Archives
| Title | Posted |
|---|---|
| Unmanned LACs | Aug 2004 |
| Honor's Second Marsh strategy | Aug 2004 |
| c-Fractional missile attack plan | Aug 2004 |
| Energy-siphon effect | Aug 2004 |
| How big is a recon drone? | Aug 2004 |
| Wedge interaction | Aug 2004 |
| Counter-missile pods and two-stage counter-missiles | Aug 2004 |
| Wedge-killer missiles | Aug 2004 |
| Masada and the Eridani Edict | Jul 2004 |
| <em>Medusa-Bs</em> | Jun 2004 |
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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.
Compensator failure
- Series: Honorverse
- Date: October 31, 2004
On the compensator issue. No, it isn't possible to kill power to the wedge quickly enough to save the crew's lives in the event of compensator failure. And, no, compensator failures aren't "elastic" enough to permit any sort of controlled shut down or additional inertia dumping to save the crew, either.
The sump is a little elastic, which is how you can at least try to take a compensator beyond its rated top limit and maybe survive, as Honor did on her middy cruise. The odds of doing so are… poor.
I think I've said before that compensator failures are all or nothing. If I haven't also said specifically that they're effectively instantaneous events, I should have. The sump's limits can be strained and even theoretically exceeded -- briefly! -- without the compensator necessarily failing, but the instant it decides to shut down, it dies completely and catastrophically, and with absolutely no detectable warning signs. Either it's working perfectly, even if temporarily in excess of its designed maximum load, or the crew is anchovy paste. On or off. A binary solution.
