Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Theemile wrote:

penny wrote:

Is that true? Do you have textev on that? In all of the discussions on the matter, I've never caught wind of that. We have also discussed the mechanics of the propulsion. Are we to believe that the spider drive's tractor beam attaches itself to the hyperwall mere centimeters from the ship?

And, the tractors are described as being oversized and much more powerful than normal tractors. Yet their range is mere centimeters? If true, then so much for the notion of propulsion by "rowing" then.

Looking for the reference - it's not in the pearls.

As for needing to reach out to connect to the hyper wall - where do you think the hyper wall is? It's everywhere. you don't need to reach out 300 miles to grab it - it's right next to you!

The tractors may be strong, it's not for range, but to grab hold of the intangible. Rowing as an analog is still an option, but more a grabbing motion than a scooping motion. One post by David mentioned the motion of a millipedes' legs; a "thousand" individual feet grabbing and releasing in a rippled sequence, pulling the body along.

I havn't been able to find the reference - it might have aged off the bar, I might be misremembering, so I'll retract.

However, we do have the quote that they are short ranged - I know short ranged in the honorverse can be measured in 10s of thousand of KM, but as I said, the hyperwall is right there, next to the ship; you don't need a million KM tractor beam to grab it. They are supposed to be powerful and tightly focused - chances are their focus is less than a KM from the hull at most.

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
On the other hand, for anything large enough to mount sufficient emitters for more acceleration you run into issues dealing with said acceleration's affects on the internal items and personnel. For the later that's where your quoted 150g normal accel comes in; and slightly further down that same page it goes on to say 200g normal combat max, and 310g maximum, brief, emergency acceleration. (And that emergency accel mentions that's not only the crew limit, 9g experienced, but that's what the ships structure was designed for)


In theory it seems like an uncrewed vessel the size of a ship might be built strong enough, and with acceleration rated components, to allow higher accelerations. But we don't know how much quicker accelerating it'd be practical to make it.
We don't know how much each emitter adds to the acceleration, whether that's linear or sub-linear (logarithmic?), or even how many emitters you can fit on a given size of hull. Nor do we know if there's some limit on the maximum possible spider acceleration no matter how many emitters you throw at the problem.

I believe there was a quote, that the longer the spider ship, the higher the accel possible (it makes more sense, more "legs" equals more power) So while the drive on a SDD (Super Duper Dreadnaught, again borrowing from the moniker shed) may have more capability for accel, it will always be limited by the limits of the water based occupants. Conversely, it means that a small spider ship, like a Graser Torpedo or a Ghost scout frigate may have less accel than an LD, because their drive isn't powerful enough to reach the human's max acceptable forces. OR not - we don't know where that balance sweet spot is.

The actual quote I'm aware of is the one saying a practical sized weapon is too small to mount enough emitters for high acceleration. but yes, the logical corollary of that is that a bigger ship can mount more emitters which should be able to give it higher accel.

(Though now that I say it I don't know whether the spider drive cares about ship mass. If it does, then at some point the square cube law likely catches up and mass grows faster than room for emitters and theoretical max accel starts falling off)

However there's little practical reason to mount so many emitters that your SDD could accelerate at, say, 1000g. Not when pulling over 310 is going to crush the crew. And it'd take a crazy amount of extra structure to handle the 43.5g that'd leak through the grav plates (or does the structure have to take the full 1000g accel?).
It'd be very counter productive to waste all that mass and volume on performance the crew couldn't survive.

And if the SDD was built to the same 310g (9g experienced) emergency max structural limits as the current Spider ships then it'd also be a waste of volume and mass to install enough emitters to massively exceed that.
You'd want some extra emitters to allow you to maintain acceleration even with battle damage or other failures; but 50% extra is probably overly generous.


So while a very large spider ship could seemingly have a theoretical much higher acceleration than a small one I doubt one would actually be built with that much excess drive performance.

Theemile wrote:I believe there was a quote, that the longer the spider ship, the higher the accel possible (it makes more sense, more "legs" equals more power) So while the drive on a SDD (Super Duper Dreadnaught, again borrowing from the moniker shed) may have more capability for accel, it will always be limited by the limits of the water based occupants. Conversely, it means that a small spider ship, like a Graser Torpedo or a Ghost scout frigate may have less accel than an LD, because their drive isn't powerful enough to reach the human's max acceptable forces. OR not - we don't know where that balance sweet spot is.

Something I have always wondered on this end was whether it was possible to make a dual impeller/spider drive ship. Honestly might be the way to go, since it has the stealth capability, as well as impeller capability if necessary.

