NEXT GENERATION SDs

Somtaaw wrote:MAlign would totally build to 12MT or larger if they could actually lay hands on Manticoran compensators, but I recall reading somewhere they haven't yet gotten samples. So while they would, they're technologically unable to do so.

I do not remember the ship size of the Leonard Detweiler class, but had the impression that they were bigger than an SD. But that does not matter to them, since the spider drive does not allow for the use of a compensator; they have to use gravity plates instead, with a resulting lower acceleration.

The question remaining is whether they also have a compensator for use with the sails? And if they do, whether they would also add the additional nodes to have a wedge, in addition to the sails. But if they do have a compensator, then they are also limited by the rapid drop-off of effect at higher mass and if they don't, then the amazing accelerations under sail are denied to them.

tlb wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:MAlign would totally build to 12MT or larger if they could actually lay hands on Manticoran compensators, but I recall reading somewhere they haven't yet gotten samples. So while they would, they're technologically unable to do so.

I do not remember the ship size of the Leonard Detweiler class, but had the impression that they were bigger than an SD. But that does not matter to them, since the spider drive does not allow for the use of a compensator; they have to use gravity plates instead, with a resulting lower acceleration.

The question remaining is whether they also have a compensator for use with the sails? And if they do, whether they would also add the additional nodes to have a wedge, in addition to the sails. But if they do have a compensator, then they are also limited by the rapid drop-off of effect at higher mass and if they don't, then the amazing accelerations under sail are denied to them.

I would guess no they can't form a conventional military-grade drive with 2 wedges each on top and bottom. That requires pretty specific ship design (the flattened spindle) while the Lenny Dets being described as more triangular almost makes them sound like Goa'uld pyramid ships. Which probably means they cannot have proper distancing between impeller rings for a full strength military wedge, although they should still be able to form sails.


I would think they have to have the sails and a generic compensator, that's non-negotiable. Streak drive is still standard hyper, if they encountered a rogue wave while sailing from Darius to (insert target), that would annihilate any LD's on an attack mission.

Unless they're willing to accept some pretty extreme routing to stay away from even the slightest chance of a wave, but that could turn an operation from being 1-2 months into being over 2 years in duration for a single strike. That's also not even counting that the Spider means they'd be in the target system for over 2 months simply to avoid detection in the first place (exit hyper 2-3 light-months out, spider your way in, drop your ordinance, spider back out and enter hyper).

Lacking sails and conventional compensator also means the Lenny's couldn't utilize wormholes. And I have a strong suspicion one of their first planned strikes was to pop through and lay waste to Torch, which they couldn't do without the necessary parts.

tlb wrote:I do not remember the ship size of the Leonard Detweiler class, but had the impression that they were bigger than an SD. But that does not matter to them, since the spider drive does not allow for the use of a compensator; they have to use gravity plates instead, with a resulting lower acceleration.

It's never told to us. The Sharks were 4MT, the LDs were said to be much bigger, with people here estimating from 12 to 30 MT in size. But basically it's as large as David needs it to be. Since we don't really understand conceptually how the LDs will work it's not clear how big they need to be.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

By comparing their acceleration improvement to smaller classes designed in the same year we can see that the RMN/GSN ships are still not over the edge of the plateau. But, because that edge is an inflection point in the compensator curve slope we've no way to extrapolate how far it's moved.

Sorry, how do smaller ships tell us anything about the edge of the plateau? By definition, smaller ships are not anywhere near the edge of the plateau.

Short version:
It doesn't tell us where the edge of the plateau is -- but by comparing the relative improvement of small ships to ships above the old 8.5 mton plateau edge we can see that the large ships got effectively the same improvement to acceleration as their smaller counterparts -- whereas if the large ships were beyond the plateau edge they should have a significantly lower percentage boost to their acceleration.


Long background:
Pre-1905 all warships (except LACs[1]) sat on the same tonnage/acceleration curve (though it seems more like acceleration line segments with infection points at certain tonnage). Way back, with a lot of data fitting work, I got a good enough recreation of that with 5 inflection points (which closely correspond to the MTH table tonnage vs acceleration table) 70 known pre-1905 ships[2] fit on it to within +/-0.2 gees)

Post-1905 all data points to compensator improvements acting as a simple multiplier, with each generation of improved compensator having its own value that applies to all ships carrying that compensator. To figure out a ship's new acceleration simply take it's pre-1905 acceleration and multiply it by the % improvement of the given compensator generation.

