Spider drive ships and technical limitations

tlb wrote:I believe that going through a wormhole is just a special case of the ability to go through hyperspace,; so if you can do one then you can do the other.

quite possibly a cat wrote:If the Mesan Alignment is clever their next batch of nano will infect people going to bolthole, record the star locations and give them Bolthole's location. This can be followed up by extreme (like 6mo.) long range missile fire. Since there isn't any civilian habitation in the system and its not even claimed by any star nation they can just let the missiles self target. Heck, they could even do something like use missile impeller wedges on planets.

kzt wrote:

tlb wrote:I believe that going through a wormhole is just a special case of the ability to go through hyperspace,; so if you can do one then you can do the other.

I think it's more it's special case of a grav wave, but yes.

tlb wrote:I believe that going through a wormhole is just a special case of the ability to go through hyperspace,; so if you can do one then you can do the other.

kzt wrote:I think it's more it's special case of a grav wave, but yes.

Jonathan_S wrote:Or to put it another way the ability to enter hyperspace is a necessary but not sufficient condition to use a wormhole.

The early exploration ships, before the invention of Warshaski sails, could use hyper but a grav wave or a wormhole would tear them to pieces.

Peregrinator wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:As of the end of SoV, he's on Darius, so it doesn't matter at all.

Yeah, I know where he is, but I'm not sure what you mean by "it doesn't matter". It matters to me out of curiosity; of course it probably won't matter in the sense of helping Manticore defeat the Alignment.

tlb wrote:The nano that you reference has to be tailored to the target's DNA and can only do actions that can be simulated ahead of time; so it does not know coordinates or passwords that the attacker does not know.

We have snippets of Bolthole showing that is was a lost colony found by the Legislaturists, so of course there is civilian habitation and it is now part of Haven.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Or to put it another way the ability to enter hyperspace is a necessary but not sufficient condition to use a wormhole.

The early exploration ships, before the invention of Warshaski sails, could use hyper but a grav wave or a wormhole would tear them to pieces.

But no modern ship would be without sails, since they result in free energy when traveling in hyperspace. So my statement was true as correctly representing what I believed; but my belief was inadequate, because I had forgotten the first explorers.

Jonathan_S wrote:Fair enough - we were nitpicking.

Though I guess in exceptional situations we've seen LACs launched while in hyper. Those don't have hyper generators or sails - so they have to stay well clear of any grav waves.


But you'd need a fairly oddball scenario to have reason to build a modern ship with a hyper generator but no alpha nodes. Even if your expected operational use was just shuttling between a pair of systems where there were no grav waves nearby you'd probably want to spend the extra on alpha nodes just to have the flexibility to repurpose the ship if circumstances changed.

Jonathan_S wrote:Fair enough - we were nitpicking.

Though I guess in exceptional situations we've seen LACs launched while in hyper. Those don't have hyper generators or sails - so they have to stay well clear of any grav waves.

But you'd need a fairly oddball scenario to have reason to build a modern ship with a hyper generator but no alpha nodes. Even if your expected operational use was just shuttling between a pair of systems where there were no grav waves nearby you'd probably want to spend the extra on alpha nodes just to have the flexibility to repurpose the ship if circumstances changed.

Theemile wrote:On non-RMN/GSN ships, Alpha nodes create the majority of thrust on ships - 2/3rds of the thrust as a matter of fact. replacing the alphas with betas would give a ship with less than 1/2 the thrust of the normal arrangement. Designing a ship without them would be intentionally hobbling them.

Yes, LACs do so, but that is an intentional mass and cost saving in a cheap, small attritional unit. As we all know, the minimal hull you can mount alphas, a hyperdrive, and a minimal weapons fit is 50-55Ktons (ie a frigate), where a LAC with a similiar weapons fit is in the 10-20K range.

It had taken just over five hundred years, but finally, in 1246 P.D., the scientists had learned enough for the planet Beowulf to perfect the impeller drive, which used what were for all intents and purposes "tame" grav waves in normal-space. Yet useful as the impeller was in normal-space, it was extraordinarily dangerous in hyper. If it encountered one of the enormously more powerful naturally occurring grav waves, it could vaporize an entire starship, much as Honor herself had blown the Havenite courier boat's impeller nodes with Fearless's impeller wedge.

