Concepts: Today's similarities and differences to the HV

penny wrote:Perhaps the Ghost Captain got a tip that that ship is headed to Bolthole. And maybe there are ways that a Ghost ship can affix itself to the hull of a GA ship. I always thought there were random places on a ship where large items can be attached for transport in an emergency. Perhaps the spider “legs” can attach themselves to more than just the hyper wall.

Well, yes, they could. They are supersized tractors after all. So they could be used for the purpose they were supersized from: tractoring things or onto things.

The GA ship would definitely have places where things could be attached to. We've had pods limpeted to the hull for a decade now. The top and underside of the wedge ship are also usually devoid of openings and protuberances because there's no point: a sensor there would only see up to the wedge, which is usually opaque enough.

But I don't think this would go unnoticed by the other ship. The increase in mass would be noticeable and anything bigger than a LAC would distort the compensator field, the wedge geometry, and the hypergenerator's bubble. Even a LAC does and required that Thunder of God realign its geometries to transport the Masadan tiny LACs to the Yeltsin's Star system.

What's more, if the GA ship is transiting through the Calvin Wormhole, it means it will drop to sails, which will expose the ventral and dorsal of the ship to all observers, including traffic control and the defenders of the Haven side. They would see the blob of dark attached to the hull of the ship about to transit.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The GA ship would definitely have places where things could be attached to. We've had pods limpeted to the hull for a decade now. The top and underside of the wedge ship are also usually devoid of openings and protuberances because there's no point: a sensor there would only see up to the wedge, which is usually opaque enough.

The underside normally has big openings for boat bays (think the ISD's ventral bay the Tantive IV gets pulled into at the beginning of Star Wars -- except proportionally much larger)
And even the top side isn't devoid of protuberances. you've got various radiators, I think some sensor masts, observation bubbles, and the like up there. And I think some of the escape pods are berthed up (and down) there mostly out of the way.

It's less busy that the broadsides, and isn't pierced for weapons, but not exactly featureless.

Unlike a wedge, can a spider-driven ship land on a planet?

And if it can land on the planet can it "land" in an ocean? Emergency descent. Can it be detected while submerged? After all, it is a "submarine" of sorts.

penny wrote:Unlike a wedge, can a spider-driven ship land on a planet?

And if it can land on the planet can it "land" in an ocean? Emergency descent. Can it be detected while submerged? After all, it is a "submarine" of sorts.

Never mentioned/never seen in text, but all wedge based units that land only use air breathing turbines or fusion thrusters in lower atmo - they shut the wedge down as they enter heavy air. The wedge has a tendency to swallow air for some reason (Sarcasm intended). The Spider drive (Being a tractor based system) may still be able to work - or not, in which case it would require a atmospheric drive system as well.

penny wrote:Unlike a wedge, can a spider-driven ship land on a planet?

And if it can land on the planet can it "land" in an ocean? Emergency descent. Can it be detected while submerged? After all, it is a "submarine" of sorts.

Theemile wrote:Never mentioned/never seen in text, but all wedge based units that land only use air breathing turbines or fusion thrusters in lower atmo - they shut the wedge down as they enter heavy air. The wedge has a tendency to swallow air for some reason (Sarcasm intended). The Spider drive (Being a tractor based system) may still be able to work - or not, in which case it would require a atmospheric drive system as well.

We have a couple of examples of small wedge powered anti-vehicle missiles, including the ones that downed Honor's shuttle in FiE. So a wedge will work in atmosphere, I believe the problem is that wedges big enough to move people around are destructive to everything (except air) and so too dangerous; the same way that wedges are not permitted (with very few exceptions) around the orbital platforms like Hephaestus.

Similarly a spider drive might work, but would be considered too destructive to be a authorized for use.

Theemile wrote:Never mentioned/never seen in text, but all wedge based units that land only use air breathing turbines or fusion thrusters in lower atmo - they shut the wedge down as they enter heavy air. The wedge has a tendency to swallow air for some reason (Sarcasm intended). The Spider drive (Being a tractor based system) may still be able to work - or not, in which case it would require a atmospheric drive system as well.

I won't thing we know if the tractor beam (and the spider derived from it) work spookily at a distance, or whether they're pulling on the entire column between their target and emitter.

