What happens to all that debris?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:You dropped the ball upstream following the conversation. Protect from oxygen, if pressurization is the norm along with a breathable atmosphere. Which, btw Jonathan, if there is a small crew aboard it is going to be a bitch to have to perform their duties in a spacesuit all of the time in a nitrogen environment.

But again, if there was a small crew aboard thousands of ships, Honor killed a lot of unnecessary people needlessly.

Again, what oxygen? There's none on the outside and we talked about having a pure nitrogen atmosphere on the inside.

Yes, that makes it impossible to do shortsleeve working, but is that necessary? How often must a live crew board a ship, instead of sending remotes for inspection? If they must come on-board to repair, can't they then and only then pump oxygen in, then remove again? And only to the portions that they need access to?

I am factoring in how things work in the real world. It was posited that nominal reactor power must be available. If there is a single reactor there must be a warm body to keep it from running away. There must also be available power for the environmental systems to monitor and keep the ships pressurized with nitrogen. Since these ships are in orbit, there must also be power to fire thrusters when the orbit decays. That sounds like a full-time skeleton crew. And a full-time crew needs oxygen. They are not going to sleep in a space suit.

I suppose the orbit of thousands of ships can be monitored and corrected from a facility in orbit, but power must be available aboard this mass of ships to fire thrusters and receive and process commands.

This is why I said that early on in the series I assumed the ships were parked in the vastness of space to allow true mothballing without the need to correct orbits or run a skeletal crew to babysit a reactor.

cthia wrote:I am factoring in how things work in the real world. It was posited that nominal reactor power must be available. If there is a single reactor there must be a warm body to keep it from running away. There must also be available power for the environmental systems to monitor and keep the ships pressurized with nitrogen. Since these ships are in orbit, there must also be power to fire thrusters when the orbit decays. That sounds like a full-time skeleton crew. And a full-time crew needs oxygen. They are not going to sleep in a space suit.

That's circular reasoning. You're saying that it needs to have an atmosphere because crew needs to come in because it needs to have a reactor so it can keep an atmosphere.

I doubt that they keep a working reactor or breathable atmosphere aboard at all.

More likely, the ships would be grouped together and tied to an external reactor supplying power through umbilicals. "Shore power" like a ship moored to a space station.

They wouldn't use their own thrusters to keep orbits. They wouldn't even have the propellent inside to do so. Instead, (automated) tugs can do that, either semi-permanently attached to the ship or a roving tug that comes every now and again to nudge them. I don't know if the Jupiter-Ganymede L4 and L5 are stable because of Ganymede's resonance with Io and Europa. But if they are, that's also where I'd put the ships so they don't fall into Jupiter.

Or they're anchored to that shore power delivery system, which raises their orbits as needed.

This external mechanism is a far easier thing to manage, since you can probably supply them from the outside, without having to go through the armour and security mechanisms to gain access to the inside of the ship.

I suppose the orbit of thousands of ships can be monitored and corrected from a facility in orbit, but power must be available aboard this mass of ships to fire thrusters and receive and process commands.

I don't agree.

They may have a trickle of power to keep some air vents running for the minimal atmosphere and for some computers to still be able to run self-diagnostic. But it wouldn't be more than what batteries could deliver in emergency conditions for crew inside. So give them shore power and the reactors can be cold. And drained of fuel.

This is why I said that early on in the series I assumed the ships were parked in the vastness of space to allow true mothballing without the need to correct orbits or run a skeletal crew to babysit a reactor.

Right. Like I said, the Jupiter system is one of the worst possible locations. I don't think there's a stable Lagrange point anywhere there, due to the huge number of moons disturbing every orbit. Maybe Callisto's L2 is somewhat stable, since it's the outermost large moon (the next moon is over 4 radii further out and masses less than a trillion tonnes). But not Ganymede's.

I'd park them on the Venus-Sun L4 or L5. That's well inside the hyperlimit and nowhere close to Earth, Venus or Mars. The closest it gets to anything is 0.27 AU (40 million km) from Earth, just under once an Earth year. Venus is inside the Goldilocks zone so one could build habitats there, but it's close to the inner edge. I expect people would prefer Earth's L4 and L5, both with the Sun and the Moon, as prime real estate first.

But the decision may have been forced on the SLN. Once they had the Ganymede Station, some politician might have passed a bill requiring the Reserve One to be located there...

If I had to stay in the Jupiter system, I'd probably park the ships on a moon. A smaller, outer one so its gravity won't crush the ship and not to close to Jupiter to endanger the ship with Jupiter's radiation belts. Leda and Lysithea look like good candidates.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Pitting by micrometeriorites wouldn't be stopped by a coat of paint either. That's what the armour is there for.

