pd 1924 - Shape of Beowulf's fleet

Jonathan_S wrote:I believe when a ship arrives its hyper generator is discharged and so far below Stand-By readiness (though possibly not all the way back to powered down).
RFC's infodump on hyper drives says an 8 mton SD "requires 4 minutes to go from Stand-By to actual translation"
but "from Powered Down to Translation, the same ship would require 32 minutes."

So, maybe after freshly arriving it might take an SD around 12-18 minutes before it could hyper back out. So you might not be able to count of hypering out in 4 minute or so if your appearance immediately draws an overly hostile reaction.

That's probably true (though the Long Manoeuvre brings some timing issues to the discussion), but on first arrival, the enemy is not aware of you and is not ready to attack. Moreover, your arrival locus is not known and is usually not on the hyperlimit itself. First rule of warfare: don't be where your enemy is shooting at. So a fleet with SD-sized components can mitigate its danger of flawed intel by arriving where the enemy can't fire for 15 minutes or more.

Honor arrived on the least time course near the hyperlimit at Galton because she was confident of her forces and the balance of power, because Galton had been scouted. Plus, remember that no one had the ability to accurately direct fire from 5 light-minutes away except for the GA with the Apollo missiles. That technology will take some time to duplicate. Still, we've discussed how reckless that was, given that this enemy possessed stealth ships that no Manticore sensor had been able to detect a few years before.

In any case, designing a ship now that takes 4 years to build but would be vulnerable to a massed, surprise Apollo attack doesn't sound very logical to me. The Monitor would need to arrive much further out than a light-minute from the hyperlimit: a 4-drive system-defence missile can use 60 seconds of its 4th stage still on acceleration, covering 4.5 light-minutes in 600 seconds. Any additional distance is covered at 0.81c of the end speed of the third stage: 300 more seconds (for a total of 15 minutes) extends the range by another 4 light-minutes to 8.5, 400 seconds brings it to nearly 10 light-minutes. In fact, with about 23 minutes of flight time, missiles can reach anywhere within 15 light-minutes, which would be up to 5 light-minutes outside the hyperlimit for a missile shoal in near orbit of the planet it's protecting.

This will eventually be a problem for SDs too, but for the same mass/volume expenditure, you'll have more units in SD size than Monitors. The square-cube law comes in reverse in this case: you have more area to mount point defence and CM missile tubes on if you have more but smaller ships. That is, for the a volume 8X, you can have one ship at a linear dimension 2L and area 4A, or eight ships at linear dimension L and area A each, for a total of 8A. So long as the quality of weapons and defence is the same, it would mean twice the defence capability too. Is a Monitor twice as survivable as an SD, given its better armour? I don't think so.

Still, speed of popping into hyper hasn't been a key tactical ability in most battles. Though it was implicit in Honor's tactics at Galton and Sol (staying back outside the hyper limit -- accepting the low but increased risk of being jumped at close range in exchange for the ability to hyper out from an overwhelming strike)
One issue with it is (if I'm right about needing extra recharge time after leaving hyper) is it can't easily be repeated. You can quickly evade one strike, but if you come back it seems it'd be much longer before you'd be ready to evade another.

So I don't know if slow hyper entry alone is enough reason to nix a slow monitor concept.

Alone, no. I didn't say that; I only said that there would be an upper limit due to limited flexibility. There may be another limit on heat dissipation, though there's no way to speculate about that.

Monitors could bring other advantages too. They could be equipped with pods full of 4DMs, so they could effectively attack targets from 15 light-minutes away or more. A forward-deployed force could be transmitting targetting data over FTL, with more data coming in from RDs inside the hyperlimit. This force could also assume control of the missile waves once they're past, so even the tiny, extra FTL lag would be removed as a problem.

But I am not convinced that they're worth the downside. Fewer units means they can be in fewer places at the same time. A Monitor limited to 150 gravities only worth if you're attacking someone, and possibly multiple someones.

