Spoilers - Toll of Honor

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

Although I do not want to take Penny's side, there is a slight counterpoint.

At least if you have the steam turbines, then you will realize the need for better hull design and better propeller design (maybe even trying a toroid design). It is true that there will still be much work to be done, but some technologies do co-evolve. Turbinia did start a revolution in ship design.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

Although I do not want to take Penny's side, there is a slight counterpoint.

At least if you have the steam turbines, then you will realize the need for better hull design and better propeller design (maybe even trying a toroid design). It is true that there will still be much work to be done, but some technologies do co-evolve. Turbinia did start a revolution in ship design.

It's fair enough that once you had steam turbines you might realize how much your hull design was limiting you and start looking into ways to improve.

But in actual history Turbinia postdated Froude's breakthroughs in hydrodynamics and tank testing by nearly 20 years. So the technology to design improved hulls didn't coevolve with turbines -- though until they came along there was little reason to use to it design hulls for speeds in excess of the low 20s of knots.

Still, the test methods and formulas Froude used in the 1870s would have been perfectly capable of working out such high speed hulls; but no engine existed that could have pushed ships up to that speed for any appreciable period of time; so nobody bothered designing warships for those speeds. (Better to optimize the hull for the speed you'd actually need; since a hull optimized for a higher speed will be less efficient or beneficial at lower speeds)

Jonathan_S wrote:Still, the test methods and formulas Froude used in the 1870s would have been perfectly capable of working out such high speed hulls; but no engine existed that could have pushed ships up to that speed for any appreciable period of time; so nobody bothered designing warships for those speeds. (Better to optimize the hull for the speed you'd actually need; since a hull optimized for a higher speed will be less efficient or beneficial at lower speeds)

Bringing back to in-universe, the RMN and GSN have had higher acceleration for now a decade and haven't developed higher hyperspace speed. It doesn't appear the limit has raised in centuries actually, when accelerations have.

Compensators are not the same technology that enables higher speeds. The "particle shield" is, as posted some time recently in some thread, a combination of a passive gravitic system that moves small particles out of the way (literally like a wedge, or the hull of a sea ship going through water) and a radar system tied to the chase armaments to shoot larger chunks out. So I think my analogy of steam turbines to radar is an apt one.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Still, the test methods and formulas Froude used in the 1870s would have been perfectly capable of working out such high speed hulls; but no engine existed that could have pushed ships up to that speed for any appreciable period of time; so nobody bothered designing warships for those speeds. (Better to optimize the hull for the speed you'd actually need; since a hull optimized for a higher speed will be less efficient or beneficial at lower speeds)

Bringing back to in-universe, the RMN and GSN have had higher acceleration for now a decade and haven't developed higher hyperspace speed. It doesn't appear the limit has raised in centuries actually, when accelerations have.

Compensators are not the same technology that enables higher speeds. The "particle shield" is, as posted some time recently in some thread, a combination of a passive gravitic system that moves small particles out of the way (literally like a wedge, or the hull of a sea ship going through water) and a radar system tied to the chase armaments to shoot larger chunks out. So I think my analogy of steam turbines to radar is an apt one.

Top speed within a hyper band - yeah, I'm not sure when that hit 0.6c but it doesn't seem like it's changed in a long time. (Can't find any reference to what particle shielding allowed back in Travis Long's time)

But higher hyper band access happened at some point between Travis Long's day (1540s PD) and Honor's (1900s PD). ACtA implies that even warship can't climb higher than the Gamma bands back then - whereas now merchant ships routinely cruise the Delta bands (1 above Gamma), warships routinely cruise the Theta bands (5 above Gamma), and MAlign streak drive ships can use Iota bands (7 above Gamma).

A Call To Arms wrote:“Hyperdrive technology and capabilities are being improved every day. It may not be long before ships will be able to access bands above Beta and Gamma, maybe even far above them. When that happens, we’ll all be much closer neighbors than we are now.

(And compensators and acceleration also improved over time. In the Travis Long series a ultra-modern IAN BB'a acceleration is:

A Call To Insurrection wrote:even with a zero safety margin, the battleship’s maximum acceleration was only 252.7 gravities

While we don't have its exact tonnage it should be significantly smaller than a modern-ish BB; like the Peep's Triumphant-class which, at 4.5 million tons, can pull 445.1g)

Jonathan_S wrote:Top speed within a hyper band - yeah, I'm not sure when that hit 0.6c but it doesn't seem like it's changed in a long time. (Can't find any reference to what particle shielding allowed back in Travis Long's time)

But higher hyper band access happened at some point between Travis Long's day (1540s PD) and Honor's (1900s PD). ACtA implies that even warship can't climb higher than the Gamma bands back then - whereas now merchant ships routinely cruise the Delta bands (1 above Gamma), warships routinely cruise the Theta bands (5 above Gamma), and MAlign streak drive ships can use Iota bands (7 above Gamma).

We do have a rough travel time from Manticore to Haven and to Silesia in ACTV, then to New Berlin in ACTI, and it was months. The number isn't precise enough for us to estimate what speed they were taking in Gamma over those journeys. And we don't have the actual distances either: with the advent of the Junction, no one undertook those direct journeys in Honor's time, aside from Lester Tourville and Genevieve Chin for the Battle of Manticore.

