What happens to all that debris?

What makes you think that some bright soul in a place like Manticore Astro Control hasn't already though about the potential problem of someone trying to run or force an unscheduled mass transit to screw up the wormhole?

Other than weighing ships heading into the queue with some sort of equipment or test to confirm actual vs declared mass to keep from having some deranged person filling a 4 million ton freigherer with too much material like lead, what are some options.

1st would be that if you notice that several multi million ton ships are screaming down on the terminus all together at whatever speed, you could use some of your mines, missile pods, some of those repurposed SLN SD grazers in remote mounts, etc and target the incomming mass of ships. In order to enter the wormhole (and survive) you need to set your sails in the correct sequence. Start taking out nodes on the incomming ships and that would create a few problems for said ships.
If they are trying to go through at the same time they -theorectialy- have to be "together", not sequential as Hamish used in the multi transit from Trevor's Start to Basilisk. Start blowing nodes and the "together" isn't going to do so well and certainly won't enter the wormhile though they may pass through the location of the terminus.
And what happens if a ship runs right through the present location of the terminus lane but is not PROPERLY configured to make the transit?

Even a number of ships on a suicide mission still have to get to the entry point...but if they get shot up such that they can't enter the wormhole (not be able to form sails) will it "clog" the wormhole

Even if you take a bunch of SD, how much hammering will they be able to take from the (nominally "fixed" )defenses before they won't be able to transit. This isn't that they have lost the ability to go into hyperspace- it's the next higher critera of correct sail formation. And they are going to be comming at speed and probably acclerating.....what happens if you hit the theoretical event horizon of a terminus having been accelerating at 300 gravities and your still doing that kind of acceleration when you get to the place you would otherwise cross at?

Does it enter the wormhole but get ripped to component atoms and just not come out again?

Does it get riped apart by gravitational forces and contineue as an expanding cloud of bits on the original trajectory without entering the wormhole.

If it can't ENTER the wormhole but only pass through where the entry point is, does that effect the timing and capasity of the wormhole?

How fast could the various weapons be retargeted to aquire and hit an incomming ship? That would also apply to something that needed to be stopped for any other reason.

How many SD sized grasers firing at 50,000km does it take to screw up an SD? I only use 50k km because RFC mentioned a 12k diameter for a terminus lane and you can park a whole lot of stuff between 12 and 50k km.
Inquiring minds want to know.

Brigade XO wrote:If not carrying electronic messages and a couple of people in spartan conditions, something in the 250k mt range could funtion like a FedEx or UPS or DHL express boat for high value/time critical physical delivery.

By the way, data can weigh a lot too.

I don't know how many times the AWS Snow Mobile has ever been needed, but this may happen in the Honorverse too.

Paraphrasing Andrew Tanenbaum, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a dispatch boat full of molycirc drives hurtling down the Junction".

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:What will happen if two fleets transit the junction simultaneously from opposite sides? Will they crash into each other inside the wormhole?

What happens to the debris inside a wormhole and inside hyperspace? Seems debris would be more dangerous there sense sensors are severely degraded and the ship's speed is high.

Basically you can't. The transition is instant and the first ship/fleet through would shut the wormhole down for somewhere between 10 seconds and many hours; depending on how much tonnage transited. It don't matter how few fractions of a second difference there might be in activation; there is no "simultaneous" and so one ship/group goes and one ship/group is blocked. Because the transition is instant there's no possibility of collision within the wormhole.

Now I don't think the books have said what happens if you try activate your hyper-generator when the wormhole is blocked. But I suspect it's like trying to use it to leave normal space from within the hyper-limit. It discharges but you don't go anywhere. (Well you keep moving, but you're still in the departure system)

And I believe the entrance and exist lanes are separate, so there shouldn't be a collision upon arrival. But it'd be damned startling to see someone pop into existence nearby right when you were supposed to depart...

One other point about simultaneous transits:

You can have multiple simultaneous transits--even mass transits of fleets--as long as the transits use different hyper bridges of a wormhole with a central junction and at least one more terminus than the number of vessels/fleets transiting--and it will not lock down the wormhole to all traffic.