Theemile wrote:My current house (Built 5 years ago) was built out of flat modules built in a factory and assembled onsite - each wall module was ~8'x10', with the framing, cladding, windows, doors and insulation all installed at the factory. A floor was built out of pre-made manufactured trusses at the site(over the foundation/basement, then the first floor modules were assembled and connected to the deck, followed by each floor then the pre-made trusses and the roof. I was told the method saved ~1.5 months of construction on site - the build still took ~9 months to complete for a 4,000 sq foot house, even though every major part was constructed in a factory and just "assembled" onsite.

Cool. Wow is this comment timely. Looking at building a modular prefab house myself. Talking to different people and most want to ship in 13ft wide sections, but the road into myplace is NOT friendly to big rig trucks. ALso, I am willing to do ALL the work myself.

Who did you go with? I am looking at Montana area to build. What options available? Could you order say... an Aframe wood timber framed 2 story version? Already building a post and beam garage/shop. Just got done buying the solar components and about to do assembly myself.

The best part? No cell service where I am going. Ah: PEACE and QUIET! Have elk, deer, bear, turkey everywhere and have already seen all of the above. Supposedly there is a wolf pack in the area and I might have heard them VERY briefly early in the morning last time I was there.

Thanks!

Relax wrote:Lets partially reframe my argument:
***Most planets are Geographically 200-250Mkm inside their hyperlimit***

WITH FTL control(60X multiplier), this means distance equivalent of shooting from ~4Mkm without FTL. In other words, Anyone crossing a hyperlimit with a capital ship of any kind, be it an SDP or a Fort/Monitor, should be court martialed instantly for RAGING incompetence!!!... such as Honor at Galton.

Which is why she only did that once the battle was effectively won, with all the system defences crippled or taken out. Any rational defender would have used any reserves they had had at this point. The final spite wasn't designed to win the battle or at least drive it to a stalemate, it was designed to inflict unnecessary casualties. And it had a high chance of failing at that too.

Also, as I pointed out in my post above, no one at the time had FTL control but her own allies. This will change, though, and then your point will likely become valid.

NEXT topic: Sure, A bigger ship will require longer to recharge their hypergenerator... SO what? Who cares? You can't go into hyper if you cross the hyperlimit anyways. Missiles from orbit require ~30minutes to get to where you are. Who cares if your charge time is even 8 minutes(2X an SDP)? If they have a ready squadron outside the hyperlimit... So what? Who cares? If you cannot handle a squadron of wallers within 5~10 minutes of your own translation outside the hyperlimit then you should have NEVER been there to begin with and should instantly be brought to courts martial! If you cannot handle a swarm of Pre-deployed pods within 60Mkm of you being fired, you should NEVER have been there to begin with and should instantly be brought to courts martial! Why? Not smart enough to send in scouting first for said deployed pods. One truly has to question that Admirals sanity if you just jump in blind screaming UNDELLEEEEEEEEEE!!! like the fool SLN...

See calculations above. A 4-drive missile can cover 15 light-minutes in 23 minutes. That's 270 million km, which means 20 million km past the hyperlimit if launched from planetary orbit and at the 250 million km upper limit you said above.

The danger isn't on the case of planetary-orbit missiles and hypergenerators on stand-by. There are two other dangers: missiles much closer by, from shoals that weren't detected, and when the hypergenerator is discharged. The latter happens when you've just arrived, making this the moment of greatest vulnerability. No one is going to mistake the unannounced arrival of a monitor-sized ship for anything but an invasion, so the defenders will be quite correct at immediately pushing the "Oh Shit" button and firing everything at it.

In that case, I'll make your words mine: if you cannot handle this, you shouldn't be there in the first place. That means you shouldn't bring a ship that would take 30 minutes to hyper out in case intel was deeply flawed.

And we're talking about stealth intel here, not scouted. This can only have been done surreptitiously, from afar or using a disguised ship, while the shoals and defences were not themselves active. A scout force sent ahead of time would be noticed and cede the initiative, making matters worse: the defences would be already up and running, with ships under way for the hyper limit in advance of the expected invasion. The scout force may even be recognised as belonging to you and your enemy would know that you possess Monitors.

