What's the chance of a Streek Drive Super Dreadnought?

Charles83 wrote:

kzt wrote:

Cronicler wrote:Also on a similar tangent, the existing prime trade zones are based on the WHJs, negating the advantages of Steak drive.

Even if RMMM switched to medium-rare steak drive, it would take some time (a decade or two is my guess) for the overall interstellar economy to grow big enough to support the new developments.

I think the steak drive is in another Weber series. :)

Yeah i think so too, probably a series where they use dogs to move some gigantic hamster wheels on the engine room and need to be feed with steak

Probably. I think the primary tactical doctrine involves perpendicular ramming, too. (T-Bone collisions...) :)

jchilds wrote:
Yeah i think so too, probably a series where they use dogs to move some gigantic hamster wheels on the engine room and need to be feed with steak

Probably. I think the primary tactical doctrine involves perpendicular ramming, too. (T-Bone collisions...) :)[/quote]


Just dogs? I would think, that being Manticorans, they would have trained Hexapumas, or If the beowulfans, with their great advancement in biosciences, to have Tyrannosaurs or Raptors. And the beasties will be wearing pirate hats, and have a robot ninja engineer to feed them and look after them...... =D

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Its not paranoia if its justified....
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JohnRoth;
I was thinking about the available stuff to fill the cargo holds. Thanks to the general corruption, we know that there isn't much exportable production in most of the systems.

What good is faster transport capability if there isn't enough stuff to fill your holds when you get there?

The author doesn't agree with you. Honor among enemies among other books.

There is nothing "real world science" about hyper space. It is whatever the author wishes.

TheMonster wrote:

Relax wrote:Oh dear. Its not bands. It band. Singular. Sorry for confusion. It is BANDS when you cross multiple hyper walls.

But in other contexts, a "band" of hyperspace is treated as more than a single entity, as if additional translations carry a ship through "sub-bands" or some damn thing without crossing a "wall" to the next "band".

Regardless of the precise terminology, the idea that moving from Alpha to Beta is a "longer" step than going from N-space to Alpha, and each additional step is progressively longer than the last, fits into other things we're familiar with from real-world science.

Here's the most detailed description of a hyper translation that we get in the books, from Honor of the Queen. It's a downward translation, and a relatively gentle one:
The translation from n-space to hyper was speed critical—at anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apart—but the reverse wasn’t true. Which didn’t make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn’t a factor as far as hardware was concerned...
...
“Mark!” DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless’s hyper generator became a basso growl.
Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.
Her readouts stopped blinking. The visual display was suddenly still, filled once more with the unwinking pinpricks of normal-space stars, the sense of nausea faded almost as quickly as it had come, and HMS Fearless’s velocity had dropped in less than ten minutes from ninety thousand kilometers per second to a bare hundred and forty.

So, this definitely describes multiple layers of hyperspace within each band; covers the fact that speed is a) not critical during the downward translation, b) is critical during the upward translation, and c) is lost during the translation, quite rapidly. It also tells us how long to translate across four bands of hyperspace - ten minutes.

Werrf wrote:Here's the most detailed description of a hyper translation that we get in the books, from Honor of the Queen. It's a downward translation, and a relatively gentle one:
The translation from n-space to hyper was speed critical—at anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apart—but the reverse wasn’t true. Which didn’t make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn’t a factor as far as hardware was concerned...
...
“Mark!” DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless’s hyper generator became a basso growl.
Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.
Her readouts stopped blinking. The visual display was suddenly still, filled once more with the unwinking pinpricks of normal-space stars, the sense of nausea faded almost as quickly as it had come, and HMS Fearless’s velocity had dropped in less than ten minutes from ninety thousand kilometers per second to a bare hundred and forty.

So, this definitely describes multiple layers of hyperspace within each band; covers the fact that speed is a) not critical during the downward translation, b) is critical during the upward translation, and c) is lost during the translation, quite rapidly. It also tells us how long to translate across four bands of hyperspace - ten minutes.

For your b) above, the speed is only critical if the ship is going from normal (n) space to hyper space (the alpha band). Once in the alpha band (or higher bands), a ship can cross the the wall of the next higher band at speeds exceeding 30% of the speed of light (in the hyper band).