Something I have always wondered, though, is the interactions between it and Warshawski sails. Like - would it be possible to "stitch" together the top and bottom of a sail in a sidewall? What is the inertial compensator effectiveness of a Warshawski sail? (Just the sail itself.)

It would be interesting to see a hypothetical RFBSD (Really Fucking Big Super Dreadnought) using the spider drive as its main propulsion, and the sails as its compensators (And maybe sidewalls, if they can be stitched together.), since it might be able to get better acceleration then an impeller-only based ship. Hell - a parellel wedge system (Bow/Throat the same size) might work, at least based on this quote.

The wider the open aspect is, the less efficient the impeller wedge is and the less efficient the inertial compensator becomes. As the inertial compensator becomes less efficient, the max acceleration to which you can take the drive without risking compensator failure drops.

I wonder if a RFBSD could use this to overcome the downsides of both the spider and impeller drive?

Zendikarofthewest wrote:
Something I have always wondered on this end was whether it was possible to make a dual impeller/spider drive ship. Honestly might be the way to go, since it has the stealth capability, as well as impeller capability if necessary.


A dual-drive spider/impeller ship is something that's been discussed before.

The consensus is that yes it should be possible; but it'd going to be very inefficient. An impeller ship and a spider drive require radically different hull forms; so to keep the impeller wedge start-up from eating large portions of the spider ship's hull you'd need to mount the impeller rings where they'd be on a conventional impeller ship that'd be large enough the entire hull of the spider ship would fit inside. (Basically take an outline of the spider ships, then scale up an impeller ships tapered double-spindle outline until it's just large enough no part of the spider ship is sticking out; then look at where the impeller rings go.

You might even need the mount them on rams so they're out of the way of the spider drive when it's working.

The issue with that inefficiency is that compensator efficiency is driven by the mass/volume of that larger theoretical ship. So a 4mton Shark-like ship build with a duel drive would probably have the compensated acceleration of a 6 or 7mton conventional impeller ship.

(And a LennyDet is apparently so large it's over the compensator cliff and installing an impeller drive wouldn't give it any acceleration advantage because it'd still be limited by its grav plates -- on that tonnage a compensator would provide less benefit!!)

Zendikarofthewest wrote:Something I have always wondered, though, is the interactions between it and Warshawski sails. Like - would it be possible to "stitch" together the top and bottom of a sail in a sidewall? What is the inertial compensator effectiveness of a Warshawski sail? (Just the sail itself.)

It would be interesting to see a hypothetical RFBSD (Really Fucking Big Super Dreadnought) using the spider drive as its main propulsion, and the sails as its compensators (And maybe sidewalls, if they can be stitched together.), since it might be able to get better acceleration then an impeller-only based ship. Hell - a parellel wedge system (Bow/Throat the same size) might work, at least based on this quote.

I wonder if a RFBSD could use this to overcome the downsides of both the spider and impeller drive?

Um, Warshaski sails are circular disks emitted perpendicular to the long axis of a ship -- there isn't an upper and lower sail. There's a fore-sail (sticking out from the forward alpha node ring) and an aft-sail (sticking out form the aft alpha node ring).

And nobody knows any way to stitch those disks into a cylinder using a sidewall (and even if you did roughly 20% of the ship would be sticking out past the sails and unprotected). What you can do is mount a spherical sidewall generator and use that to protect the whole ship while under sail. But according to the infodumps in either More Than Honor or Short Victorious War, that generator is so large than installing it negatively affects the ship's normal space combat power; so no major navy has taken that compromise (given how rare grav-wave combat is)

Now an impeller wedge has a top and a bottom wedge -- and they are stitched together with sidewalls. That's how sidewalls work.

No idea whether a Warshawski sail itself provides any inertial sump for a compensator to use. My guess would be no more than a normal wedge, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was at little as none. (After all, the wedge is being formed by all the alpha and beta nodes; while the sail is being formed by just the alpha nodes -- so if anything it should be a weaker construct. Though one we're still explicitly told is impenetrable to weapons fire)

For most ships that seems a purely theoretical question because outside of a grav wave or a wormhole's entry/exit lanes a sail can't provide any acceleration, so whether or not it can compensate for that non-existent acceleration is moot.
(And inside those areas the interaction between sail and wave provides a vastly deeper inertial sump; letting the ship compensate for nearly 10 time as much accel as it can using it's wedge; but we're told that's due to the strength of the wave vastly exceeding any manmade grav effect)

And as noted, if your hybrid-drive ship gets a compensate mass/volume over about 9mtons the compensator isn't going to help because you've exceeded the current compensator cliff. So the hybrid drive would not seem useful for a massive RFBSD (well, unless you wanted a wedge and sidewalls purely for combat purposes; not caring that it had the same low acceleration as under spider drive)

Zendikarofthewest wrote:
Something I have always wondered on this end was whether it was possible to make a dual impeller/spider drive ship. Honestly might be the way to go, since it has the stealth capability, as well as impeller capability if necessary.


