Jonathan_S wrote:I don't think that's it. It takes CAs (much less giant freighters) a fairly long time to recharge their hyper generators. But it apparently took just 4 minutes between transitions from Delta all the way through Gamma to Beta; and less than 10 minutes from Delta to n-space. Given it takes an SD (which admittedly is bigger than some freighters, but whose military grade hyper generator is probably also faster charging) 4 minutes, when already fully charged, from pressing the button to transition 10 minutes to make 2 additional transitions seems to leave no time for recharging. Hyper generator recharge time is more like 15+ minutes between use; and then the 4 minute transition time.The Honor of the Queen wrote:“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.
So I don't think the different hyper bands have different hyper limits; the hyper limit only seems to come into play when you want to cross into n-space. (Otherwise you'd have to worry that your mid-transit hyper level change might happen to coincide with this proposed upper-band hyper limit of some star that just happens to be along your route -- and there's been no indication of that)
Those numbers for charging times may only be relevant for upward translations. At the battle on the Prime terminus in UH, Sollie battle cruisers microjump up and down in four and a half minutes, far too short for the charge time you're postulating.
On an outbound passage a longer charge time wouldn't matter as much, as the ship loses most of it's velocity each time it translates, meaning it has to stay in each band for a while before it would clear the upper band hyper limit anyway. They're not going to be able to clear that second/third/etc. limit in 20 minutes anyway, so a longer charge time going up is irrelevant. Coming down, it's demonstrably not an issue.
As for accidentally hitting a "pot hole" while transitioning bands in transit, that would be highly unlikely for two reasons. First, space is really freakin' big and even the higher hyper limits on a star are very small by comparison. Second, hyper space compression would make the already very small hyper limit a very very very small pothole to a ship in hyper. Even if a star's Delta band hyper limit was 100 light minutes in real space, it would be just over 2.75 light seconds across for a ship in the Delta band, meaning they'd have to translate downward in exactly the wrong place in a window no more than five and a half seconds long before they passed clean through the danger. The danger window is even smaller for warships in higher bands. Even for an Alpha translation downward the danger zone for a normal star is only 20-40 seconds before you clear the hyper limit on the other side.
That said, it IS possible for a ship to hit that and come to grief. Ships are occasionally lost to unknown causes, but such hazards would be charted and known on well traveled routes. It would certainly be a concern in a binary system such as Manticore or near gas giants with their own hyper limits which would need to be avoided. In higher bands the Manticore system limits might look like a peanut where the two stars' hyper limits start overlapping.