On Basilisk Station, Chapter 5 wrote:The central nexus was the key to any wormhole junction. Ships could transit from the central nexus to any secondary terminus and from any secondary terminus to the central nexus, but they could not transit directly from one secondary terminus to another. Economically, that gave Manticore a tremendous advantage, even against someone who might control two or more of the Manticore Junction's termini; militarily, the reverse was true.
There was an inviolable ceiling, varying somewhat from junction to junction, on the maximum tonnage which could transit a wormhole junction terminus simultaneously. In Manticore's case, it lay in the region of two hundred million tons, which set the upper limit on any assault wave the RMN could dispatch to any single Junction terminus. Yet each use of a given terminus-to-terminus route created a "transit window"—a temporary destabilization of that route for a period proportionate to the square of the mass making transit. A single four-million-ton freighter's transit window was a bare twenty-five seconds, but a two-hundred-million-ton assault wave would shut down its route for over seventeen hours, during which it could neither receive reinforcements nor retreat whence it had come. Which meant, of course, that if an attacker chose to use a large assault wave, he'd better be absolutely certain that wave was nasty enough to win.
But if the attacker controlled more than a single secondary terminus, he could send the same tonnage to the central nexus through each of them without worrying about transit windows, since none would use exactly the same route. Choreographing such an assault would require meticulous planning and synchronization—not an easy matter for fleets hundreds of light-years apart, however good the staff work—yet if it could be pulled off, it would allow an attack in such strength that no conceivable fortifications could stop it.

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

Vince wrote:One other point about simultaneous transits:

You can have multiple simultaneous transits--even mass transits of fleets--as long as the transits use different hyper bridges of a wormhole with a central junction and at least one more terminus than the number of vessels/fleets transiting--and it will not lock down the wormhole to all traffic.

On Basilisk Station, Chapter 5 wrote:The central nexus was the key to any wormhole junction. Ships could transit from the central nexus to any secondary terminus and from any secondary terminus to the central nexus, but they could not transit directly from one secondary terminus to another. Economically, that gave Manticore a tremendous advantage, even against someone who might control two or more of the Manticore Junction's termini; militarily, the reverse was true.
There was an inviolable ceiling, varying somewhat from junction to junction, on the maximum tonnage which could transit a wormhole junction terminus simultaneously. In Manticore's case, it lay in the region of two hundred million tons, which set the upper limit on any assault wave the RMN could dispatch to any single Junction terminus. Yet each use of a given terminus-to-terminus route created a "transit window"—a temporary destabilization of that route for a period proportionate to the square of the mass making transit. A single four-million-ton freighter's transit window was a bare twenty-five seconds, but a two-hundred-million-ton assault wave would shut down its route for over seventeen hours, during which it could neither receive reinforcements nor retreat whence it had come. Which meant, of course, that if an attacker chose to use a large assault wave, he'd better be absolutely certain that wave was nasty enough to win.
But if the attacker controlled more than a single secondary terminus, he could send the same tonnage to the central nexus through each of them without worrying about transit windows, since none would use exactly the same route. Choreographing such an assault would require meticulous planning and synchronization—not an easy matter for fleets hundreds of light-years apart, however good the staff work—yet if it could be pulled off, it would allow an attack in such strength that no conceivable fortifications could stop it.

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

A worthwhile reminder. Sometimes I remembered to use wording intended to allude to that and sometimes I forgot to.


When you're talking about shutting down a "wormhole" and a junction's involved you're actually only locking down the bridge between the center and one specific terminus - it has no impact on the rest of junction, or termini it might have.

Vince wrote:One other point about simultaneous transits:

You can have multiple simultaneous transits--even mass transits of fleets--as long as the transits use different hyper bridges of a wormhole with a central junction and at least one more terminus than the number of vessels/fleets transiting--and it will not lock down the wormhole to all traffic.

On Basilisk Station, Chapter 5 wrote:The central nexus was the key to any wormhole junction. Ships could transit from the central nexus to any secondary terminus and from any secondary terminus to the central nexus, but they could not transit directly from one secondary terminus to another. Economically, that gave Manticore a tremendous advantage, even against someone who might control two or more of the Manticore Junction's termini; militarily, the reverse was true.
There was an inviolable ceiling, varying somewhat from junction to junction, on the maximum tonnage which could transit a wormhole junction terminus simultaneously. In Manticore's case, it lay in the region of two hundred million tons, which set the upper limit on any assault wave the RMN could dispatch to any single Junction terminus. Yet each use of a given terminus-to-terminus route created a "transit window"—a temporary destabilization of that route for a period proportionate to the square of the mass making transit. A single four-million-ton freighter's transit window was a bare twenty-five seconds, but a two-hundred-million-ton assault wave would shut down its route for over seventeen hours, during which it could neither receive reinforcements nor retreat whence it had come. Which meant, of course, that if an attacker chose to use a large assault wave, he'd better be absolutely certain that wave was nasty enough to win.
But if the attacker controlled more than a single secondary terminus, he could send the same tonnage to the central nexus through each of them without worrying about transit windows, since none would use exactly the same route. Choreographing such an assault would require meticulous planning and synchronization—not an easy matter for fleets hundreds of light-years apart, however good the staff work—yet if it could be pulled off, it would allow an attack in such strength that no conceivable fortifications could stop it.

