?

penny wrote:Thanks for the response in the previous discussions.

Toll of Honor wrote: Montressor could still move on just her after-impeller ring, even with her forward ring completely down—or could have, assuming they’d had time to get it up—but she’d been brutally lamed, and with Sidewall Two gone and Four off-line, she’d lost half her starboard sidewall, as well. Spreading her remaining capacity to cover the gap would weaken that sidewall catastrophically. Of course, the state of her sidewalls would be supremely unimportant if she couldn’t get her impeller wedge up to protect her hull’s unarmored top and bottom in time.

I enquired about this eons ago. Like with the shields in Star Trek, I always wondered if the sidewalls could benefit from diverting power from other systems to them. It seems that they might; at least the sidewalls that are up can be reconfigured to cover inoperable sidewalls.

That is not quite the same as what I was suggesting eons ago that it should be possible to divert more power to a section, or sections, of a sidewall that is expected to be hit (before any damage), thus strengthening that section of sidewall in anticipation. But it is unclear if a sidewall’s strength can be increased, say, by fifty percent (even at the expense of other systems) if the sidewall’s strength is already at nominal. But if the sidewall is weakened or weakening, can diverted energy “shore it back up”?

“Increase power to the forward shields Scotty!”

Of course where I am headed is that a much bigger warship with a much bigger power budget might be able to increase the strength of the particular section of sidewalls, that are likely to be hit, by fifty percent or more.

Think SDs and LDs. If possible, LDs might be able to draw on enormous power reserves to divert to the sidewalls in an emergency.

But it appears the gap in coverage that is made in this case comes by reconfiguring the operable sidewalls to stretch and cover the gap caused by the inoperable (downed) sidewalls. That isn't exactly the same thing as increasing power to an area of the sidewalls that has not failed yet. But the question still stands.

Note: By implication I am assuming that each sidewall has four sections.

Theemile wrote:I don't think diverting extra power to sidewalls helps, they are running at 100%, and the only time they might need more power, is when their power routing is damaged. Most components on an Honorverse ship have a local ring capacitor sized to power the attached device for a limited time while disconnected from ship power, and to make sure it has sufficient power and not effected by power transients, so needing more power usually is not an issue, as more is at hand if needed.

Modern Honorverse ships have multiple sidewall generators in each broadside. They each have a zone, and overlap each other, and the larger the ship, the more actual redundancy there is. If a particular sidewall generator is overloaded or blown out, there is usually a redundant or overlapping sidewall from a different generator there to take the hit. As sidewalls are blown out in combat, it is possible to stretch the remaining sidewalls and re-align them to cover weakened or exposed areas - probably (but not mentioned in text) at the expense of the local strength of the sidewall. But just adding more power won't fix anything.

Thanks for the response. You are probably correct about the possibility. Currently anyway; but the LDs may have a few surprises.

Actually, that is mentioned in text. It is part of the section that I highlighted. It helps to drive the thought. Since spreading the sidewalls to cover exposed areas weakens the makeshift sidewall, it probably weakens the areas of sidewalls that are stretched as well. (My apology if in "local" you mean the areas of sidewalls that are borrowed from). But intuitively that might suggest that diverting more power to the cause might help.

penny wrote:

Theemile wrote:I don't think diverting extra power to sidewalls helps, they are running at 100%, and the only time they might need more power, is when their power routing is damaged. Most components on an Honorverse ship have a local ring capacitor sized to power the attached device for a limited time while disconnected from ship power, and to make sure it has sufficient power and not effected by power transients, so needing more power usually is not an issue, as more is at hand if needed.

Modern Honorverse ships have multiple sidewall generators in each broadside. They each have a zone, and overlap each other, and the larger the ship, the more actual redundancy there is. If a particular sidewall generator is overloaded or blown out, there is usually a redundant or overlapping sidewall from a different generator there to take the hit. As sidewalls are blown out in combat, it is possible to stretch the remaining sidewalls and re-align them to cover weakened or exposed areas - probably (but not mentioned in text) at the expense of the local strength of the sidewall. But just adding more power won't fix anything.

