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penny wrote:

penny wrote:I am unsure about something. Wedges cannot be operated while in hyper? But after exiting hyper into n-space the wedge is brought up rather quickly. Does that mean the hyper generator is cycling or idling while in hyper?

And of course, will a spider drive have the ability to come online as soon as it exits hyper. I know there will be a downward bleed of the sails, but can an LD immediately dive, activate its drive?

Theemile wrote:
Wedges cannot be operated in Wormholes, emergence lanes, and Grav Waves. But in other areas of Hyper (like 95% of Hyper), Wedges are the mode of transit.

What??? I thought the sails were the mode of transit.

Honor Among Enemies wrote:"Rifts" were volumes of hyper-space between gravity waves. They weren't uncommon; in fact, most of h-space was one huge rift, since grav waves tended to be quite narrow in interstellar terms. Unfortunately, the waves' crazy-quilt patterns meant most voyages required a starship to cross at least one.
[...]
By riding the waves, however, a starship accelerated faster, cost less to operate, and eliminated the danger of running into one of them.
At the same time, it was almost always necessary for a ship to make at least one transition (and usually more) between grav waves on any extended voyage, and those transitions were made—very cautiously—under impeller drive.

Honor of the Queen wrote:“Engineering, Commander Higgins.”
“Reconfigure to impeller drive, please, Mr. Higgins.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am. Reconfiguring now,” Higgins acknowledged, and Fearless folded her Warshawski sails into her impeller wedge.
There was no internal sign of the change, but Honor’s engineering readouts and visual display told the tale. Unlike Warshawski sails, which were invisible in normal space except for the brief moment in which they radiated the energy bleed of a translation, the stressed gravity bands of an impeller drive were almost painfully obvious.

penny wrote:I am unsure about something. Wedges cannot be operated while in hyper? But after exiting hyper into n-space the wedge is brought up rather quickly. Does that mean the hyper generator is cycling or idling while in hyper?

penny wrote:And of course, will a spider drive have the ability to come online as soon as it exits hyper. I know there will be a visible downward bleed of the sails, but can an LD immediately dive, activate its drive?

penny wrote:I also wonder, since an LD can produce intense fields of concentrated gravity, if a field of concentrated gravity can be placed around the entire ship that acts like a black hole absorbing the telltale bleed of the sails when exiting hyper.

penny wrote:I also wonder, since an LD can produce intense fields of concentrated gravity, if a field of concentrated gravity can be placed around the entire ship that acts like a black hole absorbing the telltale bleed of the sails when exiting hyper.

markusschaber wrote:I think that one cannot produce such a field while still transitioning. If you're not yet in normal space, you cannot prevent bleeding in normal space.
And that kind of concentrated gravity should be easily visible on grav sensors, I guess.

markusschaber wrote:

penny wrote:I am unsure about something. Wedges cannot be operated while in hyper? But after exiting hyper into n-space the wedge is brought up rather quickly. Does that mean the hyper generator is cycling or idling while in hyper?

I think the hyper generators are only active during transition between bands, they can idle while the ship is within a hyper band.

But wedges (produced by impeller nodes) are independend of being in hyper. The first hyper capable ships used rockets or fusion drives, IIRC. Outside of grav waves and wormholes, wedges work fine in hyper, see the Story where Honor saves the Hauptmanns passenger ship near Silesia.

penny wrote:And of course, will a spider drive have the ability to come online as soon as it exits hyper. I know there will be a visible downward bleed of the sails, but can an LD immediately dive, activate its drive?

We don't have any reliable information about how fast spider drives can get online.

penny wrote:I also wonder, since an LD can produce intense fields of concentrated gravity, if a field of concentrated gravity can be placed around the entire ship that acts like a black hole absorbing the telltale bleed of the sails when exiting hyper.

I think that one cannot produce such a field while still transitioning. If you're not yet in normal space, you cannot prevent bleeding in normal space.
And that kind of concentrated gravity should be easily visible on grav sensors, I guess.

Hyper generator modes of operation

Basically, just as a ship's mass/dimensions affect its acceleration rate, they also affect the speed with which it can make hyper translations. That is, a smaller, "handier" ship can cycle its hyper generator much more rapidly than a great big hairy superdreadnought, and military-grade hyper generators can cycle faster than civilian-grade hyper generators.

There are four basic levels of readiness for a hyper generator:

(1) Powered Down. This one, I think, is probably fairly self-explanatory.

(2) Routine Readiness. In this stage of readiness, the generator's basic readiness checks have been completed, there's a minimal power load on it, but its capacitors are not fully charged, and various safety interlocks are still closed to preventâ?¦ unfortunate accidents.

