What happens to all that debris?

Jonathan_S wrote:

tlb wrote:If you are forced to drop out of hyperspace, such as in chapter 54 of Torch of Freedom; then you have to hope that you have enough fuel to get you to an inhabited planet at sub light speed velocity, otherwise you become disappeared for unknown reasons.

Exactly. Well not just fuel; also life support, food, spare parts. A normal ship is unlikely to be equipped to operate without resupply or access to spares for more than maybe a year or two.

So if your hyper generator is failing and the failsafes dumped you even just 3 LY from an inhabited system you're unlikely to be able to survive the 4-5 years it'd take to cover that piddly distance without access to hyper.

Now if you can patch up the hyper generator with onboard supplies then it doesn't mater if you're in hyper or in normal space; once it's repaired you can then use hyper to get to an system for supplies and a complete overhaul. But if you can't repair it then better to have stayed in hyper - your odds of getting the attention of another ship are low (see the sensor range issues from my last post) but they're infinitely higher than trying to get attention from normal space where you're likely the only people within lightyears!

But what about, let's call it, the Snagglepus Maneuver. Emergency exit - stage N-space. Because unidentified unlocalized ships are firing on you?

How long does it take to exit hyper?

And, it sounds like being stranded on a country back road in the dark. You need a flare to increase your chances of survival. Didn't Honor use her wedge as a way to communicate with ships in hyper? More like a hope and a prayer, but it is better than nothing.

If you drop out of hyper on your own accord. You mean you can't reenter hyper where you exited?

cthia wrote:If you drop out of hyper on your own accord. You mean you can't reenter hyper where you exited?

How did you possibly get that from what we wrote?

We were very clear to specify that we were specifically discussing what would happens if you were in deep space with a broken hyper generator.


If you drop out of your own accord then the hyper generator is presumably still fine. In less than an hour even the largest ship's generator would be recharged and then you'd be able to reenter hyperspace just like you could from any other point outside a hyper limit.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:If you drop out of hyper on your own accord. You mean you can't reenter hyper where you exited?

How did you possibly get that from what we wrote?

We were very clear to specify that we were specifically discussing what would happens if you were in deep space with a broken hyper generator.


If you drop out of your own accord then the hyper generator is presumably still fine. In less than an hour even the largest ship's generator would be recharged and then you'd be able to reenter hyperspace just like you could from any other point outside a hyper limit.

I think we're talking past each other, compounded by my lack of total understanding.

I was responding in part to what I understood you to say that if forced to drop out of hyper before scheduled, you'd be lost. And I don't understand why you would be lost. Stranded maybe, but not lost.

And, inducing from there, if unscheduled exits from hyper results in you being lost, then whether you can get back into hyper or not should be a moot point, since you don't know from where you're entering hyper. IOW, I thought you were saying unscheduled exits totally screwed up your bearing. If I misunderstood, which is likely, my apology in advance.

I read in a thread somewhere that there may be Generational ships still out there that haven't arrived. Since they aren't traveling in hyper, it should be possible for a conventional ship to happen upon them. If so, is there anything that can be done?

Are they vulnerable to the countless centuries of battle generated debris fields?

cthia wrote:If you drop out of hyper on your own accord. You mean you can't reenter hyper where you exited?

Jonathan_S wrote:How did you possibly get that from what we wrote?

We were very clear to specify that we were specifically discussing what would happens if you were in deep space with a broken hyper generator.


If you drop out of your own accord then the hyper generator is presumably still fine. In less than an hour even the largest ship's generator would be recharged and then you'd be able to reenter hyperspace just like you could from any other point outside a hyper limit.

cthia wrote:I think we're talking past each other, compounded by my lack of total understanding.

I was responding in part to what I understood you to say that if forced to drop out of hyper before scheduled, you'd be lost. And I don't understand why you would be lost. Stranded maybe, but not lost.

And, inducing from there, if unscheduled exits from hyper results in you being lost, then whether you can get back into hyper or not should be a moot point, since you don't know from where you're entering hyper. IOW, I thought you were saying unscheduled exits totally screwed up your bearing. If I misunderstood, which is likely, my apology in advance.

We might have misunderstood your original question and then you misunderstood us. In my answer I was responding to being forced out of hyperspace because of a broken hyperspace generator. Under that circumstance, you would know where you were in normal space (because of the "hyper log" that keeps track of the correspondence between hyperspace location and normal space location). The problem is that knowing where you are is no good, if you do not have the resources to travel to someplace inhabited in the course of the rest of your life. In that case you are missing, presumed lost. In Torch of Freedom, they were lucky to be able to build a replacement part. In another thread I speculated that for them, it might have been better if the failing generator had left them in hyperspace; because then they continue to their destination and find a place where traffic in hyper would encounter and help them.

