Warshawski sail

Medievel scholars arguing about how many angels can fit on a pin head?
It is what RFC decides. I suspect he does check in here for inspiration. So, who knows, you may be Archangels advising the Creator?
In an infinite universe, anything can and will happen, so Honor is out there.

penny wrote:I just didn't think sails were needed for wormhole transits. Someone just reiterated a few days ago how the emergence and exit lanes are so small. Yet -- and I'm not sure about this -- sails have to have some separation from each other as well, right? I don't know if anything happens if sails collide, but if I am correct, how exactly is a mass transit possible? Or am I simply wrong that sails do not extend beyond the ship?

That's why they're difficult!

The emergence lane is a few thousand km long and a thousand km wide or so. Given that the sails are 200 km wide, yeah, it makes for very packed ship deployments. They could be just lined up single file and you could fit them, though.

BTW, what are sails composed of again? A band of gravity?

Unknown. They are generated by the nodes, so possibly yes. But they've never been described as a band of stressed gravity, and we know that acceleration cuts when a node ring switches to sails, so possibly not. Adrienne Warshawski wasn't working with Joe Buckley, who did come up with the impeller drive. Though she was also working 30 years after him, so she may have improved upon his creation.

I am surprised that sails are needed for a wormhole anyway. The total 'trip' is instantaneous. I suppose slamming into a wall for only an instant can be fatal as well. But I never thought that a wormhole had anything to do with hyperspace. Oh well.

The fact that sails are needed for grav waves and for wormhole transits would indicate they are similar phenomena. Though the wormhole itself may not be the thing that needs the sails, but the entry and emergence lanes themselves.

penny wrote:I just didn't think sails were needed for wormhole transits. Someone just reiterated a few days ago how the emergence and exit lanes are so small. Yet -- and I'm not sure about this -- sails have to have some separation from each other as well, right? I don't know if anything happens if sails collide, but if I am correct, how exactly is a mass transit possible? Or am I simply wrong that sails do not extend beyond the ship?

BTW, what are sails composed of again? A band of gravity?

I am surprised that sails are needed for a wormhole anyway. The total 'trip' is instantaneous. I suppose slamming into a wall for only an instant can be fatal as well. But I never thought that a wormhole had anything to do with hyperspace. Oh well.

I guess we don't know if technically you need sails during that unmeasurable instant of actually wormhole transit -- but it's kind of a moot question since you need them to survive the thousands of kilometers long (varies by wormhole) approach and departure from the termini.

Sails are described as "stress bands", and a "circular disk of focused gravitation" [OBS]

On Basilisk Station wrote:In the course of her research, [Dr. Adrienne Warshawski] had penetrated far deeper into the entire grav wave phenomenon than anyone before her, and she had suddenly realized that there was a way to use the grav wave itself. An impeller drive modified so that it projected not an inclined stress band above and below a ship but two slightly curved plates at right angles to its hull could use those plates as giant, immaterial "sails" to trap the focused radiation hurtling along a grav wave.

And they stretch out further than wedges do. OBS describes the light cruiser Fearless's sail as extending "for over three hundred kilometers in every direction from the cruiser's hull" -- but a ship that small probably has less than 150 km wide wedge - so less than 75 km measured from its center point, over the hull. (Even a much larger Reliant-class BC only has 162km wide wedge; per the diagram in Jaynes)


Don't know why you would have thought a wormhole had nothing to do with hyperspace when both require the use of a hyper generator. Also, the first introduction we got to them, back in OBS, described it as "the Junction was simply a focused funnel of hyper-space, like the eye of a hurricane frozen forever in normal-space terms"

But, again, the sails are needed to simply to survive in the approach/departure lanes, where you get grav turbulence analogous that that found in a grav-wave.

The total area you need sails around the Junction (with its separate lanes for each remote terminus) is probably 25-50,000 km wide. Narrow enough for a laserhead to detonate outside it and its beams to still reach the center; but pretty wide in navigational terms. However the spot you have to hit to make transit is going to be significantly smaller (but I don't think we've been told quite how small) -- and the 'marked' navigational channels probably still narrower than that -- to ensure that the volume you can transit through it divided into well separated departure and arrival areas. Wouldn't want an unexpected arrival to be on a collision course with a departing starship -- and artificially splitting the volume into separate arrival and departure lanes provides that traffic separation.
But I'd assume for a mass transit the niceties of normal navigation lanes are ignored, and every cubic cm of the terminus volume is utilized.

