cthia wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:snip
1) When a freighter jumps into hyper it's going to be 10 minutes or so before they could possible jump back out (hyper generator need to recharge).
Isn't exiting hyper simply a downward transition? And downward transitions from band to band need no recharging?
Yes. Honor's convoy of merchantmen freighters and the escorts transiting downward from the delta band of hyperspace:
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 5 wrote:Hyper space’s rippling energy fluxes and flurries of charged particles hashed any sensor beyond a twenty-light-minute radius, but the convoy’s clustered light codes were clear and sharp and gratifyingly tight on Honor’s maneuvering display as it approached the hyper limit of Yeltsin’s Star at a comfortable third of light-speed.
The translation from n-space to hyper was speed critical—at anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apart—but the reverse wasn’t true. Which didn’t make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn’t a factor as far as hardware was concerned, but the effect on humans was something else again. Naval crews were trained for crash translations, yet there was a limit to what training could do to offset the physical distress and violent nausea, and there was no point in putting anyone—especially her merchant crews—through that.
“Ready to begin translation in forty-one seconds, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander DuMorne reported from Astrogation.
“Very well, Mr. DuMorne. The con is yours.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am. I have the con. Helm, prepare for initial translation on my mark.”
“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.
Her readouts stopped blinking. The visual display was suddenly still, filled once more with the unwinking pinpricks of normal-space stars, the sense of nausea faded almost as quickly as it had come, and HMS Fearless’s velocity had dropped in less than ten minutes from ninety thousand kilometers per second to a bare hundred and forty.