Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:No. Like I said, running a wedge is an energy negative action. You have to expend energy to keep the wedge going; the energy siphon effect of the wedge only covers some fraction of its power requirements. (We don't know the exact amount, but say if covered 90% of the energy usage -- the missile's onboard power would still have to provide the other 10% to keep the wedge going. So when the wedge goes down the energy the missiles on-board power supply needs to provide goes down)

Actually my speculation is that the siphon percentage is variable, but never as high as 100%. Basically that as the missile goes faster and relativity should start requiring more and more energy to maintain the same acceleration rate; but that basically all that extra energy comes from the energy siphon effect -- so the energy draw from the capacitors or reactor might remain close to constant. But that's just a personal speculation.

All we know for sure is that both wedges and sails siphon energy, and only sails (in a grav wave) are capable of siphoning enough energy to fully run themselves.

So no energy from the wedge goes to the other hardware in the missile. A capacitor missile has power stored specifically for running the sensors, ecm, and coms for a specific period of time (plus energy for the RMS system and Warhead), that we know is at least ~20 minutes of time, possibly more.

penny wrote:

This has always gotten my goat. We've had this discussion before and I have acquiesced. But that goat still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The wedge seems to be an infinite power source to be able to perform the “voodoo that it do(es).”

A wedge can drive an object (seemingly regardless of its mass) to a significant fraction of light; .9X C.

Only a wedge can destroy a wedge. Yet a wedge constantly needs energy to keep itself running. The current crop of HV missiles are powered by a reactor. This reactor keeps the wedge running. It may as well power all other nominal systems in ballistic mode as well. No need to add redundant capacitors; right?

Yet, capacity powered missiles in the earlier HV had the same capabilities as nuclear powered missiles. The only difference seem to be the enormous energy budget available to power the RMN’s superior ECM.

Back to only a wedge can destroy a wedge. A larger wedge will destroy a smaller wedge. Two wedges of the same size would result in wedge fratricide. They’ll take each other out. But what if the wedges are the same size but one wedge is powered by capacitors and the other is powered by a reactor?

Considering this question as it applies to a warship, at one point posters were submitting that a NIMM (near infinite mass missile) could NOT destroy a ship’s wedge in “ram mode”. (Near infinite mass because it is traveling near the speed of light.)*

Text has witnessed the wedge faltering but staying up. I suppose when a wedge is faltering it is drawing more power from the reactor during those moments. It seems intuitive that a wedge powered by a reactor should have more energy to contribute to the health of the wedge than one powered by a bank of capacitors. If vice versa then vice versa. Thus, wedge on wedge collisions should only result in destruction of the weaker wedge, and not necessarily the smaller wedge.

So, during the time Manticore had reactor powered missiles and Haven did not, it would seem that in a war of wedges, Haven’s missiles should not have survived.


*Near infinite mass missiles are first discussed on page 128 of the venerable ? thread.

penny wrote:Text has witnessed the wedge faltering but staying up. I suppose when a wedge is faltering it is drawing more power from the reactor during those moments. It seems intuitive that a wedge powered by a reactor should have more energy to contribute to the health of the wedge than one powered by a bank of capacitors. If vice versa then vice versa. Thus, wedge on wedge collisions should only result in destruction of the weaker wedge, and not necessarily the smaller wedge.

So, during the time Manticore had reactor powered missiles and Haven did not, it would seem that in a war of wedges, Haven’s missiles should not have survived.

Theemile wrote:

penny wrote:

This has always gotten my goat. We've had this discussion before and I have acquiesced. But that goat still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The wedge seems to be an infinite power source to be able to perform the “voodoo that it do(es).”

A wedge can drive an object (seemingly regardless of its mass) to a significant fraction of light; .9X C.

Only a wedge can destroy a wedge. Yet a wedge constantly needs energy to keep itself running. The current crop of HV missiles are powered by a reactor. This reactor keeps the wedge running. It may as well power all other nominal systems in ballistic mode as well. No need to add redundant capacitors; right?

Yet, capacity powered missiles in the earlier HV had the same capabilities as nuclear powered missiles. The only difference seem to be the enormous energy budget available to power the RMN’s superior ECM.

Back to only a wedge can destroy a wedge. A larger wedge will destroy a smaller wedge. Two wedges of the same size would result in wedge fratricide. They’ll take each other out. But what if the wedges are the same size but one wedge is powered by capacitors and the other is powered by a reactor?