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

Jonathan_S wrote:A worthwhile reminder. Sometimes I remembered to use wording intended to allude to that and sometimes I forgot to.


When you're talking about shutting down a "wormhole" and a junction's involved you're actually only locking down the bridge between the center and one specific terminus - it has no impact on the rest of junction, or termini it might have.

Good post Vince. I'm glad that was cleared up. Jonathan stated upstream the entire wormhole would be closed, but in his defense he was trying to deal with me opening cans of worms faster than the worms can squirm.

Since lockdowns are independent, why aren't mass transits and departures also independent? IOW, there must be several sets of inbound and outbound lanes (Trevor's Star, Sigma Draconis, Matapan, Gregor A etc.) So why can't a transit be queued for each outbound lane simultaneously? They're going to different places. Trevor's Star being just one destination. You mean tlb's semaphore ship has to coordinate ACS in several different systems? That's why I suggested that several transits should be possible simultaneously. Akin to the bus station. "Track 1 is now boarding for Florida. Track 2 is boarding for NY, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Atlanta and all points North."

At any rate, what is keeping a ship or ships from very quickly "busting an unsafe maneuver" much like a U-ey (U-TURN) once it gets into the transit lane, cutting across lanes and quickly hitting the transit button, especially after a MAlign distraction is created elsewhere.

Also, if debris is in the transit lane, why doesn't it go through as well if it is in the transit "area" when the transit button is engaged? The debris should be destroyed, perhaps. But I can't see why it wouldn't transit as well.

cthia wrote:Good post Vince. I'm glad that was cleared up. Jonathan stated upstream the entire wormhole would be closed, but in his defense he was trying to deal with me opening cans of worms faster than the worms can squirm.

Since lockdowns are independent, why aren't mass transits and departures also independent? IOW, there must be several sets of inbound and outbound lanes (Trevor's Star, Sigma Draconis, Matapan, Gregor A etc.) So why can't a transit be queued for each outbound lane simultaneously? They're going to different places. Trevor's Star being just one destination. You mean tlb's semaphore ship has to coordinate ACS in several different systems? That's why I suggested that several transits should be possible simultaneously. Akin to the bus station. "Track 1 is now boarding for Florida. Track 2 is boarding for NY, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Atlanta and all points North."

At any rate, what is keeping a ship or ships from very quickly "busting an unsafe maneuver" much like a U-ey (U-TURN) once it gets into the transit lane, cutting across lanes and quickly hitting the transit button, especially after a MAlign distraction is created elsewhere.

Also, if debris is in the transit lane, why doesn't it go through as well if it is in the transit "area" when the transit button is engaged? The debris should be destroyed, perhaps. But I can't see why it wouldn't transit as well.

In my head I knew that by "wormhole" I meant the single point to point connection between the Junction and, say, Trevor Star - rather than the entire Junction; but that definitely may not have been clear to people that weren't in my head

Yes mass transits and departures would also be independent. That's why Manticore, pre-war, was worried about Haven controlling multiple termini because they could send 200-ish million tons simultaneously through each they controlled. And Manticore could of course instead do the same from the Junction to each one of those multiple termini. In almost all ways the Junctions behaves like 7 different totally independent wormholes just happen to all have a termini all within 1 LS of each other at Manticore.

Activity and lockdown on one "leg" or bridge of the Junction is totally independent of activity on any other; and yes that means any semaphore ships would have to independently coordinate the state of those 7 different legs.



So it is somewhat like a bus station, with 7 different platforms for departures to different systems. Just a very very widely spread out bus station - with the platforms scattered over about 300,000 km.


As for "a ship or ships from very quickly "busting an unsafe maneuver" much like a U-ey (U-TURN) once it gets into the transit lane, cutting across lanes and quickly hitting the transit button"... Well, nothing physically prevents them - though sheer distance means it'll take a while to complete this very quickly executed unsafe maneuver

Calculated a couple pages back that at the Junction each entry/exit lane is a 90,000 km long cylinder of grav effect that ships must travel under sail and can't pop out the side of. So if the ship has already entered that part of the lane it'd need to make a full U-turn, run clear of the gravity effect, switch to impellers to get over the to start of another 90,000 km long grav lane, switch back to sails and head down that to depart. Obviously that's all possible - I'm just explaining the mechanics.