Externally, what I expect the mothball process to do is to ensure all missile tube ports and PDLCs are covered, and if any treatment is required on the hinges and seams, for that to be done too. But the rest of the surface of the ship is probably fine as is.

Though there are exposed bits that would be less happy about micrometeorite damage than the main armor, and those might get removed or covered in additional protective materials as part of mothballing.

I'm thinking of things like the radar and comms antennas, the blades of the grav sensors, or even the impeller nodes. In normal operation the ship would have particle shielding running, which would basically make all of those immune to micrometeorites -- but leave it floating powered down in orbit for a decade or so and you might need to pull and replace a bunch of that stuff if you hadn't taken precautions. Just because damage doesn't make it through the main armor doesn't mean that it isn't degrading to knocking out important ship systesm.

Better to have pulled and warehoused what you can during mothballing, and deploy physical protections (like Whipple shields) over the rest. Yeah, reinstalling things, or removing the protections, would then need to be done before the ship could be operational -- but that's still a fairly small part of the effort you'd already be putting in to reactivate and update a mothballed ship.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:I am factoring in how things work in the real world. It was posited that nominal reactor power must be available. If there is a single reactor there must be a warm body to keep it from running away. There must also be available power for the environmental systems to monitor and keep the ships pressurized with nitrogen. Since these ships are in orbit, there must also be power to fire thrusters when the orbit decays. That sounds like a full-time skeleton crew. And a full-time crew needs oxygen. They are not going to sleep in a space suit.

That's circular reasoning. You're saying that it needs to have an atmosphere because crew needs to come in because it needs to have a reactor so it can keep an atmosphere.

I doubt that they keep a working reactor or breathable atmosphere aboard at all.

More likely, the ships would be grouped together and tied to an external reactor supplying power through umbilicals. "Shore power" like a ship moored to a space station.

They wouldn't use their own thrusters to keep orbits. They wouldn't even have the propellent inside to do so. Instead, (automated) tugs can do that, either semi-permanently attached to the ship or a roving tug that comes every now and again to nudge them. I don't know if the Jupiter-Ganymede L4 and L5 are stable because of Ganymede's resonance with Io and Europa. But if they are, that's also where I'd put the ships so they don't fall into Jupiter.

Or they're anchored to that shore power delivery system, which raises their orbits as needed.

This external mechanism is a far easier thing to manage, since you can probably supply them from the outside, without having to go through the armour and security mechanisms to gain access to the inside of the ship.

The HV has wireless, beamed power transmission. With a sufficient receiver on the mothballed vessel, it doesn't need any physical connections to anything else, just a clear line-of-sight to the supplying transmitter.

As for the idea of restoring a breathable atmosphere in order to carry out periodic maintenance, why bother? It makes for a more comfortable working environment, sure, but the Navy has to train in the conditions it's going to fight in sometimes and that means doing mothball maintenance in skinsuits.

These personnel would not live aboard those reserve vessels, they would live aboard the nearest station or support platform and commute by shuttle.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:I am factoring in how things work in the real world. It was posited that nominal reactor power must be available. If there is a single reactor there must be a warm body to keep it from running away. There must also be available power for the environmental systems to monitor and keep the ships pressurized with nitrogen. Since these ships are in orbit, there must also be power to fire thrusters when the orbit decays. That sounds like a full-time skeleton crew. And a full-time crew needs oxygen. They are not going to sleep in a space suit.

That's circular reasoning. You're saying that it needs to have an atmosphere because crew needs to come in because it needs to have a reactor so it can keep an atmosphere.

I doubt that they keep a working reactor or breathable atmosphere aboard at all.

More likely, the ships would be grouped together and tied to an external reactor supplying power through umbilicals. "Shore power" like a ship moored to a space station.

They wouldn't use their own thrusters to keep orbits. They wouldn't even have the propellent inside to do so. Instead, (automated) tugs can do that, either semi-permanently attached to the ship or a roving tug that comes every now and again to nudge them. I don't know if the Jupiter-Ganymede L4 and L5 are stable because of Ganymede's resonance with Io and Europa. But if they are, that's also where I'd put the ships so they don't fall into Jupiter.

Or they're anchored to that shore power delivery system, which raises their orbits as needed.

This external mechanism is a far easier thing to manage, since you can probably supply them from the outside, without having to go through the armour and security mechanisms to gain access to the inside of the ship.

munroburton wrote:The HV has wireless, beamed power transmission. With a sufficient receiver on the mothballed vessel, it doesn't need any physical connections to anything else, just a clear line-of-sight to the supplying transmitter.

