80 % Military Power

ThinksMarkedly wrote:.
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.

My guess is actually the opposite; that it’s the lowest because it matches the speed of signal propagation along the next hyper wall (presumably adjacent to the lowest sub band)

The chart says the effective C in the alpha bands is 62x. And FTL signals in normal space propagate at 62c as ripples along the Alpha wall. But if 62c was the highest possible compression in the Alpha bands you’d expect that to happen near the Beta wall, not the Alpha wall.

But it’s all speculation because we haven’t been given enough details to figure it out.

Have a friend who still might work for an aircraft manufacturer. He got to fly around in a certain country now known for a recent virus doing work. Traveling by air on a domestic airline there he witnessed a "minor" problem with one of the plane's engines. A turbine decided to start sheading blades. Some of them went though the passenger compartment. Fortunatly the crew managed to shut down fuel etc before it caught fire. Never found out the cause of the problems but he decided he didn't want to keep flying around there.

What is the theoretical limit of a ship's accell if there are no people aboard?

Also, if an impeller, a node, or spark plug is damaged, then what is the maximum safe accel she can pull? I recall passages something to the effect "She'll be unable to pull better than 'X' accel." Can she safely achieve - that now reduced - max accel? If major engine components of a car are damaged, you want to pull over, let alone predict your safe max accel. How exactly is that determined on the fly?

Personal rant: Ok, here's the thing. I'm certain to confuse impellers, nodes, sprockets and sockets on a warship. Ordinarily I'd be embarrassed, but since I can no longer raise the hood of my car and recognize anything but the battery, I'll get over it. I remember a time I worked on my own car. The engine compartment was big enough to do my homework while taking a break to work on the engine, even entertaining one of my annoying sisters who simply wanted to talk about boys. She sat inside the engine bay too! You could see the ground from inside the engine bay once upon a time, and if you dropped a tool it'd fall clean through. One of my brothers once lost his wallet in one of the modern new sportscars and never saw it again for the better part of two years. One day he took the car in for major repairs. The next day the mechanic asked him to come and get his wallet.

"I have my wallet with me."

"No you don't, I've got it."

The thing had fallen in the engine bay and remained safe for the better part of two years. Engines today.

:facepalm:

Brigade XO wrote:Have a friend who still might work for an aircraft manufacturer. He got to fly around in a certain country now known for a recent virus doing work. Traveling by air on a domestic airline there he witnessed a "minor" problem with one of the plane's engines. A turbine decided to start sheading blades. Some of them went though the passenger compartment. Fortunatly the crew managed to shut down fuel etc before it caught fire. Never found out the cause of the problems but he decided he didn't want to keep flying around there.

We know why turbines fail like that. It’s almost always a manufacturing defect, typically an inclusion in the disk. Could also be poor maint where they didn’t properly inspect them, or FOD - like a bird.

cthia wrote:What is the theoretical limit of a ship's accell if there are no people aboard?

Also, if an impeller, a node, or spark plug is damaged, then what is the maximum safe accel she can pull? I recall passages something to the effect "She'll be unable to pull better than 'X' accel." Can she safely achieve - that now reduced - max accel? If major engine components of a car are damaged, you want to pull over, let alone predict your safe max accel. How exactly is that determined on the fly?

Personal rant: Ok, here's the thing. I'm certain to confuse impellers, nodes, sprockets and sockets on a warship. Ordinarily I'd be embarrassed, but since I can no longer raise the hood of my car and recognize anything but the battery, I'll get over it. I remember a time I worked on my own car. The engine compartment was big enough to do my homework while taking a break to work on the engine, even entertaining one of my annoying sisters who simply wanted to talk about boys. She sat inside the engine bay too! You could see the ground from inside the engine bay once upon a time, and if you dropped a tool it'd fall clean through. One of my brothers once lost his wallet in one of the modern new sportscars and never saw it again for the better part of two years. One day he took the car in for major repairs. The next day the mechanic asked him to come and get his wallet.

"I have my wallet with me."

"No you don't, I've got it."

The thing had fallen in the engine bay and remained safe for the better part of two years. Engines today.

:facepalm:

The ship's maximum Accel is a factor of it's wedge power, ie node power. Every warship has surplus wedge power to compensate for battle damage, so ships can lose a node or 2 and still make the max compensated Accel. The amount varies by design, but 10-20% spare is probably the norm in 1900. Now designs are designed with even more more power to pull more pods.

My point is this. I'll use the first gen BMW 750 as an example. They were twelve cylinder engines with the ability to retard six of them for fuel economy. The engine was essentially two sixes mated together. The problem was that the driver had the ability to select economy mode but could end up damaging the engine at speeds if he failed to reselect the proper mode. The software was supposed to reselect it but didn't. They all had to get the software upgrade. So my point, can the ship be driven too hard under dsmaged conditions, which would be a factor of the limitations of the components at that point and not the compensator.

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.

I read Truman's bouncing off the wall as being an accident, and nothing intentional. Sort of like the faster you go on the speedway forces you higher and higher up the wall, until oftentimes, BANG, the biggest crash in Nascar History after you bounce off the wall. Control of the vehicle becomes suspect at those speeds?

cthia wrote:My point is this. I'll use the first gen BMW 750 as an example. They were twelve cylinder engines with the ability to retard six of them for fuel economy. The engine was essentially two sixes mated together. The problem was that the driver had the ability to select economy mode but could end up damaging the engine at speeds if he failed to reselect the proper mode. The software was supposed to reselect it but didn't. They all had to get the software upgrade. So my point, can the ship be driven too hard under dsmaged conditions, which would be a factor of the limitations of the components at that point and not the compensator.

