?"
"Fixed? How?" He pointed a finger at the rotor's shaft. Even Ganny, whose many fields of expertise and knowledge did not include matters mechanical, could see that it was badly worn.
"I'd have to remove it, first. That could be done, although it'd take a while. That's the easy part. Then I'd have to add metal to it, using welding equipment we don't have, so I'd have to design and build the welding equipment which I could probably do with the odds and ends we have on this rustbucket of a so-called starship but you're looking at weeks of work, Ganny. Might be as much as two or three months. Then I'd have to turn it back down to specs using metal-shaping equipment which we also don't have. The so-called 'machine shop' on this piece of crap is a joke and you can tell that cheapskate Walter Imbesi I said so. There's no way on God's green earth I could possibly build a modern computerized machining center. And even if I could, who'd design the program? You're probably the closest we've got to a real programmer and . . ."
He cocked an inquisitive eye up at her. Ganny shook her head. "I'm not really that good a programmer and what little skill I do have runs entirely toward financial stuff. There's no way I could design a program to do what you want, Andrew."
He nodded. "What I figured. So that means I'd have to build an old-style lathe."
"A . . . what?"
He grinned. "And you claim to be the old-timer here! A 'lathe' is an antique piece of equipment, Ganny, used to cut metal. More or less contemporaneous, I think, to ox-drawn plows. Still, it'd do the trick although it'd take a lot longer than modern equipment. Fortunately, we've got a pretty good suite of measuring instruments so I could probably manage to get the shaft back to specs using a micrometer."
"A . . . what?"
"A micrometer's an ancient type of measuring tool, Ganny. Definitely contemporaneous to ox-drawn plows. Well, yardsticks anyway."
"What's a 'yardstick'?" piped up Ed Hartman. He and his two buddies had been watching the process with great interest from close up. As close up as Andrew would let them come, anyway. He was deeply suspicious of their claims to being crispy clean.
"A stick to measure a yard, what d'you think?"
"So what's a 'yard'?" asked Brice Miller.
Artlett scowled. "Ganny, is this a consultation over critical repair issues or a remedial history class?"
She smiled, and made shooing motions at the three teenagers. "Give your uncle some breathing room, kids. I'll explain to you what a yard is later."
She looked back down at Andrew. "And how long would it take to make this . . . 'lathe,' you called it?"
"At least as long as it took me to make the welding equipment. Even though it'll have to be a primitive as they come, since I've got no way to make a lead screw. Fortunately I can probably jury-rig an electromagnetic actuator of some kind."
"What's a 'lead'—never mind. Again, in other words, you're talking about weeks."
"Might even be months. There's really no way to know ahead of time. The bottom line is this, Ganny. Unless we replace the worn out parts now, this equipment is likely to go out completely once we put any real stress on it. At that point, we're dead in the water. We'd still have power, so it wouldn't be immediately life-threatening. We could probably survive for at least a year. But we'd just be drifting in space until I could fix it. And, like I said, that could take anywhere up to half a year."
She nodded. "All right, then. I'll just have to tap into what funds we've got. Write up what you need, Andrew, and I'll transmit it down to the surface as soon as we've been given customs clearance. That shouldn't take long. This is our third visit. The Mesans are being downright gracious now that they figure we're repeat business."

