BEOWULF - THE KARMA SUITSYA

Dauntless wrote:i don't think exact tonnages for streak of dispatch boats have been given beyond the off hand comments in In Enemy hands about Honor's yacht and how it was basically a civliian dispatch boat.

in other threads there has been some info from things like Jaynes and other books developed for various honorverse games but how accurate they are i don't know.

generally I believe a Dispatch boat will be about 60K tons (pre war destroyers were about 80K and a dispatch boat is basically a small destroyer without weapons), Streak boats haven't been different enough to rise eyebrows, so the added equipment for "streak" ability is probably no more then an extra 2/3K which is not enough difference to draw attention.

Dauntless wrote:i don't think exact tonnages for streak of dispatch boats have been given beyond the off hand comments in In Enemy hands about Honor's yacht and how it was basically a civliian dispatch boat.

in other threads there has been some info from things like Jaynes and other books developed for various honorverse games but how accurate they are i don't know.

generally I believe a Dispatch boat will be about 60K tons (pre war destroyers were about 80K and a dispatch boat is basically a small destroyer without weapons), Streak boats haven't been different enough to rise eyebrows, so the added equipment for "streak" ability is probably no more then an extra 2/3K which is not enough difference to draw attention.

tlb wrote:I would think that a standard DB is more the size of a frigate, making both of them the smallest hyper capable vessels. The streak drive is a hyper generator that is larger than normal; I do not remember how much larger.

Dauntless wrote:a frigate has to be bigger then DB as a frigate was armed and DB aren't. even if weapons is just a couple of missile tubes and lasers I'd expect at least 5 to 10K difference in size

the only frigates we have seen were built for torch quite recently, I don't recall a size mentioned but given how modern they are i'd expect one to be as big as a pre war destroyer. culvern class the last deign prior to wolfhound/roland was 105K and came out in 1899 5 years before the war.

tlb wrote:

Dauntless wrote:i don't think exact tonnages for streak of dispatch boats have been given beyond the off hand comments in In Enemy hands about Honor's yacht and how it was basically a civliian dispatch boat.

in other threads there has been some info from things like Jaynes and other books developed for various honorverse games but how accurate they are i don't know.

generally I believe a Dispatch boat will be about 60K tons (pre war destroyers were about 80K and a dispatch boat is basically a small destroyer without weapons), Streak boats haven't been different enough to rise eyebrows, so the added equipment for "streak" ability is probably no more then an extra 2/3K which is not enough difference to draw attention.

tlb wrote:I would think that a standard DB is more the size of a frigate, making both of them the smallest hyper capable vessels. The streak drive is a hyper generator that is larger than normal; I do not remember how much larger.

Dauntless wrote:a frigate has to be bigger then DB as a frigate was armed and DB aren't. even if weapons is just a couple of missile tubes and lasers I'd expect at least 5 to 10K difference in size

the only frigates we have seen were built for torch quite recently, I don't recall a size mentioned but given how modern they are i'd expect one to be as big as a pre war destroyer. culvern class the last deign prior to wolfhound/roland was 105K and came out in 1899 5 years before the war.

I can accept that; note I only said closer to a frigate than the destroyer, which is what you said originally. So a DB can be smaller than a frigate, which is smaller than a destroyer of the same period.
I cannot remember whether the streak hyper generator doubled in size; I thought it was less than that.

ldwechsler wrote:I would doubt MAlign would use streak drive on dispatch boats. They go everywhere and are checked by a lot of home navies. Would you take a chance that a really good inspection officer with an engineering background would notice some things very different about a boat? That could lead to a REAL inspection that could give away the whole secret.

tlb wrote:

Dauntless wrote:i don't think exact tonnages for streak of dispatch boats have been given beyond the off hand comments in In Enemy hands about Honor's yacht and how it was basically a civliian dispatch boat.

in other threads there has been some info from things like Jaynes and other books developed for various honorverse games but how accurate they are i don't know.

generally I believe a Dispatch boat will be about 60K tons (pre war destroyers were about 80K and a dispatch boat is basically a small destroyer without weapons), Streak boats haven't been different enough to rise eyebrows, so the added equipment for "streak" ability is probably no more then an extra 2/3K which is not enough difference to draw attention.

tlb wrote:I would think that a standard DB is more the size of a frigate, making both of them the smallest hyper capable vessels. The streak drive is a hyper generator that is larger than normal; I do not remember how much larger.

Dauntless wrote:a frigate has to be bigger then DB as a frigate was armed and DB aren't. even if weapons is just a couple of missile tubes and lasers I'd expect at least 5 to 10K difference in size

the only frigates we have seen were built for torch quite recently, I don't recall a size mentioned but given how modern they are i'd expect one to be as big as a pre war destroyer. culvern class the last deign prior to wolfhound/roland was 105K and came out in 1899 5 years before the war.

I can accept that; note I only said closer to a frigate than the destroyer, which is what you said originally. So a DB can be smaller than a frigate, which is smaller than a destroyer of the same period.
I cannot remember whether the streak hyper generator doubled in size; I thought it was less than that.

ldwechsler wrote:I would doubt MAlign would use streak drive on dispatch boats. They go everywhere and are checked by a lot of home navies. Would you take a chance that a really good inspection officer with an engineering background would notice some things very different about a boat? That could lead to a REAL inspection that could give away the whole secret.

Dauntless wrote:tlb sorry didn't mean to sound argumentative, it is simply frigates have so little screen time that I wanted clarify what sort a tonnage a frigate might be in relation to both DB and destoryer.

The streak drive represented a fundamental advance in interstellar travel, and there was no indication anyone else was even close to duplicating it. For centuries, the theta bands had represented an inviolable ceiling for hyper-capable ships. Everyone had known it was theoretically possible to go even higher, attain a still higher apparent normal-space velocity, yet no one had ever managed to design a ship which could crack the iota wall and survive. Incredible amounts of research had been invested in efforts to do just that, especially in the earlier days of hyper travel, but with a uniform lack of success. In the last few centuries, efforts to beat the iota barrier had waned, until the goal had been pretty much abandoned as one of those theoretically possible but practically unobtainable concepts.
But the Mesan Alignment hadn't abandoned it, and finally, after the better part of a hundred T-years of dogged research, they'd found the answer. It was, in many ways, a brute force approach, and it wouldn't have been possible even now without relatively recent advances (whose potential no one else seemed to have noticed) in related fields. And even with those other advances, it had almost doubled the size of conventional hyper generators. But it worked. Indeed, they'd broken not simply the iota wall, but the kappa wall, as well. Which meant the voyage from New Tuscany to Mesa, which would have taken anyone else the next best thing to forty-five T-days, had taken Anisimovna less than thirty-one.

Please bear in mind, of course, that it takes time for information from our best surviving sources to reach us. It's not like we can ask the newsies about these things the way we can clip stories about military operations like Lovat, for example. At this point, and even using dispatch boats with streak capability on the Beowulf conduit, we're still talking about very preliminary reports."