Relax wrote:The best part? No cell service where I am going. Ah: PEACE and QUIET! Have elk, deer, bear, turkey everywhere and have already seen all of the above. Supposedly there is a wolf pack in the area and I might have heard them VERY briefly early in the morning last time I was there.

Elon ruins that with Starlink. There's hardly anywhere on this planet that you can't get service. You may need to move to Antarctica, the North Pole, or choose another planet, which may limit your access to elk, deer, bear, and turkey.

Relax wrote:The entire argument about hypergenator charge time is a strawman argument.

Mostly fair -- you shouldn't be putting yourself in situations where that matters. And I said I don't know that slow hyper entry alone is enough reason to nix a slow monitor concept.

The one situation where there could be missiles you couldn't pre-scout would be a Paul Revere style hyperspace trap. But they'd only spring that trap while you were still outside the hyper limit if you showed you were going to fight from outside it. So hopefully any ship would have time to recharge it's generator before it became obvious the fleet wasn't going to walk fully into the trap and the enemy forces attacked.

Relax wrote:Next argument: Forts are NOT spherical, nor rugby shaped. Nor would you want them Spherical or rugby shaped unless you were wanting to dual with Grasers... Unless you are sitting outside the hyperlimit at a wormhole junction, Graser duals do not exist. DW has also stated forts have impellers. Which means their tops and bottom are protected via impeller just like any other impeller drive ship. In fact, they could have double sets of impellers since they do not exactly have to be efficient(loss of mass of course). They happen to have a spherical sidewall potential(backup if their impellers get destroyed???)... Though why you would want a spherical sidewall for anything other than back up is a head scratcher and rather odd when DW has ALSO stated that sidewall strength can be easily increased with just using stronger generators and the biggest difference between capital ships and lower classes of ships. Distinction here is somewhere there might be a mass conservation cross over between sidewall generator strength and a spherical sidewall, but you would lose your impellers so... Ugg why?

You want a spherical sidewall because, even with bow walls, there are still large chinks in the armor of impeller + sidewalls (because we're told physics says you can't close the bow and stern stress bands simultaneously -- so you have to leave one end unprotected).

I had the impression that even in combat they aren't under impeller most of the time -- that's just for if they have to reposition, say to spread out to cover gaps where another fort was destroyed, or to dodge frac-c ballistic attacks.
But if under impeller say the fort chose to leave it's stern open (as that opening is smaller) - an missile passing behind it within +/- 3.84 to 3.87° horizontally and +/- 7.56 to 7.63° vertically of it's current long axis has a shot on some of the ship unprotected by any sidewall (narrower ranges means LOS all the way to the bow, wider only gives LOS to the stern).

That's not vast, but it's way bigger than the zero vulnerable angles a spherical sidewall gives you.

And if it's actually accelerating then both bow and stern must be open and the bow has the same lateral constraints (caused by the sidwall's 'tunnel' effect as they extend beyond the length of the hull) but its vertical constraint is loosened to +/- 32.23 to 57.534°


All that said, it's true that I can't recall the shape of modern pod-based, and LAC hosting, forts having been described. So they may be more ship-like than older forts.

But even if we ignore energy range, having much fuller hull forms gives more surface area

You're right that acceleration isn't all that important to strategic mobility because you spend most of your time cruising at constant speed. Though being too big for a compensator would be mildly annoying if your departure point rests within a grav wave. Ships with sails and compensators get approximately 10x the accel as normal, so the time to accelerate to warship hyperspace cruise speed (0.6c) would go from about 50 minutes for an Invictus SD(P) up to 34 hours for this 150g monitor.
Invictus value based on 10x the acceleration (613.3g or 6.01 KPS^2) one was seen pulling in SftS

A day late might mater on shorter trips. But even there probably not.

(Also, technically, the velocity doesn't go all the way to zero each time you transition -- but you're still right that that still basically negates whatever pre-translation velocity you might have been carrying. The speed by hyper band chart shows even the worst case, crossing the Alpha wall, "only" has a 92% Translation Bleed-Off, and the effect is weaker the higher you go, so crossing the Theta wall has only a 52% bleed-off. But, because they're cumulative, by the time a warship has climbed from normal space up to the Theta band the total drop is well over 99%)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And we're talking about stealth intel here, not scouted.