Thanks for the response. You are probably correct about the possibility. Currently anyway; but the LDs may have a few surprises.

Actually, that is mentioned in text. It is part of the section that I highlighted. It helps to drive the thought. Since spreading the sidewalls to cover exposed areas weakens the makeshift sidewall, it probably weakens the areas of sidewalls that are stretched as well. (My apology if in "local" you mean the areas of sidewalls that are borrowed from). But intuitively that might suggest that diverting more power to the cause might help.

Whether more power is useful depends on whether any given sidewall generator can handle more power without damaging itself - and whether shoving more power in generates any noticeable strengthening of the grav shear field.

It'd be a bad bet if somehow shoving 10% more power into the generator gave you a 50% chance of it blowing when its sidewall takes a hit (letting the hit through and leaving you with a gap in coverage going forward that you'll need to weaken the rest of the wall to cover), or a lifespan measured in minutes.

And we just don't know how much, if any, you can push a sidewall generate past its design limits -- and more importantly what the risks and tradeoffs are for doing so. But people already design them to be as powerful as they possible can be within those design limits and for acceptable tradeoffs. So if it was possible to reasonably make them more powerful then that'd already be how they were operated. (implying that it isn't reasonable to provide extra power to them -- if that's all it took ships would be design with sufficient power generation to always provide that amount of power to them)


Now what you almost certainly can do is rearrange that coverage so you shrink the coverage areas of some generators and expand the coverage of others; creating stronger zones in your sidewall at the expense of creating offsetting weaker zones. The issue with that is because you're almost always defending against lightspeed weapons (laserheads, lasers, or grasers) you can't see the shots coming so you don't know where the sidewall is going to be hit and so you don't know where to strengthen and where its safe to weaken.

Had to catch up on a lot of posts.

G-torps are DESIGNED to overheat and catastrophically fail as a self-destruct mechanism. Literally the consume themselves but in the process they push the energy output beyond what the same grazer would produce in a conventional( say, shipboard mount). They get a 3 second beam which, among other things, overheats the grazer and everything else so that it at least consumes itself and taking the spider drive along with the guidance, grazer, and power source.
Could you do this with a ship-mounted grazer......sure, if you want the weapon system to explode in its mount, melting its major components before they fail with explosive results and causing serious problems in the power feeds etc to the grazer banks linked with it. Could you do this with the SLN SD size grazers which are being retrofitted into defensive pods for the Junction etc? Yes, but you would have the same problem- burn out the grazer, slag the pod and only get one shot out of it.


You don't need G-torps to kill mining ships or in particularly the ore carriers. A standard (non-lazerhead) nuclear warhead will do just find. Actually you might even want to use a standard counter-misslle on an initial ballistic intercept which would initiate it's wedge drive when it gets close enough so that you use the wedge to destroy your target like with the TUFT ships at Hypatia. Civilian ships, not much in the way of defense or probably any way to detect a cold CM before it's lights off its wedge.


Approaching planets or stations in-system from a wormhole terminus is probably not usually the best option to drop off cargo for forwarding to a different system if you can use a closer point. We have seen a lot of terminus locations with various stations co-located near by for ship repairs, passenger and cargo facilities to transfer passengers and cargo to system transports. Time is money and any freighter (even one that carries a few passengers) is going to want to drop its passengers and relevant cargo off out by the terminus, collect anything being picked up and get on it's way. They may not know there is something to pick up but the local freight brokers will pass offers for jobs hauling cargo to at least the next stop listed in their routing and to places several stops beyond if there is any available capacity on the incoming freighter.
Places like the Manticore Junction and any busy terminus serving multiple routs from the terminus also are going to have stations which include Bonded Warehouse facilities to do the drop off and pick up of cargo that is going to have to change freighters one or more times in the process of being shipped from point A to point B. They function as freight terminals for storage and translating of goods. No need to dive into the local system's gravity well and then come back out. That takes time and fuel mass which can be better used getting to where your next stop is.