And those improvement both cluster (with multiple ships having, within reasonable rounding error, the same multiple and those ships tending to be designed (if not commissioned) around the same time.

We've got:
Ships with 1.05x the base acceleration [Courvosier BC (1904), Joshua DD (1905)]
Ships with 1.17x the base acceleration [Benjamin the Great SD (1911)[3], Edward Saganami CA (1908)].
Ships with 1.25x the base acceleration [Harrington SD(P) (1913), Medusa SD(P) (1914), Reliant [flight III-IV] – BC (1915)].
Ships with 1.43x the base acceleration [Harrington II SD(P),
Invictus SD(P), Nike BC(L) (1920),Courvosier II BC(P) (1915), Agamemnon BC(P) (1919), Saganami-B CA (1917), Saganami-C CA (1920), Kamerling SCC (1921), Avalon CL (1919)]
Ships with 1.52x the base acceleration [Wolfhound DD (1919), Roland DD (1920)]

There are 4 classes on that list that exceed the old 8.5 mton edge of the plateau (Benjamin the Great 8.52 mtons, Medusa 8.55 mtons, Harrington II 8.87 mtons, and Invictus 8.77 mtons) and yet all are basically within a rounding error of matching the acceleration improvements of other, smaller, ships designed in the same era (and thus presumably with the same generation of compensator) which is indirect evidence that they're still on this side of the plateau edge.

(Technically the Harrington II and Invictus are 1.42x and the others in that list are closer to 1.45x -- that might hint that the SD(P)s have a non-optimal hull form[4] and thus aren't quite a quick as you'd expect. Or it could show that they're marginally over the plateau edge and consequently lost 12 gees of acceleration [30,000 tons if the old 1 g per 2,500 tons ratio holds; which it may not] -- note however that if the 8.5 mton edge had held they'd have been 270-280 ktons over; not maybe 30 ktons over)


It's hardly perfect, nor definitive, as it relies on both my original reconstruction of the acceleration 'curve' and applying relatively few modern ships to it by dividing their HoS reported acceleration by my calculation of what their acceleration 'should have been' on the reconstructed curve.
But it provides some slight evidence that the designers likely kept them inside the edge; and thus that it has moved upwards somewhat. But none of this actually lets us know how much it's moved up.

---
[1] And we're told specifically that old-style LACs had weak impellers which limited their performance -- the ones Honor took to Silesia in IEH were the first ones Manticore built that broke that limitation.
[2] Except the Culverin-class DD whose entry in HoS appears to be in error. It's about 28.5 gees high (and noticeably higher than ships 35,000 tons lighter than it -- and likely not coincidently its acceleration in the older Jayne's and SITS books was 28.5 gees lower)
[3] A case where we know their commission was delayed; so their design accel would have been using a pre-delay compensator generation
[4] For example CLAC's are 'fat' -- having a wider beam to draught ratio than most ships and Tom Pope confirmed to me that that's why they're a little slower than their tonnage would imply; which is why I left them off this list

Somtaaw wrote:I would guess no they can't form a conventional military-grade drive with 2 wedges each on top and bottom. That requires pretty specific ship design (the flattened spindle) while the Lenny Dets being described as more triangular almost makes them sound like Goa'uld pyramid ships.

Oops, that's not the right image to take. The Goa'uld pyramid ships were in fact pyramid-shaped, but not tetrahedrons. They had four triangular faces and one square one.

The spider-drive ships are describing as having a rounded-triangular cross-section, but are very, very long. The geometric form you're looking for is a prism with a triangle base.

Aside from that, I agree with your assumptions about their compensators, rings, and Warshawskis.

Jonathan_S wrote:It doesn't tell us where the edge of the plateau is -- but by comparing the relative improvement of small ships to ships above the old 8.5 mton plateau edge we can see that the large ships got effectively the same improvement to acceleration as their smaller counterparts -- whereas if the large ships were beyond the plateau edge they should have a significantly lower percentage boost to their acceleration.

Indeed. All that tells us is that the plateau is higher. It tells us nothing about it being wider.

