Wormhole Assault: MA Style

Jonathan_S wrote:Well we have seen that wedges can't apply as much rotational velocity as they can forward velocity. And I'm not sure if they have any ability to slow down or move laterally without first pointing the ship in the desired direction. That'd might make precision station keeping, interesting. I could potentially see ships trying to hold very close formation at nominally identical velocities using their thrusters in conjunction with their wedge for fine adjustment of velocity and lateral separation.

OTOH if the wedge can provide even a tiny amount of lateral or reverse acceleration that's all you'd need for station keeping around the junction; as we saw in OBS a normal transit has the ship creeping into the lane, preparing to rig sails, at a sedate 20 gees. So it's already using only a fraction of the wedge's full power; so if the wedge could apply a few percent of it's forward acceleration is other directions that'd let you fine tune position, or hold yourself stationary, without having to supplement it with thrusters.

Taking Theemile's analogy of a toll booth approach, one big difference is that while the ships would have their wedges up and ready for use, [i]they won't be accelerating[i]. They're all moving into the booth in a known vector, but they're all keeping the same constant velocity.

ACS probably mandates that they keep the ships in a specific vector both to facilitate the actual transit when the sails bite and for an emergency stop.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Well we have seen that wedges can't apply as much rotational velocity as they can forward velocity. And I'm not sure if they have any ability to slow down or move laterally without first pointing the ship in the desired direction. That'd might make precision station keeping, interesting. I could potentially see ships trying to hold very close formation at nominally identical velocities using their thrusters in conjunction with their wedge for fine adjustment of velocity and lateral separation.

OTOH if the wedge can provide even a tiny amount of lateral or reverse acceleration that's all you'd need for station keeping around the junction; as we saw in OBS a normal transit has the ship creeping into the lane, preparing to rig sails, at a sedate 20 gees. So it's already using only a fraction of the wedge's full power; so if the wedge could apply a few percent of it's forward acceleration is other directions that'd let you fine tune position, or hold yourself stationary, without having to supplement it with thrusters.

Taking Theemile's analogy of a toll booth approach, one big difference is that while the ships would have their wedges up and ready for use, they won't be accelerating. They're all moving into the booth in a known vector, but they're all keeping the same constant velocity.

ACS probably mandates that they keep the ships in a specific vector both to facilitate the actual transit when the sails bite and for an emergency stop.

That sounds reasonable, and yet the one time I can recall seeing a detailed description of that transition from wedge to sail the ship was accelerating (albeit slowly).

On Basilisk Station wrote:Fearless drifted forward at a mere twenty gravities' acceleration, aligning herself perfectly on the invisible rails of the Junction" [...]
Fearless's light code flashed bright green as the cruiser settled into exact position, and Honor nodded to Santos.
"Rig foresail for transit."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Rigging foresail—now."

Jonathan_S wrote:That sounds reasonable, and yet the one time I can recall seeing a detailed description of that transition from wedge to sail the ship was accelerating (albeit slowly).

On Basilisk Station wrote:Fearless drifted forward at a mere twenty gravities' acceleration, aligning herself perfectly on the invisible rails of the Junction" [...]
Fearless's light code flashed bright green as the cruiser settled into exact position, and Honor nodded to Santos.
"Rig foresail for transit."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Rigging foresail—now."

That's when the ship was actually transiting. When it comes to the head of the queue, it probably needs to accelerate into the outbound transit lane. Why that might be required I can speculate:

It can be that the wedge must be generating power so the sails do bite when transitioning.

The ship may need to increase the distance from the next one, which is one minute behind you (more during OBS times, but irrelevant).

Jonathan_S wrote:That sounds reasonable, and yet the one time I can recall seeing a detailed description of that transition from wedge to sail the ship was accelerating (albeit slowly).

On Basilisk Station wrote:Fearless drifted forward at a mere twenty gravities' acceleration, aligning herself perfectly on the invisible rails of the Junction" [...]
Fearless's light code flashed bright green as the cruiser settled into exact position, and Honor nodded to Santos.
"Rig foresail for transit."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Rigging foresail—now."

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's when the ship was actually transiting. When it comes to the head of the queue, it probably needs to accelerate into the outbound transit lane. Why that might be required I can speculate:

It can be that the wedge must be generating power so the sails do bite when transitioning.

The ship may need to increase the distance from the next one, which is one minute behind you (more during OBS times, but irrelevant).

