?

The Peeps were caught with cold nodes. But all through the series, and here as well, it is suggested that time can be shaved off of the process of going from a cold wedge to getting it online. What exactly is done to shave time off of the process? Diverting power maybe?

I suppose I should add that shaving time off of the entire process is not without its drawbacks, since safety protocols are mentioned.

At any rate, I do not understand why the amount of time that can be shaved off is not predetermined.

" ... I need a running update on how much time they think they might be able to shave off.”

“Of course, Citizen Vice Admiral!” Citizen Captain Marlowe had been only a lieutenant seven T-months earlier—about the same time Costa had been a commander—and his face was pale. But his voice was commendably steady, and Costa touched him gently on the shoulder.

“And tell them for me,” he added with a crooked smile, “that Engineering’s safety protocols are officially relaxed today.”

penny wrote:The Peeps were caught with cold nodes. But all through the series, and here as well, it is suggested that time can be shaved off of the process of going from a cold wedge to getting it online. What exactly is done to shave time off of the process? Diverting power maybe?

I suppose I should add that shaving time off of the entire process is not without its drawbacks, since safety protocols are mentioned.

At any rate, I do not understand why the amount of time that can be shaved off is not predetermined.

I'm assuming it's a risk vs reward trade-off.

If you follow the book it'll take X time, and that's a process that'd be designed to not only be safe for the ship and crew but also to avoid excessive reduction in the service life of the nodes.

If you're willing to abuse the nodes and push the risk to engineering up a little, and wear a lot of service life off the nodes, you can probably dump carefully controlled extra power into them to warm them up faster.

If you're willing to run a higher risk of blowing a node (and being dead in the water) you can shave even more time off by pushing them even harder.


You could possibly analogize it to a steam warship bringing up it's boilers. If all the boilers were cold it might take as much as 24 hours for a WWII BB to get up to full steam. Because it takes time for the boilers to warm up and you're constantly circulating water (and then steam) through the system as you steadily bring the temperature and pressures up -- to make sure everything warms up in sync and you don't get excessive stress in the boilers, engines, or piping from uneven heating or thermal shock.

If you have a source of steam (like boilers that are already lit off) you can run through the boilers to pre-heat them you can many hours off that, though there's a bit more risk that something will fail (or at least shorten it's service life) by warming up too quickly or too unevenly.

And in an absolute emergency you could try and crank the boilers up even faster, even without a source of steam. But you're really likely to shatter the fire bricks that insulate their walls, or shatter a pipe, or even turbine blades, from differential heating.

And of course there were a number of stages between totally cold and full steam at which you could hold the boilers; say holding the ship at 4 hours readiness. So the boilers would be on, just with the heat turned down, and much of that pre-heating already done. (Although for a steam warship if it wasn't expecting combat it might have only enough boilers lit off to quickly bring it up to cruising power; which is usually less than a quarter of the boilers you'd need for flank speed. Diesel and later gas turbine power plants would start up much, much, quicker and could also adjust power levels more quickly without the kind of pre-planning it took on a big steam plant)


So in both the steam plant and the impeller nodes it would seem that the more time you shave off the "book" time the higher the risk that something will go wrong. And that's why there's no fixed time savings because the engineers are making a judgement call about what this particular ship's propulsion can take, today, without breaking. (Something that would change over time as the plant got worn at toward the end of its service life; how many times it had bee stressed, how good a state of repair and maintenance it was in, whether it was on the stronger or weaker side of the allowable material tolerances, etc.)

Charging the capacitors quicker would seem to do the trick. But charging them too quickly can blow them. Initially I thought available power was the limiting factor, but that does not seem to be the case. The reason I asked is that I thought since the Peep ships were close to the base that they could receive beamed power to assist with startup. Oh well.

“Capacitors at seventy-seven percent!” Citizen Petty Officer Dombrosky called out.

“What’s the charge gradient?” Citizen Lieutenant Mercier-Pascal demanded.

