penny wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:Anyway, circling back to the question of stopping.
The spider drive is described as grabbing ahold of the hyper wall. That at least raises the possibility that it could stop in some absolute sense - since presumably if you were able to grab points on all sides of the ship and pulled you'd be unable to move in any direction -- just hang suspected in your web of tension.
Though that possibility raises at least a couple of questions - neither of which we have the information to answer.
1) On an engineering level do any of the current spider drive systems have enough ability to alter their grab point to grab points immediately beside, or even angled behind their current position. If not, if they always have to grab points that are angled ahead of their current position then it would seem that the particular implementation of the drive would be unable to grab the hyper wall in such a way to know absolutely that the ship is stopped.
I don't think it matters. Grabbing the hyper wall and not letting go to grab a point on the wall further ahead should be sufficient. At some point no greater than the size of the ship the ship should come to a complete stop. It would be anchored to the wall.
Plus, the ship could face the wall and grab a hold of it while in the orientation of facing the wall. Akin to a human facing a wall and grabbing a hold of it instead of reaching out with our left hand to grab a hold of it.
Except the wall isn't a physical object that exits within the current space/dimension; it's the barrier between two different spaces/dimensions. So there isn't any orientation that's 'towards' the wall -- the wall is everywhere and nowhere -- any direction a spider tractor shoots out from a ship it can grab the Alpha wall (assuming it was in normal space). And the ship body doesn't interact with the wall so I don't see how you could possibly hold yourself against it like a human holding themselves against a wall.
penny wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:2) What relative movement might exist between the local hyper wall and the local star? (Or, if in hyper, between the next higher hyper wall an the n-space emergence point from there relative to the local star).
Intuitively there is an insignificant change of distance between the hyper wall and the star because of a phenomena called “frame dragging.” I touched on that in another thread. The sun is dragging everything in its local time frame with it as it orbits the milky way.
Do consider that when a spider drive latches onto the hyper wall, as far as I know, that in itself does not create acceleration; nor is the spider ship being dragged by the wall because the wall is moving. At least we haven't been told that information??? The ship must alternate grabbing and letting go to create the movement. Even though hyper walls are not walls as we usually think of walls, walls do not generally move. We also hear about ships “bouncing” off and or hitting up against the wall; which to me implies a wall that does not physically move. Although, it could also indicate that the wall does move because movement along with the direction of travel would be less dangerous for a ship. Akin to walking with a crowd of people in NY and bumping into the crowd while moving along with the crowd, as opposed to bumping into the crowd when moving against the crowd. I suggest a wall that is not moving.
Actually we hear about ships bouncing off the hyper limit. That's a different phenomenon.
Echoes of Honor wrote:A ship which attempted to translate out of hyper inside a star's hyper limit couldn't. As long as it made the attempt within the outer twenty percent of the hyper limit, all that happened was that it couldn't get into n-space. If it made the attempt any further in than that, however, Bad Things happened. Someone had once described the result as using a pulse cannon to fire soft-boiled eggs at a stone wall to see if they would bounce.
Hyper limits exist at specific distances from local gravitational bodies (the actual distance depending on the mass of the object). But the hyper wall exists everywhere, both inside and outside that limit -- that's how FTL comms, wedges, Warshaski sensors that can see wedges in near-realtime, and the Spider drive itself can all work inside the hyper limit as well as outside it. All require integration with the hyper wall.
So there's no particular reason to except frame dragging in this space/dimension to impact the hyper wall which is simply the barrier between spaces/dimensions. That said we also have zero evidence of whether the wall is fixed or not relative to the local star. It probably doesn't have significant velocity -- but a spider drive (which actually latches onto it) is the first thing we know of that might actually allow scientists to tell.
But if it's effectively stationary with respect to all local stars[1] then it must do something odd in the spaces between them because all stars aren't stationary with respect to each other.
But you're right that we haven't been told that simply latching onto the wall impart velocity. OTOH the spider drive is an overpowered tractor. It acts by pulling the ship towards the anchor point. So unless you specifically set things up so you have exactly opposing pulls (so the ship is held in tension between opposing sets of anchor points) it might be hard to disentangle motion imparted by the anchor moving (with respect to the local system) from motion imparted by the tractor pulling the ship towards the anchor.
That said, while we don't know and can't rule out the possibility that points on the hyper wall might move relative to a position in the spade/dimension 'below' them I do tend to think it unlikely.
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[1] or probably more accurately stationary with respect to the barycenter of local systems -- because, for example, it couldn't be stationary with respect to each star in a binary star system as they orbit each other.----
penny wrote:[snip]
Jonathan_S wrote:Still, even the possibility of some way to ensure you were stopped dead relative to some spot in space (or hyper) is an interesting one.