(3) Stand-By Readiness. In this stage of readiness, the capacitors are fully charged, the interlocks have been disengaged, and the engineer is ready to press the "go" button. However, even after the button is pressed, there is a minimum cycle time while the generator spins its field up to translation capability.

[ David seemed to have trouble counting the day he composed this, so I'll take the liberty of including the fourth readiness state for him:

(4) Sustaining. Running and in hyperspace. -Ed ]

It takes longer to go from Powered Down to Routine than from Routine to Stand-By. Basically, without getting into the detailed numbers (which scale with the tonnage of the ship, from a minimum cycle time of 30 seconds for even a dispatch boat), an 8,000,000-ton superdreadnought requires 4 minutes to go from Stand-By to actual translation. That is, the absolute minimum time for that ship to translate into hyper would be 240 seconds. To go from Powered Down to Translation, the same ship would require 32 minutes.





Excerpted from a post to DAVIDWEBER.NET dated June 27, 2011:

The generator has to be online and running at what I think of as "full" or "operational" readiness for a ship to enter or leave hyper space or to change hyper bands. It is also on in sustained operation the entire time the ship is in hyper, but this is not necessary to keep it in hyper; it is operated in that fashion in order to maintain hyper maneuverability (the ability to transition from band to band in routine navigation (and to evade potential threats --- natural or manmade --- by band-hopping. Missiles don't care about threats and if LACs were being used in an escort role, they would/could be covered by the merchies' hyper fields for "in close" transits or band-hopping and would be able to avoid just about any conceivable natural threat while dealing with the manmade threat which had required their deployment in the first place. (Before anyone objects to the previous sentence, "avoid" does not apply to LACs which find themselves in a grav wave, but since only an idiot would launch them there in the first place, I think we can agree to ignore that particular possibility.) From a starship's perspective, an operating hyper generator affords several advantages which range from highly useful to potentially vital where grav waves and some of the other hazards of hyper-navigation are concerned, which is why it's kept online… and why it defaults to n-space whenever the ships computers know a "safe" n-space destination woould be in reasonable reach cruising at a high-percentage of light speed.

penny wrote:I also wonder, since an LD can produce intense fields of concentrated gravity, if a field of concentrated gravity can be placed around the entire ship that acts like a black hole absorbing the telltale bleed of the sails when exiting hyper.

markusschaber wrote:I think that one cannot produce such a field while still transitioning. If you're not yet in normal space, you cannot prevent bleeding in normal space.
And that kind of concentrated gravity should be easily visible on grav sensors, I guess.

tlb wrote:You say "intense fields of concentrated gravity", but the tractor beams are not anywhere near as strong as either the wedge or the sail; so there is NO chance that they can hide the effects of exiting hyper.

penny wrote:But what about the wedge? One shouldn't be able to produce the wedge either. The wedge is also a band of concentrated gravity. The wedge just doesn't encompass the entire ship.

Wait. The bleeding only occurs when the ship enters n-space, no? The sails are causing the bleed, which implies the sails must be in n-space, which implies the ship must be in n-space?

penny wrote:And just like markusschaber stated above, that kind of concentrated gravity should be easily detected by grav sensors. But not only does textev say it is not detected, IINM, it also says it does not cause a visible distortion. If photons are not being bent and / or the effects of the tractors are not visible in the vicinity, then perhaps the intense gravity is trapping local photons, like a black hole / singularity.

Hence, that whole phenomenon might be exploited, and the intense gravity can surround the ship preventing the downward bleed by trapping the photons.

Chapter 46 wrote:The hyper translation had been all Citizen Commodore Yang had promised. He'd never imagined anything like it, and he knew he'd stood there, gawking through the observation blister's magnifying grav lens, as ship after ship followed Farnese across the hyper-space wall into the Cerberus System. The sleek battlecruisers had been magnificent enough, with the two hundred and fifty-kilometer disks of their Warshawski sails bleeding blue lightning, but the transports had been even more awesome. They outmassed the battlecruisers by over five-to-one, and despite their weaker drives, the actual area of their sails was much greater. They had flashed into existence like huge, azure soap bubbles, blazing against the blackness like brief-lived blue suns, and the sight had driven home the reality of their sheer size.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:But what about the wedge? One shouldn't be able to produce the wedge either. The wedge is also a band of concentrated gravity. The wedge just doesn't encompass the entire ship.

Wait. The bleeding only occurs when the ship enters n-space, no? The sails are causing the bleed, which implies the sails must be in n-space, which implies the ship must be in n-space?

My impression is that the ship, along with its wedge or sail, makes the transition all together -- one instant none of it in is n-space, the next instance all of it is.

