Attacking Darius:

Do we have any textev incoming us on how tough those bubble sidewalls are?

Another thought... At Galton, does the absence of any weapon system the GA couldn't detect provide a clue for the GA that their search for the MAlign isn't over?

Don

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n7axw wrote:Do we have any textev incoming us on how tough those bubble sidewalls are?

Another thought... At Galton, does the absence of any weapon system the GA couldn't detect provide a clue for the GA that their search for the MAlign isn't over?

Don

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Nope. Presumably fort bubbles are pretty effective, I’d expect more than a sidewall. But it’s never been directly addressed other than comments that forts are way tougher ton for ton than ships. Exactly why this is has been left as an exercise for the reader.

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:Do we have any textev incoming us on how tough those bubble sidewalls are?

Another thought... At Galton, does the absence of any weapon system the GA couldn't detect provide a clue for the GA that their search for the MAlign isn't over?

Don

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Nope. Presumably fort bubbles are pretty effective, I’d expect more than a sidewall. But it’s never been directly addressed other than comments that forts are way tougher ton for ton than ships. Exactly why this is has been left as an exercise for the reader.

It is certainly an interesting question though.

I posited in the Wormhole Assault: MA Style thread iinm, that all of a ship's systems must need access to enormous amounts of energy. We know that the wedge needs an insane amount of energy to start. If my assumptions are correct, then the bigger the ship the larger the reserves of available energy there is to be fed thru its veins.

A sidewall or bubble wall should be more robust if the sustained energy fed to it is greater. Think Star Trek, "feeding more power to the shields."

Do ships of the wall enjoy more robust sidewalls than ships below the wall? Could it really be a factor of the available power fed through them?

Does a ship that is not accelerating as hard burn less energy?

This seems intuitive if you consider one of my pet peeves with David's tech. Particle shielding simply must require burts of energy that approach infinity when instantaneously diverting debris while traveling at a significant fraction of light.

During energy battles a ship is usually not accelerating, thus, does it have more power available to feed the energy weapons?* In fact, I wonder if energy weapons can be fired during high accelerations? Or fired as effectively; and not simply as a consideration for any targeting difficulties that may occur at high speeds. If my theory - such as it were - holds true, then an LD may have access to a much greater power reserve, due to a lack of overhead. Assuming the spider drive itself isn't an energy hog.

Therefore, for the same reasons it is true for forts - due to a much higher production of energy, along with a lack of the same energy gobbling overheads present in a warship - an LD's bubblewalls may be much more robust. Where, by nature, bubblewalls may already be significantly more robust than sidewalls.

And, of course, as I posited in another thread, the availability of more power to feed the energy weapons could conspire with malignant ingenuity to develop hellfire 3-second stingers.

"We turn up the energy in energy weapons. We don't call Lenny One the Black Widow for nothing."

If a "power company" as large as a "fort" engages you inside its energy range, you don't have to worry about paying your energy bill.

* Note. I do recall one scene where Honor positioned her ships to afford either of them a shot at any one of the ships in the Havenite Fleet as it passed in-between. They were traveling at a high rate of speed, and possibly still accelerating.

Or, maybe, if it matters it only matters for smaller ships.


Please forgive any editing woes. This was originally a very long post circumcised on the cutting room floor.

cthia wrote:It is certainly an interesting question though.

I posited in the Wormhole Assault: MA Style thread iinm, that all of a ship's systems must need access to enormous amounts of energy. We know that the wedge needs an insane amount of energy to start. If my assumptions are correct, then the bigger the ship the larger the reserves of available energy there is to be fed thru its veins.

A sidewall or bubble wall should be more robust if the sustained energy fed to it is greater. Think Star Trek, "feeding more power to the shields."

Do ships of the wall enjoy more robust sidewalls than ships below the wall? Could it really be a factor of the available power fed through them?

