cthia wrote:If we are right about the overall design of the system, I think it is reasonable to consider that the available power from the reactors which is fed to the capacitors and then fed to the wedge has to be the bottleneck in wedge start times. Why else would it be referred to as "powering up the wedge?"
Agreed on the limitation, not on the turn of phrase. The turn of phrase can have any number of aphysical reasons.
[quoteFor the life of me, I cannot accept that a system as robust as the wedge cannot handle a massive power dump. Although my impeccable logic doesn't make it true, what makes more sense to me is that the latent time it takes for the reactors to produce the required amount of power to start is limited by a factor of the time needed for the reactors to produce the requited load, and it is not a function of the system's ability to quickly absorb that load. Remember that the required power to start a wedge is greater than the output of all of the reactors combined.[/quote]
As you said above, the problem is not likely to be the power dump. In fact, I think it is designed for a massive power dump and it is such a massive power or energy dump (or a combination of both) that makes the wedge go up in the first place. The limitation is the power generation and transfer. Which one of the two is the most difficult to overcome is not obvious, though clearly they are both currently limiting because no one would lay vastly more power transfer circuits than power can be generated -- it would be a waste of mass/volume and materials.
I understand your point about the speed in which an MDM currently crosses the engagement zone. But I am not suggesting even 9-minute start times. I'm suggesting closer to instantaneous wedge starts, to be practical.
Going from a 15-minute start to 1 minute means generating at least 15x higher rate and transferring it at a least 15x more higher rate to its destination. I said at least because it's at extreme regimes that one usually finds the most inefficiencies. So if a 6-reactor SD uses 5 reactors for 20 minutes to build up sufficient energy in the capacitors before starting the wedge, then to do so in 1 minute would take the output equivalent to 100 reactors. So what you're saying, even if it is possible ("if brute force isn't working, you're not using enough of it"), it's impractical: this goes beyond "LD has 12 reactors and thus power to spare" to "LD has 144 reactors." It has to be at least an order of magnitude more and we're told the LD is massive, but not 10x bigger.
At any rate, I'm not sold on how quickly the GA would be able to detect your notion of "leaking reactors." No ship has been readily detected while lying doggo. Aren't reactors idling hot while a ship is lying doggo? Madrigal did not detect the Masadan ship when it was lying doggo before it killed Courvosier. So, if the MA can develop a system where wedge starts are near instantaneous, then the ability to cycle between the two propulsion systems seems reasonable and practical.
We're not talking about the power from the reactors, though that would also come into effect if you have 100 reactors lit up and generating power just in case you needed it (see Brigade's replies on the boilers). You must dump excess heat somewhere lest you boil everything inside the ship. Having sufficient idle power to start a wedge goes counter to having effective stealth.
But instead what we're talking is about the gravitic effects on the nodes. We don't know why that is, only that it is. Only RFC can give us more parameters on the actual conditions, whether it is only during start up phase or not, what the range is, etc.
The crew can also be genetically altered to withstand impossibly harsh working conditions.
That means they'd been bred for that for at least 25 years, which is not likely given that the design of the ship isn't that old. The MAlign had no idea the Spider would be a practical technology until maybe 10 years ago, and hadn't prototyped it on a warship until 5 years ago. They could be engineering such crews now, but time is not on their side.
I don't think the time could have been shortened. For all we know in the HV, even Alphas take decades to mature to adulthood. Genetic slaves may be sold when they're barely 10 or 12 years old and have the body of an adult, but it's a long leap from that to crewing capital ships with such stock. At the very least the officers in charge need to be fully-trained, mature and thinking members of the Alignment society, not an automaton. And given that not even the hard labour lines of Manpower were automata, I don't think such a thing is even possible in the HV.
Admittedly, a lot of the tech I am proposing the MA could showcase is born of the completely different paradigm in which MA doctrine obviously operates, afforded by its total, unprecedented stealth. Like the missiles I propose which would attain current HV speeds launched from much closer engagement ranges even before the era of Apollo. No other navy has been motivated to design such an ability because no other navy would expect to be able to launch from such close ranges which an LD may find itself. Perhaps it is likewise with an instantaneous wedge. No navy needs to develop such a system because of the time it takes an enemy to enter it's engagement range. It is the same notion at play about hellfire energy weapons designed to take out Sidewalls from never before envisioned close ranges. Which would be somewhat opposite the physics employed by TWTSNBN.
You may be right that a lot of the notions I am proposing may be suicide. But I think we need to shelve a lot of the traditional tactics used by traditional navies before we can even come close to understanding the tactics which would be employed by the LDs. And we certainly need to understand that personal sacrifice is an MA creed which is imbibed while in test tubes.
Again there's the problem of timing. The Spider was not a viable technology until 5-10 years ago. So all of these other ancillary technologies you're proposing would need to have been invented and made into reality since the concept was first proven. It's just too unlikely that they would that many breakthroughs in such a short time span if they didn't steal it from somewhere else. The spider is the only technology of theirs we're in fact told is a genuine "out of the box" invention. The Streak drive was a mere brute force approach; the Cataphracts were slapped together; the Silver Bullet was an inelegant version of Sonja's Mistletoe; the graser in the torpedo is still a graser, even if firing for longer, and a similar line applies to their stealth.
I also don't buy that only they would have the impetus for these technologies. Or, specifically these technologies. Anyone and everyone would have killed for a million-gravity missile that lasts more than 10 seconds. Starting a wedge more quickly is certainly a factor for anything that is time-sensitive, like warships but also courier boats. Especially if this also leads into restarting a wedge more quickly after battle damage brings it down, so it's clearly an avenue of research I'd expect most navies and tech contractors to have looked into, especially those that care about their personnel returning home. Starting with Project Gram.
Finally, I don't think "personal sacrifice" is a regular trait of the Alphas. In fact, I think it's entirely the opposite and they're arrogant and egotistical. The inner Onion certainly is. You don't want your middle management to empathise with the "rabble of the human race" after all.
And one last thing: I do agree we'll need to rewrite the book once the LDs come calling. My problem is that I just don't currently see how they would operate, so the rewriting will need to wait for a few more books.