The outbound transit lane?

All examples that are given are all single ship transits, and not at all like anything with the potential to become as messy as stacked mass transits. I simply do not see a wedge as being a finely-controlled method of nuanced propulsion. One minute separation when stacking for a mass transit doesn't seem to leave enough margin for error. Even when ACS has to stack 'em and rack 'em upon exit.

In Theemile's example at the toll booth, do note the constant stop and start action, controlled by the brake and the impulse power of the engines. The ship ahead of you is always unpredictable. The universe supplies lots of imperfect variables. Further hindered by the fact that no single ship can prematurely cross a certain threshold, lest it initiate a single transit.

Also note that the impulse power of a car's engine and the brake are a perfect combination. Impulse power does not overpower the capability of the brake in this stop and go environment. Much like what would happen descending a steep mountain if the driver is inexperienced. A wedge would seem to overpower the ability of the thrusters in a nuanced situation.

And again, each ship stacked for a mass transit is sitting in varying turbulence caused by grav waves heading into the junction. I can imagine mass transits being amongst the top situations which burn the most fuel where thrusters are constantly firing.

At any rate, it would be a sick joke to have a "no tailgating" sign on whatever passes for a bumper.

cthia wrote:The outbound transit lane?

All examples that are given are all single ship transits, and not at all like anything with the potential to become as messy as stacked mass transits. I simply do not see a wedge as being a finely-controlled method of nuanced propulsion. One minute separation when stacking for a mass transit doesn't seem to leave enough margin for error. Even when ACS has to stack 'em and rack 'em upon exit.

In Theemile's example at the toll booth, do note the constant stop and start action, controlled by the brake and the impulse power of the engines. The ship ahead of you is always unpredictable. The universe supplies lots of imperfect variables. Further hindered by the fact that no single ship can prematurely cross a certain threshold, lest it initiate a single transit.

Also note that the impulse power of a car's engine and the brake are a perfect combination. Impulse power does not overpower the capability of the brake in this stop and go environment. Much like what would happen descending a steep mountain if the driver is inexperienced. A wedge would seem to overpower the ability of the thrusters in a nuanced situation.

And again, each ship stacked for a mass transit is sitting in varying turbulence caused by grav waves heading into the junction. I can imagine mass transits being amongst the top situations which burn the most fuel where thrusters are constantly firing.

At any rate, it would be a sick joke to have a "no tailgating" sign on whatever passes for a bumper.

Couple things.
First, 1 minute separation isn't a mass transit. That's ACS's normal traffic minimum separation. If a mass transit is the Blue Angels making a formation take-off the one minute interval is the delay ATC imposes between airliner take-offs on a single runway (with a longer interval if you're taking off after a 747 or A380).

Second, whether the wedge (or sails) would overpower the thrusters would depend on what power setting the wedge (or sails) were set for. Remember that a warship's thrusters are capable of at least 150g (though you burn fuel like crazy at that thrust), as we saw at Cerberus. That's more than enough delta-v to correct minor deviations in velocity or position when the wedge (or sails) are set for low accelerations. (And again, when we saw Fearless do this she was accelerating at 20 g; 13% of what her thrusters alone could provide).

Third, the final alignment would happen under sail. It seems like ships departing from the Junction transition to sail minutes before transit (since they've got to accelerate down that final 90,000 km under sail). As mentioned before we're not sure if sails have better station keeping capabilities than wedges.

Still, for a mass transit you probably use even lower accelerations than a single ship, to give time to get everybody into whatever alignment is required. And that means your thrusters are even more capable of braking (or sidestepping) against the sail; given its minimal power settings.


And as for the risk of crowding and causing a mass transit; I don't think that's a concern under ACS's normal rules. We saw smaller warships hitting 10 seconds intervals without triggering a mass transit. I suspect you'd need to be much closer and triggering your hyper generator within fractions of a second in order to mass transit. So the normal 60 second interval leave vast amounts of safety margin against minor errors in position and velocity. (And most civilian ships going through would be large enough, over 2.5 mtons, to force a longer interval since their transit will lock the Junction down over 60 seconds anyway; so ACS will have them at a larger interval. Dispatch boats, yachts, or liners are smaller, but even most small freighters seem to be in the 3 - 4 mton range)

cthia wrote:The outbound transit lane?