They do enjoy more robust sidewalls; but it's not merely a factor of running more power through them; the actual generators have to be built to handle that power. (Try to run an SD generator's level of power through a destroyer's sidewall generator and you'd presumably just immediately burn it out)

There are multiple references in the books to certain designs, or newer classes, mounting more powerful sidewall generators.
"The newer [Star Knight] class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts" [IEH]
"we've also built much heavier sidewall generators into the Shrike to go with them. The result is a sidewall which is about five times as tough as anything ever previously mounted in a LAC." [EoH]

Additionally, as you go into larger ships the designers tend to build in more redundancy and overlap in their sidewall generators -- so the ship can afford to lose more generators before the sidewall strength or coverage starts to drop. So an SD would have the most powerful generators, and the highest ratio or generators/length, of any ship a navy builds. (All part of how they devote a higher % of the ship to defenses -- sidewall, armor, ECM, etc. -- than anything smaller does)

However IFF's armor essay confirms that sidewalls are power hogs and ships (at least early ones) sometimes need to mount extra reactors just to power them.

cthia wrote:Does a ship that is not accelerating as hard burn less energy?

This seems intuitive if you consider one of my pet peeves with David's tech. Particle shielding simply must require burts of energy that approach infinity when instantaneously diverting debris while traveling at a significant fraction of light.

During energy battles a ship is usually not accelerating, thus, does it have more power available to feed the energy weapons?* In fact, I wonder if energy weapons can be fired during high accelerations? Or fired as effectively; and not simply as a consideration for any targeting difficulties that may occur at high speeds. If my theory - such as it were - holds true, then an LD may have access to a much greater power reserve, due to a lack of overhead. Assuming the spider drive itself isn't an energy hog.

Actually ships in combat usually are accelerating.

The wedge cheats physics so badly it's hard to tell whether a ship that's accelerating hard actually needs more power from its reactors than one that's barely accelerating. Okay, in universe explanation is that once active the wedge siphons most of the power it needs from the next higher hyper band; but I can't recall it being spelled out whether or not the remaining load on the ship varies with acceleration or whether the wedge just has a fixed power requirement and all additional power for acceleration rates is siphoned.

However that's probably academic because we know on many heavy cruisers, and any ship larger, have entire spare reactors just to keep the ships at full power if a reactor is lost or has to be shut down. So whatever the ship's power budget might be, a major warship carries somewhere between 1/5th and 1/3rd more power production capacity than its maximum calculated power consumption.

Also, as a point of interest HoS mentions the old Javelin-class destroyers suffered issues from cramming their sidewall generators to close to magazines and missile tubes -- and thus creating problematic feedback issues between the grav drivers and the sidewall generators. That implies that adding more generators requires that you carry fewer missile/cm tubes in order to maintain acceptable separation between the various grav generating components.

But we also know that as ships have to spread a generator's coverage wider to cover for disabled/destroyed generators that the resulting sidewall is weaker. So allowing the generator to cover a smaller area seems to allow higher sidewall strength for the same input power (which makes sense; the field can be denser if it isn't spread so thinly) -- so additional generators doesn't just provide redundancy; it would be part of how you create more powerful sidewalls in the first place.

Oh - and as for particle shielding, the IFF essay also says "The space between the sidewall and the hull is filled with particle and radiation shielding to deal with natural space hazards. These shields plow debris and radiation out of the ship’s path using a weaker gravitic field. Instead of the sidewall’s small localized region of incredibly high acceleration, these shields are more gradual. They typically work on particles for longer periods, pushing their trajectories away from the vessel’s hull. Specially mounted detection systems and the ship’s energy weapon projectors vaporize the rare piece of debris too large or fast for the particle shields to deflect by themselves." (so they don't need to instantaneously deflect particles)

cthia wrote:

Therefore, for the same reasons it is true for forts - due to a much higher production of energy, along with a lack of the same energy gobbling overheads present in a warship - an LD's bubblewalls may be much more robust. Where, by nature, bubblewalls may already be significantly more robust than sidewalls.

Given how large we're given to understand a bubble sidewall generators is (enough an SD would have to give up a non-trivial number of weapons to fit it) that generator may be able to handle far higher power than all an SD's active sidewall generators combined.

For the LD the question is how did the designers decide to trade-off sidewall generators against everything else it needs to do. More powerful generators aren't free - they take up more space, require more power, and you may need more of them -- which means you can mount fewer other systems; like missile tubes, point defense, sensors, drives, etc.

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:Do we have any textev incoming us on how tough those bubble sidewalls are?

