80 % Military Power

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

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.

That’s not how it works. In “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington”, Honor takes the ship above 100% with no change in felt forces.

cthia wrote: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.

During the first war Haven had increased their military power from 80% to 90%; partly due to more trust in their compensators and partly accepting higher risk of failure in order to minimize the acceleration gap the Manticoran alliance had.
I want to say at some point during the ceasefire the Manticoran alliance matched that - entirely because compensators were now less failure prone.

While not as destructive as compensator failure warships have been known to damage their engines by pushing them too hard during sea-trials. I can't find it, but IIRC one of the Royal Navy BCs or fast battleships in WWI suffered engine damage due to pushing too hard in sea trials; and SMS Lützow was delayed several months in joining 1st Scouting Group because her engines had to be repaired after trials.

But in those engines "full power" is usually selected in part with an eye to engine longevity. So at some, but usually fairly small, risk of immediate failure engines can get pushed past 100% in combat. But even if they don't fail you're burning lifetime off them at a greatly accelerated rate - so they'd required repair/replacement far sooner than expected. Which is partly a cost problem, but also an operational one if it become necessary before the conflict ends and so you're deprived a ship at a possibly critical time because the engineering plant was over-strained. So captains need to be judicious about when they ask for more that full power. But even there many naval plants were built with a certain required amount of emergency power beyond 100% (but occasionally situations called for exceeding even that planned emergency power level)

kzt wrote: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.

Right. Hypothesis: it's the amount of energy you put in the capacitors before dumping to the hypergenerator. We know that the MAlign solved this by brute force, which sounds to me like it was by just using more energy and by making things bigger (to handle more energy).

But what isn't explained is what "bouncing off the iota wall" means. Does it mean that Truman really did try to get into the iota band with her 53-year-old light cruiser?

Additionally, she broke the speed records for transit between Yeltsin's Star and Manticore. If the compression factors of the different hyperspace bands are constant, the transit time (if there's no grav wave involved) is limited by the ship's ability to cycle its hypergenerators and how quickly it can get to cruising speed once it's at the highest band it can reach. That would mean she probably ran her Apollo to 100% acceleration (517.8) instead of 80% (414.2). That would allow her to reach 0.6c theta in 9.83 hours instead of 12.3 h. But I don't see how this translates to "bounce off the iota wall." Could it be just an expression?

[If there's a grav wave, it's also a matter of navigation and possibly "weather" conditions.]

Or is there such a thing as sub-bands of a hyperspace band? Could it be that the more energy you put into the translation from eta to theta gives you more compression factor?

Out-of-universe, it seems like David hadn't decided how hyperspace worked yet. For a long time, it sounds like ships need to keep pouring energy into the hypergenerators lest they drop out of hyper and the more energy you do, the faster you go. Like propeller-driven sea-going ships and aircraft. By the end of HAE, it was clear that if you lose your generators, you can't go back to n-space and you'd be forever in hyper.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote: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.

Right. Hypothesis: it's the amount of energy you put in the capacitors before dumping to the hypergenerator. We know that the MAlign solved this by brute force, which sounds to me like it was by just using more energy and by making things bigger (to handle more energy).

But what isn't explained is what "bouncing off the iota wall" means. Does it mean that Truman really did try to get into the iota band with her 53-year-old light cruiser?

Additionally, she broke the speed records for transit between Yeltsin's Star and Manticore. If the compression factors of the different hyperspace bands are constant, the transit time (if there's no grav wave involved) is limited by the ship's ability to cycle its hypergenerators and how quickly it can get to cruising speed once it's at the highest band it can reach. That would mean she probably ran her Apollo to 100% acceleration (517.8) instead of 80% (414.2). That would allow her to reach 0.6c theta in 9.83 hours instead of 12.3 h. But I don't see how this translates to "bounce off the iota wall." Could it be just an expression?

[If there's a grav wave, it's also a matter of navigation and possibly "weather" conditions.]

Or is there such a thing as sub-bands of a hyperspace band? Could it be that the more energy you put into the translation from eta to theta gives you more compression factor?