“Sixty-one percent, Citizen Lieutenant,” Citizen Chief Aria replied.

Mercier-Pascal caught his lower lip between his teeth and glanced at the Engineering status board, then at the time display. Almost fourteen minutes had passed since the Manties were detected. According to the book, a fully trained engineering crew was supposed to need only ten minutes to fully charge the plasma capacitors, but Impeller Room Six still didn’t have power to its beta nodes.

Mercier-Pascal’s impeller room was scarcely alone in that, but all the others were at least closer than Impeller Six. That was sure to earn a reaming from Citizen Captain Philidor—or, at least, Citizen Commander Rust—which was more than bad enough. But until they had power on the impellers, Montressor was a sitting duck, and the Manties were rumbling steadily closer.

“Increase the gradient. Take it to seventy-five percent.”

“Citizen Lieutenant, we’re already eleven percent above Book levels,” Citizen Chief Aria pointed out.

“I know that,” Mercier-Pascal half-snapped. “But without a wedge, we can’t even raise sidewalls, Citizen Chief! So which do you prefer? Taking a chance on blowing the capacitors, or sit around buck naked, waiting until we take a laserhead up the ass?”

penny wrote:Charging the capacitors quicker would seem to do the trick. But charging them too quickly can blow them. Initially I thought available power was the limiting factor, but that does not seem to be the case. The reason I asked is that I thought since the Peep ships were close to the base that they could receive beamed power to assist with startup. Oh well.

It might be, but those were not competent people. Maybe arranging to beam power now would take longer than the 10 minutes they were expected to need to do their jobs.

And if you continue reading, you'll see what happens if you charge too fast.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Charging the capacitors quicker would seem to do the trick. But charging them too quickly can blow them. Initially I thought available power was the limiting factor, but that does not seem to be the case. The reason I asked is that I thought since the Peep ships were close to the base that they could receive beamed power to assist with startup. Oh well.

It might be, but those were not competent people. Maybe arranging to beam power now would take longer than the 10 minutes they were expected to need to do their jobs.

And if you continue reading, you'll see what happens if you charge too fast.

Could be.
It depends on why it's already taken 14 minutes -- and that's not something we're told.

Certainly by this point they appear to already have more power than they can (safely) use -- as they push the charging gradient (whatever that is in this context) from the already unsafe 61% up to 75%. Presumably by increasing the rate of power transfer.

If they had that available power all along then even instantly available externally beamed power wouldn't help -- either way they'd have more power than they can use. It's only if the delay was caused by some delay in having onboard power available (prior to the scene we see) that external power would seem to have any hope of speeding things up. And so the only situation where how quickly these less than fully competent engineers might be able to prepare to receive that external power would be relevant.


I see three plausible scenarios, with no good way to pick between them:
1) The slow charging was not caused by lack of available power; so external beamed power was irrelevant.
2) Slow charging was caused by lack of initially available onboard power but knew it would have taken longer to rig for receiving beamed power than it took to ramp up the onboard power.
3) Slow charged was caused by lack of initially available power
and these less than fully competent engineers failed to consider whether external power might have sped things up.

I do not think the slow charging was because of a lack of available power either. My guess would be the lack of an acceptable amount of elapsed time that the available power was made available. IOW, it took far too long to go through the checklist of steps that are necessary to begin the power transfer.

As a manufactured example.

Throw switch A.
Throw switch B.
Shunt plasma conduits from safe mode to ready mode.
Open circuits.
Etc. Etc.

I do wonder, however, if beamed power could expedite the process when possible. Especially if the ships are in close proximity to the base and the Captain orders cold impellers to reduce wear and tear. At any rate, if possible, beamed power probably needs to be prearranged as an option.

P.S. I have seen capacitors explode. It is not pretty.

Too simplistic.

I am sure that the start up procedures require various meters and guages to reach the right values before moving onto the next one.

