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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

White Haven's double-transit to Basilisk

Someone has suggested that Hamish missed a bet during his emergency Junction transit to Basilisk by not "ganging" his lighter units into the mass equivalent of, say, single superdreadnoughts and sending them through in a series of "mini-mass transits" in order to get all of them through in the time available to him. Did he, or not?

 

No, he didn't. Yes, he could have sent them through in groups. There was, however, no real point in doing so. He had the ships transit in the order in which they arrived, and the fact that the lighter units had higher acceleration rates, meant that they got there first. So he sent them through in a tightly-sequenced stream which he then interrupted as soon as his wallers began to arrive. Theoretically, he could have gotten a somewhat higher number of lighter units through using the proposed technique, but he got virtually all of his escorts through the Junction anyway. That is, he didn't have a significantly higher number of them than he got through the transit process. In addition, while a mass transit is entirely feasible, it isn't an easy thing to arrange on the fly, as it were. It requires very precise station-keeping of all the units involved in the transit, and the consequences if even one of them strays out of its position can be… extreme. So Hamish chose to avoid the risks involved in a hastily arranged mass transit, and assumed -- correctly -- that any of his screening units which he failed to get through before his wallers started pushing them out of the queue would have added only a negligible amount to his actual combat power. Certainly, what they might have added would not have been sufficient to offset the potential loss of life and the destruction of ships involved in a mass transit which hiccuped.