Why did everyone become dumb at the end of TEIF?

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:It is possible that the LDs, Sharks and Ghosts are built without the capability to use wormholes. With the spider, they wouldn't have the problem of reaction ships and could re-accelerate when going up and down the bands. Without a wedge, a grav wave might not be too dangerous -- and it's possible they have a Warshawski even if they don't have Warshawski Sails.

But that would mean always going the long way via hyperspace. Even with a streak drive, they'd still be much slower than ships that could transit wormholes, which is a military disadvantage. And if that's the case, then we also have an upper limit for the distance between Manticore and Darius, because the Sharks would have gone the long way to reach it for Oyster Bay.

I think it's far more likely they can transit wormholes, especially given that Darius has a terminus. Though the only wormhole that they're likely to transit is Felix's. How the Sharks did get from Darius to Manticore would be an unknown: they could have made the trip in hyperspace, they could have come from Felix (which is 12 light-years from Mannerheim and we kind of know where Mannerheim is, so this is unlikely), or they could have used one of the other termini of that Junction to get even closer. My bet would be the latter case.

The crossing into the upper level bands is unsafe for any ship without a sail, even those without a wedge. Without a sail the early ships were limited to the first three bands; the quotes make that quite clear. So for any ship to make use of the streak drive, it has to have sails. Not even a spider-drive ship can go too far up the bands without them.

The only unanswered question is whether the bigger spider-drive ships also have a compensator for use with those sails? Without a compensator any manned ship is limited to accelerations that artificial gravity make livable; so the utility of the sail is severely curtailed.

Which goes back to the main point- we know the spider drive cannot use a comp, and comps require a wedge/sail to work properly. Sails (as we know them) need alpha nodes AND Comps to work.

So, either a Spider ship carries 2 sets of Alpha Nodes in a dual ring formation and a Compensator in addition to the Spider drive system - all 3 of which (Spider, Sails, and Comps) have specific ship geometries required to produce their effects, which are limiting to those required by the other systems), or has a different technology to produce a similar effect.

We only know that Spider ships CAN Transit wormholes and grav waves (per David "Why would the MAN design a ship that cannot transit a wormhole.", and "the OB attack fleet returned to Darius using the wormhole.", and Grayson is in the middle of a Grav wave and cannot be accessed any other way.), but no word has been said to the best of my knowledge about HOW they did it.

So either they carry the 2nd, massive, redundant, design limiting drive system, which we have no mention of, (which doesn't make sense), or they have developed a new tech, probably based off the spider drive - which we also have not been informed about in any way.

tlb wrote:The only unanswered question is whether the bigger spider-drive ships also have a compensator for use with those sails? Without a compensator any manned ship is limited to accelerations that artificial gravity make livable; so the utility of the sail is severely curtailed.

Theemile wrote:Which goes back to the main point- we know the spider drive cannot use a comp, and comps require a wedge/sail to work properly. Sails (as we know them) need alpha nodes AND Comps to work.

That is something that we do not know to be true; in fact we expect it to be false, because the sail was invented about 100 years before the compensator. We know that scientist Adrienne Warshawski invented the sail in 1273 pd after already inventing a new device capable of scanning hyper-space for grav waves and wave shifts within five light-seconds of a starship. Whereas it was not until 1384 pd that Shigematsu Radhakrishnan invented the inertial compensator. {dates from the same source as before}

tlb wrote:They could use a different name and identifier on the freighter or an actual different freighter.

The freighters used for the Silver Bullets at Beowulf were totally normal in every way and probably carried freight to be delivered (perhaps they were the ones that dropped off the bombs for the orbitals). I will not repeat everything that Brigade XO wrote, but yes they could have picked up waiting freight and carried it on to new destinations.

They have been burned before on the whole 'let's use a different name'. If it's as hot as it would be after that I'd want to send it into a sun somewhere.

tlb wrote:The crossing into the upper level bands is unsafe for any ship without a sail, even those without a wedge. Without a sail the early ships were limited to the first three bands; the quotes make that quite clear. So for any ship to make use of the streak drive, it has to have sails. Not even a spider-drive ship can go too far up the bands without them.

I still think you're reading too much into that one bit of text. Nothing else we've seen in the novels has talked about having to find a grav wave in order to climb into (or out of) the Delta - Theta bands; but we see ships entering and leaving those bands.

Hell, we see the liner Artemis make a translation out of the Delta band without using any sail or impeller at all!! (To avoid tipping the Peep BC off that it was now chasing a decoy pretending to be the injured liner)

Honor Among Enemies - Ch. 42 wrote:Artemis had dropped the LACs and her shuttles and then translated very cautiously down to the alpha bands without using her impellers at all—possible for such a slow translation, though only the best ship handler and engineer could have pulled it off—and hidden in the lower bands while Sukowski led the search mission towards Wayfarer's last known position.