Out-of-universe, it seems like David hadn't decided how hyperspace worked yet. For a long time, it sounds like ships need to keep pouring energy into the hypergenerators lest they drop out of hyper and the more energy you do, the faster you go. Like propeller-driven sea-going ships and aircraft. By the end of HAE, it was clear that if you lose your generators, you can't go back to n-space and you'd be forever in hyper.

Alternately, Truman could have pushed her comps past 100%, pulling 520 or 530 Gs, her translations might have been made with the most energy she could carry over (making for a sick crew) and she could have run the ship at 61-62% of light speed despite her engineer' warnings that that color is not a good color in Rad shielding. Any or all of the above options is considered risky behavior, and would get a long term speed crossing record - if the ship held up to the trip.

Bouncing off the Iota wall might just be an expression for top hyper speed, just like "pedal to the metal" is today (I don't know about your car, but my carpet is impeding my car's pedal...)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Or is there such a thing as sub-bands of a hyperspace band? Could it be that the more energy you put into the translation from eta to theta gives you more compression factor?

Out-of-universe, it seems like David hadn't decided how hyperspace worked yet. For a long time, it sounds like ships need to keep pouring energy into the hypergenerators lest they drop out of hyper and the more energy you do, the faster you go. Like propeller-driven sea-going ships and aircraft. By the end of HAE, it was clear that if you lose your generators, you can't go back to n-space and you'd be forever in hyper.

I thought that it had been explained that there were sub-bands in hyperspace, although I do not know how that works.

Also in Torch of Freedom, chapter 54, the Hali Sowle has the hyper generator fail; but it happened so slowly (?) that they were dropped back into n-space. I am not sure why even a slow fail would give that result.

I have pulled this quote from another thread:

darrell wrote:Not were a specific number of bands is mentioned, but there are many passages that say that there are multiple bands between each wall.

Honor’s convoy was cruising along in the mid-delta bands, HotQ

Our ships are restricted to the middle gamma bands, HotQ

“Too high. We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin.” HotQ

Even for courier boats, who routinely rode the risky upper edge of hyper-space's theta band, SVW

Elliot had held the convoy to the lower delta bands, HAE

twice translating through two distinct sets of hyper bands HAE

translating steadily down the alpha bands as they rode one of hyper-space's gravity waves towards the normal-space wall. ToF

Hyper-space consists of multiple regions or layers—called "bands"—of associated but discrete dimensions. MTH

There are in addition, between 50-100 references that refer to alpha bands, plural, beta bands, plural, delta bands, plural, theta bands, plural, etcetera.

glossery, AAC, WOH wrote:Alpha translation—
The translation into or out of the alpha (lowest) bands of hyper-space.

Hyper-space-
Multiple layers of associated but discrete dimensions which bring points in normal-space into closer congruence, thus permitting effectively faster than light travel between them. Layers are divided into "bands" of closely associated dimensions. The barriers between such bands are the sites of turbulence and instability which become increasingly powerful and dangerous as a vessel moves "higher" in hyper-space.

Basically, if you cross into Iota you are destroyed. Game over, do not collect 200. The grav gradients are insane and rip you apart.

The MA figured how to avoid that, using their doubletalk drive to doublethink.

But is later books you seemed to need to make a conscientious decision to change bands and activate the hyper generator to do it. So who knows.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Out-of-universe, it seems like David hadn't decided how hyperspace worked yet. For a long time, it sounds like ships need to keep pouring energy into the hypergenerators lest they drop out of hyper and the more energy you do, the faster you go. Like propeller-driven sea-going ships and aircraft. By the end of HAE, it was clear that if you lose your generators, you can't go back to n-space and you'd be forever in hyper.

tlb wrote:in Torch of Freedom, chapter 54, the Hali Sowle has the hyper generator fail; but it happened so slowly (?) that they were dropped back into n-space. I am not sure why even a slow fail would give that result.

