The roof and belly of a ship is naked... here's a fix.

Uroboros wrote:The only place I can see a turret being useful is in a pinnace, during air-to-ground operations. In space, the ships can probably turn faster than a turret could, and give gunners a better angle of fire. As well, turrets require a lot more space per weapon than a fixed emplacement. They require the mechanisms to move, as well as the extra space to move around in. I don't think it'd be wise to turret anything on ships, since the installations are already freaking massive.

Besides, the only place a turret would actually be useful is during energy combat. And that's not been seen in a long while, aside from Chatterjee's destroyers getting ambushed.

I agree with all of your points except one. Ships do not turn faster than a turret. It takes a destroyer 100 seconds to turn 90 degrees, and a superdreadnought takes 12 minutes to turn 90 degrees. If you are talking about spinning on the long axis, it takes time for a ship to get up a good rotational speed. Even when they do, ships larger than a cruiser cannot roll fast enough to roll 360 degrees in the time in the time it takes to reload missiles. A turret can turn faster than a ship. It's just that a Manticoran ship doesn't need to any more.

SWM wrote: It takes a destroyer 100 seconds to turn 90 degrees, and a superdreadnought takes 12 minutes to turn 90 degrees.

Why so long? Shouldn't the ship's fusion thrusters be able to give over 100 gs of acceleration? That would mean turning a superdreadnought around would take a mere 2 seconds. Hell, even with only a single gravity of acceleration an SD should be able to turn in about 25 seconds.

That's for directional thrusters mind, not using the wedge for the maneuver.

Belial666 wrote:

SWM wrote: It takes a destroyer 100 seconds to turn 90 degrees, and a superdreadnought takes 12 minutes to turn 90 degrees.

Why so long? Shouldn't the ship's fusion thrusters be able to give over 100 gs of acceleration? That would mean turning a superdreadnought around would take a mere 2 seconds. Hell, even with only a single gravity of acceleration an SD should be able to turn in about 25 seconds.

That's for directional thrusters mind, not using the wedge for the maneuver.

I can't say why it takes so long. I'm just telling you what David Weber has told us. Check out the bottom paragraph of http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/128/1.

SWM wrote:I can't say why it takes so long. I'm just telling you what David Weber has told us. Check out the bottom paragraph of http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/128/1.

Because big sailing ships under sail maneuver a lot slower then small ships. And because reasons.

kzt wrote:

SWM wrote:I can't say why it takes so long. I'm just telling you what David Weber has told us. Check out the bottom paragraph of http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/128/1.

Because big sailing ships under sail maneuver a lot slower then small ships. And because reasons.

LOL, yeah.


Though using thrusters an SD would still be a lot slower than a destroyer. I mean, the destroyer would make the turn in half a second, not four seconds.

Belial666 wrote:

SWM wrote: It takes a destroyer 100 seconds to turn 90 degrees, and a superdreadnought takes 12 minutes to turn 90 degrees.

Why so long? Shouldn't the ship's fusion thrusters be able to give over 100 gs of acceleration? That would mean turning a superdreadnought around would take a mere 2 seconds. Hell, even with only a single gravity of acceleration an SD should be able to turn in about 25 seconds.

That's for directional thrusters mind, not using the wedge for the maneuver.

Probably a difference in design - enough thrusters and reaction mass to spin a 100-200kton ship is much less than that of a 8,500kton ship. Yes, the SD's thrusters are scaled up, but not proportionately as this eats into volume and surface area of the ship.

Hypothetically, if a DD devoted 4% of its mass to maneuvering thrusters and a SD devoted .5%, then a 8.5mt ship's thrusters are 12.5% as effective as the 100kton destroyer's. Obviously, those are not accurate numbers, for illustration purposes only. The infodump figure of 100 seconds to 12 minutes suggests the effectiveness figure is 13.9%.

Sure, but it still doesn't explain why a destroyer would be so very slow in the first place - and we got no evidence that it's actually the case.

Honor's ships in Cerberus were capable of well over 100 gs on reaction thrusters. That would allow them to roll or turn 180 degrees in 4 seconds flat. Even if the directional thrusters were a mere 1/100 as powerful, they'd still be able to roll or turn 180 degrees in 25 seconds.



Think of it this way; once it started falling, the World Trade Center only took seconds to fall under 1 standard gravity. A superdreadnought is 2,5 times longer, so it takes about 50% longer.
Even the weakest thrusters in the Honorverse are capable of much higher accelerations than that.

Duckk wrote:The dorsal and ventral aspects are already jam packed with stuff that you can't stick an appreciable amount of firepower on them. It's not worth the engineering headaches of finding a place to the turrets while still maintaining the necessary open aspects for sensors, comms, etc, nor figuring out how to best armor and feed those weapons. The weapons are in the broadsides for a very good reason.

With missiles perhaps but with energy weapons: Not really. Lets look at an SD: lets say a ship has 4 grazers in her broadside & 2 each in her chase mounts. That’s 12 grazers carried. Now if you mounted 1 turret each on the upper & lower bow & stern. That’s only 4 turrets with only 4 guns but with the same broadside, and the same chase battery (that’s why modern ships use them). But you would free up all the space on the hull side & ends where the grazers were (more than enough for the sensors removed from the top & bottom of the hull). In addition you would free up a lot of internal space where these mounts were and pod-noughts would be able to have aft chase batteries without interfering with the launch doors.

There's one big assumption you're making here: That a starship-scale energy weapon is small enough to make a turreted mount feasible. You are also assuming that a turret mount is able to achieve the same accuracy as a fixed mount (Honorverse weapons are unbelievably accurate). Then there's the assumption that there's a worthwhile amount of tonnage to be gained by rearranging those weapon mounts.

The big problem however is that you're expending effort to make a ship that is better at performing in a tactical situation that is increasingly unlikely to occur.

Plus there's the little assumption that you can fire out of your broadside at all, what with the lack of gunports and all.