That make it clear that using impellers would stabilize the transition and allow it to be taken more quickly; and if within a grav wave then sails would have the same effect. But sails won't stabilize you at all if you're trying to make a translation within a rift -- as Artemis was doing, as she was still in the Selker Rift.


(Also it wasn't sails that cracked the higher hyper bands, it was improvements in hyper generators. Remember that in the Travis Long books, long after sails were a normal part of every starship, even military hyper generators couldn't let a ship climb above the Gamma bands -- lower than a modern merchant ship can go)

A Call to Duty - Ch. 19 wrote:“There’s one other factor to consider,” Eigen said quietly. “Hyperdrive technology and capabilities are being improved every day. It may not be long before ships will be able to access bands above Beta and Gamma, maybe even far above them.

tlb wrote:The crossing into the upper level bands is unsafe for any ship without a sail, even those without a wedge. Without a sail the early ships were limited to the first three bands; the quotes make that quite clear. So for any ship to make use of the streak drive, it has to have sails. Not even a spider-drive ship can go too far up the bands without them.

Jonathan_S wrote:I still think you're reading too much into that one bit of text. Nothing else we've seen in the novels has talked about having to find a grav wave in order to climb into (or out of) the Delta - Theta bands; but we see ships entering and leaving those bands.

You have misread the text I presented; it does not say anything about forcing you to find a gravity wave in order to translate. Instead it is saying the boundaries between bands are dangerous in and of themselves; that is why hitting the iota wall as Truman did in Honor of the Queen was so dangerous. So reread this text paying attention to the "dimensional shear" which happens when you transition from one band to another as a property of the boundary between the bands:

The second problem was that the interfaces between any two hyper bands are regions of highly unstable and powerful energy flows, creating the "dimensional shear" which had destroyed so many early hyperships, and dimensional shear becomes more violent as band levels increase. Moreover, even the relatively "safe" lower bands which could be reliably reached were characterized by powerful energy surges and flows—currents, almost—of highly-charged particles and warped gravity waves. Adequate shielding could hold the radiation effects in check, but a grav shear within any band could rip the strongest ship to pieces.

So in order to make use of the streak drive, a ship has to have sails in order to cross the upper band walls.

As for transitioning from normal space into an area occupied by a gravity wave, the author says this in the Pearls of Weber under FAQ at the top of the screen:

Does the transition have to be made under impeller drive or Warshawski sail, or either?

Outside a grav wave's area of influence, you do not necessarily have to be underway to make a hyper transit; it's just a little safer because the forward movement gives you more dimensional stability when you crack the wall. If, however, you are making transit into a grav wave, you must have rigged at least one set of Warshawski sails, or grav shear will destroy your vessel as you enter the grav wave's area of influence.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:The crossing into the upper level bands is unsafe for any ship without a sail, even those without a wedge. Without a sail the early ships were limited to the first three bands; the quotes make that quite clear. So for any ship to make use of the streak drive, it has to have sails. Not even a spider-drive ship can go too far up the bands without them.

Jonathan_S wrote:I still think you're reading too much into that one bit of text. Nothing else we've seen in the novels has talked about having to find a grav wave in order to climb into (or out of) the Delta - Theta bands; but we see ships entering and leaving those bands.

You have misread the text I presented; it does not say anything about forcing you to find a gravity wave in order to translate. Instead it is saying the boundaries between bands are dangerous in and of themselves; that is why hitting the iota wall as Truman did in Honor of the Queen was so dangerous. So reread this text paying attention to the "dimensional shear" which happens when you transition from one band to another as a property of the boundary between the bands:

The second problem was that the interfaces between any two hyper bands are regions of highly unstable and powerful energy flows, creating the "dimensional shear" which had destroyed so many early hyperships, and dimensional shear becomes more violent as band levels increase. Moreover, even the relatively "safe" lower bands which could be reliably reached were characterized by powerful energy surges and flows—currents, almost—of highly-charged particles and warped gravity waves. Adequate shielding could hold the radiation effects in check, but a grav shear within any band could rip the strongest ship to pieces.

So in order to make use of the streak drive, a ship has to have sails in order to cross the upper band walls.

I'm aware of the dimensional shear - but the text does not say that sails are the solution to it. Truman's light cruiser had sails, as did every other ship that had ever tried to crack the Iota wall.