Brigade XO wrote:

Approaching planets or stations in-system from a wormhole terminus is probably not usually the best option to drop off cargo for forwarding to a different system if you can use a closer point. We have seen a lot of terminus locations with various stations co-located near by for ship repairs, passenger and cargo facilities to transfer passengers and cargo to system transports. Time is money and any freighter (even one that carries a few passengers) is going to want to drop its passengers and relevant cargo off out by the terminus, collect anything being picked up and get on it's way. They may not know there is something to pick up but the local freight brokers will pass offers for jobs hauling cargo to at least the next stop listed in their routing and to places several stops beyond if there is any available capacity on the incoming freighter.
Places like the Manticore Junction and any busy terminus serving multiple routs from the terminus also are going to have stations which include Bonded Warehouse facilities to do the drop off and pick up of cargo that is going to have to change freighters one or more times in the process of being shipped from point A to point B. They function as freight terminals for storage and translating of goods. No need to dive into the local system's gravity well and then come back out. That takes time and fuel mass which can be better used getting to where your next stop is.

David discussed how much cargo touched Manticorian hulls years ago, and much of cargo moves through "hub and spoke" cargo systems. So yes, A freighter moving cargo to Plant X with a wormhole probably exits the wormhole and exchanges it's local cargo at a transshipment point near the wormhole. Unless the freighter is mostly filled with cargo for the local planet, it saves that hull's time to transship to a warehouse and a cross transfer to a dedicated freighter for the local tip.

I think just about every wormhole terminus will have such a system.

Theemile wrote:David discussed how much cargo touched Manticorian hulls years ago, and much of cargo moves through "hub and spoke" cargo systems. So yes, A freighter moving cargo to Plant X with a wormhole probably exits the wormhole and exchanges it's local cargo at a transshipment point near the wormhole. Unless the freighter is mostly filled with cargo for the local planet, it saves that hull's time to transship to a warehouse and a cross transfer to a dedicated freighter for the local tip.

I think just about every wormhole terminus will have such a system.

Specifically at Manticore: a ship might be carrying freight for all three inhabited planets, so by offloading at the terminal for transshipment by local carriers, there is an enormous savings in time for the ship, without adding much time to the freight movement.

Collecting outbound freight from the three planets at the terminal would also yield time savings.

tlb wrote:Specifically at Manticore: a ship might be carrying freight for all three inhabited planets, so by offloading at the terminal for transshipment by local carriers, there is an enormous savings in time for the ship, without adding much time to the freight movement.

Collecting outbound freight from the three planets at the terminal would also yield time savings.

Plus since Manticore's a Junction each arriving ship is likely carrying cargo that needs to go by way of multiple different termini (and might not be carry any cargo destined for a planet in the MBS)
And, heck, your route might not even go on to another terminus but instead you might be returning to the terminus you just arrived from (after picking up any applicable cargo).

Using the freight warehouses out at the Junction make that kind of store and forward shipping vastly more efficient; as a freighter having to detour unnecessarily to planetary orbit would add over a day to their trip.


There are probably wormhole termini that are too low traffic for the local system to have been willing or able to invest in infrastructure out at the terminus. But I suspect that you don't need all that much traffic to make terminus warehousing profitable. (Especially if the wormhole is in an inhabited system -- your companies will have better luck getting their cargo shipped if they can see if every passing freighter has room to bring it along to the next warehouse; and more freighters are going to pass the terminus that will swing by your planet. Of course you'd need to get your cargo to the terminus warehouse, but a sub-light freighter is going to be cheaper and easier to build than a hyper-capable on and you can just have one making shuttle runs from planet to terminus and back whenever cargo or warehouse/astro-control crew need to be cycled.)

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Question. About those multistage missiles. Why aren't they currently designed to separate when a stage is spent like our very own booster rockets? Since they are no longer kinetic weapons. The result could be more acceleration, and there certainly would be a much smaller target at the end.

I'd be surprised if that question hasn't been discussed before.