??? Real world is not stealth recon Short Victorious War. In war, scouting is done ALL the time; everywhere. Why there are no DD's/CL's, CA's, BC's available for commerce protection in 1st Havenite war. Those ships are scouting hoards of systems continuously. With advent of RD's this makes it absurdly easy to do, and see so called "concealed" mass deployed pods which in DW's universe are bare ass naked to EMP from missiles nuclear explosions close by( ).... so any "scouting" force in a real war, will see those mass deployed "stealthed" pods and just launch while they dip back into hyper. Pods can't hide/maneuver. Problem solved. A couple LAC squadrons sweeping asteroid fields before deploying the Fleet: Problem solved. Take your pick. Mass deployed pods have to be defended.

Why I have argued here and many years previously your fleet reaction unit should 100% be outside the hyperlimit, where the repair base which should be as deep into the star's gravity well as possible. ~Backside of Mercury in perpetual darkness and your main fleet port stationed near the hyperlimit surrounded by large continuously powered blocking wedge forts, with spacing just big enough to not allow Missiles fired from outside the hyperlimit inside, but tugged, slow, ships could be brought in through a revolving impeller wedge for instance.(not fully thought out, but hey, food for splatter on a chalk board and maybe some thought)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I believe when a ship arrives its hyper generator is discharged and so far below Stand-By readiness (though possibly not all the way back to powered down).
RFC's infodump on hyper drives says an 8 mton SD "requires 4 minutes to go from Stand-By to actual translation"
but "from Powered Down to Translation, the same ship would require 32 minutes."

So, maybe after freshly arriving it might take an SD around 12-18 minutes before it could hyper back out. So you might not be able to count of hypering out in 4 minute or so if your appearance immediately draws an overly hostile reaction.

That's probably true (though the Long Manoeuvre brings some timing issues to the discussion), but on first arrival, the enemy is not aware of you and is not ready to attack. Moreover, your arrival locus is not known and is usually not on the hyperlimit itself. First rule of warfare: don't be where your enemy is shooting at. So a fleet with SD-sized components can mitigate its danger of flawed intel by arriving where the enemy can't fire for 15 minutes or more.

Which one was the "Long" manouver?

I remember the "Lee" maneuver from ToH --popping into hyper to reposition and scrub off speed. (Though that it had other problems -- at least in the eARC and I don't think they got corrected in the final version. RFC only accounted for one 92% translation bleed-off; but elsewhere says that the bleed-off happens whether going up or down; so the new velocity should have been 8% of 8% of the original; but RFC's number was 8% of the original. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem except it was an explicit plot point that the fleet still had so much velocity it couldn't stop for 36 minutes; and that plot point doesn't work so well if you use the actual double bleed-off velocity and they're able to stop in under 3)

Though that wasn't the only spot on ToH where the hyperspace translation math went wonky.

(I understand why RFC won't deal with corrections from eARC readers -- but it's annoying when you find about 20 items which most editors will miss - from hyper/velocity maths, to relationships, to timeline issues, to ship names; and sure enough they nearly all slip through into the final release)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:The best part? No cell service where I am going. Ah: PEACE and QUIET! Have elk, deer, bear, turkey everywhere and have already seen all of the above. Supposedly there is a wolf pack in the area and I might have heard them VERY briefly early in the morning last time I was there.

Elon ruins that with Starlink. There's hardly anywhere on this planet that you can't get service. You may need to move to Antarctica, the North Pole, or choose another planet, which may limit your access to elk, deer, bear, and turkey.