I am going to systematically go through things I'd like to discuss, and or note, in the book in a timely manner as the thread goes on. First up is something that was never clear to me. Young was shielded by his allies who were in the same despicable Conservative Association that he and his father were a part. Let me just …

He did have political allies, of course. Some because they, too, were members of the Conservative Association and shared his hatred of and contempt for the Cromarty Government and all its works. Others because they knew he’d come into possession of his father’s secret files, with all the potentially embarrassing (or far, far worse) secrets the tenth earl had amassed in a lifetime spent playing the political game.

What still is not clear is if dirt on enough members of the Conservative Association was found in those files to still have supported Young regardless, had those files not existed. Young commented that some of those members were on his side simply because of those files.

I always wanted to know what percentage that was. Thus, was the bulk of the Conservative Association worthless, or were they simply held and controlled under the threat of the puppet master's blackmail? I also always wanted to know how high up the food chain those files went. Admittedly I am human, and I want to know if the Queen, Queen's consort, Prime Minister, etc., was found in those files.

This next item is simply a very amusing incident that I would like to share that reminds me of one of my favorite childhood TV shows. I got goosebumps from thinking about the image of Pavel Young getting his just dessert. Although misery loves company, joy loves company too. I didn't realize that the court-martial was actually as embarrassing as one of the most popular TV shows depicted it. Marvelous! …

Anger rose like magma as he remembered the admiral reading the court-martial’s sentence aloud, the assembled ranks of black and gold uniforms. As he remembered the junior-grade lieutenant who’d stripped away the badges of rank, the braid from his cuffs, the medal ribbons, the shoulder boards, the gold and scarlet Navy shoulder flash while the pitiless HD cameras recorded every instant of his shame, broadcast it throughout the entire Star Kingdom.

https://youtu.be/uV-7D4io1Rs?feature=shared

penny wrote:What still is not clear is if dirt on enough members of the Conservative Association was found in those files to still have supported Young regardless, had those files not existed. Young commented that some of those members were on his side simply because of those files.

I always wanted to know what percentage that was. Thus, was the bulk of the Conservative Association worthless, or were they simply held and controlled under the threat of the puppet master's blackmail? I also always wanted to know how high up the food chain those files went. Admittedly I am human, and I want to know if the Queen, Queen's consort, Prime Minister, etc., was found in those files.

I do not think we will know what the percentage was, but I do not believe that the information was confined to the Conservative Association members. It would be much more powerful to have dirt on people not in the party. In particular to have dirt on people in the parties controlled by Lady Descroix, and Countess New Kiev and maybe even those leaders.

I would consider that the ones who are only held in the party by blackmail to be the ones that are "worthless", it is the others that are the true believers.

tlb wrote:I would consider that the ones who are only held in the party by blackmail to be the ones that are "worthless", it is the others that are the true believers.

I'd say the truly worthless are those in a third category -- the ones holding up the declaration of war as a cynical political ploy.

They don't have the excuse of truly believing that the Peep might have changed; nor are they being blackmailed into compliance.
They're just willing to risk the war, or at least higher military losses, to try to extort political concessions from the government.

tlb wrote:I would consider that the ones who are only held in the party by blackmail to be the ones that are "worthless", it is the others that are the true believers.

Jonathan_S wrote:I'd say the truly worthless are those in a third category -- the ones holding up the declaration of war as a cynical political ploy.

They don't have the excuse of truly believing that the Peep might have changed; nor are they being blackmailed into compliance.
They're just willing to risk the war, or at least higher military losses, to try to extort political concessions from the government.

I was not aware that was a third major bloc of voters. There were two major groups for me:

The first were those fighting the government over the prosecution of Pavel Young (perhaps you were referring to them?), which includes the entire Conservative Association and those others being blackmailed (although they may disguise themselves as part of the second group). As the membership of the court martial panel revealed, these included people who believed that Honor acted illegally in not transferring command.

The second were those who believed that there was a chance for peace in the aftermath of major victories by the Navy of Manticore and the destruction of the Harris government by the Navy of Haven. We readers know that was a false hope, but it was real to people such as the Honorable Reginald Houseman.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:I would consider that the ones who are only held in the party by blackmail to be the ones that are "worthless", it is the others that are the true believers.

Jonathan_S wrote:I'd say the truly worthless are those in a third category -- the ones holding up the declaration of war as a cynical political ploy.

They don't have the excuse of truly believing that the Peep might have changed; nor are they being blackmailed into compliance.
They're just willing to risk the war, or at least higher military losses, to try to extort political concessions from the government.

I was not aware that was a third major bloc of voters. There were two major groups for me:

The first were those fighting the government over the prosecution of Pavel Young (perhaps you were referring to them?), which includes the entire Conservative Association and those others being blackmailed (although they may disguise themselves as part of the second group). As the membership of the court martial panel revealed, these included people who believed that Honor acted illegally in not transferring command.

The second were those who believed that there was a chance for peace in the aftermath of major victories by the Navy of Manticore and the destruction of the Harris government by the Navy of Haven. We readers know that was a false hope, but it was real to people such as the Honorable Reginald Houseman.

A good portion of the 3rd bloc were the so called "New Men", which were a loose group which held out for concessions which suited them best. There were no doubt individuals like this bloc that are against anything which doesn't directly scratch their backs or line their pockets, but didn't align with the New Men or another group.