However, there's plenty RFC hasn't shared about the exact mechanics of a simultaneous transit -- so we don't know exactly how the 20ish ships position themselves for it.


But I'd expect that in addition to the stated mass limit there's also a volume limit. While the Junction can support a max transit of about 200 million tons (about 20 SDs), I don't think that means it could support a transit of 1,500 Wolfhound DDs (despite the later massing less) There just wouldn't be room to fit them all. (An issue you run into with shipping; heavy things can hit the max weight while there's lots of free room in the vessel while light things run out of room long before reaching max weight)

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I just didn't think sails were needed for wormhole transits. Someone just reiterated a few days ago how the emergence and exit lanes are so small. Yet -- and I'm not sure about this -- sails have to have some separation from each other as well, right? I don't know if anything happens if sails collide, but if I am correct, how exactly is a mass transit possible? Or am I simply wrong that sails do not extend beyond the ship?

BTW, what are sails composed of again? A band of gravity?

I am surprised that sails are needed for a wormhole anyway. The total 'trip' is instantaneous. I suppose slamming into a wall for only an instant can be fatal as well. But I never thought that a wormhole had anything to do with hyperspace. Oh well.

I guess we don't know if technically you need sails during that unmeasurable instant of actually wormhole transit -- but it's kind of a moot question since you need them to survive the thousands of kilometers long (varies by wormhole) approach and departure from the termini.

Sails are described as "stress bands", and a "circular disk of focused gravitation" [OBS]

On Basilisk Station wrote:In the course of her research, [Dr. Adrienne Warshawski] had penetrated far deeper into the entire grav wave phenomenon than anyone before her, and she had suddenly realized that there was a way to use the grav wave itself. An impeller drive modified so that it projected not an inclined stress band above and below a ship but two slightly curved plates at right angles to its hull could use those plates as giant, immaterial "sails" to trap the focused radiation hurtling along a grav wave.

And they stretch out further than wedges do. OBS describes the light cruiser Fearless's sail as extending "for over three hundred kilometers in every direction from the cruiser's hull" -- but a ship that small probably has less than 150 km wide wedge - so less than 75 km measured from its center point, over the hull. (Even a much larger Reliant-class BC only has 162km wide wedge; per the diagram in Jaynes)


Don't know why you would have thought a wormhole had nothing to do with hyperspace when both require the use of a hyper generator. Also, the first introduction we got to them, back in OBS, described it as "the Junction was simply a focused funnel of hyper-space, like the eye of a hurricane frozen forever in normal-space terms"

But, again, the sails are needed to simply to survive in the approach/departure lanes, where you get grav turbulence analogous that that found in a grav-wave.

The total area you need sails around the Junction (with its separate lanes for each remote terminus) is probably 25-50,000 km wide. Narrow enough for a laserhead to detonate outside it and its beams to still reach the center; but pretty wide in navigational terms. However the spot you have to hit to make transit is going to be significantly smaller (but I don't think we've been told quite how small) -- and the 'marked' navigational channels probably still narrower than that -- to ensure that the volume you can transit through it divided into well separated departure and arrival areas. Wouldn't want an unexpected arrival to be on a collision course with a departing starship -- and artificially splitting the volume into separate arrival and departure lanes provides that traffic separation.
But I'd assume for a mass transit the niceties of normal navigation lanes are ignored, and every cubic cm of the terminus volume is utilized.

However, there's plenty RFC hasn't shared about the exact mechanics of a simultaneous transit -- so we don't know exactly how the 20ish ships position themselves for it.


But I'd expect that in addition to the stated mass limit there's also a volume limit. While the Junction can support a max transit of about 200 million tons (about 20 SDs), I don't think that means it could support a transit of 1,500 Wolfhound DDs (despite the later massing less) There just wouldn't be room to fit them all. (An issue you run into with shipping; heavy things can hit the max weight while there's lots of free room in the vessel while light things run out of room long before reaching max weight)

You misunderstood me. Or quite possibly as always, there is so much matter in my head that I failed to make my thoughts clear.