Hrmm, Starlink is doing phone service now??? Haven't looked, makes sense they could. Hrmm, I think a shield over 100 acres is a bit extreme... Not sure

Relax wrote:Next argument: Forts are NOT spherical, nor rugby shaped. Nor would you want them Spherical or rugby shaped unless you were wanting to dual with Grasers... Unless you are sitting outside the hyperlimit at a wormhole junction, Graser duals do not exist. DW has also stated forts have impellers. Which means their tops and bottom are protected via impeller just like any other impeller drive ship. In fact, they could have double sets of impellers since they do not exactly have to be efficient(loss of mass of course). They happen to have a spherical sidewall potential(backup if their impellers get destroyed???)... Though why you would want a spherical sidewall for anything other than back up is a head scratcher and rather odd when DW has ALSO stated that sidewall strength can be easily increased with just using stronger generators and the biggest difference between capital ships and lower classes of ships. Distinction here is somewhere there might be a mass conservation cross over between sidewall generator strength and a spherical sidewall, but you would lose your impellers so... Ugg why? Graser duals requiring better lines of fire such as the old spherical forts have disappeared for anything outside of junction defense and here more than likely, Graser Mines in abundance would be cheaper.

Forts are NOT protected by wedges during combat, but by a spherical sidewall; the wedges are only used when the fort needs to change location. The wedge would only protect the top and bottom of a fort, it would still need a bow, stern and two sidewalls.

From On Basilisk Station chapter 5:

The smallest fortress out there massed close to sixteen million tons, twice as much as a superdreadnought, and its weapons-to-mass ratio was far higher. The forts weren't hyper-capable, for they used mass a warship might have devoted to its hyper generators and Warshawski sails to pack in still more firepower, but they were far more than immobile weapon platforms. They had to be.

Each of those forts maintained a stand-by battle watch and a 360º sidewall "bubble" at all times, but no one at this end of the Junction could know anyone was coming through it until they arrived, and no one could remain eternally vigilant.

From The Short Victorious War "Honor Harrington's Navy, Naval Design and Doctrine":

A few navies have experimented with the idea of mounting the sidewall bubble generators used to generate 360° "sidewalls" around fixed fortifications in their capital ships for use in hyper-space engagements, but the sheer mass of the system is self-defeating. A ship so equipped has an enormous advantage in hyper, but the volume consumed by the generators cuts deeply into that available for weapons, which places the same vessel at an even greater disadvantage in normal-space combat.

PS: The spindle shape, with hammerheads, is dictated by the sails, not by the wedges.

PPS: As Jonathan_S stated, the physics of the wedge prohibits using both a bow wall and a stern wall at the same time. So if the fort tried to use the wedge as protection, there would ALWAYS be a open aspect to be attacked. Note that Manticore's orbitals also have the capability of a spherical sidewall, as well as the station at Hancock in SVW.

Jonathan_S wrote:

You want a spherical sidewall because, even with bow walls, there are still large chinks in the armor of impeller + sidewalls (because we're told physics says you can't close the bow and stern stress bands simultaneously -- so you have to leave one end unprotected).

I had the impression that even in combat they aren't under impeller most of the time -- that's just for if they have to reposition, say to spread out to cover gaps where another fort was destroyed, or to dodge frac-c ballistic attacks.
But if under impeller say the fort chose to leave it's stern open (as that opening is smaller) - an missile passing behind it within +/- 3.84 to 3.87° horizontally and +/- 7.56 to 7.63° vertically of it's current long axis has a shot on some of the ship unprotected by any sidewall (narrower ranges means LOS all the way to the bow, wider only gives LOS to the stern).

That's not vast, but it's way bigger than the zero vulnerable angles a spherical sidewall gives you.[/quote]

But why have the ends open at all? You are outside the hyperlimit. There is zero reason to only run a buckler(allows acceleration) May as well have a massive bow/stern wall.

Only fly in the ointment is we do not know the actual STRENGTH of a spherical sidewall and how much mass/power it requires compared to SDP bow/stern/sidewalls or equivalent sidewall strength as spherical. It could be, massively(pardon the pun) in favor of spherical. If so, can still use hyper generator etc to get to the other systems.

Where is the 10X slower coming from? 600G vrs 150G is 4X. I thought new grav plates 150G = 1 G instead of the 75G shown in books previously and it was only when pushed beyond this that another ~75G = 5G apparent when talking about the MALIGN Sharks? Hrmm, Mission of Honor?

Oh well, gotta go, dinner and not sure I will be able to reply much. Busy, but wanted to relax some and peruse the forum.