Honorverse ramblings and musings

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:[
You'd get twice the missile capacity from one point source in space and a significant increase in energy batteries that can be brought to bear. Presumably, you'd also get twice the throw weight?

OTOH, you'd lose twice everything with a golden bb. I'd like to know what the WDB would actually say about it. Then cross reference it with Harrington.

Can a single SD be built at twice the size, faster than two normal sized SDs? What will the cost comparison yield between a double-sized SD and two current sized?

In an era of Superior Manty missile range paired with Apollo missiles and a screen, diminished acceleration isn't going to matter as much.

A lion will slow down for a cheetah any day. A lion that can project its power as an Apollo armed SD will slow down for several.

Perhaps the untapped tactical potential of Apollo is great enough to offset a decrease in acceleration advantage.

First, one of the earlier posters was incorrect; it's compensators not impellers that limit acceleration above 8-9 mtons. Even a 16 mton fort uses impellers; however it has to use grav plates to counter the acceleration as its way off the edge of the compensator effeciency cliff. Once you go past that inflection point a compensator loses something like 1g if acceleration for ever extra 2500 tons.

Now one issue with building a 16-18 mton Apollo ship is that while the volume to carry missile pods went way up the surface area to mount fire control antenna, PDLCs, CM tubes, sensors, etc grows much slower than the volume. A pair of Invictus SD(P)s can together probably fire and control more point defense than a singe double-sized super-SD(P).

Also, to play my own devil's advocate, as found in the design of the A380 Airbus - a "similar" problem in that every time you increase the size, the weight increases more than the size.

Theemile wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm sure it doesn't work this way, and I'm even more sure that someone has already considered it. But, just in case, (and to suffer bringing my-mere-mortal self up to speed should you not mind), concentrating effort on the first limiting factor from above 1)volume overhead - since current ship designs enjoy a significant decrease in manned crew and since compensator efficiency depends on the two items above, why can't a double sized SD be designed where only the necessary areas of a ship are brought under compensator effect -- manned and computer sections? Since humans and computers are what seems to be effected. Why does the volume of the entire ship have to be covered? Design a new generation SD where only the crew and computers are contained within sections that will be under compensator effect. As akin to when less than 100 % of early ships were pressurized or 'spin-gravitized'.

Am I barking up the wrong gravity well?

2 words

STRUCTURAL FAILURE

you have one point in a structure with no force on it and the point next to it is under 608G s of acceleration - or in a Grav wav, ~3000 Gs of stress. and its on - and it's off - on - off - on - off.

Eventually something is going to break - pretty spectacularly - and at the wrong time.

In the spin section ships, the entire ship was compensated - the spin was to add 1G (or so) to certain areas of the ship for human comfort - this was before grav plates existed to add the 1G for univerisal Human hability in 1 G.

cthia wrote:I agree structural failure would be a real copper-plated Ransom of a concern, as also opined by pnakasone some five posts upwind.

I initially considered it before I suggested such a thing, but assumed this would be a new design that would take this problem into account, with plenty of extra volume to reinforce where necessary -- and because textev already gives a total failure at damaging only fragile systems (computers, etc.) and humans. If going from 600+ Gs of compensation to virtually nil in a second doesn't damage the structure, I think we're off to a good start. No?

Plus, treat the effected areas as deep-sea divers facing the "bends." To prevent the "structural bends" decrease decompensation gradually.

Learn from life.

There wouldn't be any on-off-on-off in that manner. Only off, effect repairs and back on. If the areas in question can be gradually decompensated as my previous post describes, I think the robustness of an SD can take it. They somewhat endure something similar during a barrage of laser heads anyways...

SoS - Prologue

Her target staggered as the deadly blast of energy, dozens of times more powerful than even a ship of the wall's laser heads, sledgehammered into her. It was as if she had run into a rock in space.

cthia wrote:There wouldn't be any on-off-on-off in that manner. Only off, effect repairs and back on. If the areas in question can be gradually decompensated as my previous post describes, I think the robustness of an SD can take it. They somewhat endure something similar during a barrage of laser heads anyways...

