Spoilers - Toll of Honor

penny wrote:Grayson's compensators were marginally more efficient. What exactly is meant by "more efficient" ?

The practical effect is you can accelerate quicker without the compensator failing and killing you horribly.

I presume "more efficient" means something like can make more efficient use of the same 'depth' of a wedge's "inertial sump", allowing it to compensate more gravities of acceleration.

Though when we first meet them that theoretical efficiency advantage seems to be offset by the generally lower tech level they could apply to the design. As per HoS's numbers and my calculations their pre-alliance ships aren't any quicker than an RMN unit of the same size would be (Ararat, Zion, Glory, and Austin Grayson -classes from HoS are dead on with anybody else's warship of their tonnage)

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Grayson's compensators were marginally more efficient. What exactly is meant by "more efficient" ?

The practical effect is you can accelerate quicker without the compensator failing and killing you horribly.

I presume "more efficient" means something like can make more efficient use of the same 'depth' of a wedge's "inertial sump", allowing it to compensate more gravities of acceleration.

Though when we first meet them that theoretical efficiency advantage seems to be offset by the generally lower tech level they could apply to the design. As per HoS's numbers and my calculations their pre-alliance ships aren't any quicker than an RMN unit of the same size would be (Ararat, Zion, Glory, and Austin Grayson -classes from HoS are dead on with anybody else's warship of their tonnage)

Thank you. IOW, hyper raiders are beginning to sound like a real possibility. If Grayson could manage more efficient inertial compensators from scratch, without instruction, then the Mesan Alignment should be able to increase efficiency more than just marginally for those hyper raiders to do their thing.

But, hyper raiders optimized for combat in a grav wave would be even more deadly you all say?

penny wrote:Thank you. IOW, hyper raiders are beginning to sound like a real possibility. If Grayson could manage more efficient inertial compensators from scratch, without instruction, then the Mesan Alignment should be able to increase efficiency more than just marginally for those hyper raiders to do their thing.

Do what? How does finding more efficiency in compensators allow for hyper raiders?

The hyper raiders required three things, from the past discussion:

First, the ability to follow a ship through the transition to other bands. This should be possible, but we don't have any evidence of this. In fact, all evidence points to ships completely breaking contact the moment they transition and being completely safe.

Second, the significantly increased range of the sensors in hyper. The range seems to be a few light-minutes. If the hyper raider needs to follow using a spider drive, it will fall so much behind that it has little hope of retaining a sensor lock on the ship.

Third, the ability to reach a higher top speed in hyper so they could overtake the ship they're following. This is a limitation of the particle shields, not the compensator.

I don't see how Grayson having ideas on how to improve compensators influences any of that.

If the hyper-raider is a hybrid spider-wedge ship, then things change a little. For one, it can out-accelerate freighters that can only get to 150 gravities and you don't need Grayson innovations for that (Solarian technology had been reaching over 200 gravities for 400 years). Since it can out-accelerate the freighters, then the raider doesn't need to reach a higher top-speed: it will start overtaking the target much earlier than that.

But if it keeps the wedge up, the gravitic sensors in the target will see the raider coming. An escort or a Q-ship would be very bad news for the raider. It could cut the wedge earlier, but that means having achieved a higher speed, so it needs to start from further behind and thus needs those better sensors.

But, hyper raiders optimized for combat in a grav wave would be even more deadly you all say?

How so? What do you propose to add to it to make it better than a random warship?

Remember the ground rules: all ships must keep sails up and can't fire weapons (other than energy ones) because they'd get destroyed in the process.

penny wrote:If Grayson could manage more efficient inertial compensators from scratch, without instruction, then the Mesan Alignment should be able to increase efficiency more than just marginally for those hyper raiders to do their thing.

First, Grayson's design was marginally more efficient 19 years ago. It's improved dramatically since then.
Two years of research gave HMS Nike about a 5% boost in acceleration. But the latest RMN/GSN ships are closing in on a 200% boost in acceleration. That's a hell of a lot more ground to make up.