More than thirty years had passed before Dr. Adrienne Warshawski of Old Earth found a way around that danger. It was Warshawski who finally perfected a gravity detector which could give as much as five light-seconds' warning before a grav wave was encountered. That had been a priceless boon, permitting impeller drive to be used with far greater safety between grav waves, and even today all grav detectors were called "Warshawskis" in her honor, yet she hadn't stopped there. In the course of her research, she had penetrated far deeper into the entire grav wave phenomenon than anyone before her, and she had suddenly realized that there was a way to use the grav wave itself. An impeller drive modified so that it projected not an inclined stress band above and below a ship but two slightly curved plates at right angles to its hull could use those plates as giant, immaterial "sails" to trap the focused radiation hurtling along a grav wave. More than that, the interface between a Warshawski sail and a grav wave produced an eddy of preposterously high energy levels which could be siphoned off to power a starship. Once a ship had "set sail" down a grav wave, it could actually shut down its onboard power plants entirely.

And so the grav wave, once the promise of near certain death, had become the secret to faster, cheaper, and safer hyper voyages. Captains who had avoided them like the plague now actively sought them out, cruising between them on impeller drive where necessary, and the network of surveyed grav waves had grown apace.

There had still been a few problems. The most bothersome was that grav waves were layers of focused gravity, subject to areas of reverse flow and unpredictable bouts of "turbulence" along the interfaces of opposed flows or where one wave impinged upon another. Such turbulence could destroy a ship, but it was almost more frustrating that no one could take full advantage of the potential of the Warshawski sail (or, for that matter, the impeller drive) because no human could survive the accelerations which were theoretically possible.

Improved Warshawskis had tended to offset the first difficulty by extending their detection range and warning ships of turbulence. With enough warning time, a ship could usually trim its sails to ride through turbulence by adjusting their density and "grab factor," though failure to trim in time remained deadly, which was why Sirius's claim of tuner flutter had been so serious. A captain still had to see it coming, but the latest generation detectors could detect a grav wave at as much as eight light-minutes and spot turbulence within a wave at up to half that range. The problem of acceleration tolerance, on the other hand, had remained insoluble for over a standard century, until Dr. Shigematsu Radhakrishnan, probably the greatest hyper physicist after Warshawski herself, devised the inertial compensator.

Radhakrishnan had also been the first to hypothesize the existence of wormhole junctions, but the compensator had been his greatest gift to mankind's diaspora. The compensator turned the grav wave (natural or artificial) associated with a vessel into a sump into which it could dump its inertia. Within the safety limits of its compensator, any accelerating or decelerating starship was in a condition of internal free-fall unless it generated its own gravity, but the compensator's efficiency depended on two factors: the area enclosed in its field and the strength of the grav wave serving as its sump. Thus a smaller ship, with a smaller compensator field area, could sustain a higher acceleration from a given wave strength, and the naturally-occurring and vastly more powerful grav waves of hyper-space allowed for far higher accelerations under Warshawski sail than could possibly be achieved under impeller drive in normal-space.

Even with the acceleration rates the compensator permitted, no manned vessel could maintain a normal-space velocity above eighty percent of light-speed, for the particle and radiation shielding to survive such velocities simply did not exist. The highest safe speed in hyper was still lower, little more than .6 c due to the higher particle charges and densities encountered there, but the closer congruity of points in normal-space meant a ship's apparent velocity could be many times light-speed. Equipped with Warshawski sails, gravity detectors, and the inertial compensator, a modern warship could attain hyper accelerations of up to 5,500 g and sustain apparent velocities of as much as 3,000 c. Merchantmen, on the other hand, unable to sacrifice as much onboard mass to the most powerful possible sails and compensators the designer could squeeze in, remained barred from the highest hyper bands and most powerful grav waves and were lucky to make more than 1,200 c, though some passenger liners might go as high as 1,500.

Theemile wrote:On non-RMN/GSN ships, Alpha nodes create the majority of thrust on ships - 2/3rds of the thrust as a matter of fact. replacing the alphas with betas would give a ship with less than 1/2 the thrust of the normal arrangement. Designing a ship without them would be intentionally hobbling them.

Yes, LACs do so, but that is an intentional mass and cost saving in a cheap, small attritional unit. As we all know, the minimal hull you can mount alphas, a hyperdrive, and a minimal weapons fit is 50-55Ktons (ie a frigate), where a LAC with a similiar weapons fit is in the 10-20K range.