All examples that are given are all single ship transits, and not at all like anything with the potential to become as messy as stacked mass transits. I simply do not see a wedge as being a finely-controlled method of nuanced propulsion. One minute separation when stacking for a mass transit doesn't seem to leave enough margin for error. Even when ACS has to stack 'em and rack 'em upon exit.

I was talking about single-ship transits too. As Jonathan wrote above, one-minute separation is normal transit, not mass transit.

In Theemile's example at the toll booth, do note the constant stop and start action, controlled by the brake and the impulse power of the engines. The ship ahead of you is always unpredictable. The universe supplies lots of imperfect variables. Further hindered by the fact that no single ship can prematurely cross a certain threshold, lest it initiate a single transit.

I didn't note that because that's not my experience. I was thinking more of a toll booth with automatic payment system, where the cars don't actually to a complete halt. They're just going slowly through the booth so the readers do read the device on your car. Plus, it gives time for the follow-on cars to make a complete stop if the reading fails and the boom comes down halting traffic. When I am going through that, I am usually coasting and have my foot on the brake pedal, ready to react if the car in front of me makes a mistake.

At any rate, it would be a sick joke to have a "no tailgating" sign on whatever passes for a bumper.

Could be worse. Remember the Spaceballs ship bumper?

Many modern highways have high speed toll lanes that allow vehicles to maintain the posted max speed and collect tolls electronically.
It should be relatively easy to set up lane beacons/bouy systems that monitor the relative positions and speeds (and changes) in ship traffic actions. At least all the Manticore termini and the Junction have local AstroControl to both monitor what is going on with the terminus/Junction and traffic plus any installations relative to their locations like warehouses and repair or passenger transfer facilities.
A question is at what point can a ship not be able to divert from an inbound transit lane before the vector changes would not be possible to avoid being torn apart by the gravitational forces of the wormhole? Certainly it would be some combination of speed (and mass of the ship) and physical location of the lane plus any components of gravitational eddy relative to the lane. We see that ships on final approach to transit are at a steady LOW speed (not acceleration) and are more or less threading a needle on predetermined course. At what point could they safely break off? At what point could they go to hard deceleration (or acceleration at acute angle) and avoid entering the terminus of a given lane.
I'm guessing that you are unable to complete rigging your sails and cross the terminus boundary you are just so much junk and probably not much more than a collection (fast expanding) of your component atoms.
But all this has to be something known and addressed in the normal protocols of running a wormhole transit operation. We have seen that when emergencies have occurred (attacks on systems etc) the local Astro Control has closed the lanes and diverted traffic. So they have to have some method of running scenarios on EACH ship that is going to use the wormhole in the event that they have to divert it and shut down transits.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:The outbound transit lane?

All examples that are given are all single ship transits, and not at all like anything with the potential to become as messy as stacked mass transits. I simply do not see a wedge as being a finely-controlled method of nuanced propulsion. One minute separation when stacking for a mass transit doesn't seem to leave enough margin for error. Even when ACS has to stack 'em and rack 'em upon exit.

I was talking about single-ship transits too. As Jonathan wrote above, one-minute separation is normal transit, not mass transit.

In Theemile's example at the toll booth, do note the constant stop and start action, controlled by the brake and the impulse power of the engines. The ship ahead of you is always unpredictable. The universe supplies lots of imperfect variables. Further hindered by the fact that no single ship can prematurely cross a certain threshold, lest it initiate a single transit.

I didn't note that because that's not my experience. I was thinking more of a toll booth with automatic payment system, where the cars don't actually to a complete halt. They're just going slowly through the booth so the readers do read the device on your car. Plus, it gives time for the follow-on cars to make a complete stop if the reading fails and the boom comes down halting traffic. When I am going through that, I am usually coasting and have my foot on the brake pedal, ready to react if the car in front of me makes a mistake.

I grant it's a loose analogy, because there is no toll booth to pay, which would stop the line moving as it does in real toll situations as the unprepared drivers rummage for quarters. My point was the cars in line are in a continual (but not necessarily continous) forward movement to the entry point and do not stop and shut down their engines in the process.