Also just because Grayson was the only known place to figure out a better way (when the entire rest of the known galaxy had tried and failed to figure that out) does not mean that the MAlign could necessary be able to improve on that -- at least not to the same amazing extent that Manticore and Grayson together have managed over the last 19 years.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The hyper raiders required three things, from the past discussion:

First, the ability to follow a ship through the transition to other bands. This should be possible, but we don't have any evidence of this. In fact, all evidence points to ships completely breaking contact the moment they transition and being completely safe.

Though in SVW Sarnow certainly thought it was possible for a fleet to follow another fleet into hyper and shadow them.

Short Victorious War wrote:"I think we should consider a forward deployment, instead, Sir," Parks' junior squadron commander said quietly.
"How far forward, Admiral?" The question sounded sharper than Parks had intended, but Sarnow seemed unfazed.
"Right on the twelve-hour limit from Seaford Nine, Sir," he replied, and feet shuffled under the table. "I'm not talking about a permanent presence, but an extended period of maneuvers out there would almost have to make Rollins nervous, and we'd still be outside the territorial limit. He wouldn't have a leg to stand on if he tried to protest our presence, but if he started anything, we'd be close enough to keep our force concentrated and stay with him all the way to his intended target—whatever it might be."

Rollings commanded the Peep fleet at Seaford Nine, and the only way Park's RMN fleet could stay with him from (just outside) the 12-hour territorial limit around Seaford Nine to Rollings' destination is if they were confident of being able to shadow his fleet through hyper. (Still, what's possible for a fleet with dozens of destroyers and light cruisers to scout might not be possible for small numbers of hyper raiders. If necessary Park's light units could shotgun themselves across the hyper bands to find Rollings' fleet no matter which band it tried to use or change to)


As for your question on grav wave optimized raiders being more deadly -- the text is pretty clear that a ship that was designed to carry a spherical bubble sidewall would have a very decisive edge in grav wave combat over normal warships which don't find the significant tradeoff worth it (given how vanishingly rare combat there is; and how much fitting it compromises their combat power in any other environment). But a hyper raider that carried one would have a major advantage in a fight within a grav wave.

(Mind you, I don't think there's anything stopping their opponent from making a crash translation back into normal space -- and which point the spherical sidewall is no longer an advantage for the raider; instead it has the disadvantage of ton for ton being less heavily armed to squeeze in that spherical sidewall generator which no longer benefits it.
Sure, it's protected from all angles if its keeps its wedge down and bubble wall up -- but then it can only move under thrusters and its target simply leaves)

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:If Grayson could manage more efficient inertial compensators from scratch, without instruction, then the Mesan Alignment should be able to increase efficiency more than just marginally for those hyper raiders to do their thing.

First, Grayson's design was marginally more efficient 19 years ago. It's improved dramatically since then.
Two years of research gave HMS Nike about a 5% boost in acceleration. But the latest RMN/GSN ships are closing in on a 200% boost in acceleration. That's a hell of a lot more ground to make up.

Also just because Grayson was the only known place to figure out a better way (when the entire rest of the known galaxy had tried and failed to figure that out) does not mean that the MAlign could necessary be able to improve on that -- at least not to the same amazing extent that Manticore and Grayson together have managed over the last 19 years.

Yes, but text implies that Grayson accomplished that marginal increase pretty much from scratch with inferior components. They didn't know what they were doing and supposedly had no designs to go by? I don't know about you, but in my book that is incredible and ludicrous all at the same time. The MAN has copies of SLN tech and the MAN knows about the RMN's accel advantage.

Logically, better particle shields go hand in hand with traveling first class in higher hyper bands.

penny wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:First, Grayson's design was marginally more efficient 19 years ago. It's improved dramatically since then.
Two years of research gave HMS Nike about a 5% boost in acceleration. But the latest RMN/GSN ships are closing in on a 200% boost in acceleration. That's a hell of a lot more ground to make up.

Also just because Grayson was the only known place to figure out a better way (when the entire rest of the known galaxy had tried and failed to figure that out) does not mean that the MAlign could necessary be able to improve on that -- at least not to the same amazing extent that Manticore and Grayson together have managed over the last 19 years.

