Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's an easy calculation: 0.6c / (150 * earth gravity). Type that on Google. Answer: 1.415 days or nearly 34 hours. That's acceleration and deceleration, since you don't want to crash translate every time, though you may shave off a couple of hours at the end. And those pairs may not be once per voyage, since you may need to translate down to catch a grav wave or something.

There may be some crews that accept that, but I don't think it's more than a blip in the statistics.

What would make that better would be to have genetically-modified people to tolerate higher accelerations in comfort or to put the crew in semi-stasis while the ship accelerates on its own. The former seems unlikely in the current political context and the latter seems unlikely in the Honorverse.

Also, would a ship without compensators even be able to enter a grav wave? They'd detect them via the Warshawskis, but if they can't enter them, the trips would be much longer. Doesn't seem acceptable for merchant shippers' bottom lines.

But you do not really want to get to half of that, because .3c is the absolute max velocity to make a transition into hyperspace. I do not remember exactly, but commercial vessels can go past the Beta band.

Galactic Sapper wrote:I'd have to look up the reference and math it out, but as a ballpark putting a 20 MT fort (plus ~5 MT carrier kinda like a matryoshka doll that fits over the fort) would only lock the Junction down for an hour or so. Annoying but hardly something that can't be scheduled around.

tlb wrote:But you do not really want to get to half of that, because .3c is the absolute max velocity to make a transition into hyperspace. I do not remember exactly, but commercial vessels can go past the Beta band.

You only need the sails (which were invented about 100 years before the compensator) and the hyperdrive generator to move through hyperspace. Check the material in More than Honor.

Jonathan_S wrote:We saw during Honor Among Enemies that most merchant chips don't carry military grade rad shielding and so are limited to 0.5c in hyper; and similarly don't carry military grade hyper generators and so are limited to the Delta bands.

However once in hyper the 0.3c limit doesn't matter any more; and even the newest RMN warships don't have the acceleration to breach 0.3c on a normal trajectory from planet to hyper limit. These hypothetical ultra-mega freighters wouldn't ever have to worry about that. They'd still be plenty slow when they reached the hyper limit; they'd do their prolonged acceleration once they'd climbed to the Delta band.

Still, even at that lower 0.5c maximum speed I doubt a specialized ultra-mega ship crew would care to spend a bit over a day at 5 gees subjective boosting up to that velocity, just to trim a couple days off a long voyage (admittedly the more you have to change velocity the more the time difference adds up).

She had already invented a new device capable of scanning hyper-space for grav waves and wave shifts within five light-seconds of a starship (to this day, all grav scanners are known as "warshawskis" by starship crews), which made it possible to use impeller drive between hyper-space grav waves, since they could now be seen and avoided.
That, alone, would have been sufficient to earn Warshawski undying renown, but beneficial as it was, its significance paled beside her next leap forward, for in working out her detector, Dr. Warshawski had penetrated far more deeply into the nature of the grav wave phenomenon than any of her predecessors, and she suddenly realized that it would be possible to build an impeller drive which could be reconfigured at will to project its grav waves at right angles to the generating vessel. There was no converging effect to move a pocket of normal-space, but these perpendicular grav fields could be brought into phase with the grav wave, thus eliminating the interference effect between impellers and the wave. More, the new fields would stabilize a vessel relative to the grav wave, allowing a transition into it which eliminated the traditional dangers grav shear presented to the ship's physical structure. In effect, the alterations she made to Fleetwing to produce her "alpha nodes" provided the ship with gigantic, immaterial sails: circular, plate-like gravity bands over two hundred kilometers in diameter. Coupled with her grav wave detector to plot and "read" grav waves, they would permit a starship to literally "set her sails" and use the focused radiation hurtling along hyper-space's naturally occurring grav waves to derive incredible accelerations.
Not only that, but the interface between sail and natural grav wave produced an eddy of preposterously high energy levels which could be "siphoned off" to power the starship. Effectively, once a starship "set sail" it drew sufficient power to maintain and trim its sails and also for every other energy requirement and could thus shut down its onboard power plants until the time came to leave hyper-space. A Warshawski Sail hypership thus had no need for reaction mass, required very little fuel mass, and could sustain high rates of acceleration indefinitely, which meant that the velocity loss associated with "cracking the wall" between hyper bands could be regained and that use of the upper bands was no longer impractical.
This last point was a crucial factor in attaining higher interstellar transit times. The maximum safe velocity in any hyper band remained .6 c, but the higher bands, with their closer point-to-point congruencies, added a significant multiplier to the FTL equivalent of that velocity. Prior to the Warshawski Sail, not only had dimension shear made translating into the upper bands dangerous, but the successive velocity losses had made it highly uneconomical for any reaction drive ship. Now the lost velocity could be rapidly regained and the higher, "faster" bands could be used to sustain a much higher average velocity. As a result, the dreaded grav wave became the path to ever more efficient hyper travel, and captains who had previously avoided them in terror now used their new instrumentation to find them and cruised on standard impeller drive between them.

Jonathan_S wrote:To get the time a given tonnage locks down the junction is (the max 10 is because there is always a minimum 10 second lockdown):
<seconds locked down> =MAX(10; 1.6 * <mtons>^2)

Going the other way to get the time a given tonnage you just flip it around (this one doesn't have error checking, so it'll give you a theoretical tonnage for less than 10 seconds; even though that tonnage would still produce a 10 second lockdown)
<mtons> = SQRT(<seconds locked down>/1.6)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:A simple way to go about this is for the junction to charge per minute of lock down. Want to transit with something that locks down for 2 minutes? Pay for 2 transits.

Double your mass and now you pay for 4 transits. Triple instead and you're paying for 9 transits. At some point, it becomes uneconomical enough that ultra-large ships are extremely rare and are only used for delicate, huge equipment that cannot be disassembled and shipped in parts. And that may be the only market for niche ultra-large freighters, which may also be limited to 50 gravities of acceleration.

Such as the Airbus Beluga, Beluga XL and Antonov An-225 aeroplanes of our world. Only 5 units of each Beluga model and one Antonov An-225 were ever constructed; the 5 older Belugas were retired as the new XL ones were built.

tlb wrote:Your pricing scheme is interesting, but does not make the few ultra-large freighters uneconomical. If it is carrying some multiple of freight that would fit in a regular ship, then an increase in the transit charge by that same multiple causes no penalty on a per weight basis. If it is carrying 5 times what a freighter could and it is charged 10 times the transit fee; that would likely still be economical, for the special cases where this capacity was absolutely needed.

tlb wrote:Your pricing scheme is interesting, but does not make the few ultra-large freighters uneconomical. If it is carrying some multiple of freight that would fit in a regular ship, then an increase in the transit charge by that same multiple causes no penalty on a per weight basis. If it is carrying 5 times what a freighter could and it is charged 10 times the transit fee; that would likely still be economical, for the special cases where this capacity was absolutely needed.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's not the same multiple because the transit lock downs are quadratic. 5 times the regular is 25 times in fee.

tlb wrote:Since you said two minutes results in paying for 2 transits; I did not read the rest well enough; but no matter, shippers will pay the fees for the kind of shipments that require an ultra-heavy transport. The US Navy could have broken the USS Cole into pieces and transported the results on regular ships; instead they paid the premium to bring it home without additional damage.

kzt wrote:It's basically going to be Beowulf to Manticore traffic that would be enormous objects. Like say KM sized pieces of orbital platforms or shipyards.

Normal shippers have no way to get things that large to the WHJ.