Do we actually need SD(P)s?

Somtaaw wrote:They definitely use Hydrogen because it's even more available than Helium, and they use it because that one fuel source is also used in multiple locations. Specifically, it's the fusion reactor bunkerage for the starships themselves and their emergency thrusters, it's used in pinnaces & assault shuttles for thrusters and fuel for both fusion plants (hip pockets for the pinnaces, miniaturized ones for the assault shuttles).


It's also described during one of Honor's dinner parties with High Ridge as PM, by Henke that Honor's strategy at Hades during her final action (when she came out of the sun), that she used so much hydrogen for her "no wedge" burn for intercept, if she had to fight normally Honor's whole fleet might have run out of power mid-fight and thereby lost their wedges.

And when Honor's pinnace was shot down by the Armsmen working for Steadholder Burdette (Flag in Exile) there were 2 sets of hydrogen fuel tanks. One set were on ejectible fuel pods which caused big explosions upon impacting the surface (after the pinnace had already crashed), and the second set were deep inside the hull and they blew up due to fires. This heavily suggests they do in fact keep the hydrogen as uncompressed gas, since they had time before the fires & hydrogen gas mixed and blew the entire pinnace up. If it were compressed hydrogen, Honor would have been dead, still inside the crashed pinnace before she ever even realized she was on the surface.

Somtaaw wrote:They definitely use Hydrogen because it's even more available than Helium, and they use it because that one fuel source is also used in multiple locations. Specifically, it's the fusion reactor bunkerage for the starships themselves and their emergency thrusters, it's used in pinnaces & assault shuttles for thrusters and fuel for both fusion plants (hip pockets for the pinnaces, miniaturized ones for the assault shuttles).

It's also described during one of Honor's dinner parties with High Ridge as PM, by Henke that Honor's strategy at Hades during her final action (when she came out of the sun), that she used so much hydrogen for her "no wedge" burn for intercept, if she had to fight normally Honor's whole fleet might have run out of power mid-fight and thereby lost their wedges.

And when Honor's pinnace was shot down by the Armsmen working for Steadholder Burdette (Flag in Exile) there were 2 sets of hydrogen fuel tanks. One set were on ejectible fuel pods which caused big explosions upon impacting the surface (after the pinnace had already crashed), and the second set were deep inside the hull and they blew up due to fires. This heavily suggests they do in fact keep the hydrogen as uncompressed gas, since they had time before the fires & hydrogen gas mixed and blew the entire pinnace up. If it were compressed hydrogen, Honor would have been dead, still inside the crashed pinnace before she ever even realized she was on the surface.

Theemile wrote:If memory serves, Honor had left 8 hours remaining on the BCs and 6 for the CAs. Enough for a fight, but no way to run.

Theemile wrote:

cthia wrote:Oops.

5%?...4?...3? Heck, I give up.

I've seen naval accommodations; it's why I said sardine cans upstream. (Albeit aboard the oldstyle battleships, with no air conditioning and no women). Speaking of women, the Honorverse has so many women and I was thinking they would have separate quarters and separate facilities. Due to your incredulity, I do remember Helen's conversations with the crews, and they were not separate. I was also factoring in the space saved by the use of pods and other general automation. Again, lots of space must have been wasted to be able to gut a ship.

Whatever is responsible for the eggshell factor is the only thing left to account for the capital gains in available space for the design. (Which I do remember was explained, somewhere.) Anyway, even if the women were separate that wouldn't have significantly added to the footprint either.

I did think Honorverse accommodations would be a bit better. Again, until I remembered Helen. (Poor Grayson women...and their armsmen's apoplexy.) Well, more than a bit better as far as environmental systems. The only thing left to explain the sudden windfall of available space to fit pods has to be losing the battle steel and dampening - the thing that turns them into eggshells. Must have been a heckuva lot of battle steel, but bulkheads were only feet thick, as I recall, Not yards. Anyways, I give up the ghost, and the hunt for Red October.

The to biggest contributors to the void we call a pod bay are the missile magazines and the missile feed tubes. The Magazines were nothing but a large volume with racks of missiles, control wiring, plasma plumbing, and automated robotics fetching the appropriate missile to each feed tube. The Feed tubes were, well, tubes to each launcher, with armored cofferdam doors periodically to keep blasts from sneaking up the tunnel unopposed. SDs carried 15-30 thousand, 130 kton missiles, each the size of a large shipping container - remove those and you have (literally) tons of space to play with.

Somtaaw wrote:And when Honor's pinnace was shot down by the Armsmen working for Steadholder Burdette (Flag in Exile) there were 2 sets of hydrogen fuel tanks. One set were on ejectible fuel pods which caused big explosions upon impacting the surface (after the pinnace had already crashed), and the second set were deep inside the hull and they blew up due to fires. This heavily suggests they do in fact keep the hydrogen as uncompressed gas, since they had time before the fires & hydrogen gas mixed and blew the entire pinnace up. If it were compressed hydrogen, Honor would have been dead, still inside the crashed pinnace before she ever even realized she was on the surface.

Somtaaw wrote:Those 2 sources alone probably account for a considerable amount of the "empty space" we think Honorverse ships have to spare, since zero modern ships whether surface or submarine have those needs.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't think a hydrogen explosion is likely, as explained above. However, if the bunkers do store a compressed gas, whether it's deuterium, helium, rupturing the bunker could cause explosive decompression, which would further rip open the hole created by the projectile. That's considerable damage. A water tank wouldn't nearly as much damage, as I don't think it would store water under high pressure. However, it would sublimate when exposed to vacuum.

Jonathan_S wrote:Though if you hit a large water tank with a giga- to exawatt energy beam you'll probably get an impressive steam "explosion" from it.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:
Of course you can saturate an old-school ship. I'm assuming the defenders are aware of what's going on and counterdesign--and I'm saying the podnaught design gives up more than the increase defenses to counter a podnaught. An innovation that might very well be useful in war due to the surprise factor isn't so useful in peacetime because your enemies will see what you're up to and counterdesign.

The one place where it might be of value is a fleet action if they could concentrate fire on a single ship--but my impression of the old fashioned missiles is that wasn't really how it worked. At substantial range you were only hoping to hit the enemy, not a particular ship.

I'm not convinced that anyone would react until someone they care about gets hammered by these crazy new ships.

The scientist has 32 tubes, with an implied 30 second cycle time. So squadron fires 256 missile every 30 seconds. They had 16 CMs and 32 PDLCs, so it appears reasonable to say they are designed to defend against themselves.

So they can handle 512 missiles per minute. A single BC(P) can deliver 240 missiles per minute. So a squadron of them delivers almost 4 times the missiles they are designed to handle. They go winchester after like 5 minutes, but each will have fired almost 3000 capital ship missile.

So even without trying to target just one ship the volume of fire distributed across all the Scientists seems likely to result in a very bad day for them, which will get worse then the SDs the BCs are escorting are included and then they close to energy range on the damaged fleet.

Fire control is an issue, but I suspect that not so much at SDM range.

Somtaaw wrote:Well surface ships don't have to budget tonnage towards "air tanks" of compressed Oxygen, or Air Scrubber plants. Even subs don't have to make a huge dedication to air scrubbing, because they can always employ water electrolysis on seawater to get brand new oxygen almost as needed.