Kizarvexis
Captain (Junior Grade)
Posts: 270
Joined: Tue Apr 03, 2012 6:18 pm
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Rakhmamort wrote:SWM wrote:No, they can't. The impeller rings are set up to create a particular arrangement of wedge. The fore impeller ring cannot act like the rear impeller ring, and vice versa.
Which is really weird. In Basilisk Station we saw nodes installed in telescoping arms/piston so we know they can be moved around. I don't see any reason why their physical placements (if that is what is required) cannot be changed. If the fore and aft nodes are truly different from each other, then they shouldn't even all be called beta nodes. There should be a clear differentiation between front/back beta nodes. We sure know that whatever it is these nodes do, their output can be adjusted. Battle damage to a node does not stop a ship completely so that means whatever field they are generating is still being generated albeit with a weaker/smaller effect.
I found some pearls with revelvant info. italics are the questions and bold is RFC's answer. Pearls of Weber wrote: 6) If alpha and beta nodes cannot be armored themselves, can each of them be positioned inside an armored "ring" so the only angle an energy beam can come without hitting armor is from directly above them?
(6) No. The emitter head has to be a certain distance (which varies with the size and power of the node) from the hull and any other solid wall, bulkhead, armor, etc. That's why Sirius had to run her nodes out on rams to clear the hull before she could accelerate.
Variable geometry starships
The Handy-Dandy Folding Starship. This idea apparently stems from the observation/belief that missile combats are going to be short and very intensive, and that being able to throw the heaviest possible weight of missiles as quickly as possible is ultimately going to be decisive, or darned close to it, at any rate. So the theory here is that you build a ship which is basically a skeletal framework on which you mount only the essential systems -- fusion plants, impeller nodes, hyper generator, etc.. For all intents and purposes it would be an open girder-work construct around the maximum possible number of missile pods, and its sole function would be to transport the pods to the scene of combat and then to deploy its entire loadout as quickly as possible. Thereafter, it would literally "fold up" into a much smaller- dimension hull, which would use its smaller size and much decreased tonnage to permit it to attain higher acceleration rates as it ran rapidly away from the other side. I don't think the idea is for the ship itself to control the pods, only to get them into position as rapidly as possible for more capable units to control and target.
Folding Starships. Not a good idea. This sounds like one of your war-gamers came up with it. (Don't tell me if I guessed right about that, by the way.) The tactical advantages in being able to drop that many pods into space in a single go aren't as great as they might appear on the surface. The total numbers of pods which can be controlled are limited by the capabilities built into the ships available to control them. There's nothing out there which would have sufficient redundant fire control to handle the sheer numbers of missile pods you seem to be talking about here. Basically, you'd have a huge traffic jam in the firing queues of the fleet which deployed them. At least, if I'm understanding the concept correctly, you would. Even leaving aside the question of "gunsmoke," you simply wouldn't have sufficient control links to handle that many pods without major degradation in accuracy -- far more degradation then would be necessary to offset the advantage of simply chucking that many missiles down-range in a single mighty flush. Even leaving aside the fact that the tactical utility of the concept strikes me as doubtful, there would be serious engineering difficulties involved in producing a ship which would basically reconfigure itself. Even freighters in the Honorverse are built with a structural strength which would make the Brooklyn Bridge look fragile by comparison, and for very good reasons. Not only that, but each ship's alpha and beta nodes are built to function in a very specific spatial relationship to one another. In other words, nodes are built and installed to produce a specific size and shape of impeller wedge and "sump" to feed the mounting ship's inertial compensator. You don't futz around with those relationships once they're established. That doesn't mean that you can't lose nodes and continue to produce a wedge, or to feed an inertial compensator's requirements, obviously. But even when you lose nodes out of a damaged impeller wedge, those nodes are still physically located where they always were, and that physical relationship has to be maintained. You could, in theory, I suppose, build your ship with two completely separate sets of nodes and inertial compensators. If you did that, then you could probably build a "folding" starship with the structural integrity for your proposal, and by providing it with one set of nodes for "unfolded" and a second set for "folded" operation, you could probably produce the effect you're after. You'd pay a fairly high price in terms of internal volume and tonnage, and the capability wouldn't be cheap in financial terms, but you could do it. Given the fact that I don't see it as providing any truly significant tactical advantage, however, I can't see any real point in plowing the money, effort, and resources into building what would essentially be the chief exhibit in the Interstellar Freaks and Rarees Show.