As for the idea of restoring a breathable atmosphere in order to carry out periodic maintenance, why bother? It makes for a more comfortable working environment, sure, but the Navy has to train in the conditions it's going to fight in sometimes and that means doing mothball maintenance in skinsuits.

These personnel would not live aboard those reserve vessels, they would live aboard the nearest station or support platform and commute by shuttle.

Brilliant, munroburton. Both of you. After reading Thinksmarkedly's post, I thought of beamed power as well. A notion I suggested recently in another thread.

Again, I have always wondered about the whole process of mothballing warships. As the image that the term evokes, it should have as painless a process as possible. Personally, I wouldn't think there would be an active reactor aboard. That would require warm bodies permanently. I didn't think they would be pressurized either as that also requires regular inspection. And also, I never thought about nitrogen as the gas used to resist corrosion. So, beamed power would seem to solve a lot of problems.

I also questioned the use of nitrogen as the gas because of the frequency that crew would need to work aboard ship, but it makes sense that it could be used as a training opportunity. I also wondered about making certain repairs in a nitrogen environment, like welds. Certain welds require shielding gasses. I don't think nitrogen would be a problem, certainly in the HV.

However, I am still not certain I am comfortable with the overall safety of the logistics. A ship developing a major leak in its pressurized hull may act as a thruster sending an SD into its neighboring consorts causing a chain reaction and a resultant pile up on Aisle 1.

And I didn't think the orbits of so many warships could be made stable enough around Jupiter and its hinky local celestial mechanics. And, there simply can't be thousands of SDs orbiting about a single planet. And in four different clusters? Painlessly?

cthia wrote:However, I am still not certain I am comfortable with the overall safety of the logistics. A ship developing a major leak in its pressurized hull may act as a thruster sending an SD into its neighboring consorts causing a chain reaction and a resultant pile up on Aisle 1.

Sure. You only have a decade to catch it, though. So if you can't do that, you have bigger problems.

Use Tsiolkovski's rocket equation to calculate just how much air leaking out of a hole and how fast is required to move a 7-million-tonne ship.

Just don't use that to calculate how Honor accelerated her ships at Cerberus.

And I didn't think the orbits of so many warships could be made stable enough around Jupiter and its hinky local celestial mechanics. And, there simply can't be thousands of SDs orbiting about a single planet. And in four different clusters? Painlessly?

Right and that's a much bigger problem. As posted above, there's a lot of gravitational influences for orbits to be stable for long. You have the 1:2:4 resonance between Io, Europa and Ganymede, meaning the inner two will pull on anything in the L1, L3, L4 and L5, while Callisto will pull on the L2 on the far side of Ganymede. You will need active maintenance of the orbits. That doesn't mean a thruster running all the time, but it does mean puffs of gas or a nudge by a tug every couple of months or a year.

Those four moons are big enough that there's little large debris around in their orbit, though (Ganymede is the ninth most massive body in the Solar system, bigger than Mercury). But small debris that has yet to settle? There must be plenty enough for ships that are going to be stored for decades.

Anyway, textev doesn't say four different clusters. It says twenty-four. It also says 2700 missiles, but not the ship count, neither before or destroyed (just the vague "thousands" destroyed). I've maintained that Reserve One wasn't the full 8000 mothballed SD count. It's probably the biggest reserve, but if there are 3 reserves, that could be just 3000-3500 ships. So if Honor's 2700 missiles killed 2500 ships, message delivered and received.

And 3600 is neatly divisible by 24, for 150 ships at 15° intervals around Jupiter.

So, two more snips from Uncompromising Honor.. right near my earlier post. The SDs are in 24 clusters in orbit of Jupiter WITH Ganymead. and there were 1,249 shipkillers that went in and delivered their warheads.

from Uncompromising Honor

Of the other twenty-four hundred, Andrea Jaruwalski had dedicated a full quarter as EW and penaid platforms. So there were a total of “only” eighteen hundred actual shipkillers in that tide of death.
Naval Station Ganymede fired well over two hundred thousand counter-missiles at them, backed by more than four thousand point defense clusters, most far larger than any mobile structure mounted. They were more powerful, there were more of them, and their software had been continuously tweaked since the Battle of New Tuscany.
And they still weren’t good enough.
The defenders killed 811 Mark 23s, but 260 of them were penetration platforms. In the end, 1,249 of the most powerful laser heads ever deployed punched straight through the very best the Solarian League Navy could throw at them. They drove in on their targets and then, in one perfectly synchronized instant, they detonated.

break break break

“A message,” Haeckle said softly. “They were sending a message.”
His brain raced. He hadn’t even thought about the thousands of obsolescent superdreadnoughts parked in the twenty-four, equidistantly spaced clusters riding Jupiter orbit with Ganymede. Why should he have? If the Manties had proved one thing, it was that those pre-pod fossils were deathtraps waiting to happen. They knew that even better than the SLN, so why in God’s name should they have even considered wasting missile fire on ships which were already inevitably destined for the breakers?