The sails then bleed off their excess energy - but that seems to be a bleeding of photons (so moving at lightspeed) and not the source of the emergence flare's FTL ripples. We don't know whether wedges have a similar kind of energy bleed; but the massive distorting effect they have on photons would mean it wouldn't be the awe inspiring sight of disks hundreds of km in diameter brightly (if briefly) glowing.

We know the emergency flare is affected by the energy that's carried across the hyperwall -- a function of ship mass and ship velocity (well, presumably, of velocity squared). A full speed crash translation it going to produce a vastly more obvious flare than if you'd slowed down to a relative stop before transitioning.



Actually, thinking about, it even if you could wrap the ship in a grav effect I don't think that would capture or suppress the emergence flare. We've never seen a wedge or any other grav effect absorb, deflect, weaken, or in any way affect the FTL ripples moving along the hyper wall -- whether generated by an FTL comm, a wedge, or a sail. Because those signals aren't carried by particles in normal spacetime there's no particular reason to expect even extreme gravity to affect them.

If you could wrap the emerging ship in a black hole level of gravity the photons of its emergence might not be visible (unless they escaped before the event horizon could form and trap them) -- but, far all we know, the FTL ripples (caused by the energy transferring through the hyper wall) might continue unimpeded. (Or might not)


That said, even the Honorverse can't create grav that powerful -- and you probably couldn't wrap a ship entire inside a gravity effect without subjecting the ship itself to that gravity. If its strong enough to eat photons its more than strong enough to instantly destroy the ship. But since they can't produce grav powerful enough to eat photons that seems moot.

penny wrote:I'm thinking the FTL ripples will continue on and be detected, but it won't be accompanied by a brilliant flare. Thus, the entire phenomena might be ruled as a malfunction.

penny wrote:I agree that it shouldn't be possible to wrap a ship in such a massive gravity field without it affecting the ship. But it also shouldn't be possible to use a gravity field so concentrated that it can contain a reactor failure (like what happens with containment fields) without that concentrated gravity affecting the mechanism that is producing it. So, whatever breakthroughs in material and technology that enables concentrated gravity to be used as a containment field without interacting with the mechanism can simply be adapted in a large scale fashion.

penny wrote:But I am thinking that if the several tractors can each cut a hole in local space, if the effect of those tractors can combined to produce the effects at a single point in local space then perhaps a singularity can be formed that is the sum of the total. And the event horizon of such an accumulated source of several concentrated beams of gravity might extend beyond the ship. As a very concentrated single point of highly concentrated gravity produces a circumference of concentrated gravity represented by the event horizon of a black hole.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I'm thinking the FTL ripples will continue on and be detected, but it won't be accompanied by a brilliant flare. Thus, the entire phenomena might be ruled as a malfunction.

Unlikely since you wouldn't wait 62 times longer for the confirming optical signal to arrive. When the the Silver Cepheids were sent to investigate the emergence flare a light-month from Manticore they were sent as soon as the FTL signal arrive (~11.6 hours after the ring of Spider ships emerged) -- roughly 29 1/2 days before any optical signal could have arrived. They'd finished their (fruitless) search and returned before anybody knew one way or the other if there were photons associated with the possible emergence flare.

penny wrote:I agree that it shouldn't be possible to wrap a ship in such a massive gravity field without it affecting the ship. But it also shouldn't be possible to use a gravity field so concentrated that it can contain a reactor failure (like what happens with containment fields) without that concentrated gravity affecting the mechanism that is producing it. So, whatever breakthroughs in material and technology that enables concentrated gravity to be used as a containment field without interacting with the mechanism can simply be adapted in a large scale fashion.

The reactors are said to be "GRAVMAK" using a combination of gravity and electromagnetic confinement. They don't have to hold in electrically neutral photons, just the electrically charged plasma - and the gravity assist the EM fields in that.

But even without that assistance, the gravity necessary to hold in fusing plasma is vastly less than the gravity needed to hold in photons. (All stars hold in fusing plasma, only the vastly stronger black holes capture photons)

Also, Honorverse grav generators seem to be able to create gravity that pushes away from them. So it's possible that the emitters on the reactor are on the outside - while the gravity is primarily affecting just the plasma inside its hollow center -- keeping the physical structure from being subjected to that massive force. Something a ship attempting to put a grav field around itself couldn't duplicate -- because, well, it is at the center.

penny wrote:But I am thinking that if the several tractors can each cut a hole in local space, if the effect of those tractors can combined to produce the effects at a single point in local space then perhaps a singularity can be formed that is the sum of the total. And the event horizon of such an accumulated source of several concentrated beams of gravity might extend beyond the ship. As a very concentrated single point of highly concentrated gravity produces a circumference of concentrated gravity represented by the event horizon of a black hole.

I don't think that's how spider nodes, or tractors, work. But I admit we don't have enough detail to be 100% certain.