Light bulb Captured Solly fleet

SWM wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Hate to resume and keep this post alive, but I saw something that sort of made me grin relative to the fact that we figure the best thing to do to get rid of these things is to break them up...

...and, we want to defend the Torch wormhole. So what happens if
in comes the first few MAlign invaders (and get blown up, presumably by a few frigates on station), and instead of counter invading, you simply aim enough of these at that particular location in space but never raise a sail? does the mass limitation come into play while the wormhole stresses tear the thing to shreds, and does the fixed hyperspace wave then toss x-gazillion tons of fragged ship through the other side of the wormhole helter skelter? or do you get nicely busted up raw materials on your end for your miners to salvage?

Things that make you go hmmmmm....

Nothing happens. They fly through that point in space and keep going. They never enter the Wormhole itself, and they do not trigger the mass limitation.

I don't know about the mass limitation, but they don't keep going. They seem? to enter the wormhole, but they never come out:

War of Honor, Chapter 34 wrote:Stop that, she scolded herself. They may never have been tested by another ship, but Kare and his crowd have put over sixty probes into this terminus to compile the readings your precious numbers are based on! Which was true, as far as it went. On the other hand, she reflected with another almost-smile, not a single one of those probes has ever come back again, has it now?
Of course they hadn't. Nothing smaller than a starship could mount a hyper generator, and only something with a hyper generator could hope to pass through a wormhole junction terminus. The scientists' probes had reported faithfully right up to the moment they encountered the interface of the terminus itself, at which point they had simply ceased to exist.
Unlike them, Zachary's ship did have a hyper generator. Which mean Harvest Joy could pass safely through the hyper-space interface which had destroyed the probes . . . probably. Whether or not she would survive whatever lay on the other side of it was another matter, of course. After all, there were all of those deliciously terrifying, venerable legends about the rogue wormholes whose termini deposited doomed travelers directly into the heart of a black hole or some other suitably lethal destination. Not that anyone had ever actually found a wormhole where warships made transit in but never made transit out again.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

Vince wrote:

SWM wrote:Nothing happens. They fly through that point in space and keep going. They never enter the Wormhole itself, and they do not trigger the mass limitation.

I don't know about the mass limitation, but they don't keep going. They seem? to enter the wormhole, but they never come out:

You're right, they don't keep going. I forgot that bit of text.

Looks like they get destroyed when they hit the transit point. They don't go through the wormhole.

Vince wrote:

SWM wrote:Nothing happens. They fly through that point in space and keep going. They never enter the Wormhole itself, and they do not trigger the mass limitation.

I don't know about the mass limitation, but they don't keep going. They seem? to enter the wormhole, but they never come out:

War of Honor, Chapter 34 wrote:Stop that, she scolded herself. They may never have been tested by another ship, but Kare and his crowd have put over sixty probes into this terminus to compile the readings your precious numbers are based on! Which was true, as far as it went. On the other hand, she reflected with another almost-smile, not a single one of those probes has ever come back again, has it now?
Of course they hadn't. Nothing smaller than a starship could mount a hyper generator, and only something with a hyper generator could hope to pass through a wormhole junction terminus. The scientists' probes had reported faithfully right up to the moment they encountered the interface of the terminus itself, at which point they had simply ceased to exist.
Unlike them, Zachary's ship did have a hyper generator. Which mean Harvest Joy could pass safely through the hyper-space interface which had destroyed the probes . . . probably. Whether or not she would survive whatever lay on the other side of it was another matter, of course. After all, there were all of those deliciously terrifying, venerable legends about the rogue wormholes whose termini deposited doomed travelers directly into the heart of a black hole or some other suitably lethal destination. Not that anyone had ever actually found a wormhole where warships made transit in but never made transit out again.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

I personally suspect that "ceased to exist" means that they were destroyed totally, ripped into their component atoms or further. An Honorverse wormhole is basicly a super powerful gravity wave that has extruded itself into normal space. To traverse one, you need both the W-sails to manage the gravitational shear and a hyper generator to manage the dimensional shear.

Additionally, wormhole is not an accurate term for what we have in the Honorverse; they should properly be called "hyper bridges." In order to use one, you basicly go into hyperspace for no time and then come out somewhere else. We have never seen anything enter hyperspace without the use of a hyper generator. Baring a comment from On High, I assume that it is impossible.

Considering that a transit is basicly instantaneous, I doubt that you could enter a hyper bridge and not exit it. You would probably be shredded, and your atoms (or possibly even subatomic particles) would be flug out at random directions near the speed of light.

SWM wrote:

Vince wrote:I don't know about the mass limitation, but they don't keep going. They seem? to enter the wormhole, but they never come out:

You're right, they don't keep going. I forgot that bit of text.

Looks like they get destroyed when they hit the transit point. They don't go through the wormhole.

My personal visualization, from that limited bit of text-ev, was that the grav "shear" at the terminus point was strong enough to rip apart anything without a sail to stabilize it and a hyper-generator to jump through (and of course the drones presumably had neither).

But for something much larger and robust than a drone I don't know if the terminus would still cause it to completely "cease to exist" or if it would only be mangled and broken into multiple large pieces.


However I don't think it'd trip the mass limit. Now if you could rig the hypergenerators and sails for complete unmanned operation you could (as someone suggested a while ago) temporarily block a wormhole by a manmanned mass transit. But it takes a lot of mass for less than a day of blockage; so it's unlikely to ever be useful.