Considering this question as it applies to a warship, at one point posters were submitting that a NIMM (near infinite mass missile) could NOT destroy a ship’s wedge in “ram mode”. (Near infinite mass because it is traveling near the speed of light.)*

Text has witnessed the wedge faltering but staying up. I suppose when a wedge is faltering it is drawing more power from the reactor during those moments. It seems intuitive that a wedge powered by a reactor should have more energy to contribute to the health of the wedge than one powered by a bank of capacitors. If vice versa then vice versa. Thus, wedge on wedge collisions should only result in destruction of the weaker wedge, and not necessarily the smaller wedge.

So, during the time Manticore had reactor powered missiles and Haven did not, it would seem that in a war of wedges, Haven’s missiles should not have survived.


*Near infinite mass missiles are first discussed on page 128 of the venerable ? thread.

The reactor doesn't supply more power to the wedge than a capacitor missile of equal specs. It has more power to give, but the wedge doesn't need more. It can provide power for the wedge longer than a capacitor, yes, but per moment time, it provides (and the wedge requires) the same power from the reactor. If the 2 missiles interacted, both would be equally destroyed.

Wedge faltering usually comes from battle damage - usually to the nodes, and is the re-balancing of the drive nodes - certain nodes ramp up their output, others drop theirs to balance the output of the ring. If the power system is damaged - some of the nodes have lost their sustainment power and it needs rerouted - or the node drops out and the rings are re-balanced as above.

Where have you seen different?

penny wrote:Only a wedge can destroy a wedge. Yet a wedge constantly needs energy to keep itself running. The current crop of HV missiles are powered by a reactor. This reactor keeps the wedge running. It may as well power all other nominal systems in ballistic mode as well. No need to add redundant capacitors; right?

penny wrote:
What is powering the nodes? During battle damage, power is being rerouted, sure. But during battle damage, lots of energy is being lost/leaked. Blown conduits, etc. Where do the nodes get extra energy to ramp-up their power output?

penny wrote:

Theemile wrote:Wedge faltering usually comes from battle damage - usually to the nodes, and is the re-balancing of the drive nodes - certain nodes ramp up their output, others drop theirs to balance the output of the ring. If the power system is damaged - some of the nodes have lost their sustainment power and it needs rerouted - or the node drops out and the rings are re-balanced as above.

Where have you seen different?

What is powering the nodes? During battle damage, power is being rerouted, sure. But during battle damage, lots of energy is being lost/leaked. Blown conduits, etc. Where do the nodes get extra energy to ramp-up their power output?

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm not sure this is entirely true. No (known?) weapons system can penetrate a wedge - but wasn't the tug that took part of the OB debris on its wedge close to that the wedge could take? I don't have my ebooks handy any the moment but I thought I remembered that was the case.

HMS Longshoreman, one of Hephaestus' ready-duty tugs, was headed away from the station, towing the brand new Saganami-C-class cruiser Jessica Rice towards Traffic Control's impeller limit, when the attack came in. The two ships were accelerating at the piddling rate of barely ten gravities out of deference to the fact that Jessica Rice was on internal grav plates only, since her inertial compensator was inoperable without the impeller wedge traffic regulations forbade her in such close proximity to the station. They were well clear of the slip in which Jessica Rice had been berthed, but that didn't matter.

One of the Mesan torpedoes scored a direct hit on the station's spine, slashing outward and across successive secondary axes in a horrendous bow wave of secondary blasts and explosive decompressions. It reached the outer edge of the station and kept right on going until it ripped lengthwise across Jessica Rice's unarmored topsides, shattering the big, powerful ship. And then she, like Saladin, blew up. The explosion disabled Longshoreman's after impeller ring, sending her wedge into automatic shutdown . . . and leaving her unprotected as a chunk of what had once been HMSS Hephaestus which out-massed the tug by at least fifty percent slammed into her and destroyed her completely.

Quay hurtled across the wreckage stream spilling down from orbit. Her sensors' view was restricted, but she had more than enough coverage out the sides of her wedge for Truida Verstappen to know the belly band wasn't getting it all. She'd set up her computers to tag everything that crossed the sensors' field of view, and Quay's cybernetic brain began plotting descent curves. They could only be approximate until the tug turned and brought her powerful forward radar and lidar into action, but at least Lieutenant Verstappen would know where to start looking.

Had anyone been in a position to actually watch, they would have seen HMS Quay slash into the heart of the wreckage. Despite the impenetrability of the wedge itself, it was still a high risk move. Sugimatsu had to get deep enough into the stream to intercept the most dangerous chunks of it, and that meant intersecting its path late enough that quite a few major pieces of debris were actually swept into the open throat of Quay's wedge. He'd counted on that, since he couldn't avoid it anyway. And it didn't matter whether a piece of wreckage hit an impeller wedge on its way in or on its way out. What did matter was the distinct possibility that Quay might strike one of those pieces on its way through. The odds were against it—on the scale of the tug's overpowered wedge, both she and even a very large piece of wreckage were actually rather small objects in a relatively large volume—but the odds weren't as much against it as he could have wished, and he realized he was holding his breath.

