penny wrote:ThinksMarkedly wrote:When transiting a wormhole, the sails would be highly visible. First, because they are sails and we're told that they are emiting light in a grav wave, so it should be analogous in a wormhole transit. I think we've been told they do, so I don't think I'm just remembering wrong and extrapolating.
Second and most importantly, because the wormhole terminus is a very small region where the defender has enough sensors in to detect dust. The sails are still a gravitic phenomenon and will be seen by everything there. A hyperspace translation can happen anywhere outside the hyperlimit, so the attacker has a choice of where to do so and where it would be unlikely the defender has enough assets to see the transition happening or, if they do, react quickly enough before the ship disappears into stealth. In a wormhole transit, the attacker has no choice but to appear at exactly the wormhole's terminus emergence lane.
Sails are needed in a wormhole transit???
Um, yes. (Well, excect, maybe, for however RFC tum-tee-tumed Spider ships into seemingly able to use them)
Remember this bit (among many possible examples) from the first book?
On Basilisk Station wrote:Fearless drifted forward at a mere twenty gravities' acceleration, aligning herself perfectly on the invisible rails of the Junction, and Honor watched her display intently. Thank God for computers. If she'd had to work out the math for this sort of thing, she'd probably have cut her own throat years ago, but computers didn't mind if the person using them was a mathematical idiot. All they needed was the right input, and, unlike certain Academy instructors she could name, they didn't wait with exaggerated patience until they got it, either.
Fearless's light code flashed bright green as the cruiser settled into exact position, and Honor nodded to Santos.
"Rig foresail for transit."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Rigging foresail—now."
No observer would have noted any visible change in the cruiser, but Honor's instrumentation told the tale as Fearless's impeller wedge dropped abruptly to half-strength. Her forward nodes no longer generated their portion of the normal-space stress bands; instead, they had reconfigured to produce a circular disk of focused gravitation that extended for over three hundred kilometers in every direction from the cruiser's hull.
[...]
"Stand by to rig aftersail on my mark," Honor murmured as Fearless continued to creep forward under the power of her aft-impellers alone. A new readout flickered to life, and she watched its numerals dance steadily upward as the foresail moved deeper and deeper into the Junction. There was a safety margin of almost fifteen seconds either way, but no captain wanted to look sloppy in a maneuver like this, and—
The twinkling numbers crossed the threshold. The foresail was now drawing sufficient power from the tortured grav waves twisting eternally through the Junction to provide movement, and she nodded sharply to Santos.
"Rig aftersail now," she said crisply.
"Rigging aftersail," the engineer replied, and Fearless twitched as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and a second Warshawski sail sprang to life at the far end of her hull from the first.
[...]
The maneuvering display blinked again, and then, for an instant no chronometer or human sense could measure, HMS Fearless ceased to exist. One moment she was here, in Manticore space; the next she was there, six hundred light-minutes from the star named Basilisk, just over two hundred and ten light-years distant in Einsteinian space, and Honor swallowed in relief as her nausea vanished, disappearing with the transit energy radiating from Fearless's sails.
"Transit complete," Chief Killian reported.
"Thank you, Helm. That was well executed," Honor replied, but most of her attention was back on the sail interface readout, watching the numbers spiral downward even more rapidly than they had risen. "Engineering, reconfigure to impeller."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Reconfiguring to impeller now."
Fearless folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward more rapidly, accelerating steadily down the Basilisk outbound traffic lane
(Probably should have edited that down some more)
You need sails to survive in the grav effects of entry and emergence lanes, kilometers of basically "frozen" grav wave within normal space.
(Of course sails along aren't enough to make transit, you also need a hyper generator once you reach the terminus itself)
The need for sails is what keeps arriving warships from protecting themselves with wedge or sidewalls. That plus the grav effects that destroy anything not under sail, preventing the use of missiles or CM, combine to make for the oft discussed utter vulnerability of hostile warships against any kind of terminus defense. It can take minutes to accelerate far enough to dispense with the sails -- minutes when you're basically defenseless.