A dual-drive spider/impeller ship is something that's been discussed before.

The consensus is that yes it should be possible; but it'd going to be very inefficient. An impeller ship and a spider drive require radically different hull forms; so to keep the impeller wedge start-up from eating large portions of the spider ship's hull you'd need to mount the impeller rings where they'd be on a conventional impeller ship that'd be large enough the entire hull of the spider ship would fit inside. (Basically take an outline of the spider ships, then scale up an impeller ships tapered double-spindle outline until it's just large enough no part of the spider ship is sticking out; then look at where the impeller rings go.

You might even need the mount them on rams so they're out of the way of the spider drive when it's working.

The issue with that inefficiency is that compensator efficiency is driven by the mass/volume of that larger theoretical ship. So a 4mton Shark-like ship build with a duel drive would probably have the compensated acceleration of a 6 or 7mton conventional impeller ship.

(And a LennyDet is apparently so large it's over the compensator cliff and installing an impeller drive wouldn't give it any acceleration advantage because it'd still be limited by its grav plates -- on that tonnage a compensator would provide less benefit!!)

Zendikarofthewest wrote:Something I have always wondered, though, is the interactions between it and Warshawski sails. Like - would it be possible to "stitch" together the top and bottom of a sail in a sidewall? What is the inertial compensator effectiveness of a Warshawski sail? (Just the sail itself.)

It would be interesting to see a hypothetical RFBSD (Really Fucking Big Super Dreadnought) using the spider drive as its main propulsion, and the sails as its compensators (And maybe sidewalls, if they can be stitched together.), since it might be able to get better acceleration then an impeller-only based ship. Hell - a parellel wedge system (Bow/Throat the same size) might work, at least based on this quote.

I wonder if a RFBSD could use this to overcome the downsides of both the spider and impeller drive?

Jonathan_S wrote:Um, Warshaski sails are circular disks emitted perpendicular to the long axis of a ship -- there isn't an upper and lower sail. There's a fore-sail (sticking out from the forward alpha node ring) and an aft-sail (sticking out form the aft alpha node ring).

And nobody knows any way to stitch those disks into a cylinder using a sidewall (and even if you did roughly 20% of the ship would be sticking out past the sails and unprotected). What you can do is mount a spherical sidewall generator and use that to protect the whole ship while under sail. But according to the infodumps in either More Than Honor or Short Victorious War, that generator is so large than installing it negatively affects the ship's normal space combat power; so no major navy has taken that compromise (given how rare grav-wave combat is)

Now an impeller wedge has a top and a bottom wedge -- and they are stitched together with sidewalls. That's how sidewalls work.

No idea whether a Warshawski sail itself provides any inertial sump for a compensator to use. My guess would be no more than a normal wedge, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was at little as none. (After all, the wedge is being formed by all the alpha and beta nodes; while the sail is being formed by just the alpha nodes -- so if anything it should be a weaker construct. Though one we're still explicitly told is impenetrable to weapons fire)

For most ships that seems a purely theoretical question because outside of a grav wave or a wormhole's entry/exit lanes a sail can't provide any acceleration, so whether or not it can compensate for that non-existent acceleration is moot.
(And inside those areas the interaction between sail and wave provides a vastly deeper inertial sump; letting the ship compensate for nearly 10 time as much accel as it can using it's wedge; but we're told that's due to the strength of the wave vastly exceeding any manmade grav effect)

And as noted, if your hybrid-drive ship gets a compensate mass/volume over about 9mtons the compensator isn't going to help because you've exceeded the current compensator cliff. So the hybrid drive would not seem useful for a massive RFBSD (well, unless you wanted a wedge and sidewalls purely for combat purposes; not caring that it had the same low acceleration as under spider drive)

While looking for the spider tractor length yesterday, I did find this from David (the discussion was about a Grav lance, but the comment is important):

The grav lance is the ship's impeller wedge which has been focused to generate the gravitic equivalent of an old row galley's ram. It cannot be generated without an impeller wedge and, just to knock this notion on the head one more time, as well, it cannot be generated by a LAC because there's no place to put the generators. So unless your cruiser-sized (or larger) spider drive ship wants to pull up within less than 100,000 km of its target, turn off its spider drive, and power up an impeller wedge (which, among other things, means it has to be equipped with both the spider and impeller nodes), this is not going to happen.