Pre-1905 all warships (except LACs[1]) sat on the same tonnage/acceleration curve (though it seems more like acceleration line segments with infection points at certain tonnage). Way back, with a lot of data fitting work, I got a good enough recreation of that with 5 inflection points (which closely correspond to the MTH table tonnage vs acceleration table) 70 known pre-1905 ships[2] fit on it to within +/-0.2 gees)

Post-1905 all data points to compensator improvements acting as a simple multiplier, with each generation of improved compensator having its own value that applies to all ships carrying that compensator. To figure out a ship's new acceleration simply take it's pre-1905 acceleration and multiply it by the % improvement of the given compensator generation.

That probably means you've effectively reverse-engineered the formulae that RFC himself uses for compensator ships, so he's not pulling numbers out of thin air every time he comes up with a new ship class.

There are 4 classes on that list that exceed the old 8.5 mton edge of the plateau (Benjamin the Great 8.52 mtons, Medusa 8.55 mtons, Harrington II 8.87 mtons, and Invictus 8.77 mtons) and yet all are basically within a rounding error of matching the acceleration improvements of other, smaller, ships designed in the same era (and thus presumably with the same generation of compensator) which is indirect evidence that they're still on this side of the plateau edge.

(Technically the Harrington II and Invictus are 1.42x and the others in that list are closer to 1.45x -- that might hint that the SD(P)s have a non-optimal hull form[4] and thus aren't quite a quick as you'd expect. Or it could show that they're marginally over the plateau edge and consequently lost 12 gees of acceleration [30,000 tons if the old 1 g per 2,500 tons ratio holds; which it may not] -- note however that if the 8.5 mton edge had held they'd have been 270-280 ktons over; not maybe 30 ktons over)

Understood.

But it provides some slight evidence that the designers likely kept them inside the edge; and thus that it has moved upwards somewhat. But none of this actually lets us know how much it's moved up.

We do know the accelerations achievable by 8.75 Mtonne ships. What we don't know is what would be achievable by a 9.0, 9.5 or 10 million tonne one. That is, we know how much the plateau has moved up, but not how much wider it is -- how much to the right the inflection point is.

To be clear, I am thinking of a graph plotting the ship size on the X axis and the acceleration it can achieve on the Y. You should be seeing a curve going down, and then after the 8.5-9.0 Mtonne range it sharply goes down. We know the Y position of that inflection point. We don't know its X coordinate.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We do know the accelerations achievable by 8.75 Mtonne ships. What we don't know is what would be achievable by a 9.0, 9.5 or 10 million tonne one. That is, we know how much the plateau has moved up, but not how much wider it is -- how much to the right the inflection point is.

To be clear, I am thinking of a graph plotting the ship size on the X axis and the acceleration it can achieve on the Y. You should be seeing a curve going down, and then after the 8.5-9.0 Mtonne range it sharply goes down. We know the Y position of that inflection point. We don't know its X coordinate.

Agreed.

Yes, from HoS We know the (design) accelerations of the 8.77 & 8.78 mton ships. (Though in later books we see Invictus-class accelerating even faster than that; yay compensator upgrade refits)

But from those 2 data points all we can really say is that the inflection point moved right on your X axis to an absolute minimum of 8.75 mtons. We can't, however, say anything about the maximum amount more it could have shifted; because we have zero data for that.

We don't even know if the slope past that final inflection point remains the same -1 in 2,500 as before or if that has also changed -- we just have no data.


(Though I'd say we don't even really know the Y position of that inflection -- as that would require knowing the lowest acceleration on the existing line before it inflects sharply downward. Actually if we had that acceleration we could use that known line segment to work out approximately the X position, the ship's tonnage, from it)

All very interesting speculation. A thought... wasn't Tourville's flagship SD at the first BOM a bit over 9 M tons? Been a while since I've read that book but I wanna say it was 9.2 Mtons.

jaydub69 wrote:All very interesting speculation. A thought... wasn't Tourville's flagship SD at the first BOM a bit over 9 M tons? Been a while since I've read that book but I wanna say it was 9.2 Mtons.

I'm looking through 'At All Costs' and not finding that. In fact the only mention of his flag ship's size I can find it the following generic statement.

At All Costs - Ch 62 wrote:Lester Tourville sat at his desk for several seconds, looking around his day cabin, feeling the massive megaton bulk of RHNS Guerriere around him.