Yes, but text implies that Grayson accomplished that marginal increase pretty much from scratch with inferior components. They didn't know what they were doing and supposedly had no designs to go by? I don't know about you, but in my book that is incredible and ludicrous all at the same time. The MAN has copies of SLN tech and the MAN knows about the RMN's accel advantage.

But the whole point was their breakthrough wasn't related to component quality. They independently developed a method for how to compensate for acceleration; a method that everybody else "knew" wasn't possible.

Everybody else knew method A -- and throwing the best components and technology in the world at method A only gave you so much efficiency. The Grayson, because they were aware that compensators existed, but couldn't get anybody to tell them the method, were forced to reinvent the wheel and came up with method B.

This is an area where already knowing method A might make it harder, not easier, to replicate method B (especially if method A was based on an incomplete or partially incorrect understanding of exactly how things worked)



One very rough example might be steam ship propulsion. The original boilers for steam propulsion were "fire tube" boilers, very close to how you might heat up a kettle of water -- you had a boiler full of water, a very hot fire, and you had the boiler sit atop the fire box, and as an extra benefit you piped the hot exhaust gas from the fire through the water to better get it's heat into big water tank. And refermenting in metallurgy and shaping of the design improved their efficiency and steam production over time; so later fire tube boilers were better than early ones. But it became hard to push things further.
And then someone had a idea and asked why not reverse the entire problem? Instead of trying to make one giant pressure vessel and trapping a lot of water and steam in it, running small exhaust pipes through it, why not make many small pressure vessels with water in them and run them through one giant exhaust pipe. It's easier to make smaller diameter pressure vessels, and the higher surface area to volume ratio means they heat up faster, and once the water entirely boils you can keep heating the steam to make it even higher pressure. Now you have to figure out how to get new water in instead of the steam in the new water pipe boiler from pushing all the water out of those little water tubes (you end up needing to use part of the steam output to inject water in under high pressure) -- but it turns out that (despite certain tradeoffs) water tube (and as they were refined, small [water] tube) boilers were much more efficient and powerful -- allowing much greater ship speeds.

But knowing the way to make a boiler (fire tube) doesn't necessarily help you figure out how someone else made a significantly more efficient boiler (water tube)



I guess another possible example would be an electric light. We now know several ways to turn electricity into light (incandescent, fluorescent, LED) but someone who has access to the best research and technology for incandescent lighting isn't going to have much leg up in figuring out how someone else got higher efficiency lighting by discovering a non-incandescent lighting technology (Not until they can get their hands on the research, design info, or their lights to reverse engineer and realize that all the research they throw into even greater refinements in filament technology is a dead end that's not going to let them replicate the efficiency gain they're trying to match)

penny wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:First, Grayson's design was marginally more efficient 19 years ago. It's improved dramatically since then.
Two years of research gave HMS Nike about a 5% boost in acceleration. But the latest RMN/GSN ships are closing in on a 200% boost in acceleration. That's a hell of a lot more ground to make up.

Also just because Grayson was the only known place to figure out a better way (when the entire rest of the known galaxy had tried and failed to figure that out) does not mean that the MAlign could necessary be able to improve on that -- at least not to the same amazing extent that Manticore and Grayson together have managed over the last 19 years.

Yes, but text implies that Grayson accomplished that marginal increase pretty much from scratch with inferior components. They didn't know what they were doing and supposedly had no designs to go by? I don't know about you, but in my book that is incredible and ludicrous all at the same time. The MAN has copies of SLN tech and the MAN knows about the RMN's accel advantage.

Jonathan_S wrote:But the whole point was their breakthrough wasn't related to component quality. They independently developed a method for how to compensate for acceleration; a method that everybody else "knew" wasn't possible.

Everybody else knew method A -- and throwing the best components and technology in the world at method A only gave you so much efficiency. The Grayson, because they were aware that compensators existed, but couldn't get anybody to tell them the method, were forced to reinvent the wheel and came up with method B.