Agreed. I have an idea about how it might be exploited. But first a little review about what we learned in school. We learned that the speed of light “C” is not just a measure of speed but also a measure of distance. C is the distance that light travels per unit of time. For instance, in a second.
If attacking Manticore, the MAN could travel by hyper at a constant speed in the higher band time after time again and measure the travel time to that waypoint. Let's say for the sake of argument the average ETA to the MBS is 3 hrs 20 minutes. Then, the coordinates of an anchored fleet should be 3 hrs 20 minutes from Darius. In case of drift, that drift should add / subtract the appropriate amount of time to the waypoint (“coordinates”). Therefore, a dispatch boat attempting to locate the fleet would travel at least 3 hrs 20 minutes. To cut the margin of error and the possibility of overflying the fleet the dispatch boat should slow down at about 3 hrs 15 minutes or so? Or at some time equal to the average drift at that distance traveled. I posit that the drift is constant, and a factor of distance traveled.
More like 3 months than 3 hours. Even the Kappa band (as high as a streak drive can climb) tops out at a warship velocity of about 4,300 c. Just getting to Manticore from Sol through the Kappa bands would take you about 44 days.
And the hyperlog is more sophisticated than just dead reckoning by elapsed time. But your larger point is correct, if there is a known drift vector (velocity & direction) then by knowing how long the ships you're attempting to rendezvous with should have been waiting you can calculate where they should have drifted to and adjust your course to go there instead. (Or if unsure of the duration to to the original coordinates and then head down the drift vector until you've gone far enough they couldn't possibly have arrived early enough to drift past there). Your (or their) hyperlog might still have picked up enough positional error that you don't pass within sensor range[2] of them; but that issue doesn't change whether or not hyperspace has drift.
(Now if it has non-constant drift then that'd be a whole different problem
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[2] And as noted in previous posts one of the issues with an in-hyper rendezvous is that sensor range is so much lower; and much much lower still for ships using spider drives (which are invisible to the much longer ranged grav sensors). Though your point that they might be able to use sails (if they have them) as a "here I am" signal is a good one.
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penny wrote:However, hyper lanes are wide enough that two fleets could pass each other and not know it. So how can a dispatch boat ensure that it will not fly by the anchored fleet? The solution comes from my college days on the few occasions where I had too much to drink. My freshman year I lived in a dorm that had twisting hallways at ninety degree angles. If I had too much to drink, how do I get back to my dorm room without missing it?
I placed my hand up against the wall and followed the twisting wall all the way back to my dorm room.
If a spider drive is attached to a hyper wall, then a dispatch boat can kill its drive minutes before the ETA and hug the wall all the way during the voyage. It will run into the anchored ship. Akin to traveling in the carpool lane all the way to your friend who has “broken down” in the carpool lane. Instead of several lanes over where he can be missed.
Note: If sails are only needed in grav waves??? Then can a spider ship raise sails in regular hyper anyway, to also serve as a beacon? IF a spider ship has sails which I do not think it has???
Again, hyper walls are everywhere. The only divide one layer of hyperspace from another. They don't restrict a ship's 3 dimensional movement within the layer of hyperspace. So you can't put your hand against one and follow it home.
Also Honorverse hyperspace is just a more compressed (and high background EM noise) version of normal space. There's aren't hyper lanes. The only thing like that is the normal space transit lanes near a wormhole terminus (which seem to be around 40-50,000 km wide) or grav waves in hyper (which can be multiple lightyears wide). But you don't
have to follow grav waves in hyper -- it's perfectly possibly to cut straight across the rifts between them (and probably 90+% of hyperspace is rifts, not waves). But, again, your point that it's quite possibly to sail past an entire other fleet without either being able to see the other is quite true. Hyperspace is vast, and sensor ranges are painfully short (compared to normal space)
But assuming a spider ship mounts sails (something RFC hasn't confirmed; despite very strongly implying they were capable of using wormholes) there's nothing stopping a ship from raising its sail wherever it wants. It won't provide
propulsion unless its in a grav wave or one of the transit lanes around a wormhole terminus, but it'll still be a big visible grav signature. (And, in fact, if a ship is departing from a system that lies without a grav wave the ship
must transition from wedge to sails before using its hyper generator to crack the Alpha wall and enter hyper. It'd just be coasting with sail up in the (likely brief) interval between raising sail and translating into hyper; but it needs the sails already up to stabilize it as it'll appear in hyper already in the middle of the grav wave that the system lies within.