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80 % Military Power

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80 % Military Power
Post by cthia   » Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:07 pm

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You see this a lot in storyline. It always reminds me of a time long ago when I witnessed the testing of a Westinghouse jet engine.*

At any rate, you ever wonder how the limits of a ship's "engine" is determined? Surely they don't just strap you in the cockpit and say "Good Luck Charlie."

We know that there are safety interlocks in place, and some daring COs have disabled them at times for the honor of the Queen and for the love of Honor. Surely those safety interlocks aren't arbitrarily set.

IINM, I also recall textev implying, or saying outright, that varying navies have more reliable systems.


*P.S. I was told of a few accidents. But I never knew if they were serious or simply anecdotal jesting for the new guy. I was told of an incident where a coffee maker was left in the testing room and destroyed an engine. And also of a woman's high heel shoe. Just one shoe? Weird.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by tlb   » Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:17 pm

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cthia wrote:At any rate, you ever wonder how the limits of a ship's "engine" is determined? Surely they don't just strap you in the cockpit and say "Good Luck Charlie."

We know that there are safety interlocks in place, and some daring COs have disabled them at times for the honor of the Queen and for the love of Honor. Surely those safety interlocks aren't arbitrarily set.

IINM, I also recall textev implying, or saying outright, that varying navies have more reliable systems.

There is a joke in Calvin and Hobbes, when Calvin asks his father how they know a bridge has a certain number of tons as a limit. His father says that they run trucks with increasing loads across the bridge until it fails. Then they rebuild the bridge and weigh the truck to get the limit for the sign. Obviously that is not what they do, instead engineers can compute static and dynamic loads (including wind loads after "Galloping Gertie") and after assigning on the appropriate safety factor decide on the limit.

But how would they do that with the compensator? Do they have a black box (but what is the chance of recovering it)? Does the theory permit calculating limits? Did they have a test program off in an empty part of space where they could run remotely controlled ships to destruction and gather information that way? This is an interesting question. Also how do they decide maintenance level and wear?
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:43 pm

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tlb wrote:But how would they do that with the compensator? Do they have a black box (but what is the chance of recovering it)? Does the theory permit calculating limits? Did they have a test program off in an empty part of space where they could run remotely controlled ships to destruction and gather information that way? This is an interesting question. Also how do they decide maintenance level and wear?


They probably do a "field" test every now and then. The failure is also not instantaneous. If the compensators can compensate for N gravities, at N+1 gravities of apparent gravity is only 1.41421 (square root of two) and pointing 45° between "down" and "aft". So what they need is a gravity direction sensing equipment aboard an Invictus and push slowly it until the direction no longer points towards the deck. This equipment is called "pendulum": a rock on a string will do.

The rock can also make weather forecast: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/384987468121523034/

The 80% rate, given what we've observed from the evolution of Manticoran equipment, is not an outcome of the theory, but of equipment quality. So it's obtained from statistics. It's like the red zone in the tachometer in combustion engine vehicles: the engine does operate under those conditions, but it'll generate so much heat that the ability to dissipate that and lubricate the parts becomes compromised. But different vehicles have different zones: a diesel engine will red-line at 5000 rpm; a petrol engine at 7000 rpm, Formula 1 is capped at 12000 rpm today, I think, and an Indy Racing League still gets to 19000 rpm and stays there for hours (well, for those who completed the race).
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by kzt   » Mon Jul 27, 2020 9:24 pm

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No, David has said the failure is instantaneous. It goes from ‘hey everything is great’ to red goo without warning.

But the ship can survive the compensator failure without damage (because reasons) so it’s easy enough to test.
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by cthia   » Mon Jul 27, 2020 9:50 pm

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It is only easy if you are not aboard the ship which is about to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

There is also the matter of hyperspace travel and hitting the various walls. How do you determine the limits of that? If a ship goes in and doesn't come out, then its navy is no better than the SLN being devoid of news because all the would be mail carriers had their eggs cracked.

How many malignant chickens did the Malign kill bouncing off the iota wall? And I thought the crew aboard the Harvest Joy had problems and sleepless nights.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:21 am

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kzt wrote:No, David has said the failure is instantaneous. It goes from ‘hey everything is great’ to red goo without warning.

But the ship can survive the compensator failure without damage (because reasons) so it’s easy enough to test.


When the compensator fails, yes. It goes from compensating 560 gravities to compensating zero.

My point is that when it's not failed, it is compensating 560. So you can go to 560.1 and detect the 5.7° deviation in gravity.

So why don't they go above 100%? That's a good question. We do know that gravity plates do work on a non-tower ship, despite being in the wrong vector (see Honor's stunt at Cerberus). I'd assume that the gravity plates don't work in conjunction with compensators, so you can choose 50-gravity compensation with plates or 560 with compensators, but not 560+50. A 1% increase in acceleration takes us to only 565.6, which is not going to catch smaller ships. But it is going to increase the perceived gravity inside the ship to 5.1 gravities and shifted 78° towards the aft.
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:27 am

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cthia wrote:How many malignant chickens did the Malign kill bouncing off the iota wall? And I thought the crew aboard the Harvest Joy had problems and sleepless nights.


Bouncing off the wall doesn't seem to be a problem. Truman did that with HMS Apollo trying to call the cavalry to save HMS Fearless. Apparently, you run your generators and try to transit, but then nothing happens.

We haven't heard of trouble translating back. It's possible, though. But if you can piece the wall upwards, you should be able to do so downwards. Anyway, simply automate this. Take a crewed ship to the theta band, as high as you can, then set a timer to translate up, recover, translate down, then jump ship. If it comes back, great! If it doesn't, well, back to the drawing board.
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by Daryl   » Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:33 am

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I was thinking about this the other day, of scenes where ships have been totaled, with no air or main lighting, but survivors still seem to have gravity, as they head to the life pods. Are the gravity generators separately wired?
Are all the ships setup with gravity at right angles to the axis, making them conveniently similar to wet navy ships inside?
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:47 am

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Daryl wrote:I was thinking about this the other day, of scenes where ships have been totaled, with no air or main lighting, but survivors still seem to have gravity, as they head to the life pods. Are the gravity generators separately wired?


When did this happen? Are you thinking of the acceptance of the surrender of Cradall's ships, in Spindle? I don't remember if the gravity was still on.

Are all the ships setup with gravity at right angles to the axis, making them conveniently similar to wet navy ships inside?


Yes, modern ships apparently do. Gravity is oriented perpendicularly to the direction of motion. Older ships in Travis' time (all but HMS Casey) didn't have artificial gravity at all inside the wedge, despite pulling over 100 gravities outside. They had rotating sections to simulate gravity through centrifugal force.

Spider-drive ships are tower-stack-oriented. That is, gravity is anti-parallel to the direction of motion. They do that because they need the gravity plates to compensate up to 150 gravities down to 1. Honor didn't need that at Cerberus, but the Havenite-designed and built compensators on her captured ships only compensated up to 50.
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Re: 80 % Military Power
Post by kzt   » Tue Jul 28, 2020 3:31 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Bouncing off the wall doesn't seem to be a problem. Truman did that with HMS Apollo trying to call the cavalry to save HMS Fearless. Apparently, you run your generators and try to transit, but then nothing happens.

Well, the reaction of White Haven suggested that bouncing off the wall was a really big deal. The reason the safety’s were present and prevented that kind of behavior was it was very unsafe.

Though how exactly that is even possible given the description of how hyperspace travel works and the hyper generators role in is really unclear to me.
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