Something large, jagged, and broken—it looked, in the fleeting glimpse he had, as if it were probably at least half of a heavy fabrication module, which must have massed the better part of thirty-five thousand tons—went screaming past Quay's prow and impacted on the inner surface of her wedge's roof. Or, rather, was ripped into very, very, very tiny bits and pieces in the instant it entered the zone in which local gravity went from effectively zero to several hundred thousand gravities in a space of barely five meters.

The ship shuddered and bucked as other multiton chunks of Vulcan's shattered bones slammed into her wedge. Not even her inertial compensator could completely damp the consequences of that much transferred momentum without shaking her crew like a terrier with a rat. But she'd been built with generous stress margins for a moment just like this one, and she came out the other side intact, already turning to bring tracking systems and tractors to bear on whatever had gotten past her.

Verstappen's hands flew over her console. If she'd only had more time, time to really evaluate the wreckage before they physically intercepted it, she would have been far better placed to prioritize threats. As it was, she had to do it on the fly, and perspiration beaded her forehead. At their velocity, even with the range of a tug's tractors, they had only seconds—no more than a minute or two, maximum—before their velocity would carry them too far from the debris to do any good.

"Take the queue, Harland!" she barked, pressing the key that locked in her best estimate of threat potentials, and down in Engineering, Harland Wingate and his two assistants went frantically to work.

Quay's tractors stabbed out, no longer powerful, carefully modulated hands making gentle contact with other ships but deliberately overpowered demons, ripping and rending, striking with so much transfer energy that even enormous pieces of debris shattered.

In the one hundred and three seconds they had to work, those tractors destroyed eighteen potentially deadly shards of Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan. Four more looming projectiles were dragged bodily after Quay as she went streaking away from her intercept. There would have been more, but two of her tractors had burned out under the abuse.

* * *

Given how little time Quay had been given, she and her crew did a magnificent job. But magnificent isn't always enough.

Several large pieces got past her, including three at least the size of cruisers, accompanied by a trailing shower of smaller bits and pieces, trailing a de-orbiting arc across the daylight side of Sphinx.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I'm not sure this is entirely true. No (known?) weapons system can penetrate a wedge - but wasn't the tug that took part of the OB debris on its wedge close to that the wedge could take? I don't have my ebooks handy any the moment but I thought I remembered that was the case.

No, debris hitting the wedge was NOT a problem for a tug; it was the possibility of something getting through the open aspects and damaging the tug itself that was the problem. From chapter 29 of Mission of Honor:

HMS Longshoreman, one of Hephaestus' ready-duty tugs, was headed away from the station, towing the brand new Saganami-C-class cruiser Jessica Rice towards Traffic Control's impeller limit, when the attack came in. The two ships were accelerating at the piddling rate of barely ten gravities out of deference to the fact that Jessica Rice was on internal grav plates only, since her inertial compensator was inoperable without the impeller wedge traffic regulations forbade her in such close proximity to the station. They were well clear of the slip in which Jessica Rice had been berthed, but that didn't matter.

One of the Mesan torpedoes scored a direct hit on the station's spine, slashing outward and across successive secondary axes in a horrendous bow wave of secondary blasts and explosive decompressions. It reached the outer edge of the station and kept right on going until it ripped lengthwise across Jessica Rice's unarmored topsides, shattering the big, powerful ship. And then she, like Saladin, blew up. The explosion disabled Longshoreman's after impeller ring, sending her wedge into automatic shutdown . . . and leaving her unprotected as a chunk of what had once been HMSS Hephaestus which out-massed the tug by at least fifty percent slammed into her and destroyed her completely.

Quay hurtled across the wreckage stream spilling down from orbit. Her sensors' view was restricted, but she had more than enough coverage out the sides of her wedge for Truida Verstappen to know the belly band wasn't getting it all. She'd set up her computers to tag everything that crossed the sensors' field of view, and Quay's cybernetic brain began plotting descent curves. They could only be approximate until the tug turned and brought her powerful forward radar and lidar into action, but at least Lieutenant Verstappen would know where to start looking.