And I leave it to you to figure out what would happen during the 40 minutes or so it would take for the aforesaid spider drive ship to turn off it's spider, turn on it nodes, and cycle them from cold, through standy, to readiness, and then active. Complete cycle could be a little less than 40 minuites --- haven't checked my notes --- but not a heck of a lot less.

Can we please retire brilliant attempts to recycle a thoroughly dead end bit of technology now?


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.

Note, while he doesn't say it's impossible, his tone suggests that mounting both drives in the same hull is not a normal situation.

Theemile wrote:While looking for the spider tractor length yesterday, I did find this from David (the discussion was about a Grav lance, but the comment is important):

The grav lance is the ship's impeller wedge which has been focused to generate the gravitic equivalent of an old row galley's ram. It cannot be generated without an impeller wedge and, just to knock this notion on the head one more time, as well, it cannot be generated by a LAC because there's no place to put the generators. So unless your cruiser-sized (or larger) spider drive ship wants to pull up within less than 100,000 km of its target, turn off its spider drive, and power up an impeller wedge (which, among other things, means it has to be equipped with both the spider and impeller nodes), this is not going to happen.

And I leave it to you to figure out what would happen during the 40 minutes or so it would take for the aforesaid spider drive ship to turn off it's spider, turn on it nodes, and cycle them from cold, through standy, to readiness, and then active. Complete cycle could be a little less than 40 minuites --- haven't checked my notes --- but not a heck of a lot less.

Can we please retire brilliant attempts to recycle a thoroughly dead end bit of technology now?


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.

Note, while he doesn't say it's impossible, his tone suggests that mounting both drives in the same hull is not a normal situation.

Good point on that, and reminding us of the cold-start time on impeller nodes. Don't know if the spider drive has any similar warm-up time; though the apparently cyclic nature of each emitter's use might hint otherwise -- but we can hardly take that as a given.

So if a hybrid-drive ship was spotted under impeller and tried to go into stealth it might or might not be able to alter its vector soon after dropping its wedge -- depending on whether or not the spider drive requires any warm-up.

But in any case, at least switching drive modes in one direction will be a slow process. So it's not like a spider ship that's discovered would have time to bring up a wedge + sidewalls and try to fight its way out conventionally. (Even ignoring how poorly its trilateral hull will align with a wedge's broadsides -- one side can be just fine, but then the other is going to have an emitter skeg pointed right out shadowing many of the weapons mounts; hardly ideal)

One more reason this hybrid drive seems in the realm of 'technically possible, but not actually practical'

Theemile wrote:While looking for the spider tractor length yesterday, I did find this from David (the discussion was about a Grav lance, but the comment is important):

The grav lance is the ship's impeller wedge which has been focused to generate the gravitic equivalent of an old row galley's ram. It cannot be generated without an impeller wedge and, just to knock this notion on the head one more time, as well, it cannot be generated by a LAC because there's no place to put the generators. So unless your cruiser-sized (or larger) spider drive ship wants to pull up within less than 100,000 km of its target, turn off its spider drive, and power up an impeller wedge (which, among other things, means it has to be equipped with both the spider and impeller nodes), this is not going to happen.

And I leave it to you to figure out what would happen during the 40 minutes or so it would take for the aforesaid spider drive ship to turn off it's spider, turn on it nodes, and cycle them from cold, through standy, to readiness, and then active. Complete cycle could be a little less than 40 minuites --- haven't checked my notes --- but not a heck of a lot less.

Can we please retire brilliant attempts to recycle a thoroughly dead end bit of technology now?


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.

Note, while he doesn't say it's impossible, his tone suggests that mounting both drives in the same hull is not a normal situation.

Jonathan_S wrote:Good point on that, and reminding us of the cold-start time on impeller nodes. Don't know if the spider drive has any similar warm-up time; though the apparently cyclic nature of each emitter's use might hint otherwise -- but we can hardly take that as a given.

So if a hybrid-drive ship was spotted under impeller and tried to go into stealth it might or might not be able to alter its vector soon after dropping its wedge -- depending on whether or not the spider drive requires any warm-up.

But in any case, at least switching drive modes in one direction will be a slow process. So it's not like a spider ship that's discovered would have time to bring up a wedge + sidewalls and try to fight its way out conventionally. (Even ignoring how poorly its trilateral hull will align with a wedge's broadsides -- one side can be just fine, but then the other is going to have an emitter skeg pointed right out shadowing many of the weapons mounts; hardly ideal)

One more reason this hybrid drive seems in the realm of 'technically possible, but not actually practical'

It also brings back the discussion about spider drive ships using a wormhole - the spider would need to be shut down to bring up Alpha nodes - 40 minutes later. Approaching a wormhole would need to be done on fusion thrusters alone, since i doubt someone would allow you to coast on an approach vector at a wormhole for 40+ minutes.