Another thought... At Galton, does the absence of any weapon system the GA couldn't detect provide a clue for the GA that their search for the MAlign isn't over?

Don

-

Nope. Presumably fort bubbles are pretty effective, I’d expect more than a sidewall. But it’s never been directly addressed other than comments that forts are way tougher ton for ton than ships. Exactly why this is has been left as an exercise for the reader.

RFC has also said that the RMN has developed other "tricks" for Forts which make them even tougher. Once again, an open ended reference.

Theemile wrote:RFC has also said that the RMN has developed other "tricks" for Forts which make them even tougher. Once again, an open ended reference.

Considering the sheer amount of internal volume a fort has, you can have triple or more redundancy for everything and cycle equipment during heavy load to avoid burnouts. And with that power budget they should also be able to put out some extreme jamming and lures. I do hope we get to see what RFC referred to.

One of the things I wondered about, when ships use their tractors to put stuff outside the wedge/sidewall, why can't forts do the same? With CM canisters and/or missile pods?

Another thing I wondered about, is it possible to use tractors as a defense? They can reach outside the wedge/sidewall, why can't they also reach and hold incoming missiles in a ship "throat" as an added "point-defense"?

Joat42 wrote:<snip>

One of the things I wondered about, when ships use their tractors to put stuff outside the wedge/sidewall, why can't forts do the same? With CM canisters and/or missile pods?

Another thing I wondered about, is it possible to use tractors as a defense? They can reach outside the wedge/sidewall, why can't they also reach and hold incoming missiles in a ship "throat" as an added "point-defense"?

Modern Forts are usually deployed with clouds of system defense missile pods, and their own internal podbays - so Yes, they do use their tractors to re-maneuver pods. Canisters are tube launched, but that shouldn't stop someone from loading a non-Apollo pod with CM canisters - I don't know if that will cause issues with the separate CM firecontrol system (David said the 2 firecontrols do not talk to each other, so the CM system may not interface with pods.)

I think a wedge will over power tractors... besides, Missiles are firing their laser heads at 20-50+ thousand kilometers from the target (depending on the tech level). I don't think tractors have that kind of range.

Joat42 wrote:Another thing I wondered about, is it possible to use tractors as a defense? They can reach outside the wedge/sidewall, why can't they also reach and hold incoming missiles in a ship "throat" as an added "point-defense"?

There is a comment in the books that the tractors of the spider drive are strong enough to use as weapons, but it did not state what the range was.

Tractor beams can only reach around a sidewall or wedge, as we see from this statement concerning tractors through a spherical sidewall in Mission of Honor, chapter 28:

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.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:It is certainly an interesting question though.

I posited in the Wormhole Assault: MA Style thread iinm, that all of a ship's systems must need access to enormous amounts of energy. We know that the wedge needs an insane amount of energy to start. If my assumptions are correct, then the bigger the ship the larger the reserves of available energy there is to be fed thru its veins.

A sidewall or bubble wall should be more robust if the sustained energy fed to it is greater. Think Star Trek, "feeding more power to the shields."

Do ships of the wall enjoy more robust sidewalls than ships below the wall? Could it really be a factor of the available power fed through them?

They do enjoy more robust sidewalls; but it's not merely a factor of running more power through them; the actual generators have to be built to handle that power. (Try to run an SD generator's level of power through a destroyer's sidewall generator and you'd presumably just immediately burn it out)

There are multiple references in the books to certain designs, or newer classes, mounting more powerful sidewall generators.
"The newer [Star Knight] class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts" [IEH]
"we've also built much heavier sidewall generators into the Shrike to go with them. The result is a sidewall which is about five times as tough as anything ever previously mounted in a LAC." [EoH]

Additionally, as you go into larger ships the designers tend to build in more redundancy and overlap in their sidewall generators -- so the ship can afford to lose more generators before the sidewall strength or coverage starts to drop. So an SD would have the most powerful generators, and the highest ratio or generators/length, of any ship a navy builds. (All part of how they devote a higher % of the ship to defenses -- sidewall, armor, ECM, etc. -- than anything smaller does)

However IFF's armor essay confirms that sidewalls are power hogs and ships (at least early ones) sometimes need to mount extra reactors just to power them.