Mission of Honor wrote:Everyone had known it was theoretically possible to go even higher, attain a still higher apparent normal-space velocity, yet no one had ever managed to design a ship which could crack the iota wall and survive. Incredible amounts of research had been invested in efforts to do just that, especially in the earlier days of hyper travel, but with a uniform lack of success. In the last few centuries, efforts to beat the iota barrier had waned, until the goal had been pretty much abandoned as one of those theoretically possible but practically unobtainable concepts.
But the Mesan Alignment hadn’t abandoned it, and finally, after the better part of a hundred T-years of dogged research, they’d found the answer. It was, in many ways, a brute force approach, and it wouldn’t have been possible even now without relatively recent advances (whose potential no one else seemed to have noticed) in related fields. And even with those other advances, it had almost doubled the size of conventional hyper generators. But it worked. Indeed, they’d broken not simply the iota wall, but the kappa wall, as well.

The solution was a better hyper generation.

Which is exactly what let ships, at some point after Travis Long's time, crack the Delta wall. Again the ships of his era that couldn't survive the dimensional shear of the Delta wall were equipped with sails -- because almost immediately after they were invented every hyper capable ship carried sails. But that wasn't enough to safely crack that wall.


And sorry, I didn't fully explain my reasoning. Sails, to the best of my knowledge, only do something when:
1) entering a grav wave
2) traveling in a grav wave
3) in the entrace or exit lane of a wormhole, or
4) transiting a wormhole.

So if you're not translating into or out of a grav wave rigging sails should do bugger all to stabilize the ship -- and, as noted above, overcoming the ever nastier dimensional shear of the higher hyper walls is primarily done by the hyper generator.
That's why I jumped to talking about needing to find a grav wave if you were getting stabilized by a sail -- because they've got no "bite" outside something like a grav wave. However I did begger the question of whether they'd do anything by assuming that they wouldn't outside a grav wave and then saying the lack of ships finding grav waves was proof that sails weren't needed to stabilize translations. (And see below where the early warshawski sail ships did find grav waves to ease their translations)

However More Than Honor's description of the newly invented sail is clear that it stabilizes the relative to a grav wave -- it says nothing about stabilizing it relative to a hyper wall.

More Than Honor: The Universe of Honor Harrington - (1) Background (General) wrote:That, alone, would have been sufficient to earn Warshawski undying renown, but beneficial as it was, its significance paled beside her next leap forward, for in working out her detector, Dr. Warshawski had penetrated far more deeply into the nature of the grav wave phenomenon than any of her predecessors, and she suddenly realized that it would be possible to build an impeller drive which could be reconfigured at will to project its grav waves at right angles to the generating vessel. There was no converging effect to move a pocket of normal-space, but these perpendicular grav fields could be brought into phase with the grav wave, thus eliminating the interference effect between impellers and the wave. More, the new fields would stabilize a vessel relative to the grav wave, allowing a transition into it which eliminated the traditional dangers grav shear presented to the ship's physical structure.

Riding a grav wave (and hence using a sail; because you must when within a grav wave) when cracking a hyper wall is safer -- More Than Honor does say that. And the early hyper ships, with their far, far, less capable hyper generators seem to have used that technique as a mater of routine.

More Than Honor wrote:The Warshawski Sail also made it possible to "crack the wall" between hyper bands with much greater impunity. Breaking into a higher hyper band was (and is) still no bed of roses, and ships occasionally come to grief in the transition even today, but a Warshawski Sail ship inserts itself into a grav wave going in the right direction and rides it through, rather like an aircraft riding an updraft.

But we have seen even a ship with a badly damaged modern hyper generator (Artemis) make a translation across the Gamma wall, and later climbing back up through the Delta wall, with no wedge or sail. So even badly damaged a modern hyper generator doesn't need the help of riding a 'wave through the translation. (Sure if there happens to be one going your way you'll be riding it for safety and economy reasons anyway so you'll take that slightly smoother translation as a nice bonus -- but it does not appear to be required any longer)

And there's no indication that the Streak drive would require that assistance either. (Though, to be fair we've very little info about it at all; so there's certainly room for RFC to announce such a limitation on the Streak drive; that wouldn't contradict any of the tiny bit that's been written about it)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:All this said, it's possible Traffic Control would simply chalk this up to an eccentric and/or naive pilot who only needs to get his licence reexamined, in the days prior to Oyster Bay, the same way that the insertion happened. But unlike the insertion, this ship would be counting on luck to avoid an inspection, which is not something planners could rely on. Plus, the Ghosts wouldn't know ahead of time if their ride home hadn't been intercepted and in its place there's an ambush.