If the former than, maybe you could use a spider drive in atmo. You still wouldn't want to fire a spider into the ground (or even in the ocean) - not even if you didn't particularly care about any planetary occupants. But under that kind of a gravity field presumably you wouldn't have to -- just orient two skek/keels upwards and lower yourself from their offset anchor points. (Though we don't know the impact of punching through the grab the alpha wall would have on gases surrounding each anchor point). And a ship doing this would have to be slow, not the 150g is slow for an Honorverse warships, but like well below Mache 1 lest aerodynamic effects and frictional and compression heating and plasma formation blind and damage the ship. (It also would be really obvious to any sensor pointed its way -- so better hope there's no enemy nearby when you try to put your multi-megaton ship down on, or lift from, a planet)

But if the whole column is being accelerated then the spider drive would seem like it'd cause significant widespread damage, as well as damaging the ship (starting with the expensive and fancy stealth coating) because you'd be pointing dozens of low power particle accelerators at yourself as each overpowered tractor wildly accelerated an air column back at the ship.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Unlike a wedge, can a spider-driven ship land on a planet?

And if it can land on the planet can it "land" in an ocean? Emergency descent. Can it be detected while submerged? After all, it is a "submarine" of sorts.

Theemile wrote:Never mentioned/never seen in text, but all wedge based units that land only use air breathing turbines or fusion thrusters in lower atmo - they shut the wedge down as they enter heavy air. The wedge has a tendency to swallow air for some reason (Sarcasm intended). The Spider drive (Being a tractor based system) may still be able to work - or not, in which case it would require a atmospheric drive system as well.

We have a couple of examples of small wedge powered anti-vehicle missiles, including the ones that downed Honor's shuttle in FiE. So a wedge will work in atmosphere, I believe the problem is that wedges big enough to move people around are destructive to everything (except air) and so too dangerous; the same way that wedges are not permitted (with very few exceptions) around the orbital platforms like Hephaestus.

Similarly a spider drive might work, but would be considered too destructive to be a authorized for use.

I was going to mention those, but I think their "magic" is they only work for a handful of seconds at most - having a wedge work for a hour or 2 in low atmo might be... interesting.

Theemile wrote:I was going to mention those, but I think their "magic" is they only work for a handful of seconds at most - having a wedge work for a hour or 2 in low atmo might be... interesting.

Handfuls of seconds and a wedge that's probably only a meter or so wide. Far different from the (likely) dozens of meters that even a pinnace wedge must be; much less then 90+ kilometers of a starship wedge.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:I was going to mention those, but I think their "magic" is they only work for a handful of seconds at most - having a wedge work for a hour or 2 in low atmo might be... interesting.

Handfuls of seconds and a wedge that's probably only a meter or so wide. Far different from the dozens of meters that even a pinnace wedge must be; much less then 90+ meters of a starship wedge.

Kilometers.... 90+ Kilometers......

Jonathan_S wrote:Handfuls of seconds and a wedge that's probably only a meter or so wide. Far different from the dozens of meters that even a pinnace wedge must be; much less then 90+ meters of a starship wedge.

That's 90 km, not meters. In fact, the distance between the floor plane and the ventral side of the ship is also in the multi-km range, so the ship would need to cut its wedge while still as high as or higher than current commercial aeroplanes. So it couldn't lower itself to the ground on wedge.

The length of the spider tractor is also unknown. But given that the ship floor orientation is in the direction of travel, it could also land as a skyscraper, so the tractors would be to the side, not down.

There are two other problems with landing on a planet. First and obvious is getting back up again. Could the spider be used for this, for lifting from a standstill?

Second, does the ship's structural integrity allow for it to be immersed in a 1g gravitational field? The spider ships may allow it, because unlike a wedge, they are not in zero-g during acceleration but are instead under those 150 to 300 gravities the tractors would be pulling. I wouldn't submerge them, though - the water pressure increases by 1 atmosphere every 10 m (well, 9.81 m), and the pressure vessel may not be designed to hold that much. Then again, it's a warship and has armour. And if it is going to go down in water, it may decide to go on its side, not upright, and then people would just have to walk on the walls, with the decks becoming bulkheads, like the ships in The Expanse did (at least for the Rocinante). That way, the difference in pressure would only be around 20 atmospheres, instead of 100+. I'm trying to remember which Sci-Fi franchise landed a tall ship in water... was it a Revelation Space lighthugger?

Of course, the most important question here is: why would you do that? Is this for repairs on ground-based shipyards? Is it for hiding the ship for an ambush? Is it for disgorging an invasion force?