So the nodes are spaced and sized in a fixed relationship with each other. The reason Sirius had to run out the nodes was concealment from casual observation. Military SD nodes were bigger than the civilian nodes a ship that size wold carry. So they pulled them in when stopped to be the same size as a civilian node, so as to seem to be a harmless civilian ship stopping over for repairs. Based on the second question, if the forward and aft impeller rooms do not have close enough spacing to swap for each other, and since ships have to flip to decelerate we can safely guess they do not, then you can't flip the wedge without so serious engineering. The folding starship example above posits two impeller rooms. Here is some info on how big an impeller room is on a ship. Pearls of Weber wrote: Impeller rooms
Impeller rooms are cylindrical volumes located within the hull and centered fore-and-aft on the impeller ring they serve. The diameters of civilian impeller rooms are approximately 60% of the diameter of the impeller ring and approximately 1.2 times as long as they are across. They normally consist of a single, very large compartment crammed with the required generators and node support hardware. Military impeller rooms are approximately 85% as wide as the diameter of the impeller ring and approximately 1.6 times as long as they are broad. They are also subdivided — normally into quarters in smaller vessels (through CL), eighths (CA-BC), or twelfths (DN-SD) — with the individual compartments heavily bulkheaded and armored to localize and contain damage. Since the outbreak of the war, the RMN and GSN have begun dividing impeller rooms in ships of the wall into 16ths — one for each beta node. These individual compartments are arranged in clusters around the long axis of the ship with each forming a smaller cylinder, bundled together with their fellows within the volume of the overall "impeller room." Thus a modern RMN SD would refer to "Impeller One" or "Impeller Two" to indicate (respectively) the forward or aft impeller rooms, and then to "Impeller Eleven," "Impeller Twelve," or "Impeller Thirteen" to indicate the subcompartments within Impeller One. (That is, "Impeller 1.1" would be referred to as "Impeller Eleven," "Impeller 1.2" would be referred to as "Impeller Twelve," etc.)
But, just make the impeller room to be able to reconfigure it self you say. Here is some info on the power levels running though an impeller room. Pearls of Weber wrote: Wedge interaction
What does happen when two wedges impact? Is it an all-or-nothing, with one wedge undamaged and the weaker destroyed? A case of complete mututal destruction, regardless of ship size, or at least within a fairly tight range of ship sizes? And if one wedge is destroyed outright, what happens to the wedge which survives? Does it take node damage, or is it completely unaffected?
When the impeller wedges of two impeller-drive vessels come into contact, wedge interference causes the nodes of the weaker vessel (or of both vessels, if the wedges are quite close together in the size and strength) to vaporize. The portion of the hull in which the nodes are mounted goes with it, and the capacitor rings associated with the nodes arc over and release all of their stored energy in the process. And if you think about the power levels routinely involved in Honorverse technology, I think you can see why this particular form of collision has a tendency to totally destroyed its victim at least as spectacularly as a breached fusion bottle.
The sole exception to the above occurs when one ship's impeller wedge is fully established, and the other ship's impeller wedge is not. There is a time period during the powering-up process for a wedge during which the wedge is actually "up" but not yet established at full power. In effect, there is an area around the ship in question in which there is a powerfully stressed gravity band which is readily observable and highly destructive to any material object in its area of effect, but which is vastly weaker than an all-up impeller wedge. You might think of it as the first stage of a multi-stage activation process. This field's existence is readily detectable, but a smaller vessel with a fully established impeller wedge could, if it entered the area of the "first-stage" field, knock out the impeller nodes producing it. Because the power levels involved are still orders of magnitude lower then those involved when the nodes go fully active and the wedge goes to full strength, the destruction is far less spectacular. Thus Honor was able to take out the nodes of the courier vessel in Basilisk without completely destroying the ship. And the fact that the courier boat's "first-stage" field had the same dimensions as its full- powered wedge would have had is why she was able to come close enough to take the field down without physically contacting the courier boat itself. Had the positions of the two vessels been reversed -- that is, had Fearless been bringing up her wedge and the skipper of the Peep courier boat had been able to maneuver his vessel, with fully established wedge, through the cruiser's "first- stage" field -- Fearless would have suffered effectively the same damage that the courier boat did.
Note that smaller and weaker impeller wedges come up faster than larger and stronger ones. This means that the courier boat's window vulnerability was actually narrower than Fearless' would have been. This also applies to missile impeller wedges, where the differences in the fundamental technology (see the answers to your second question above) also come into play. If it didn't, an impeller-drive missile would take so long to bring its wedge up from "standby" that it would be totally useless as a weapon system.
The impeller rooms have enough energy running through them to severly damage/destroy the ship, so you might not what to be moving those components around.
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