penny wrote:No, I really did mean 'if it cannot be towed through hyper.' I simply wasn't aware it'd take so long!
Well you'd be towing it lightyears -- while not even going at the speed of light - so years to the closest star.
A warship's rad shielding is good for up to 0.8c in normal space -- but a disabled one might not have rad shielding and I don't know how much the towing vessel 'plowing the road' would help with that. So the tow velocity might be far lower that than.
penny wrote:Reason being, I thought repair ships are as limited in what they can do as doctors contemplating Regen. If the heart is dead, the engine (nodes, rings) then I thought she is totaled and headed for the breakers. But towing an SD? How many ships can simultaneously tow a warship? Only one, lest wedge fratricide? Yet we never hear of a ship being scuttled, have we?
Then you've forgotten some key points from On Basilisk Station
While Sirius was 'only' purportedly waiting for a repair ship to come out from Haven with spare drive tuners for her ostensibly malfunctioning alpha rings, during the battle HMS Fearless lost at least one Alpha node (Alpha Two) - and her impeller rings both fully failed right after the battle (and had to be jerry rigged to limp back to Basilisk). Afterwards repair ships popped over from Manticore to patch her drive up enough she could go through the wormhole under her own power.
Repair ships can rebuild an entire drive -- they'll just take longer doing so than a full repair yard would be. It's just a matter of time and money. Now they probably can't fix a ship that's got major structural issues - but dead nodes while large and requiring very precise calibration and tuning are, conveniently, exposed on the outside of the hull where you can get at them. There's not even any armor in your way.
penny wrote:But you touched on something I was going to ask. Without a sail I didn't think a ship could enter hyper. So, what can one do with an SD that cannot be repaired by a repair ship?
A ship can lose sails while in hyper and survive? How is that? A ship on the seas losing its sails in treacherous waves is toast.
I know this has been covered fairly recently; but to reiterate.
When entering hyper there are two relivant scenarios:
1) The system exists within a rift, so there's no grav wave on the other side of the hyper wall. Sails would be ineffective because they'd have nothing to grab.
2) The system exists within a grav wave, if you don't rig sails before entering hyper the grav wave will tear you to pieces.
But in situation 1 even the early hyper scouts -- which predate the invention of sails, heck predate the invention of the impeller drive, were able to enter hyper. They used fusion engines!
And the text discussion ships maneuvering under wedge immediately before, or immediately after, entering hyper -- no indication that even ships which can form sails switch to them before entering hyper (except in situation 2)
In fact here's a couple of bits of text-ev I hadn't dug up for the last discussion
In Enemy Hands wrote:With her forward alpha nodes gone, Prince Adrian had lost her Warshawski sails . . . and Adler lay squarely in the heart of a hyper-space gravity wave, where only sails would permit a ship to maneuver. That single, devastating salvo from Katana had doomed his ship, and McKeon knew it.
Ashes of Victory wrote:Diamato remembered the unending succession of disasters, the helplessness with which he had watched other battleships being clawed down, blown apart by those incredible LACs' impossible grasers or-possibly even worse-fired into just until they lost an alpha node or two. With even one alpha node down, it was impossible to generate a Warshawski sail, and Hancock lay directly in the path of a grav wave. Which meant no one without Warshawski sails could maneuver in hyper at all . . . and that, in turn, meant there would be no escape from the vengefully pursuing Manty superdreadnoughts of the system's inner picket.
If sails were required to enter hyper at all then it wouldn't matter whether those systems lay within a grav wave of not - losing an alpha node would trap any ship in any system. But it doesn't.
Now as for losing a sail in hyper. Well, you'd only have them rigged while in a grav wave -- and the vast majority of hyper is rifts, between waves, such as the Selker rift where Wayfarer and her LACs (which don't have sails at all) saved the liner Artemis fought the Peep raiding squadron.
But you normally need two sails to use a grav wave -- here's what the text says about the hyperspace convoy ambush I mentioned earlier
Short Victorious War wrote:"Ma'am," he spoke softly, as if to a child, "we out-mass those ships seven to one, and they have to close to energy range. They know what that means as well as we do. So they'll do the only thing they can. They'll open their broadsides to bring every beam they can to bear, and they'll go for our forward alpha nodes. If they take out even one, our own foresail will go down, and this deep into a grav wave—"
He didn't have to complete the sentence. With no forward sail to balance her after sail, it was impossible for any starship to maneuver in a grav wave. They would be trapped on the same vector, at the same velocity. They couldn't even drop out of hyper, because they couldn't control their translation attitude until and unless they could make repairs, and even the tiniest patch of turbulence would tear them apart. Which meant the loss of a single sail would cost Reichman at least two ships, because any ship which lost a sail would have to be towed clear of the wave on a consort's tractors.
So a ship can survive (with good luck and prompt help) losing one of her sails while in a grav wave. But the loss of both would be basically instantly fatal.
penny wrote:An aside: Jonathan, I've been needing to thank you for all of the additional information you include in many of your posts. Dunno how you feel Bout it, but it was one of your posts that made the lightbulb come on in my head in the ? thread. It was your posts that led to me realizing that the two theories had been solved. Good conversation fuels discovery.
Kudos 2 U!PS
Trying to repair the engine of an SD, even if she was back home in the yard dogs hands I thought would be as difficult as Theemile's tag line says RFC said ...
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
You're very welcome. I enjoy how much your posts have me going back and digging up text-ev to try and support my thoughts (even when they don't agree with your). And sometimes I get surprised and find things I'd forgotten or overlooked - which is a great way to keep the series fresh in my mind.
As for refitting the Beowulfian SDs - the nodes aren't the problem. Okay, they'd need new nodes to retrofit in bow or stern walls, or FTL transmitters. But that's the easy stuff.
Even the compensator they'd need to keep up with a Manticoran SD(P) is comparatively easy.
The real problem is that they can't carry or fire modern missiles or CMs, don't have enough CM launchers, have no way to mount Keyhole or Keyhole II platforms, don't mount enough PDLC. The different and larger launch tubes for the MDMs and Mk-31 CMs/Vipers would require massive amounts of cutting through armor, gutting out all the magazines and rebuilding them. Adding Keyhole would require new very high bandwidth data lines be run and the belt armor reshaped to make mounting recesses for them. And all that for a ship that's still smaller and less combat capable than a new SD(P).
That's what would take longer and cost more than a new build -- not replacing, or even upgrading, the impeller nodes.