SoS - Prologue

Her target staggered as the deadly blast of energy, dozens of times more powerful than even a ship of the wall's laser heads, sledgehammered into her. It was as if she had run into a rock in space.

Yes the SD could possibly take it, if it never went into combat. Essentially, you are designing in a point of failure, since SDs will take combat damage and must remain in action. Imagine your compromised SD suddenly effectively running into that rock in space (the combat damage it experienced in the quote). The SD now has to deal with a dynamic (shock) load on the compromised sections that are already under a static load. And as many of the engineers on these forums have pointed out, the ability of any material to withstand a sudden dynamic (shock) load is many times less than its ability to withstand a static load (especially when the materials already are under a static load).

In the Honorverse, this is know as deliberately designing so that Bad Things will happen (golden BBs). The RMN has had experience (in one of the Manticore Ascendent books) where it had to refit some of its ships so that Bad Things would happen--and they did, with catastrophic results. And it wasn't even under combat conditions.

And this completely ignores the additional cost of repairing/replacing the sections that will fail unless replaced. It also completely ignores the additional time (which is also money) that the repairs/replacement of the sections that are not compensated will take, and your SDs are now in yard hands after every time the ship completes acceleration (OK, a slight exaggeration. But only a very slight exaggeration.) Which will increase the number of SDs you will require to maintain a fleet ready for/in action, not just a fleet in existence, thereby drastically increasing the cost of your total fleet.

The whole idea sounds something like former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would have dreamed up. But even he would agree the idea is a non-starter, simply because of the insane amount (total system cost--additional labor for repair/replacement, additional parts cost including maintaining the inventory, additional ship required compared to having the whole ship compensated, additional crew manning costs, and on, and on, and on) the idea would end up costing over a more conventional approach to ship design.

Military service and combat is inherently risky. But you don't accept unnecessary risks for little or no return. Instead you minimize the risks you have to take while attempting to maximize the return. For the non-sociopathic armchair naval architect, a useful non-financial question to ask yourself is: Would it be acceptable for me to have the person I love the most in the universe (spouse, child, parent or someone else) serving half their life aboard the ship design in question, under all (including and especially the worst) possible scenarios/situations it might encounter, knowing that I've designed the best possible ship for the mission. If the answer is not a resounding YES, then you are almost certainly doing it wrong.

The simplicity of covering the entire ship with the compensator rather then trying to deal with the issues of different parts of the ship being under different accelerations. You only need to be concerned with the compensator failing rather then all the extra stuff you put into the ship.

David has explicitly stated you can only have one compensator per ship.

cthia wrote:There wouldn't be any on-off-on-off in that manner. Only off, effect repairs and back on. If the areas in question can be gradually decompensated as my previous post describes, I think the robustness of an SD can take it. They somewhat endure something similar during a barrage of laser heads anyways...

SoS - Prologue

Her target staggered as the deadly blast of energy, dozens of times more powerful than even a ship of the wall's laser heads, sledgehammered into her. It was as if she had run into a rock in space.

Vince wrote:Yes the SD could possibly take it, if it never went into combat. Essentially, you are designing in a point of failure, since SDs will take combat damage and must remain in action. Imagine your compromised SD suddenly effectively running into that rock in space (the combat damage it experienced in the quote). The SD now has to deal with a dynamic (shock) load on the compromised sections that are already under a static load. And as many of the engineers on these forums have pointed out, the ability of any material to withstand a sudden dynamic (shock) load is many times less than its ability to withstand a static load (especially when the materials already are under a static load).

In the Honorverse, this is know as deliberately designing so that Bad Things will happen (golden BBs). The RMN has had experience (in one of the Manticore Ascendent books) where it had to refit some of its ships so that Bad Things would happen--and they did, with catastrophic results. And it wasn't even under combat conditions.

And this completely ignores the additional cost of repairing/replacing the sections that will fail unless replaced. It also completely ignores the additional time (which is also money) that the repairs/replacement of the sections that are not compensated will take, and your SDs are now in yard hands after every time the ship completes acceleration (OK, a slight exaggeration. But only a very slight exaggeration.) Which will increase the number of SDs you will require to maintain a fleet ready for/in action, not just a fleet in existence, thereby drastically increasing the cost of your total fleet.