I didn't mean to disparage whatever the author's intent for wormholes is. I simply failed to digest his concept because my own baggage about wormholes cannot be ignored.

Einstein-Rosen bridges should not need sails, and certainly should not need a hyper generator. And the theoretical construct of an Einstein-Rosen bridge is simply space-time folded over like the old sheet of paper bringing two points in space very close together. The gravity simply sucks the ship in if it gets too close; thus negating the need for a hyper generator to enter.

Wormholes have been alleged to be black holes with slightly different mechanics so some have coined them as white holes. But it all happens in n-space (albeit folded and stretched n-space) but there is no hyper space involved.

Even the suction IMO is logical. If one folds an object, that object has a tendency to want to snap back. Same as a wormhole. A wormhole has an expected rubber band effect that is orchestrated by its suction (gravity). It is like cocking a gun and storing potential energy. Or winding a rubber band. Stretching or folding space-time stores potential energy.

Admittedly I never paid any attention to the author's rendition of wormholes. Obviously his are not Einsteinian. Of course his have immense gravity near the entrance. After all, it is a black hole, or white hole. The author's wormholes have been subjugated and tainted by the power of plot.

https://www.space.com/20881-wormholes.h ... 20universe.

Jonathan_S wrote:I guess we don't know if technically you need sails during that unmeasurable instant of actually wormhole transit -- but it's kind of a moot question since you need them to survive the thousands of kilometers long (varies by wormhole) approach and departure from the termini.

penny wrote:You misunderstood me. Or quite possibly as always, there is so much matter in my head that I failed to make my thoughts clear.

I didn't mean to disparage whatever the author's intent for wormholes is. I simply failed to digest his concept because my own baggage about wormholes cannot be ignored.

Einstein-Rosen bridges should not need sails, and certainly should not need a hyper generator. And the theoretical construct of an Einstein-Rosen bridge is simply space-time folded over like the old sheet of paper bringing two points in space very close together. The gravity simply sucks the ship in if it gets too close; thus negating the need for a hyper generator to enter.

The wormholes are not described as Einstein-Rosen Bridges. They could be some other phenomenon and that ERBs aren't practical or real.

Even if they are ERBs, then what Jonathan said could still apply: there's no physically known way to approach an Einstein Rosen Bridge because the gravity gradient is too steep. It's the same frame dragging problem we discussed earlier. The ship would be indeed sucked in... after being broken apart by tidal stress and spaghettified. As for the hypergenerator, it might be necessary to transverse a bridge that is physically too small for the ship to go through, so you just skip over it and appear on the other side. Maybe even also skipping the steepest gradient of the wormhole entry.

Wormholes have been alleged to be black holes with slightly different mechanics so some have coined them as white holes. But it all happens in n-space (albeit folded and stretched n-space) but there is no hyper space involved.

Current physical understanding is that black hole and white holes are actually the same thing. Don't ask me to explain. Besides, moot point: even if they are such, then the entry of a wormhole would be a black hole and you'd suffer spaghettification unless the mass of said wormhole was so big that you could indeed approach it. But then it wouldn't be 7 light-hours from an inhabited system.

And they'd be uni-directional. So they can't be our current understanding.

Admittedly I never paid any attention to the author's rendition of wormholes. Obviously his are not Einsteinian. Of course his have immense gravity near the entrance. After all, it is a black hole, or white hole. The author's wormholes have been subjugated and tainted by the power of plot.

They could be the effects of primordial black holes, which is the only known way to create a BH with a sub-stellar mass. If so, they're also so small that a ship couldn't go through -- an atom couldn't go through! A 600-billion tonne PBH would have a Schwarzschild radius of just under 1 pm.

My question is sparked by the fact that Honor always mad a big deal about the precision of re-rigging sails for wormhole transition and I only recall Hyper-foot prints when a ship crossed the Alpha band

There is some text evidence that the sidewalls would not be effective to stop attack till the sails were reconfigured.