Probably think of the nodes less like cylinders in a car all linked to a common crank-shaft and more like multiple engines on a plane or a ship, driving different props.

They're not quite that independant of each other, but neither are they as dependent as cylinders in a car's engine. Cars can shut down cylinders, but the piston is still moving the head up and down so disabling a cylinder doesn't help prevent damage if the piston/head or cylinder is damaged. But on a ship or plane you can shut down a damaged engine (and potentially feather the prop attached to it) and it the running of the other engines can't cause further damage, nor is the damaged engine likely to spread that damage to the remaining ones. (There's always the risk of fire or explosion; so it's not a zero chance).

Wedges are somewhat in the middle. You do need a certain number of nodes functional in a ring in order for it to work at all. But as long as your above that critical threshold you can cut out damaged or destroyed nodes and running the wedge won't inflict any damage on the ones that are left. (You'll lose some power, but you won't spread damage). OTOH given what we've been told about impeller interference (admittedly primarily in missiles) it wouldn't surprise me if running the wedge did damage the internal structure of any nodes that were cut out of it. (However since normally a node isn't removed from the wedge unless it's non-functional a warship in combat isn't going to care that the damaged node might go from slightly non-functional to total scrap)

Plus, as long as you don't have to raise sails, a warship has 4 complete impeller rings (alpha and beta rings both fore and aft), each of which is capable of independently managing a (weak) wedge.


However I'm not sure if you can push a damaged ring 'past red-line' and cause damage that way. Normally it's not an issue because you're compensator limited - so attempting to exceed red-line is instant suicide. And even with damaged rings that presumably shrinks the grav sump; so the acceleration might still be compensator limited. But if you ever got to a situation where it wasn't you might be able to strain the impellers by applying too much power; we just don't have the information to know

Jonathan_S wrote:However I'm not sure if you can push a damaged ring 'past red-line' and cause damage that way. Normally it's not an issue because you're compensator limited - so attempting to exceed red-line is instant suicide. And even with damaged rings that presumably shrinks the grav sump; so the acceleration might still be compensator limited. But if you ever got to a situation where it wasn't you might be able to strain the impellers by applying too much power; we just don't have the information to know

From the little bits of data we've got, it sounds like the impellers are far more powerful than the acceleration the compensators can compensate. So you're going to be compensator-limited any way, unless you lose too much of your impellers. But since the compensation comes from using the sump created by the impellers, it's possible this situation can never happen. We just don't know the parameters.

Another limitation may be power production and transfer. With battle damage, it's possible the impeller rings may not be getting sufficient power. That might be a case where you're not limited by compensation.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:My point is this. I'll use the first gen BMW 750 as an example. They were twelve cylinder engines with the ability to retard six of them for fuel economy. The engine was essentially two sixes mated together. The problem was that the driver had the ability to select economy mode but could end up damaging the engine at speeds if he failed to reselect the proper mode. The software was supposed to reselect it but didn't. They all had to get the software upgrade. So my point, can the ship be driven too hard under dsmaged conditions, which would be a factor of the limitations of the components at that point and not the compensator.

Probably think of the nodes less like cylinders in a car all linked to a common crank-shaft and more like multiple engines on a plane or a ship, driving different props.

They're not quite that independant of each other, but neither are they as dependent as cylinders in a car's engine. Cars can shut down cylinders, but the piston is still moving the head up and down so disabling a cylinder doesn't help prevent damage if the piston/head or cylinder is damaged. But on a ship or plane you can shut down a damaged engine (and potentially feather the prop attached to it) and it the running of the other engines can't cause further damage, nor is the damaged engine likely to spread that damage to the remaining ones. (There's always the risk of fire or explosion; so it's not a zero chance).

Wedges are somewhat in the middle. You do need a certain number of nodes functional in a ring in order for it to work at all. But as long as your above that critical threshold you can cut out damaged or destroyed nodes and running the wedge won't inflict any damage on the ones that are left. (You'll lose some power, but you won't spread damage). OTOH given what we've been told about impeller interference (admittedly primarily in missiles) it wouldn't surprise me if running the wedge did damage the internal structure of any nodes that were cut out of it. (However since normally a node isn't removed from the wedge unless it's non-functional a warship in combat isn't going to care that the damaged node might go from slightly non-functional to total scrap)

Plus, as long as you don't have to raise sails, a warship has 4 complete impeller rings (alpha and beta rings both fore and aft), each of which is capable of independently managing a (weak) wedge.


However I'm not sure if you can push a damaged ring 'past red-line' and cause damage that way. Normally it's not an issue because you're compensator limited - so attempting to exceed red-line is instant suicide. And even with damaged rings that presumably shrinks the grav sump; so the acceleration might still be compensator limited. But if you ever got to a situation where it wasn't you might be able to strain the impellers by applying too much power; we just don't have the information to know

I like your analogy of different engines on a plane. And in that scenario, a damaged engine can be shut down and thereby pushing it too hard is not applicable. Which gives rise to the question of whether the damaged rings can simply be shut down, unless they still have some significant contribution to max accel. Whether it is applicable or not, every time I come across it in storyline, it reminds me of a time one of my friends drove an eighty thousand dollar car for five miles on two front rims. Yes, it was a female.