It occurred to me that if they had not dropped into n-space, then they would actually have been in better shape. This follows because they could still have proceeded at hyperspace speeds (since there was nothing wrong with their sails or compensator) while they worked on fixing the generator. Perhaps if they had done to Beowulf, for example, then they might have been able to meet someone in hyperspace that could have helped with the repair (assuming that they could not fix the problem before they arrived).

tlb quoting darrell wrote:Hyper-space-
Multiple layers of associated but discrete dimensions which bring points in normal-space into closer congruence, thus permitting effectively faster than light travel between them. Layers are divided into "bands" of closely associated dimensions. The barriers between such bands are the sites of turbulence and instability which become increasingly powerful and dangerous as a vessel moves "higher" in hyper-space.

kzt wrote:Basically, if you cross into Iota you are destroyed. Game over, do not collect 200. The grav gradients are insane and rip you apart.

The MA figured how to avoid that, using their doubletalk drive to doublethink.

But is later books you seemed to need to make a conscientious decision to change bands and activate the hyper generator to do it. So who knows.

Given more information, then we can say that there are multiple layers in hyperspace, but they are grouped in bands that allow for easier transition intra-band, but inter-band requires more energy to penetrate the instability. But however easy is it within one band, it's not for everyone. Truman therefore went to the uppermost sub-band of theta, which is "bouncing off the iota wall." It's dangerous because those sub-band transitions still pose an ever-increasing danger.

The compression / multiplication factor we saw in the tables shared by RFC either mea lowest, middle or highest value in that band, we don't know which. My guess is it's the highest because it refers to the speed of light in that band.

tlb wrote:It occurred to me that if they had not dropped into n-space, then they would actually have been in better shape. This follows because they could still have proceeded at hyperspace speeds (since there was nothing wrong with their sails or compensator) while they worked on fixing the generator. Perhaps if they had done to Beowulf, for example, then they might have been able to meet someone in hyperspace that could have helped with the repair (assuming that they could not fix the problem before they arrived).

What band were they in when the generator began to fail? And could they make it to civilisation in that band? Yes, if you arrive at a friendly system with reasonable traffic and sit there in the least-time course, you're going to run into someone. Then just ask for help from search-and-rescue.

But if they couldn't? Did they need material to repair, like some ore? You can't find those in hyperspace, but you should be able to find something around in the nearest star system.

Anyway, I agree with you: if your generator is failing, stop translating and just go to a friendly port! There has to be a route you can take that won't need translating up or down, even if you have to take huge detours. You have much better chance of getting there before you run out of supplies than if you drop in bands. If you drop to n-space, you won't reach anywhere useful for decades.

Theemile wrote:[
Alternately, Truman could have pushed her comps past 100%, pulling 520 or 530 Gs, her translations might have been made with the most energy she could carry over (making for a sick crew) and she could have run the ship at 61-62% of light speed despite her engineer' warnings that that color is not a good color in Rad shielding. Any or all of the above options is considered risky behavior, and would get a long term speed crossing record - if the ship held up to the trip.

Bouncing off the Iota wall might just be an expression for top hyper speed, just like "pedal to the metal" is today (I don't know about your car, but my carpet is impeding my car's pedal...)

I don’t think it’s just an expression for running flat out, because prior to making the runTruman specifically asked her chief engineer to take the safeties off the hyper generator. If you were just going to cruise slightly beyond 0.6c you wouldn’t need to mess with the hyper generator.

I think it’s more that within the Theta bands there are various sub-bands,all with slightly different compression rates. Riding the upper edges, the highest compression bands, close to the next higher hyper wall gets you a little faster transit than plodding along in the mid-bands. But nowhere near as much as jumping into the next higher band. (Thus making the chart of speed by hyper hand probably the speed of the lowest band, in each group of bands). But trying to squeeze out every last once of compression brought them too close to the discontinuity the is the Iota wall, they somehow almost made an accidental attend to cross it (which would have had fatal effects)

But since at least the grav signal of other ships in your hyper band are ripples along the next higher hyper wall I have to assume that a ship cruising in any sub band of the, say, Delta bands could detect other nearby ships within the Delta bands even when they might be in a different sub and within them. (Dunno if you could communicate via radio across sub-bands though)