It seems to me that any population in Linx would not have seen the Harvest Joy enter if they didn't happen to be looking right at it. You point to much of what I thought but I didn't get an email that there was any response to my post.

tlb wrote:

C. O. Thompson wrote:Sometimes I feel that I remember every detail other time... What were we talking about...

My recall is that the Warshawski sail was used on worm hole transit but not when crossing the Alpha wall

I am thinking there is not a Hyper Footprint when a ship exits a worm hole but that Harvest Joy was defenseless until they reconfigured the sails when they exited the worm hole from Torch/Congo into one the Mesa Alliance/Renaissance systems was guarding.
I have to reread the stories where the Torch System was attacked. Is that the side side story thread with Eric Flint.
I have most of the Honor Harrington Universe on my Kindle but I also have nine hard bound and I may have borrowed the exact book where the text evidence is from public library.

A sail is needed for a wormhole or when the transition involves a gravity wave. I don't remember the battle (I think one example was the first fight with a LAC Carrier), but the surrounding hyperspace was the location of a gravity wave; which meant that any enemy ship which had the nodes for the sails damaged could not then escape.

The thing about a ship being defenseless when exiting a wormhole is the basis for the author stating that it was unlikely that there could be a successful assault solely by going through a wormhole (I have been told that a early study of Haven using battleships from Trevor's Star is no longer considered valid).

I do not know whether there is a transition signal generated by exiting a wormhole; but my expectation is that there would be, the same as transitioning from the Alpha band. Certainly any ships or forts guarding the wormhole would know immediately (signal or not).

C. O. Thompson wrote:My question is sparked by the fact that Honor always mad a big deal about the precision of re-rigging sails for wormhole transition and I only recall Hyper-foot prints when a ship crossed the Alpha band

There is some text evidence that the sidewalls would not be effective to stop attack till the sails were reconfigured.

It seems to me that any population in Linx would not have seen the Harvest Joy enter if they didn't happen to be looking right at it. You point to much of what I thought but I didn't get an email that there was any response to my post.

That is certainly true of Lynx, but due to the fact that there were no inhabited planets close to the end of the wormhole. From War of Honor:

Chapter 34 wrote:"Here" proved to be a spot in space approximately five and a half light-hours from an unremarkable looking, planetless M8 red dwarf. That was disappointing, because the next nearest star, a G2 was just over four light-years away. That was a bit less than fourteen hours of travel for a warship, which wasn't really all that bad in a lot of ways. But the local star's lack of planets was going to deprive this terminus of any convenient anchor for the sort of infrastructure which routinely grew up to service wormhole traffic.

-- skip --

And we've been able to identify that G2 star at four light-years as Lynx

Four light years is far beyond the detection range of any gravitic sensor net, if Lynx could afford to have one. But once the forts are installed at the wormhole, all arrivals will be noticed.

In my research I read the scene where the Hexapuma with Helen Zilwicki is in line to transit to Lynx and a freighter suddenly appeared. There is mention of the sail being visible disks but I haven't found the "Hyper foot-print" is part of it. Now that I ma thinking about it,
The scene where the Peeps have some ships trying to see what was coming through the junction from Trevor's Star while Lester was killing home fleet. There was some discussion of not knowing what was coming through because the Lacs were able block that view with the wedges of the lacs at it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:I do not know whether there is a transition signal generated by exiting a wormhole; but my expectation is that there would be, the same as transitioning from the Alpha band. Certainly any ships or forts guarding the wormhole would know immediately (signal or not).

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.

C. O. Thompson wrote:In my research I read the scene where the Hexapuma with Helen Zilwicki is in line to transit to Lynx and a freighter suddenly appeared. There is mention of the sail being visible disks but I haven't found the "Hyper foot-print" is part of it. Now that I ma thinking about it,
The scene where the Peeps have some ships trying to see what was coming through the junction from Trevor's Star while Lester was killing home fleet. There was some discussion of not knowing what was coming through because the Lacs were able block that view with the wedges of the lacs at it.

Sorry, you were talking about the Battle of Manticore (in At All Costs?), but this is the same sort of situation with jamming by the forts in Echoes of Honor:

Chapter 38 wrote:"Maybe yes, and maybe no," Reynaud replied. "We've got three— no, four—SDs through with no collisions so far. But if two of those babies bump—" He shuddered, and Underwood nodded soberly. "And even if we don't have any collisions, there's always the chance the Peeps'll detect them and stay the hell out of range."