Thanks! And it makes a lot of sense. But it seems to suggest that the design from the outset may be affected by the projected available power on hand; regardless of the middle man, the sidewall generators, involved. IOW, more powerful sidewalls can be included if it is known that the necessary power to feed those systems will be available.

I understand the limitations that that imposes on the volume consumed by the necessary generators, but in for a penny in for a pound. Translated: more powerful sidewall generators or thicker armor?

cthia wrote:Does a ship that is not accelerating as hard burn less energy?

This seems intuitive if you consider one of my pet peeves with David's tech. Particle shielding simply must require burts of energy that approach infinity when instantaneously diverting debris while traveling at a significant fraction of light.

During energy battles a ship is usually not accelerating, thus, does it have more power available to feed the energy weapons?* In fact, I wonder if energy weapons can be fired during high accelerations? Or fired as effectively; and not simply as a consideration for any targeting difficulties that may occur at high speeds. If my theory - such as it were - holds true, then an LD may have access to a much greater power reserve, due to a lack of overhead. Assuming the spider drive itself isn't an energy hog.

Jonathan_S wrote:Actually ships in combat usually are accelerating.

The wedge cheats physics so badly it's hard to tell whether a ship that's accelerating hard actually needs more power from its reactors than one that's barely accelerating. Okay, in universe explanation is that once active the wedge siphons most of the power it needs from the next higher hyper band; but I can't recall it being spelled out whether or not the remaining load on the ship varies with acceleration or whether the wedge just has a fixed power requirement and all additional power for acceleration rates is siphoned.

However that's probably academic because we know on many heavy cruisers, and any ship larger, have entire spare reactors just to keep the ships at full power if a reactor is lost or has to be shut down. So whatever the ship's power budget might be, a major warship carries somewhere between 1/5th and 1/3rd more power production capacity than its maximum calculated power consumption.

Also, as a point of interest HoS mentions the old Javelin-class destroyers suffered issues from cramming their sidewall generators to close to magazines and missile tubes -- and thus creating problematic feedback issues between the grav drivers and the sidewall generators. That implies that adding more generators requires that you carry fewer missile/cm tubes in order to maintain acceptable separation between the various grav generating components.

But we also know that as ships have to spread a generator's coverage wider to cover for disabled/destroyed generators that the resulting sidewall is weaker. So allowing the generator to cover a smaller area seems to allow higher sidewall strength for the same input power (which makes sense; the field can be denser if it isn't spread so thinly) -- so additional generators doesn't just provide redundancy; it would be part of how you create more powerful sidewalls in the first place.

Overall, this certainly makes sense. Except the part about 1/3 to 1/5 redundant power available from extra reactors. I was under the impression that an SD only has three reactors. Surely two of them aren't redundant. Leaving only one redundant reactor to kick in if one is lost. But I would question whether maximum power designs would include extended energy battles. Textev always states that energy battles are never expected to be prolonged. Therefore, energy fire is likewise not expected to be prolonged. Against an enemy whose stealth is total, prolonged energy fire might be a must. Certainly if some of the tactical recommendations encountered in the forum are employed. Like firing in the dark hoping for potluck. I would certainly expect that extended energy battles would not be possible with one reactor down.

At any rate, these design considerations might just fortuitously turn out to be favorable to the LD, because of its unusual shape. Running sidewalls the length of the elongated shapes of conventional warships might be more challenging than the shape of the LD. Perhaps.

Also, if you cannot effectively localize the warship that you are attacking, can your missiles concentrate on one area? Can an LD get away with weaker sidewalls in certain "areas" of the ship.

Like Star Trek, "increase power to the forward shields."

All in all, I believe the LDs will challenge a lot of what we think we know about conventional ship design. Obviously. And some of that design may turn out to be exclusively available only to that shape. The collective of the forum seems much too quick to attribute the shape of the LD as a liability. Which might hold true, while peering through the cloudy lenses of conventional GA tech.

Thanks for the correction about ships not accelerating during energy battles. I was focusing on [i]Fearless' being engaged in a twisting snake like battle with the Q-ship. An SD on SD battle in the same way would certainly seem to tilt in favor of the opponent witb a higher, sustained firing rate. Should the two behemoths somehow meet in the same fashion.