As far as we know the Cataphracts seen to be true multi-stage missiles, based on being described as "effectively no more than a standard missile with a laserhead-armed “counter-missile” glued to its nose" [UH]. And they're pretty consistently described as having stages or being a two stage missile. So my assumption, from that, is that the standard missile body first stage is physically dropped before the second/final CM stage activates -- but I can't recall stage separation being explicitly described in the text. (Still it seems odd to call them stages if they don't stage)

The RMN (and presumably Peep and Andie) multidrive missiles appear to be different. They are pretty consistently called multidrive. And certainly we have drawing and renders of RMN MDMs and their three drive rings are tightly clustered at the rear of the missile (and for Mk23s are all powered by the same microfusion power plant further forward in the missile body). The burnt out drive rings to not appear to physically separate (and doing so would seem to provide little to no advantage because you'd seem to only be dropping a tiny fraction of the missile as all three together don't appear to cover even 1/10th of the missile's length)

However given how missile wedges work (in particular their built in compensation capability) it's unclear if physical staging would actually provide performance advantage. Certainly with a wedge simply mass never has any impact on acceleration; and it only rarely seems to have impact on compensated acceleration (at least for ship style compensators which we have more details on). We're told that for ships both compensator size and mass affect acceleration; but we've never seen a ship that's running light (dropped most of its pods, a freighter running empty, etc.) get any acceleration boost. So for warships, as a practical matter, only size seems to matter. For freighters there is presumably some mass, achievable if shipping sufficiently dense cargo, after which compensated acceleration will start to drop -- but we don't know that that mass is compared to their 'displacement tonnage' (which is just a measure of volume). And since we know even less for missiles we don't know if making them smaller makes them quicker (though that might be part of what lets CMs accelerate quicker than normal missiles -- OTOH the Viper with a small laserhead added on has the same accel as a Mk31 CM indicating that maybe size/mass isn't as impactful on missile accelerations...

---
To be fair; in a couple of places a Cataphract is called multi-drive or MDMs called multi-stage. It's unclear if that's just sloppy narration / character speech/thought or if that's intended to indicate that they do work more similarly and we shouldn't rely on "stage" to mean it actually physically stages. <shrug>

If compensator size and ship size affect acceleration, it seems intuitive that reducing the size of a missile by volume on the fly would equate to increasing the size of the compensator, on the fly, resulting in a higher potential acceleration. If all else is equal vs a missile’s and a ship’s acceleration.

penny wrote:If compensator size and ship size affect acceleration, it seems intuitive that reducing the size of a missile by volume on the fly would equate to increasing the size of the compensator, on the fly, resulting in a higher potential acceleration. If all else is equal vs a missile’s and a ship’s acceleration.

first, we don't know that all else is equal between a missile's acceleration and a ship -- the ship uses a stand-alone compensator while the missile's drive somehow (RFC wasn't real clear) produces a compensating effect. So smaller missiles may or may not have inherently higher accelerations.

The RMN MDMs seem to have the same acceleration as their SDMs; so the larger size doesn't seem to have slowed them any.

But even if that's true, RFC has said MDMs currently can't handle the different drives having different accelerations -- so even if dropping a spent drive would theoretically allow the missile higher acceleration (and it's not clear that it would) in practice it couldn't because the remaining drives must be set to the same accel as the spent one; whether or not it's still attached to the missile.
(Cataphracts are obviously different as they have a CM stage grafted onto their nose; and it does have a different accel)

(And at least for fusion powered MDMs you'd be dropping like 1% of the missile with a spend drive; so even if missile size does affect accel, and even if you overcome the limitation of drive settings, physically staging isn't going to buy you a meaningful increase in accel when you can drop so little of the missile with each burnt out drive)

Jonathan_S wrote: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)

I've been under the impression that they only had alpha nodes (which can switch between impeller and Warshavski sails). Non-hyper capable units only have the (much simpler) beta nodes. Only Warships with their double layered impeller need both kinds of nodes.
(And the new LACs used Beta-Squared nodes, which were bigger and stronger, but fewer of them needed per ring.

Jonathan_S wrote:Even if the missile impeller ring would work from another position (and it probably would)

I'm not sure about that. As there's no full compensator, it might be as simple as "pull" vs "push" forces left for the material to handle.