tlb wrote:tlb wrote:The ship could have an active sidewall on the upward side and fire through a gunport.While I will agree that a sidewall without a wedge is not nearly as strong, I find it strange to hear that a sidewall requires a wedge. For example a buckler is a sidewall that is not attached to a wedge. More importantly every gun range uses a sidewall as a backstop (even those on planets) and clearly those do not require a wedge.Jonathan_S wrote:Um, unless it has a spherical bubble sidewall a ship can't have a sidewall active without a wedge active. And activating a wedge while you're on the ground (or in the ocean) is going to end.... badly.
It seems to me that on a ship, they use the same nodes, but they have different generators. So what's the situation?
A buckler is a new and possibly special case. It certainly doesn't stitch into the wedge like a normal sidewall, even like a full bow/stern wall, does. But RFC has not clarified whether or not it still relies on the presence of a wedge. (Though we know that 360 spherical bubble sidewalls do not)
Short Victorious War wrote:The sides of the impeller wedge, unlike its ends, could be closed by gravity sidewalls, a much weaker version of the impeller stress band. A warship's sidewalls were its first and primary line of defense, extremely difficult for missiles to penetrate (though there was an unending race between missiles with better sidewall penetrators and defensive designers' efforts to build ever tougher sidewalls) and invulnerable to even the most powerful energy weapons at ranges in excess of 400,000 to 500,000 kilometers (approximately forty percent of effective range against targets without sidewalls).
[snip]
The Warshawski sail is essentially a highly modified and very powerful impeller stress band projected in the form of a disk at right angles to the hull, not as a wedge above and below it. The sail, which is just as impenetrable as an impeller wedge, extends for three hundred kilometers (as much as five hundred for really large vessels) in all directions. This not only makes chase armaments even more important but also deprives the warship of the protection of its wedge against fire from "above" or "below." Indeed, it deprives a ship even of its sidewalls, for there are no roof and floor for the sidewall to stitch together.
The highlighted final sentence is where it tells us that (normal) sidewalls won't work without a wedge to "stitch" to.
And we're told that again in MoH, for why Ghosts, Sharks, and LDs lack sidewall protection
Mission of Honor wrote:Which, in turn, meant that instead of two broadsides, a spider-drive ship had three... none of which could be protected by the impenetrable barrier of an impeller wedge. That meant both that areas no impeller-drive ship had to armor did require massive armor protection aboard a spider-drive warship and that there was no wedge floor and roof for a side wall to stitch together. And just to make matters even more interesting, the spider drive could not be used through a spherical sidewall like the ones fortresses generated.
Maybe, if a buckler can work while the wedge is down, then you could mount a buckler generator elsewhere to project such a defensive disk. (Mind you a single buckler is less than twice the diameter of a ship's maximum beam -- so it's going to protect only a small fraction of the length of its flank. And we don't know if you can merge them together or overlap them)
OTOH since a buckler is described as the first stage of a two stage bow wall - and we're told in SoS that the forward impellers have to be designed to be compatible with a bow wall generator (you need to gut the forward impeller room to refit one) - so maybe even the buckler requires compatible impellers and so wouldn't work if they weren't powered up.