However that is a lot of distance and time for a defender, even a distracted one, to notice this unsafe behavior and possibly violently object to it. Just the 90,000 km approach run under sails is going to take a few minutes - and because those departure points are scattered around within a roughly 300,000 km diameter sphere the entry points to those final approach lanes likely aren't that close to each other either.

So nothing prevents a ship from making such an unsafe maneuver except worry about acting unsafely and against ACS instructions for, say, 5 - 10 minutes while under the guns of the most heavily defended spot in the known universe

cthia wrote:At any rate, what is keeping a ship or ships from very quickly "busting an unsafe maneuver" much like a U-ey (U-TURN) once it gets into the transit lane, cutting across lanes and quickly hitting the transit button, especially after a MAlign distraction is created elsewhere.

Delta V is what keeps it from happening. Even the very limited areas of the MWJ, it's still a huge amount of area. Combined with the fact that freighters have a lot of mass to point elsewhere and to "cut across" they would have to start at a standstill, or else so far back in line that stuff is even more spaced out.

Remember that Weber, for all his other sins with physics, still deals with momentum. A space ship simply cannot make a 90 degree turn, they have to generate velocity to where they want to go and "cut the corner" so to speak to get where they want to go.

So, if when Haven holds Tervor's Star and is contemplating using it to do what Fillerta ended up trying to do much later, they would have had a fleet waiting just on the Trevor's Star end of the wormhole for a ship to come though with the message that the way was open.

Ok......so other than mines and junction forts, what else could you do to complicate a hostile transit. You could park obsticals in the exit lane. A bit more than large concrete blocks would be nessisary of course.
Perhaps you have a couple of x-Peep SDs that you brought back to the MBS but have determined that they arn't worth refitting though you could strip a lot things out of them and use them as block ships. Now you really can't put full time crews on them as you are going to use them in a manner inconsistant with the health and welfare of any crew. So you set them up as essentialy really large remote control drones and use their wedges as weapons. Have to provide station-keeping ability relative to the exit point of the wormhole from Trevor's Star and really really really close to the point at which ships would materialize. So you have the wedge up on several of these and layer them staggared out from the exit point such that anything comming out is going to at least hit the wedge if not wedge AND the SD. That should make quite the mess of anything transiting the wormhole right after it does that and the debris is going to continue "down" and out from the exit point at - to some extent- at the very low speed that the exiting ship brought with it through the wormhole.

That gives you a bit more time to get your lane defences fully engaged and also means that anybody that is sucessfuly able to capture the Junction will have to do a major clearing operation to get the drone ships out of the way before 1st a ship goes through to Trevor's Star and then anything can come back the other way- even if the Forts and mines have taken out of the equasion. Of course that would mean that when fecal matter hits the rotary impeller, the drone controls will need to be destoyed (at the AC site and with an auto destruct sent to the receivers and controls on the ships used in the blocking.

So, do you want to thread the shoal of SDs with wedges up IF you get a message that the Junction has fallen to your forces and you are urgently needed to help dealing with the Manticore Home Fleet?

Might be just too much time on my hands and not enough new material

ZVar wrote:

cthia wrote:At any rate, what is keeping a ship or ships from very quickly "busting an unsafe maneuver" much like a U-ey (U-TURN) once it gets into the transit lane, cutting across lanes and quickly hitting the transit button, especially after a MAlign distraction is created elsewhere.

Delta V is what keeps it from happening. Even the very limited areas of the MWJ, it's still a huge amount of area. Combined with the fact that freighters have a lot of mass to point elsewhere and to "cut across" they would have to start at a standstill, or else so far back in line that stuff is even more spaced out.

Remember that Weber, for all his other sins with physics, still deals with momentum. A space ship simply cannot make a 90 degree turn, they have to generate velocity to where they want to go and "cut the corner" so to speak to get where they want to go.

I wasn't exactly talking about a U-TURN. I simply used that as an example of an unsafe maneuver. I was actually contemplating cutting across lanes.

We don't know what would happen to a gaggle of ships trying to transit which exceed the mass limitation. Whether they are destroyed, hit a brick wall or if they simply continue on beyond the wormhole in n-space. Which brings me to another question. Can the wormhole be entered from the opposite direction? I wouldn't think it can. But, can ships enter hyperspace near the wormhole? And return at that same locus from hyperspace?

cthia wrote: But, can ships enter hyperspace near the wormhole? And return at that same locus from hyperspace?

Define near.
The MJW has a hyper limt of "less than a million KM" as per OBS. Inside is like inside any star or planet's hyper limit, and outside is well, outside.