"Maybe," Underwood conceded. "But they'll need damned good sensors to pick up their arrivals through all the jamming the forts are putting out. And once our people maneuver clear and take their wedges down to station-keeping levels, they should be downright invisible at anything above a few light-seconds. Besides," he summoned up a ragged smile, "at this point I'll be delighted to settle for the Peeps staying the hell away. It beats the crap out of what I thought was going to happen to us, Mike!"

"Yeah," Reynaud grunted, turning back to his console. "Yeah, I guess it does, at that. But I want these bastards, Nev. I want them bad."

Underwood eyed him sidelong. Michel Reynaud was one of the easiest going—and least military—people he knew. In fact, Underwood had always suspected that the reason Reynaud had gone ACS instead of Navy in the first place was his deep-seated, fundamental horror at the thought of deliberately taking another human being's life. But he didn't feel that way now, and when Underwood glanced at the display tied into the FTL sensors, he understood exactly why that was.

Vice Admiral Markham's gallant charge was less than twenty minutes from contact with the main Peep force, and Reynaud and Underwood both knew what would happen then.

"Their EW is getting even better, Citizen Admiral," Darlington's ops officer reported. The citizen rear admiral walked over to stand beside him, looking down at the hazy sphere that had enveloped the terminus, and frowned.

"Are their jammers hitting us harder?" he asked.

"No, Citizen Admiral. Or I don't think so, at least. But look here and here." The ops officer keyed a command, and the plot blinked as it replayed what had happened over the last several minutes at a compressed time rate. "See?" He pointed at the flickering shift of questionable icons in the display. "It looks to me like their decoys must be considerably more advanced and flexible than we'd thought, Citizen Admiral. We've still got probable fixes on the forts themselves, but our confidence in them is degrading steadily because they're throwing so damned many false impeller signatures at us."

"Well, we knew it was going to happen." Darlington sighed after a moment. "Do your best, Citizen Commander."

I suppose there might not be a transition signal (because the ship might not be moving through the Alpha wall, since the wormhole could have already torn a hole through it), but unless the author tells us specifically we will not know. Nevertheless we know that the wedge, and so by extension the sail, does create a signal just by existing; therefore when a ship with sails pops into existence, that has to generate a signal that can be detected (even though it is not what is known as a "Hyper foot-print").

C. O. Thompson wrote:There is some text evidence that the sidewalls would not be effective to stop attack till the sails were reconfigured.

Yep, at least with the kind of sidewall generators that warships mount.

Short Victorious War - HONOR HARRINGTON'S NAVY wrote:The Warshawski sail is essentially a highly modified and very powerful impeller stress band projected in the form of a disk at right angles to the hull, not as a wedge above and below it. The sail, which is just as impenetrable as an impeller wedge, extends for three hundred kilometers (as much as five hundred for really large vessels) in all directions. This not only makes chase armaments even more important but also deprives the warship of the protection of its wedge against fire from "above" or "below." Indeed, it deprives a ship even of its sidewalls, for there are no roof and floor for the sidewall to stitch together.

[...]

A few navies have experimented with the idea of mounting the sidewall bubble generators used to generate 360° "sidewalls" around fixed fortifications in their capital ships for use in hyper-space engagements, but the sheer mass of the system is self-defeating. A ship so equipped has an enormous advantage in hyper, but the volume consumed by the generators cuts deeply into that available for weapons, which places the same vessel at an even greater disadvantage in normal-space combat. Since n-space combat is the rule and hyper-space combat is the exception, no navy has ever built a major class of warship with bubble generators.

Now we do have a bit of an open question here on the forum about whether a "buckler" bow wall requires a wedge to function -- since, unlike the full bow wall, it doesn't actually tie into the wedge. (In fact is has several dozens of km gap between the edge of the bucker and the closest point on the wedge -- and that's for a stern wall; the gap is about 3x larger for a bow wall!)


And while SVW it discussing sails in the context of grav wave combat; it is equally true that they deprive a ship that just arrived via wormhole of wedge and sidewalls. The ship has to accelerate down the arrival 'lane' until it clears the grav turbulence around the terminus before it can fold its sails down into a wedge and bring up its sidewall.