1000 Worst Ways to Die in the Honorverse

phillies wrote:

saber964 wrote:Compansator failure, one second your fine next you are chunky salsa on a bulkhead.

Suppose you are in a ship pulling 100g, 1000m/s/s. and you are 10m from the bulkhead. Your fall time is 0.1s, long enough to be perceptible.

t is proportional to 1/(square root of acceleration).

Here's a thought. How do you do a body recovery from a compansaitor failure? Is it a shop vac or a scraper?

saber964 wrote:Here's a thought. How do you do a body recovery from a compansaitor failure? Is it a shop vac or a scraper?

Don't forget all the flying projectiles: anything that wasn't securely fastened (and some things that were fastened) will be accelerating with you towards the bulkheads. In fact, the entire ship should feel like it just hit a massive wall. I'd say anything except the superstructure and armour is pressed at the back of the ship.

phillies wrote:

saber964 wrote:Compansator failure, one second your fine next you are chunky salsa on a bulkhead.

Suppose you are in a ship pulling 100g, 1000m/s/s. and you are 10m from the bulkhead. Your fall time is 0.1s, long enough to be perceptible.

t is proportional to 1/(square root of acceleration).

Here's a thought. How do you do a body recovery from a compansaitor failure? Is it a shop vac or a scraper?

Shop vac. LOL

Throw down lots of extra strength kitty litter and keep working.

****** *

I'm told there are NO countergrav failures in the Honorverse. Sure there aren't. Counter grav failures would make a crane accident pale by comparison.

"Look out!"

"What?"

'SPLAT!'

Dead meat!

cthia wrote:
I'm told there are NO countergrav failures in the Honorverse. Sure there aren't. Counter grav failures would make a crane accident pale by comparison.

"Look out!"

"What?"

'SPLAT!'

Dead meat!

I know you meant it tongue-in-cheeks however:

there are 2 instances that come to mind, although in both cases outside interference was involved.

When Stephanie was trying to lower herself down from a tree, the tree she crashed into had damaged the countergrav unit.

When King Roger's grav-ski failed, it had been sabotaged by one of his security people.

George J. Smith wrote:

cthia wrote:
I'm told there are NO countergrav failures in the Honorverse. Sure there aren't. Counter grav failures would make a crane accident pale by comparison.

"Look out!"

"What?"

'SPLAT!'

Dead meat!

I know you meant it tongue-in-cheeks however:

there are 2 instances that come to mind, although in both cases outside interference was involved.

When Stephanie was trying to lower herself down from a tree, the tree she crashed into had damaged the countergrav unit.

When King Roger's grav-ski failed, it had been sabotaged by one of his security people.

Thanks for the reminder. That proves there are reasons there could be failures.

Bottom line, advanced technology greatly increases catastrophic ramifications. It doesn't fail often, but when it does.

At any rate, it's still the safest way to fly.

I'd like to know how destructive the natural wormhole disasters are. Entering the terminii without proper guidance. A disaster in hyper, bouncing too high up against the iota wall. Are these type disasters instant death like a compensator failure?

cthia wrote:I'd like to know how destructive the natural wormhole disasters are. Entering the terminii without proper guidance. A disaster in hyper, bouncing too high up against the iota wall. Are these type disasters instant death like a compensator failure?

Clearly bouncing off the iota wall is not universally fatal since since Alice Truman's CL survived doing so in HotQ.

OTOH attempting to actually enter the Iota bands had been reported to be universally fatal for any ship (other than MAlign streak drive equipped ones). And it seems to be described as an instant failure.

Not sure about a bad wormhole transitions though.
Without sails the ship would probably be heavily damaged or destroyed when it hit the grav shear near the terminus. That's probably not instant - if nothing else not all the ship hits that point at once; so at common approach velocities you've probably got at least several seconds to hear/feel parts of the ship forward of you getting mangled to bits by the grav forces.
And nothing without a hyper generator is capable of surviving at the terminus itself - the probes used to nail down the approach vector presumably had sails as they were able to reach the "interface of the terminus itself" but they lacked hyper generators so when they reached it, well, "at which point they had simply ceased to exist." [WoH]


As for bad transits - it certainly seems like you can make a bad enough one that your ship doesn't survive. And since it's said that transits take no measurable time presumably one bad enough to destroy the ship also does so in an instant. What I don't know is how much margin you might have, to deviate from the optimal approach, before bad things happen; and then once bad things do happen whether there's a range of them that could include survivably bad thing or whether you go from fine to dead when you cross that line.

cthia wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:quote="cthia"]

I'm told there are NO countergrav failures in the Honorverse. Sure there aren't. Counter grav failures would make a crane accident pale by comparison.

"Look out!"

"What?"

'SPLAT!'

Dead meat!

I know you meant it tongue-in-cheeks however:

there are 2 instances that come to mind, although in both cases outside interference was involved.

When Stephanie was trying to lower herself down from a tree, the tree she crashed into had damaged the countergrav unit.

When King Roger's grav-ski failed, it had been sabotaged by one of his security people.

Thanks for the reminder. That proves there are reasons there could be failures.

Bottom line, advanced technology greatly increases catastrophic ramifications. It doesn't fail often, but when it does.

At any rate, it's still the safest way to fly.[/quote]

Not quite IIRC the Tarakovs daughter was killed when her counter grav failed to work.

Put a person in a space suite with everything off but the heater.
Tie the arms and legs securely to something so they can't move.
Put a hole about 1/16" in diameter though the the front of one of the legs at the knee level (with any self sealing components of the suite inoperable.
Attach a fitting around the leg over the hole- one that has a small ball vavle attached to it.

Take the suite out into vacume and position so the faceplate is oriented looking at your ship. Just crack the seal on the ball valve so it starts very slowly leaking air. And go back inside your ship.

Dauntless wrote:impaled on a splinter of battle steel

I have to admit the cringing scenes of being locked in your seat and watching an explosion racing towards you with a hail of fire, electric current and razor like shards of battlesteel in it's wake is sobering. Seeing your favorite astrogator cut in half, her insides spraying all over your skinsuit has to be loads of fun.

But, watching your own hand raise a pulser to your own head knowing you are about to die has to be terrifying. No, horrifying. No, stupifying. No, oh darn, no chance I'll come up with an appropriate word. No doubt it's one of the worst ways to die on the Honorverse. Death by involuntary suicide.