--snipping--

crewdude48 wrote:I personally suspect that "ceased to exist" means that they were destroyed totally, ripped into their component atoms or further. An Honorverse wormhole is basicly a super powerful gravity wave that has extruded itself into normal space. To traverse one, you need both the W-sails to manage the gravitational shear and a hyper generator to manage the dimensional shear.
...
Considering that a transit is basicly instantaneous, I doubt that you could enter a hyper bridge and not exit it. You would probably be shredded, and your atoms (or possibly even subatomic particles) would be flug out at random directions near the speed of light.

Well, that would be much less fun than watching the HD of them great big suckers getting all blown up and shredded into little bits and messing with invading ships, locking up the wormhole or other craziness. Of course, in reality it's not even worth transporting the dang things to Torch to begin with. I just wanted a PD1922 reason to go out and buy popcorn...

Vince wrote:I don't know about the mass limitation, but they don't keep going. They seem? to enter the wormhole, but they never come out:

SWM wrote:You're right, they don't keep going. I forgot that bit of text.

Looks like they get destroyed when they hit the transit point. They don't go through the wormhole.

Jonathan_S wrote:My personal visualization, from that limited bit of text-ev, was that the grav "shear" at the terminus point was strong enough to rip apart anything without a sail to stabilize it and a hyper-generator to jump through (and of course the drones presumably had neither).

But for something much larger and robust than a drone I don't know if the terminus would still cause it to completely "cease to exist" or if it would only be mangled and broken into multiple large pieces.


However I don't think it'd trip the mass limit. Now if you could rig the hypergenerators and sails for complete unmanned operation you could (as someone suggested a while ago) temporarily block a wormhole by a manmanned mass transit. But it takes a lot of mass for less than a day of blockage; so it's unlikely to ever be useful.

Remember that the wormhole is a gravity wave, with the capability to rip a ship to very small pieces:

Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 9 wrote:The helmsman sent Wayfarer creeping forward once more, following sedately behind the two ships still in front of her, and Honor felt herself tense inwardly, ever so slightly. Although it was called a "wormhole" by spacers and the public, astrophysicists decried the misuse of that term. It wasn't totally inappropriate, but in effect the Junction was a crack in the universe where a grav wave even more powerful than one of the "Roaring Deeps" had breached the wall between hyper-space and normal-space. For all intents and purposes, it was a frozen funnel of h-space, and not a calm one, for the grav wave twisting endlessly through it was extremely potent. Impellers couldn't be used for the actual transit, and proper alignment required exquisitely accurate astrogation. One of Honor's Academy instructors had described it as "shooting a tsunami in a kayak," and she'd never encountered a better analogy.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

For what a normal gravity wave (one not powerful enough to create a hyper bridge) can do:

More Than Honor, The Universe of Honor Harrington, (1) Background (General) wrote:The second problem was that the interfaces between any two hyper bands are regions of highly unstable and powerful energy flows, creating the "dimensional shear" which had destroyed so many early hyperships, and dimensional shear becomes more violent as band levels increase. Moreover, even the relatively "safe" lower bands which could be reliably reached were characterized by powerful energy surges and flows—currents, almost—of highly-charged particles and warped gravity waves. Adequate shielding could hold the radiation effects in check, but a grav shear within any band could rip the strongest ship to pieces.

Boldface is my emphasis.

The interface between normal space and a wormhole terminus will generate dimensional shear.

Vince wrote:For what a normal gravity wave (one not powerful enough to create a hyper bridge) can do:...

The interface between normal space and a wormhole terminus will generate dimensional shear.

Random thought: Could there be wormholes that for some reason don't extend into N-Space but begin and/or end in hyperspace?

Weird Harold wrote:

Vince wrote:For what a normal gravity wave (one not powerful enough to create a hyper bridge) can do:...

The interface between normal space and a wormhole terminus will generate dimensional shear.

Random thought: Could there be wormholes that for some reason don't extend into N-Space but begin and/or end in hyperspace?

I'd guess not; that any grav feature strong enough to cause a wormhole is strong enough it'll punch right down into n-space.

But I could certainly be wrong about that.
Though (unless you had a wormhole from n-space that dumped you out in hyper) I'd say the chances of finding a terminus in hyper is infantesimal.

Weird Harold wrote:

Vince wrote:For what a normal gravity wave (one not powerful enough to create a hyper bridge) can do:...

The interface between normal space and a wormhole terminus will generate dimensional shear.

Random thought: Could there be wormholes that for some reason don't extend into N-Space but begin and/or end in hyperspace?

Interesting question. I would tentatively say no, based on what little we know. For instance, we know that wormhole termini are always (as far as Honorverse science knows) associated with stars, and in particular stars in a certain mass range. But since the Honorverse still has limited understanding of wormholes, we can't rule out startling new physics with them in the future. (I'm still waiting for the discovery which lets ships transit directly from one terminus to another without stopping at the central junction. That's been a dangling plot twist since OBS. )

Do the Honorverse equivalent of spiking the weapons of the SDs, then load them up with the Solly POWs and escort them back to Solly space.


That transfers the burden of looking after the POWs to the SL and also shows the GA as being benign towards the Solly spacers.

The spiked SDs would not be usable and the spacers would bring back to the SL the truth of just how out gunned the SLN really is.