Brigade XO wrote:A question is at what point can a ship not be able to divert from an inbound transit lane before the vector changes would not be possible to avoid being torn apart by the gravitational forces of the wormhole? Certainly it would be some combination of speed (and mass of the ship) and physical location of the lane plus any components of gravitational eddy relative to the lane. We see that ships on final approach to transit are at a steady LOW speed (not acceleration) and are more or less threading a needle on predetermined course. At what point could they safely break off? At what point could they go to hard deceleration (or acceleration at acute angle) and avoid entering the terminus of a given lane.
I'm guessing that you are unable to complete rigging your sails and cross the terminus boundary you are just so much junk and probably not much more than a collection (fast expanding) of your component atoms.
But all this has to be something known and addressed in the normal protocols of running a wormhole transit operation. We have seen that when emergencies have occurred (attacks on systems etc) the local Astro Control has closed the lanes and diverted traffic. So they have to have some method of running scenarios on EACH ship that is going to use the wormhole in the event that they have to divert it and shut down transits.

I suspect that (for some unstated reason) you can't angle out the side of an approach lane. (Though I guess maybe you can; it's just really slow).

We do know that for whatever reason the defenders were confident that if a hostile warship was ever suicidal enough to transit into the junction that they'd run down the end of the arrival lane (4.5 minutes; 90,000 km) instead of diverting out the side (less than 20,000 km laterally).

My assumptions are that there are good reasons for that. Either it's actually slower to go that shorter distance, or else you physically can't survive doing so. (Because a ship should reasonably accept a lot of risk to shave even a minute off the time until it can switch to wedge and sidewall and start using it's missiles.
I'm further assuming (though on a far weaker basis) that whatever makes it pointless to go out the side of the arrival lane would also apply to the departure lane.

Still, given a little time the ship should be able to reverse course and run back down the departure lane.




Of course we don't know for sure whether a ship would be torn apart if it reached the terminus, while under full sail, but for whatever reason doesn't (or can't) use its hyper generator to transit the wormhole.

We know probes get destroyed when they get too close; but nothing about ships. (Though we do know it's dangerous to ships if they screw up the timing of converting to sails as they enter that part of the departure lane). So it's not outside the realm of possibility that the abort maneuver is simply to sail straight through without triggering your hyper generator.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:The outbound transit lane?

All examples that are given are all single ship transits, and not at all like anything with the potential to become as messy as stacked mass transits. I simply do not see a wedge as being a finely-controlled method of nuanced propulsion. One minute separation when stacking for a mass transit doesn't seem to leave enough margin for error. Even when ACS has to stack 'em and rack 'em upon exit.

I was talking about single-ship transits too. As Jonathan wrote above, one-minute separation is normal transit, not mass transit.

In Theemile's example at the toll booth, do note the constant stop and start action, controlled by the brake and the impulse power of the engines. The ship ahead of you is always unpredictable. The universe supplies lots of imperfect variables. Further hindered by the fact that no single ship can prematurely cross a certain threshold, lest it initiate a single transit.

I didn't note that because that's not my experience. I was thinking more of a toll booth with automatic payment system, where the cars don't actually to a complete halt. They're just going slowly through the booth so the readers do read the device on your car. Plus, it gives time for the follow-on cars to make a complete stop if the reading fails and the boom comes down halting traffic. When I am going through that, I am usually coasting and have my foot on the brake pedal, ready to react if the car in front of me makes a mistake.

Theemile wrote:I grant it's a loose analogy, because there is no toll booth to pay, which would stop the line moving as it does in real toll situations as the unprepared drivers rummage for quarters. My point was the cars in line are in a continual (but not necessarily continous) forward movement to the entry point and do not stop and shut down their engines in the process.

Understood, but my experience of toll booths - domestic and international, modern and historical - is just so much different. Vehicles are different. They are not all 4-cylinder economy cars. Some are powerful V-8s, V-12s, high performance sportscars, etc. (Varying wedge strength as well). Some have experienced drivers and some don't. Some have reliable vehicles that don't break down in the middle of traffic and others don't. Some have their shit together, correct change, correct credit card, etc. My point is that the movement of traffic is rarely uniform.

Also, for the analogy to equate to a mass transit, you'd have to consider the busiest toll booths during the busiest times of the season. Such as Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. Or better yet, during evacuations. Bumper to bumper traffic.

How much stopping distance should you leave between you and the warship ahead of you. How many "car lengths?" LOL

I have owned my share of powerful sports cars and I am telling you most are not so well behaved in day to day stop and go traffic. They are meant for the open road. I imagine the more powerful wedges (impellers) aren't exactly well behaved in the congestion of a mass transit.