The whole idea sounds something like former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would have dreamed up. But even he would agree the idea is a non-starter, simply because of the insane amount (total system cost--additional labor for repair/replacement, additional parts cost including maintaining the inventory, additional ship required compared to having the whole ship compensated, additional crew manning costs, and on, and on, and on) the idea would end up costing over a more conventional approach to ship design.

Military service and combat is inherently risky. But you don't accept unnecessary risks for little or no return. Instead you minimize the risks you have to take while attempting to maximize the return. For the non-sociopathic armchair naval architect, a useful non-financial question to ask yourself is: Would it be acceptable for me to have the person I love the most in the universe (spouse, child, parent or someone else) serving half their life aboard the ship design in question, under all (including and especially the worst) possible scenarios/situations it might encounter, knowing that I've designed the best possible ship for the mission. If the answer is not a resounding YES, then you are almost certainly doing it wrong.

Your points make sense to me. I respectfully withdraw the submission from the WDB, in Hemphill-like fashion.

cthia wrote:There wouldn't be any on-off-on-off in that manner. Only off, effect repairs and back on. If the areas in question can be gradually decompensated as my previous post describes, I think the robustness of an SD can take it. They somewhat endure something similar during a barrage of laser heads anyways...

SoS - Prologue

Her target staggered as the deadly blast of energy, dozens of times more powerful than even a ship of the wall's laser heads, sledgehammered into her. It was as if she had run into a rock in space.

I saw you already withdrew the idea, but I already had a few tidbits to offer.
Unless some radically new breakthrough in compensators changes things (very unlikely) compensators are all or nothing; there's no partial compesnation or gradual decompensation. Either it's working and 100% of the accel is compensated, or it's off/failed and 0% of the acceleration is compensated.

Also, while you can tweak the size and shape of the elongated spheroid compensator field a bit, you can't make it discontinuous. So if you had a partially compensated ship you can't pick which area get compensated; it will be the outer compartements, hull, surface sensors/arrays, etc that lacked compensation. I doubt even if the structure can handle it that many of those surface mount items (or missiles moving across the acceleration discontinuity) would appreciate being constantly subject to such high accelerations.

Honorverse ships are absurdly strong. Consider why you would possibly design the deck under a 10,000 ton fusion reactor to support well over 6 million tons. Under what circumstances would it ever susptain such a load? Then consider how much additional material and space the required enormous girders and massively thick deck plating needs. It would be like designing a 747 that could survive flying into Mount Everest, just in case.

But this is what the Honorverse does all the time.

Jonathan_S wrote:Also, while you can tweak the size and shape of the elongated spheroid compensator field a bit, you can't make it discontinuous. So if you had a partially compensated ship you can't pick which area get compensated; it will be the outer compartements, hull, surface sensors/arrays, etc that lacked compensation. I doubt even if the structure can handle it that many of those surface mount items (or missiles moving across the acceleration discontinuity) would appreciate being constantly subject to such high accelerations.

It's worth noting that the outer surface of a starship tends to be slathered with sensors. As systems that will be relatively vulnerable to a bujillion gravities of uncompensated acceleration go, they're likely not far behind flag officers. A 16 mton ship that starts off its 50g acceleration and immediately becomes utterly blind does not represent the implacable cutting edge of ultimate military power.

Ok, if you guys have had your fill of ribbing me for my last suggestion ... or to run concurrently ...

Shadow of Saganami - Ch. 2 wrote:At 483,000 tons, Hexapuma was sixty-one percent larger than the Star Knight-class ships which had been the Navy's newest, latest—and largest—heavy cruisers before what people were beginning to call the First Havenite War. Yet despite the increase in tonnage, and a vast increase in firepower, her ship's company was tiny compared to a Star Knight's. In fact, the way the decreased manpower and life support requirements had freed up mass was as much the reason for her increased combat power as the improvements in weapons technology.

I don't recall, did the RHN ever manage to cut its crewing requirements as well? Which, if they didn't, it couldn't have translated into more available mass for increased combat power.

And, if not, then automation would also be a part of the tech transfer.