This is an area where already knowing method A might make it harder, not easier, to replicate method B (especially if method A was based on an incomplete or partially incorrect understanding of exactly how things worked)



One very rough example might be steam ship propulsion. The original boilers for steam propulsion were "fire tube" boilers, very close to how you might heat up a kettle of water -- you had a boiler full of water, a very hot fire, and you had the boiler sit atop the fire box, and as an extra benefit you piped the hot exhaust gas from the fire through the water to better get it's heat into big water tank. And refermenting in metallurgy and shaping of the design improved their efficiency and steam production over time; so later fire tube boilers were better than early ones. But it became hard to push things further.
And then someone had a idea and asked why not reverse the entire problem? Instead of trying to make one giant pressure vessel and trapping a lot of water and steam in it, running small exhaust pipes through it, why not make many small pressure vessels with water in them and run them through one giant exhaust pipe. It's easier to make smaller diameter pressure vessels, and the higher surface area to volume ratio means they heat up faster, and once the water entirely boils you can keep heating the steam to make it even higher pressure. Now you have to figure out how to get new water in instead of the steam in the new water pipe boiler from pushing all the water out of those little water tubes (you end up needing to use part of the steam output to inject water in under high pressure) -- but it turns out that (despite certain tradeoffs) water tube (and as they were refined, small [water] tube) boilers were much more efficient and powerful -- allowing much greater ship speeds.

But knowing the way to make a boiler (fire tube) doesn't necessarily help you figure out how someone else made a significantly more efficient boiler (water tube)



I guess another possible example would be an electric light. We now know several ways to turn electricity into light (incandescent, fluorescent, LED) but someone who has access to the best research and technology for incandescent lighting isn't going to have much leg up in figuring out how someone else got higher efficiency lighting by discovering a non-incandescent lighting technology (Not until they can get their hands on the research, design info, or their lights to reverse engineer and realize that all the research they throw into even greater refinements in filament technology is a dead end that's not going to let them replicate the efficiency gain they're trying to match)

Indeed. And indeed. But that was my point. You took the words right out of my mouth; Grayson reinvented the wheel. It kinda reminds me of the MAN. My point is that there has to be several ways to accomplish the same thing. A notion that I apply to energy weapons. But it wasn't the inferior components that make Grayson's accomplish so incredible. It is accomplishing the feat without guidance and instruction without a single clue, with inferior components. IOW, what would Grayson have been able to do if they had better components. At the point Grayson was working with the RMN on the problem, their sole intuition has already been tainted.

Anyway, I think everyone holds the GA's technology at hand when you say "it can't be done." It probably can't be done without another set of eyes who peer at the problem totally differently.

For decades man has been trying to figure out how the ancient Egyptians could have moved the insanely large sections of stone used to build the first pyramid. Our current cranes certainly won't do it. We just couldn't wrap our minds around the problem. Just recently it was discovered that water was used to displace the huge sections of stone at the center of the pyramid at the base. Duh. The MA are Alphas too, and they seem to turn everything on its ear.


https://www.heritagedaily.com/2024/07/e ... ift/152744

penny wrote:Anyway, I think everyone holds the GA's technology at hand when you say "it can't be done." It probably can't be done without another set of eyes who peer at the problem totally differently.

No one is saying that it can't be done again or that it is impossible. Only RFC can say either thing.

What we're saying is that there's no logical step that leads from one thing to the other. It's not evolutionary technology. Taking the example of the boilers, learning how to make the water ones (or stealing the technology from someone who knows it) does not imply one will invent the radar.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:What we're saying is that there's no logical step that leads from one thing to the other. It's not evolutionary technology. Taking the example of the boilers, learning how to make the water ones (or stealing the technology from someone who knows it) does not imply one will invent the radar.

Or even that you'll invent steam turbines.

Actually a better comparison might be just because you've invented water tube boilers and steam turbines doesn't imply that you'll have your counterpart of William Froude who gives you the tools to work out the hydrodynamics necessary for high speed hulls. Without that you can keep ramping the installed power up and up and barely get any improvement in speed. The ship will accelerate faster, but it'll quickly hit a wall (quite possibly at below 20 knots) where its high drag hull simply can't be pushed noticeably faster -- no mater how much more power you throw at it.

You need both better boilers/engines and better hull forms to achieve higher top speeds -- but they're two very different fields of research and expertise and improvements made in in one doesn't ensure you'll have expertise or ability to make improvements in the other.