Zendikarofthewest wrote:What is the inertial compensator effectiveness of a Warshawski sail? (Just the sail itself.)

It would be interesting to see a hypothetical RFBSD (Really Fucking Big Super Dreadnought) using the spider drive as its main propulsion, and the sails as its compensators (And maybe sidewalls, if they can be stitched together.), since it might be able to get better acceleration then an impeller-only based ship. Hell - a parellel wedge system (Bow/Throat the same size) might work, at least based on this quote.

I wonder if a RFBSD could use this to overcome the downsides of both the spider and impeller drive?

Jonathan_S wrote:No idea whether a Warshawski sail itself provides any inertial sump for a compensator to use. My guess would be no more than a normal wedge, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was at little as none. (After all, the wedge is being formed by all the alpha and beta nodes; while the sail is being formed by just the alpha nodes -- so if anything it should be a weaker construct. Though one we're still explicitly told is impenetrable to weapons fire)

The compensator is separate from, but interacts with, both the wedge and the sails. Without a compensator a ship has to use gravity plates. See "The Universe of Honor Harrington" within the book More than Honor (available on the free Mission of Honor CD):

Background (General) wrote:Then, in 1384 pd, a physicist by the name of Shigematsu Radhakrishnan added another major breakthrough in the form of the inertial compensator. The compensator turned the grav wave (natural or artificial) associated with a vessel into a sort of "inertial sump," dumping the inertial forces of acceleration into the grav wave and thus exempting the vessel's crew from the g forces associated with acceleration. Within the limits of its efficiency, it completely eliminated g force, placing an accelerating vessel in a permanent state of internal zero-gee, but its capacity to damp inertia was directly proportional to the power of the grav wave around it and inversely proportional to both the volume of the field and the mass of the vessel about which it was generated.

-- skip --

The natural grav waves of hyper-space, with their incomparably greater power, offered a much "deeper" sump than the artificial stress bands of the impeller drive, which meant that a Warshawski Sail ship could deflect vastly more g force from its passengers than one under impeller drive. In general terms, the compensator permitted humans to endure acceleration rates approaching 550 g under impeller drive and 4-5,000 g under sail, which allows hyperships to make up "bleed-off" velocity very quickly after translation. These numbers are for military compensators, which tend to be more massive, more energy and maintenance intensive, and much more expensive than those used in most merchant construction.

Theemile wrote:It also brings back the discussion about spider drive ships using a wormhole - the spider would need to be shut down to bring up Alpha nodes - 40 minutes later. Approaching a wormhole would need to be done on fusion thrusters alone, since i doubt someone would allow you to coast on an approach vector at a wormhole for 40+ minutes.

Assuming that that's how spider ships access wormholes.

All we really have is RFC's tum-te-tum and this snippet from a 2012 post in the thread "Obstacles".

runsforcelery wrote:(1) Spider drive ships can make transit into and out of hyper --- or through a wormhole --- just fine, thank you

(The bulk of the post was detailing why the Sharks linked themselves together before hypering in for Oyster Bay)

Sure, maybe the use Alpha nodes and a sail. Maybe the spider drive itself can be used within a grav wave or wormhole entry/exit lane, and that provides the necessarily stabilization against turbulence. Either (or something else entirely) could fit under "just fine, thank you" -- so we just don't know.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:It also brings back the discussion about spider drive ships using a wormhole - the spider would need to be shut down to bring up Alpha nodes - 40 minutes later. Approaching a wormhole would need to be done on fusion thrusters alone, since i doubt someone would allow you to coast on an approach vector at a wormhole for 40+ minutes.

Assuming that that's how spider ships access wormholes.

All we really have is RFC's tum-te-tum and this snippet from a 2012 post in the thread "Obstacles".

runsforcelery wrote:(1) Spider drive ships can make transit into and out of hyper --- or through a wormhole --- just fine, thank you

(The bulk of the post was detailing why the Sharks linked themselves together before hypering in for Oyster Bay)

Sure, maybe the use Alpha nodes and a sail. Maybe the spider drive itself can be used within a grav wave or wormhole entry/exit lane, and that provides the necessarily stabilization against turbulence. Either (or something else entirely) could fit under "just fine, thank you" -- so we just don't know.

Good catch on that. I missed that confirmation.

That just leaves us with the murky question of How it's done... great...