However, I didn't stop there - I did a full text search [for " tons", " ton ", "-ton", and "megaton"] through all the ebooks I have and I think I found what you were thinking of -- then Foraker's flagship:

War of Honor - Ch 10 wrote:"close" was a relative term aboard something the size of Sovereign of Space. The superdreadnought was the next best thing to nine million tons of battle steel and armor. She was also the first unit of the biggest and most powerful class of warships the Republic of Haven had ever built, although it probably wouldn't hold that distinction for long. The plans for the follow on Temeraire class were well into the final approval stage

Problem is that's kind of imprecise. Is "next best thing to nine million tons" more or less than 8.78 million tons? If more; how much more?



And for even more fun -- we know that even by the start of the 2nd war the RHN had its own improved compensators; though they weren't as good as Manticore and Grayson's latest. But did they follow the same tech path, and do their tonnage inflection points have to be in the exact same spots in the curve?

Because as I recall it's not clear how they got those improved compensators -- (though I'm pretty sure they must have had them before Erewhon dropped out of the original Manticoran alliance and signed a peace and mutual defense treaty with Haven); but whether they came from independent research, military/industrial espionage, and/or reverse engineering of captured 1st war RMN/GSN vessels/wrecks we just don't know.

Now FWIW the wiki claims that RHNS Guerriere was a Sovereign of Space-class SD(P); and the text certainly implies that (plus I don't think any of their 2nd gen SD(P), the Temeraires, were in service yet).

But even if we had Guerriere's acceleration we'd lack anything reasonable to compare it to as we don't have data points on anything else Haven designed at the same time. (This is where 'House of Lies', the Haven focused counterpart to 'House of Steel', might be really useful)

Tonnage Limitations
*** Got baby night duty so... ***

Note DN's were still a thing even though SD's were around as the total numbers are required in a line of battle as you go nowhere in sub squadron size to create a wall. Therefore Numbers required = Integers of Squadrons. This requirement does not exist anymore

*** Line of Battle as Limitation is NOT a requirement anymore.

Lets look Historical example: Artificial tonnage limits London Navy treaty regarding Carriers.

USA/Japan via testing saw that alpha strike was Ultimate limiting factor. A found carrier was a dead carrier. Thus carrier speed/range was also paramount. They had a problem, alpha strike = BIG carriers, but London treated limited tonnage. Thus both of their only solutions were to sacrifice armor for size while keeping range.

It should be noted BOTH USA/Japan essentially designed the same carrier of ~27,000tons, but total NUMBERS of hulls required forced both to shrink their designs. When Treaty limitations were removed both countries whipped out their already done and designed 27,000ton(Essex/???mind fart forgot name) carriers and with a second thought, USA decided they liked their side armor of the Lexingtons and the deck armor of the Brits and hit the printing press and out rolled the Midway class.

My point is that... Not a whole lot of "lets redesign" went into these designs. It was more, SLAP this and that and get it done. Kind of how HV SD'ps are currently.
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The HV now has pod warfare alpha strike, FTL pod warfare doubling range yet again, must carry either far more CM tubes, or new systems to increase CM interception rate, more PDLC, MUCH higher Laser head throughput, Graser heads, and essentially one does not have the ability to RUN away anymore. So, the triangle of Speed, Armor, Firepower, the Speed aspect is negligent. Armor needs a BIG increase. Firepower? Does not.

Now add that the REAL speed is getting between systems in the HV and here we have a BIG increase coming in a new hyperdrive essentially increasing "speed" 50% where total #'s is defining criteria + system defense going more towards giant forts with FTL.

So, the 8.5Mton limit for ~500G... Not needed.

The real question: What acceleration would be acceptable? How much Fusion power is required for current state of propulsion that can now be dumped into stronger sidewalls if one cuts acceleration? ***I am going to assume efficiency drops like a rock for fusion power to acceleration once you go over 8.5Mton*** If one has massive amounts of excess fusion power and no need for GRASER fire anymore, can we now drop a fusion plant while maintaining and increasing sidewall strength if we cut acceleration? That would free up a LOT of tonnage for other systems.

Next Question, why could they not just install a hypergenerator that now is able to hit the Iota bands on a 16Mton fort and for acceleration use fusion power + grav plates and if they have to bring a ship that holds nothing but hydrogen between systems, why not? May as well bring another ship carrying nothing but Pods MDM/CM with platforms to move said pods around behind the Fort and it then dissapears into hyper while you sit outside the hyper limit.

Anyways, baby has stopped crying and is asleep so... sorry for incoherant post, got to get some sleep.