More Than Honor, The Universe of Honor Harrington, (1) Background (General) wrote:Since .3 c (approx. 89,907.6 km./sec.) was the maximum velocity at which an "upward" translation into hyper-space could be made, the maximum initial velocity in hyper-space was .024 c (or 7,192.6 km./sec.). Making translation at speeds as high as .3 c was a rough experience and not particularly safe. The loss rate at .3 c was over 10%; dropping translation velocity to .23 c virtually eliminated ship losses in initial translation, and, since the difference in initial hyper velocity was less than 1,700 KPS, most captains routinely made translation at the lower speed. Even today, only military commanders in emergency conditions will make upward translation at .3 c. There is no safe upper speed on "downward" translations. That is, a ship may translate from hyper-space to normal-space at any hyper-space velocity without risking destruction. (Which is not to say that the crews enjoy the experience or that it does not impose enormous wear and tear on hyper generators.) Further, translation from one hyper band to a higher band (see below) may be made at any velocity up to and including .6 c. No vessel may exceed .6 c in hyper (.8 in normal-space) because radiation and particle shields cannot protect them or their passengers at higher velocities.

Boldface is my emphasis.

Good Grief I am going senile I swear. 2 goobers in one week. Next I will state some other obsurdity. Sigh. Sorry. Just read HAE(favorite book). Last chapter says, alpha bands, delta bands, gamma bands. All 3 with the added 's' on the end. Says translating through. Would indicate one does not recharge each band but only each hyper wall.

So hyper is clearly, Alpha WALL, alpha bands, Bravo wall, bravo bands, etc. What he means by "bands" who knows. Lower band = lower velocity multiplier it would seem etc.

Relax wrote:Good Grief I am going senile I swear. 2 goobers in one week. Next I will state some other obsurdity. Sigh. Sorry. Just read HAE(favorite book). Last chapter says, alpha bands, delta bands, gamma bands. All 3 with the added 's' on the end. Says translating through. Would indicate one does not recharge each band but only each hyper wall.

Honestly, I wouldn't even say you recharge at each wall; the text from Honor of the Queen talks about translation going faster after crossing the wall. There's no mention of stopping to cycle the generator, and the timing is also wrong for that - we have a Pearl indicating that it takes at least four minutes to cycle the hyper generator of an SD, and here we have a convoy of freighters without military drives or generators crossing four bands in ten minutes. It appears that crossing the wall from N-Space to H-Space takes a fully charged hyper generator, but once you are in hyper, moving between bands is a fairly routine procedure and doesn't need extra charging.

Here's a Pearl discussing Hyper operation.

Relax wrote:So hyper is clearly, Alpha WALL, alpha bands, Bravo wall, bravo bands, etc. What he means by "bands" who knows. Lower band = lower velocity multiplier it would seem etc.

Beta, not Bravo (sorry) :)

The way I imagine it is this:
The universe is a ball, consisting of a thick outer skin, then water inside separated into layers by thin membranes, like balloons. Normal Space is the surface of the ball. It takes a lot of effort to move from the surface of the ball into the water beneath, but once you're down there distances to any point on the ball's surface are shorter, and you can move up and down in the water relatively easily. You're in the Alpha bands. Move deeper, and you bounce off the first balloon inside, but you can pierce it and access the Beta bands; distances are shorter, but water pressure is greater. Again, you can move easily up and down in the water, but move too deep and you bounce off the Gamma wall...etc.

Dunno if that helps, or if it's anything like what DW imagines, but it's how I interpret things.

Werrf wrote:Honestly, I wouldn't even say you recharge at each wall; the text from Honor of the Queen talks about translation going faster after crossing the wall.

Here's where the notion of having built up some speed seems to make sense. If some of the bleed-off is used to convert motion in n-space into the translation along the hyper "dimension", then ships already booking along at a huge fraction of C can make a downward translation faster than those going from rest in n-space can make upward translations.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any textev that explicitly explains any of this. It just happens to be easy to infer it from the HotQ reference.

TheMonster wrote:

Werrf wrote:Honestly, I wouldn't even say you recharge at each wall; the text from Honor of the Queen talks about translation going faster after crossing the wall.

Here's where the notion of having built up some speed seems to make sense. If some of the bleed-off is used to convert motion in n-space into the translation along the hyper "dimension", then ships already booking along at a huge fraction of C can make a downward translation faster than those going from rest in n-space can make upward translations.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any textev that explicitly explains any of this. It just happens to be easy to infer it from the HotQ reference.

That's an interesting theory, except that it doesn't explain why you suddenly lose velocity when you hit a Wall between dimensional bands, even if you continue going upward or downward in bands.