Had anyone been in a position to actually watch, they would have seen HMS Quay slash into the heart of the wreckage. Despite the impenetrability of the wedge itself, it was still a high risk move. Sugimatsu had to get deep enough into the stream to intercept the most dangerous chunks of it, and that meant intersecting its path late enough that quite a few major pieces of debris were actually swept into the open throat of Quay's wedge. He'd counted on that, since he couldn't avoid it anyway. And it didn't matter whether a piece of wreckage hit an impeller wedge on its way in or on its way out. What did matter was the distinct possibility that Quay might strike one of those pieces on its way through. The odds were against it—on the scale of the tug's overpowered wedge, both she and even a very large piece of wreckage were actually rather small objects in a relatively large volume—but the odds weren't as much against it as he could have wished, and he realized he was holding his breath.

Something large, jagged, and broken—it looked, in the fleeting glimpse he had, as if it were probably at least half of a heavy fabrication module, which must have massed the better part of thirty-five thousand tons—went screaming past Quay's prow and impacted on the inner surface of her wedge's roof. Or, rather, was ripped into very, very, very tiny bits and pieces in the instant it entered the zone in which local gravity went from effectively zero to several hundred thousand gravities in a space of barely five meters.

The ship shuddered and bucked as other multiton chunks of Vulcan's shattered bones slammed into her wedge. Not even her inertial compensator could completely damp the consequences of that much transferred momentum without shaking her crew like a terrier with a rat. But she'd been built with generous stress margins for a moment just like this one, and she came out the other side intact, already turning to bring tracking systems and tractors to bear on whatever had gotten past her.

Verstappen's hands flew over her console. If she'd only had more time, time to really evaluate the wreckage before they physically intercepted it, she would have been far better placed to prioritize threats. As it was, she had to do it on the fly, and perspiration beaded her forehead. At their velocity, even with the range of a tug's tractors, they had only seconds—no more than a minute or two, maximum—before their velocity would carry them too far from the debris to do any good.

"Take the queue, Harland!" she barked, pressing the key that locked in her best estimate of threat potentials, and down in Engineering, Harland Wingate and his two assistants went frantically to work.

Quay's tractors stabbed out, no longer powerful, carefully modulated hands making gentle contact with other ships but deliberately overpowered demons, ripping and rending, striking with so much transfer energy that even enormous pieces of debris shattered.

In the one hundred and three seconds they had to work, those tractors destroyed eighteen potentially deadly shards of Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan. Four more looming projectiles were dragged bodily after Quay as she went streaking away from her intercept. There would have been more, but two of her tractors had burned out under the abuse.

* * *

Given how little time Quay had been given, she and her crew did a magnificent job. But magnificent isn't always enough.

Several large pieces got past her, including three at least the size of cruisers, accompanied by a trailing shower of smaller bits and pieces, trailing a de-orbiting arc across the daylight side of Sphinx.

Jonathan_S wrote:
Where does it say the modes ramp up their power (to above their normal baseline)? I don't think they ever do get more power than they were originally getting. (Now during the fluctuation some of the non-damaged nodes might ramp down to a lower power setting and then ramp back up to 100%, but I don't think they ever go to 'overpower' settings where they're getting more than 100% normal power).

The wedge falters because nodes are knocked out, the wedge stabilizes (if it can be stabilized) weaker. Ships that have lost impeller nodes generally suffer reductions in possible acceleration. That would have to be because the wedge is now weaker and so the compensator lacks as deep a 'sump' as it had before, and so can't compensated for as much acceleration.

We don't know whether restoring a node to a still functioning wedge requires the kind of extra power kick that bringing a wedge up does. If so the ship might have to run the wedge at reduced power for a bit to divert sufficient power into the start capacitors to bring a node back online. But if not then as soon as the power supply to the node was repaired it could be brought back in and the wedge strengthened up that bit more.

But even if the remaining nodes were somehow getting more power than before some got knocked out that power would be coming from the ship's reactor(s) -- and if you can 'overdrive' a node I suspect it would come with a higher risk of failure AND a significant reduction in operating life. And the reactor(s) would (presumably) have extra power to send because they don't need to send that power to the offline/destroyed nodes. So instead of sending each alpha node 1/32nd (IIRC) of the alpha node power budget if two were gone you could instead theoretically send each surviving node up to 1/30th of that same power budge.



Also some ships, notably the big Mars class CAs have "over-powered" wedges that are somewhat more powerful than required to accelerate a hull their size to the limits of their compensator. (This was explained in the books as the Peeps hoping to reverse engineer or steal the improved RMN/GSN compensators and when they couldn't it left the wedge over powered. This still had two benefits - 1) they could lose a small number of nodes before suffering any acceleration loss, and 2) they could tow more pods than most CAs.) Note however that the power differences aren't enough that a Mars could survive a wedge collision with another somewhat smaller CA -- you need a lot larger difference in comparative wedge power to make such an impact survivable.