Hyper out can't be detected, only the wedge. Once you're past the limit cut back the drive to the point they can't see it and keep on heading out. Slow, but it would get there eventually.

tlb wrote:The crossing into the upper level bands is unsafe for any ship without a sail, even those without a wedge. Without a sail the early ships were limited to the first three bands; the quotes make that quite clear. So for any ship to make use of the streak drive, it has to have sails. Not even a spider-drive ship can go too far up the bands without them.

Jonathan_S wrote:I still think you're reading too much into that one bit of text. Nothing else we've seen in the novels has talked about having to find a grav wave in order to climb into (or out of) the Delta - Theta bands; but we see ships entering and leaving those bands.

tlb wrote:You have misread the text I presented; it does not say anything about forcing you to find a gravity wave in order to translate. Instead it is saying the boundaries between bands are dangerous in and of themselves; that is why hitting the iota wall as Truman did in Honor of the Queen was so dangerous. So reread this text paying attention to the "dimensional shear" which happens when you transition from one band to another as a property of the boundary between the bands:

The second problem was that the interfaces between any two hyper bands are regions of highly unstable and powerful energy flows, creating the "dimensional shear" which had destroyed so many early hyperships, and dimensional shear becomes more violent as band levels increase. Moreover, even the relatively "safe" lower bands which could be reliably reached were characterized by powerful energy surges and flows—currents, almost—of highly-charged particles and warped gravity waves. Adequate shielding could hold the radiation effects in check, but a grav shear within any band could rip the strongest ship to pieces.

So in order to make use of the streak drive, a ship has to have sails in order to cross the upper band walls.

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm aware of the dimensional shear - but the text does not say that sails are the solution to it. Truman's light cruiser had sails, as did every other ship that had ever tried to crack the Iota wall.

Mission of Honor wrote:Everyone had known it was theoretically possible to go even higher, attain a still higher apparent normal-space velocity, yet no one had ever managed to design a ship which could crack the iota wall and survive. Incredible amounts of research had been invested in efforts to do just that, especially in the earlier days of hyper travel, but with a uniform lack of success. In the last few centuries, efforts to beat the iota barrier had waned, until the goal had been pretty much abandoned as one of those theoretically possible but practically unobtainable concepts.
But the Mesan Alignment hadn’t abandoned it, and finally, after the better part of a hundred T-years of dogged research, they’d found the answer. It was, in many ways, a brute force approach, and it wouldn’t have been possible even now without relatively recent advances (whose potential no one else seemed to have noticed) in related fields. And even with those other advances, it had almost doubled the size of conventional hyper generators. But it worked. Indeed, they’d broken not simply the iota wall, but the kappa wall, as well.

The solution was a better hyper generation.

Which is exactly what let ships, at some point after Travis Long's time, crack the Delta wall. Again the ships of his era that couldn't survive the dimensional shear of the Delta wall were equipped with sails -- because almost immediately after they were invented every hyper capable ship carried sails. But that wasn't enough to safely crack that wall.


And sorry, I didn't fully explain my reasoning. Sails, to the best of my knowledge, only do something when:
1) entering a grav wave
2) traveling in a grav wave
3) in the entrace or exit lane of a wormhole, or
4) transiting a wormhole.

So if you're not translating into or out of a grav wave rigging sails should do bugger all to stabilize the ship -- and, as noted above, overcoming the ever nastier dimensional shear of the higher hyper walls is primarily done by the hyper generator.
That's why I jumped to talking about needing to find a grav wave if you were getting stabilized by a sail -- because they've got no "bite" outside something like a grav wave. However I did begger the question of whether they'd do anything by assuming that they wouldn't outside a grav wave and then saying the lack of ships finding grav waves was proof that sails weren't needed to stabilize translations. (And see below where the early warshawski sail ships did find grav waves to ease their translations)

However More Than Honor's description of the newly invented sail is clear that it stabilizes the relative to a grav wave -- it says nothing about stabilizing it relative to a hyper wall.

More Than Honor: The Universe of Honor Harrington - (1) Background (General) wrote:That, alone, would have been sufficient to earn Warshawski undying renown, but beneficial as it was, its significance paled beside her next leap forward, for in working out her detector, Dr. Warshawski had penetrated far more deeply into the nature of the grav wave phenomenon than any of her predecessors, and she suddenly realized that it would be possible to build an impeller drive which could be reconfigured at will to project its grav waves at right angles to the generating vessel. There was no converging effect to move a pocket of normal-space, but these perpendicular grav fields could be brought into phase with the grav wave, thus eliminating the interference effect between impellers and the wave. More, the new fields would stabilize a vessel relative to the grav wave, allowing a transition into it which eliminated the traditional dangers grav shear presented to the ship's physical structure.