Jonathan_S wrote:Oh - and as for particle shielding, the IFF essay also says "The space between the sidewall and the hull is filled with particle and radiation shielding to deal with natural space hazards. These shields plow debris and radiation out of the ship’s path using a weaker gravitic field. Instead of the sidewall’s small localized region of incredibly high acceleration, these shields are more gradual. They typically work on particles for longer periods, pushing their trajectories away from the vessel’s hull. Specially mounted detection systems and the ship’s energy weapon projectors vaporize the rare piece of debris too large or fast for the particle shields to deflect by themselves." (so they don't need to instantaneously deflect particles)

Thanks for the explanation, but I still can't seem to wrap my brain around it. That approach may afford longer times to act on the particles/debris, but considering the acceleration of the ship, for all intents and purposes, it is still pretty much instantaneous. And exactly what is powering this (weaker? ) band of gravity? that will cover the significant areas of Honorverse ships? Only a single particle needs to get thru at those accelerations to be destructive. If particle shielding is that effective for such a significant area of the ship, then it should have no problem being designed as a shield against the particles of graser fire. Effectively creating the shields of the Star Trek universe. Concentrated particle shielding from powerful bands of gravity should greatly attenuate grasers. Isn't that the definition of sidewalls? Yet, sidewalls are not powered by the enormous energies of the wedge. Yet they stop graser fire.

BTW, I always thought of the wedge like a car engine, it only needs an enormous amount of energy to start. Then it runs totally on its own perpetual energy; its "alternator" as it were.

At any rate, I will yield to the author's design. But I won't invest any money on it. It remains a hard pill to swallow.

cthia wrote:Therefore, for the same reasons it is true for forts - due to a much higher production of energy, along with a lack of the same energy gobbling overheads present in a warship - an LD's bubblewalls may be much more robust. Where, by nature, bubblewalls may already be significantly more robust than sidewalls.

Jonathan_S wrote:Given how large we're given to understand a bubble sidewall generators is (enough an SD would have to give up a non-trivial number of weapons to fit it) that generator may be able to handle far higher power than all an SD's active sidewall generators combined.

For the LD the question is how did the designers decide to trade-off sidewall generators against everything else it needs to do. More powerful generators aren't free - they take up more space, require more power, and you may need more of them -- which means you can mount fewer other systems; like missile tubes, point defense, sensors, drives, etc.

Now we're cooking with Crisco!

This! It certainly emphasizes the MA's need to break the secret of the small power plant. And since they haven't yet - and if some of them are completed - it makes you wonder if refitting an LD with smaller reactors will be as difficult as refitting an SD.

At any rate, if an LD has the smaller power plants and the ship is significantly more energy efficient, and if the shape itself is more amenable to bubblewall designs, then the bubblewalls could be much more powerful. A wedge doesn't appear to contribute any power to conventional ships's systems.

Joat42 wrote:

Theemile wrote:RFC has also said that the RMN has developed other "tricks" for Forts which make them even tougher. Once again, an open ended reference.

Considering the sheer amount of internal volume a fort has, you can have triple or more redundancy for everything and cycle equipment during heavy load to avoid burnouts. And with that power budget they should also be able to put out some extreme jamming and lures. I do hope we get to see what RFC referred to.

One of the things I wondered about, when ships use their tractors to put stuff outside the wedge/sidewall, why can't forts do the same? With CM canisters and/or missile pods?

Another thing I wondered about, is it possible to use tractors as a defense? They can reach outside the wedge/sidewall, why can't they also reach and hold incoming missiles in a ship "throat" as an added "point-defense"?

Personally, I think that is an excellent question. Intuitively you would think the tractors could be used as a weapon. And I am sure they can be in very specific cases. But in general, they would have the same limitations that I balk about with the particle shielding needing access to infinite amounts of energy to affect anything traveling at a significant fraction of light. As opposed to particles, the acceleration of missiles would really drive that point home, even if the range of tractors was amenable.

But, they may be able to create a very localized "speed bump" of sorts, that would act like a large chunk of debris, effectively destroying the missile.

I posited something similar being employed by the LD in the "?" thread. Managed by its native connection to gravity.