ThinksMarkedly wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:Or possibly they're powerful enough that they need some clear area around each emitter; and having the hull curve up that close to them might be bad.
Or maybe the MAlign just wanted flat surfaces to mount all their 'broadside' weapons on so they don't have to mess with curved armored hatches. The Lenny Dets seem big enough they may not miss the interior volume they give up by making the bits between the spines flat instead of curved out.
Remind me again: the tractor emitters are on the triangular edges? Or the faces? If they are on the edges, then there is less mass around them. If they are on the faces, especially if those faces are slightly concave, there's more mass around them than on a cylinder, which would improve structural bracing.
My recollection
Went back and looked and found this text in MoH
Mission of Honor Ch. 28 wrote:And in that respect, even the spider drive’s lower theoretical maximum acceleration presented a definite challenge, given the fact that it produced no impeller wedge. Without a wedge, it also produced no convenient “sump” for an inertial compensator, and that meant the maximum survivable normal-space acceleration for a spider drive-equipped ship was limited by the ability of currently available grav plate technology to offset the consequences of acceleration. Unfortunately, grav plates were far less capable in that respect than inertial compensators, which had an inevitable effect on the maximum accleration a spider-drive ship could attain. It also meant that unlike impeller-drive vessels, a spider-drive ship’s decks had to be aligned perpendicular to its axis of movement rather than parallel, which was a large part of what produced its shorter, “squatter” hull form, not to mention requiring some significant rethinks about the way spacecraft designers had been arranging ship interiors literally for centuries.
Although the Alignment’s physicists had been inspired to push grav plate technology harder than anyone else, there were still limits. Up to an actual acceleration of one hundred and fifty gravities, it could achieve an efficiency of over ninety-nine percent, producing a “felt” acceleration of only one gravity. Above that level, however, the plates’ efficiency fell off dramatically. The physical plant itself grew larger and more massive on a steeply climbing curve, which cut into internal volume, and even then, each additional gravity of actual acceleration produced a “felt” increase of approximately .05 g. That didn’t sound too terrible, but what it meant was that fifty additional gravities produced an apparent increase of two and a half gravities, which raised the ship’s internal gravity to 3.5 g, at which point the crew’s ability to move about and perform even routine duties began to become ... impaired. And it also meant that grav plates powerful enough to produce that effect required almost twice the volume required to produce the 150:1 ratio.
After considering the situation carefully, the architects had designed and stressed the ship structures and control stations to permit effective maneuvering and combat at up to four gravities, but combat efficiency began to decline noticeably at that rate of acceleration due to the physiological limitations of the crew. Moreover, that still equated to an actual acceleration of only two hundred and ten gravities, which was pathetic by the standards of any impeller-drive warship. Actual acceleration could be pushed—in emergencies, and briefly, at least—to almost three hundred and ten gravities, but that produced a “felt” gravity of 9 g. Crew acceleration couches were provided for just that contingency, yet three hundred and ten gravities was still barely half of the acceleration which the RMN’s biggest superdreadnought could currently attain, and even with the best acceleration couches in the universe, no one could stand nine gravities for long. Worse, smaller spider-drive ships had no acceleration advantage over larger ones. And the need to stabilize the ship relative to the hyper wall required at least three sets of “spider legs,” which led directly to the “triple skeg” hull form which had been adopted. Which, in turn, meant that instead of two broadsides, a spider-drive ship had three ... none of which could be protected by the impenetrable barrier of an impeller wedge. That meant both that areas no impeller-drive ship had to armor did require massive armor protection aboard a spider-drive warship and that there was no wedge floor and roof for a side wall to stitch together. And just to make matters even more interesting, the spider drive could not be used through a spherical sidewall like the ones fortresses generated.
The shark class, and graser torpedo, are later described as having "trilateral symmetry"
Okay - It doesn't say that the spider legs are on the skeg "spines"; but, like tlb, that's cerainly how I'd assumed they were constructed. Oversized, over-powered, tractor projectors sticking out of each point of the triangular cross section with the sensors and weapons mounted in the 3 broadsides on the flat sides of the triangular cross section. And, since "skeg" refers to things sticking out beyond the main (underwater) hull of a ship to support either drive shafts or rudders -- things involved in propelling and steering the ship -- I defaulted to assuming the 3 skegs of the spider drive were the ridge formed by the points of the triangular cross section, sticking out from the broadsides, and that the spider nodes were mounted in/on those protruding skegs.
But I guess it's not necessarily inconsistent with the description to have the spider nodes running down the middle of the flat faces, while the 3 skegs instead mount the weapons with the point of the triangle pointed at you while weapons fire past it from both flats (kind of like if you cut the noses off a bunch of Star Destroyers and welded them into a stack; with all their bows pointed at you).