Riding a grav wave (and hence using a sail; because you must when within a grav wave) when cracking a hyper wall is safer -- More Than Honor does say that. And the early hyper ships, with their far, far, less capable hyper generators seem to have used that technique as a mater of routine.

More Than Honor wrote:The Warshawski Sail also made it possible to "crack the wall" between hyper bands with much greater impunity. Breaking into a higher hyper band was (and is) still no bed of roses, and ships occasionally come to grief in the transition even today, but a Warshawski Sail ship inserts itself into a grav wave going in the right direction and rides it through, rather like an aircraft riding an updraft.

But we have seen even a ship with a badly damaged modern hyper generator (Artemis) make a translation across the Gamma wall, and later climbing back up through the Delta wall, with no wedge or sail. So even badly damaged a modern hyper generator doesn't need the help of riding a 'wave through the translation. (Sure if there happens to be one going your way you'll be riding it for safety and economy reasons anyway so you'll take that slightly smoother translation as a nice bonus -- but it does not appear to be required any longer)

And there's no indication that the Streak drive would require that assistance either. (Though, to be fair we've very little info about it at all; so there's certainly room for RFC to announce such a limitation on the Streak drive; that wouldn't contradict any of the tiny bit that's been written about it)

I concede that the hyper generator came first and that improvements to it are important (including the streak drive), but cannot agree that a reading of the text in More than Honor can be taken to mean that sails are not material to transitioning between the upper bands.

The Warshawski Sail also made it possible to "crack the wall" between hyper bands with much greater impunity.

Yes, the text later does conflate this with entering a gravity wave; but the clear sense of that sentence is that the sail contributes to crossing the boundary, particularly in the upper bands. It does not say that they are absolutely necessary and in the lowest bands we know that they are only needed when transitioning into or out of a band with a gravity wave. I understand that you take it to mean that they are only needed when a gravity wave is involved. I take to mean that as the bands get higher, the boundaries take on more and more the nature of a gravity wave.

So we will are stuck in the absence of more text evidence with our opposing viewpoints.

But for the question that started the dialog, let me put it this way: it seems foolish to me to build a spider drive vessel without the ability to take advantage of hyperspace and wormholes to the utmost possible (unless it has to be so small, that it is impossible to fit everything in). That means a large enough spider drive ship will also have a hyper-drive generator (preferably with streak capability), sails and an inertial compensator (although that can be left out if space is an issue, with a resulting loss in maximum acceleration).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:All this said, it's possible Traffic Control would simply chalk this up to an eccentric and/or naive pilot who only needs to get his licence reexamined, in the days prior to Oyster Bay, the same way that the insertion happened. But unlike the insertion, this ship would be counting on luck to avoid an inspection, which is not something planners could rely on. Plus, the Ghosts wouldn't know ahead of time if their ride home hadn't been intercepted and in its place there's an ambush.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Hyper out can't be detected, only the wedge. Once you're past the limit cut back the drive to the point they can't see it and keep on heading out. Slow, but it would get there eventually.

That's true and that's how I think the Ghosts and Sharks left after the attack: they hypered out.

The point above was about a freighter that was sent in to collect them. Said freighter would have been noticed arriving, whether it was at the Junction, the inner system hyperlimit or away. On the latter case, since it is an impeller ship, it wouldn't be able to sneak away from the patrol ships that came to find it. It would also be a second arrival a light-month out within a couple of weeks, which would be unusual. And if it arrived in plain sight, as I posted above, it ran the risk of an inspection and it simply couldn't get far enough away coasting with its impellers down.

tlb wrote:That is something that we do not know to be true; in fact we expect it to be false, because the sail was invented about 100 years before the compensator. We know that scientist Adrienne Warshawski invented the sail in 1273 pd after already inventing a new device capable of scanning hyper-space for grav waves and wave shifts within five light-seconds of a starship. Whereas it was not until 1384 pd that Shigematsu Radhakrishnan invented the inertial compensator. {dates from the same source as before}

Another point is that we know the compensators use the wedge for the "gravity sump" (whatever that is) to operate. When a ship has transitioned fully to sails, it has no wedge, therefore its compensators must work with the sails.

So my guess is that the spider ships do have a circular ring of Alpha nodes that can project sails and those can be used to safely travel in grav waves and transit wormholes.

On the discussion going on about whether the sails are required (or at a minimum, "highly advisable") for band transitions, I don't know. The text is compelling that something must be used to mitigate the dimensional shear and it seems to imply that's the sail. But at no time are we told about a ship using sails while translating in the upper bands, so that seems wrong.