SO Throw Switch A.
Monitor Gauges 1,2,3 until in the Green.
Throw Switch B.
Monitor Gauges 5,6,7 until in the green, check 1,2,3
Etc.

With each stage requiring some finite but variable amount of settling time before the next stage is initiated.

Now maybe a good engineer can say that going with switch B while Guage 2 is only 90% is fine as long as 1 & 3 are in the green and that will save 5% time or similar so worth doing under pressure.

Since we are talking Gravitics I wonder what the effect of neighboring gravitic fields are? I am sure that these ships would have systems to compensate but does a safe load require monitoring and adjusting during start up ? Not good if a Fast Start-up pulls other ships out of their safe parking orbits but I can stuff that if its an emergency and all my neigbours are also powering up.

So the enviroment and usage can both have an impact on the heat up period, short cuts like ignoring neigbour interactions could be one thing and others could be based on the Engineer's experience with the plant it's self - i.e. understanding when the equipment reaches stability without waiting the full period to confirm that.

And yes everything will have a rated capacity for how much power you should be able to push through it and some reserve capacity for how much extra you can push into it. Now the engineer is making a guess on the tolorance of his components as to how much more he can push before something breaks.

Asfar as power sources are concerned I suspect that they can pull a lot of power from the Ships normal "Hotel" and "Weapons" loads during start up - we aint going to fire the Grasers until the wedge is up and we can manouver. So Plenty of power on the ship, just not in the right place. No need for beamed power even if the ships have suitable recievers to accept it.

penny wrote:I do not think the slow charging was because of a lack of available power either. My guess would be the lack of an acceptable amount of elapsed time that the available power was made available. IOW, it took far too long to go through the checklist of steps that are necessary to begin the power transfer.

As a manufactured example.

Throw switch A.
Throw switch B.
Shunt plasma conduits from safe mode to ready mode.
Open circuits.
Etc. Etc.

I do wonder, however, if beamed power could expedite the process when possible. Especially if the ships are in close proximity to the base and the Captain orders cold impellers to reduce wear and tear. At any rate, if possible, beamed power probably needs to be prearranged as an option.

P.S. I have seen capacitors explode. It is not pretty.

Yep, I set it up to be really simplistic. It was simply meant to get my point across. No doubt there are a gaggle of gauges to monitor. Good call. But I also wonder if coordination with all of the other impeller rooms has to be made as well before the power transfer can begin. There seems to be at least six impeller rooms. Which surprised me as well. At any rate, I wonder if the impeller rooms have to receive power in order. Or rather, has to deliver power in order or simultaneously to the impellers.

penny wrote:Yep, I set it up to be really simplistic. It was simply meant to get my point across. No doubt there are a gaggle of gauges to monitor. Good call. But I also wonder if coordination with all of the other impeller rooms has to be made as well before the power transfer can begin. There seems to be at least six impeller rooms. Which surprised me as well. At any rate, I wonder if the impeller rooms have to receive power in order. Or rather, has to deliver power in order or simultaneously to the impellers.

On a freighter I believe there are just 2 impeller rooms - a forward one and an aft one, and all the components to run the alpha and beta nodes are grouped into that one big easy to access room. (Though I'm not sure we have text-ev for that; and it's not impossible that they'd have at least 4, forward alpha, forward beta, aft beta, aft alpha)

But a warship has those impeller rooms heavily subdivided to limit damage cascades; so if something blows out the components driving the 3rd forward alpha node that internal damage should be contained by the subdivision and cofferdaming.

I'm not sure how finely subdivided it is, whether it's as granular as one room per node (in which case you'd have 48 or 64 rooms; depending on whether you have beta or beta-squared nodes) or if a few adjacent impellers have their support components in a shared room. But certainly it's split into way more than 6 rooms

penny wrote:P.S. I have seen capacitors explode. It is not pretty.

I don't think we were allowed to graduate from Electrical Engineering if you had never blown one or participated in its demise (at least the small ones in the microfarad range).