Brigade XO wrote:So, two more snips from Uncompromising Honor.. right near my earlier post. The SDs are in 24 clusters in orbit of Jupiter WITH Ganymead. and there were 1,249 shipkillers that went in and delivered their warheads.

from Uncompromising Honor

Of the other twenty-four hundred, Andrea Jaruwalski had dedicated a full quarter as EW and penaid platforms. So there were a total of “only” eighteen hundred actual shipkillers in that tide of death.
Naval Station Ganymede fired well over two hundred thousand counter-missiles at them, backed by more than four thousand point defense clusters, most far larger than any mobile structure mounted. They were more powerful, there were more of them, and their software had been continuously tweaked since the Battle of New Tuscany.
And they still weren’t good enough.
The defenders killed 811 Mark 23s, but 260 of them were penetration platforms. In the end, 1,249 of the most powerful laser heads ever deployed punched straight through the very best the Solarian League Navy could throw at them. They drove in on their targets and then, in one perfectly synchronized instant, they detonated.

break break break

“A message,” Haeckle said softly. “They were sending a message.”
His brain raced. He hadn’t even thought about the thousands of obsolescent superdreadnoughts parked in the twenty-four, equidistantly spaced clusters riding Jupiter orbit with Ganymede. Why should he have? If the Manties had proved one thing, it was that those pre-pod fossils were deathtraps waiting to happen. They knew that even better than the SLN, so why in God’s name should they have even considered wasting missile fire on ships which were already inevitably destined for the breakers?

At least this demonstration launch wasn't a total waste of Manticoran resources.

Does anyone disagree that a lot of spacers died when the reserve died?

Brigade XO wrote:from Uncompromising Honor
“A message,” Haeckle said softly. “They were sending a message.”
His brain raced. He hadn’t even thought about the thousands of obsolescent superdreadnoughts parked in the twenty-four, equidistantly spaced clusters riding Jupiter orbit with Ganymede. Why should he have? If the Manties had proved one thing, it was that those pre-pod fossils were deathtraps waiting to happen. They knew that even better than the SLN, so why in God’s name should they have even considered wasting missile fire on ships which were already inevitably destined for the breakers?

cthia wrote:At least this demonstration launch wasn't a total waste of Manticoran resources.

Does anyone disagree that a lot of spacers died when the reserve died?

If RFC does not tell us how many spacers died, then we simply do not know the death count. If any of us had positive evidence, then there would not have been a discussion about how many could have been on board.

If the demonstration was needed to get the Solarians to abandon the space stations that were to be destroyed, then it was not a waste to destroy useless ships. Otherwise it was.

tlb wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:from Uncompromising Honor
“A message,” Haeckle said softly. “They were sending a message.”
His brain raced. He hadn’t even thought about the thousands of obsolescent superdreadnoughts parked in the twenty-four, equidistantly spaced clusters riding Jupiter orbit with Ganymede. Why should he have? If the Manties had proved one thing, it was that those pre-pod fossils were deathtraps waiting to happen. They knew that even better than the SLN, so why in God’s name should they have even considered wasting missile fire on ships which were already inevitably destined for the breakers?

cthia wrote:At least this demonstration launch wasn't a total waste of Manticoran resources.

Does anyone disagree that a lot of spacers died when the reserve died?

If RFC does not tell us how many spacers died, then we simply do not know the death count. If any of us had positive evidence, then there would not have been a discussion about how many could have been on board.

If the demonstration was needed to get the Solarians to abandon the space stations that were to be destroyed, then it was not a waste to destroy useless ships. Otherwise it was.

I was simply trying to conduct a survey to test the waters regarding posters' "core thoughts" on the matter, as to whether one believes there were any deaths at all. :Sir Shrugs Alot:

If Honor simply wanted to send a message, she could have used the same form of communication that she used against Tourville. Eight octets of octets.* The same sixty-four missiles that she launched at Tourville would have made things quite clear against the defenses of the SL.

* 1 o = 8 bits.

The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as the byte has historically been used for storage units of a variety of sizes. The term octad(e) for eight bits is no longer common.