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 54 wrote:Ganny Butry's clan, including Ganny, didn't put much stock in the so-called "wisdom of age" except when the phrase was applied to Ganny herself. So the pilot of the shuttle that waited for Anton and Victor on the tarmac was Sarah Armstrong, all of twenty-two years of age—and her copilot was Brice Miller, eight years younger than she was.
Why were they the pilots? Because they were the best Ganny had at the moment. Simple as that. A lot of things were simple for the clan, probably because they were often too ignorant to know better.
"I don't think that's a good idea," said Brice dubiously. He watched as Anton and Victor and Yana and a man he didn't know and two women he'd never seen before but one of whom was already of great interest because she was about his own age continued to unload one of the crates. They were unceremoniously dumping everything it held into a refuse bin that Yana had brought up from one of the nearby maintenance centers. (The mechanics hadn't objected. Partly because Yana gave them her biggest smile but mostly because she gave them an even bigger bribe.)
"Got no choice," grunted Anton, lifting out a piece of equipment only he could have picked up unassisted. "Got to make room for Steph and Nancy."
The big piece of equipment went into the bin. Brice thought there was something familiar-looking about it, but couldn't remember why at the moment.
Most of his mind was elsewhere. She must be the Nancy one.
Sarah was practically dancing back and forth with anxiety. In her case, though, not because of the cargo they were jettisoning.
"Hurry it up, folks," she hissed. "If we lift off more than thirty seconds behind schedule, customs will have a fit. You could sharpen sticks in their assholes, each and every one. I think they send them all to obsessive-compulsive disorder school for advanced training."
Anton heaved another piece of gear into the bin.
"Why can't we just ride in the shuttle?" asked the younger of the two women. She seemed bright-eyed, alert and curious. That, combined with the big knife in her hand, made her thoroughly fascinating. She was sort of pretty, too.
Brice screwed up his courage. "No room except in the bays. And they're not pressurized. You'd die, outside of the crates."
The girl looked at him. "Who're you?"
"Brice. Brice Miller. I'm the copilot."
"The copilot, huh? How old are you?"
"Uh . . . almost fifteen. Next month."
"I'm Nancy. Nancy Becker. I turned fifteen four months ago. So I'm older than you." Having established that critical point of status, however, the girl's expression became quite warm. "Already a copilot. That's really cool."
Brice still thought dumping the contents of that crate was probably a bad idea. But he didn't care any longer. Not in the least, littlest, tiniest, teeniest bit.
The crate now emptied, it and its twin were hoisted into the cargo bay with the lift that Sarah had already rented. (For considerably more than she could have gotten it with a bribe—but she was only twenty-two. Still young and naïve.)
"Climb in, all of you!" she said, heading for the shuttle's cabin. "We can still make our schedule. Barely. Brice, seal them in."
The crates were segregated by sex. Zilwicki, Cachat and the man Brice didn't know in one. Yana and the two new women in the other. The crate inhabited by the men was crammed full. The one inhabited by the women was . . . not.
"There's still room for you," said Nancy.
Brice summoned every ounce of duty and discipline he could muster. "Sorry. Can't. I'm the copilot. But I'll be seeing you soon anyway. Uh, all of you."
It didn't take long to seal the crates. Then, seal the bay. Nonetheless, by the time he climbed into his seat in the cabin, Sarah was yelling.
"—fault if we get arrested!" The shuttle began to lift. "And don't expect me to bail you out!"
Sarah could be dense, sometimes. Brice was pretty damn sure that if Mesan customs—much less police—arrested them and discovered they were smuggling superspies and who-knew-what-else off the planet, making bail would be the least of their problems.

***Snip***

"You did WHAT?" shrieked Andrew Artlett, less than two minutes after the shuttle began disgorging its contents in one of the cargo bays of the Hali Sowle.
* * *

***Snip***

* * *
Less than an hour after they made their upward alpha translation, Andrew Artlett was completely and totally vindicated.
Mainly because they'd just made an unscheduled—and most unpleasant—downward translation.
"Congratulations, you stupid goofballs. The hyper generator is now officially defunct. We're damned lucky it lasted long enough for the failsafes to throw us back into n-space before the stabilizer went. Of course, that was all the good luck we got issued. You may have noticed that the damned rotor shaft is snapped? Not warped, not bent, not deformed—snapped? Which doesn't even mention the collateral damage the thing did when it went! And—thanks to a pair of frigging cowboys I could name—the parts we need to fix it are in a garbage bin somewhere down on the surface of Mesa!"
His volume had risen steadily through the course of his explanation. That might have had something to do with how long he'd spent throwing up after the violent nausea of the totally unexpected crash translation. Or, of course, it might have stemmed from some other concern, Brice supposed.
Most likely not, though.
Victor Cachat didn't seem disturbed, however. Neither did Anton Zilwicki.
"Trust us, will you, Andrew?" Victor said. "Nothing that can happen to us now is remotely as bad as what would have happened had we not gotten off Mesa in time."
Andrew was still glaring. "It's going to take months to get that generator working again!"
Zilwicki shrugged. "I admit that's unfortunate—but mostly because I'm worried what's going to happen before we can finally get our news back home. Just drifting in space for a few months by itself—we've got power, right? Plenty of food and water, too—is no big deal. That's why they invented chess and card games and such."

Vince wrote:Definitely bigger than a breadbox. Aboard the Hali Sowle:

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 48 wrote:"So how bad is it?" Friede Butry leaned over, peering into the space uncovered by a removed cover plate. The inside of that space was filled with a lot of equipment whose precise purpose she understood only vaguely.
Andrew Artlett straightened up from the piece of machinery he'd been working on, squatted on his heels, and started wiping his hands with a rag. That was rather silly, really. The interior of a hyper generator—even one for a ship as small as a mere million tons—needed to be kept clean at all times. In fact, Andrew had washed his hands before starting to work on it as thoroughly as a surgeon washes his hands before undertaking an operation.
But old habits died hard. Andrew always thought of himself as what he called a "jackleg mechanic," and such stalwart and doughty souls by definition always had dirty hands that needed to be wiped clean.

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm not finding where I got the impression from but I thought a courier ship had about the smallest hyper generator anybody knew how to build - but RFC has definitely said before that you can't build a hyper generator small enough to fit in anything like a missile or drone. So I'm thinking a minimum size in the 10 - 20 meter on a side cube range.

Large enough to constrain the minimum size of a dispatch boat/courier but not a major impact on the internal volume of even a DD(L) much less any larger warship.


But that's just my speculation.