In HAE, there is the other situation where the space liner was forced to make a transition between bands, so the Havenite ships (which had lost track of their position) would not be able to find them in that band. Then they later transitioned back and rescued the personnel from the wrecked Wayfarer and the PRH ship. That is serious because of the armed ships chasing you, not because you have lost your way.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:I think we're talking past each other, compounded by my lack of total understanding.

I was responding in part to what I understood you to say that if forced to drop out of hyper before scheduled, you'd be lost. And I don't understand why you would be lost. Stranded maybe, but not lost.

And, inducing from there, if unscheduled exits from hyper results in you being lost, then whether you can get back into hyper or not should be a moot point, since you don't know from where you're entering hyper. IOW, I thought you were saying unscheduled exits totally screwed up your bearing. If I misunderstood, which is likely, my apology in advance.

We might have misunderstood your original question and then you misunderstood us. In my answer I was responding to being forced out of hyperspace because of a broken hyperspace generator. Under that circumstance, you would know where you were in normal space (because of the "hyper log" that keeps track of the correspondence between hyperspace location and normal space location). The problem is that knowing where you are is no good, if you do not have the resources to travel to someplace inhabited in the course of the rest of your life. In that case you are missing, presumed lost. In Torch of Freedom, they were lucky to be able to build a replacement part. In another thread I speculated that for them, it might have been better if the failing generator had left them in hyperspace; because then they continue to their destination and find a place where traffic in hyper would encounter and help them.

In HAE, there is the other situation where the space liner was forced to make a transition between bands, so the Havenite ships (which had lost track of their position) would not be able to find them in that band. Then they later transitioned back and rescued the personnel from the wrecked Wayfarer and the PRH ship. That is serious because of the armed ships chasing you, not because you have lost your way.

^This.

I wasn't trying to say the ship was "lost" in that the crew didn't know where they were. I agree that thanks to the hyper log they'll know where they are pretty accurately even on an unplanned exit from hyper.

The problem is entirely if you are stuck in normal space (due to a broken hyper generator) and you're ALSO more than say a LY or two from that nearest inhabited system. Without access to hyper it'd take you hundreds of times longer than normal to cover that distance, and so you'll run out of supplies and die before getting there.

cthia wrote:But what about, let's call it, the Snagglepus Maneuver. Emergency exit - stage N-space. Because unidentified unlocalized ships are firing on you?

How long does it take to exit hyper?

And, it sounds like being stranded on a country back road in the dark. You need a flare to increase your chances of survival. Didn't Honor use her wedge as a way to communicate with ships in hyper? More like a hope and a prayer, but it is better than nothing.

If you drop out of hyper on your own accord. You mean you can't reenter hyper where you exited?

And now that we've hopefully cleared up the miscommunication - let's circle back to your other questions.

First, we don't know exactly how long it takes to complete an exit from hyper. Offhand the only times I recall much of anything being discussed are when Honor leads her convoy into Yeltsin in HotQ and when Artemis is hiding in a lower hyper band in HAE.

Honor of the Queen wrote:“Ready for translation, aye,” Chief Killian replied, and the helmsman’s hand hovered over the manual override, just in case the astrogator’s computers dropped the ball, while Honor leaned back to watch.
“Mark!” DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless’s hyper generator became a basso growl.
Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted “down” the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor’s stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn’t even detect. DuMorne’s calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight “down” across a “distance” which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

Honor Among Enemies wrote:A ship bled over ninety percent of its velocity as it broke each hyper-space wall in a downward translation, which could be a handy tactical maneuver. But crash translations were rough on personnel and systems, and merchant skippers preferred the gentler, safer stress of a low velocity translation. It not only allowed their crews to avoid the violent nausea crash translations induced but also reduced alpha node wear by a measurable percentage, and that made their employers' bookkeepers happy with them, too.

Honor Among Enemies wrote:And, in fact, they had been careful. Artemis had dropped the LACs and her shuttles and then translated very cautiously down to the alpha bands without using her impellers at all—possible for such a slow translation, though only the best ship handler and engineer could have pulled it off—and hidden in the lower bands while Sukowski led the search mission towards Wayfarer's last known position.
[snip]
The return flight to Artemis had been nerve wracking for everyone. Linking back up with something as small as a flight of LACs and shuttles after twice translating through two distinct sets of hyper bands was the sort of navigational feat legends were made of, but Margaret Fuchien had pulled it off. Artemis had risen slowly back into the delta bands, like a submarine surfacing from deep water, and she'd hit within less than two hundred thousand kilometers of Fuchien's estimated position. After that, it had been a straightforward if anxious proposition to drop back down into normal-space and spend ten days making repairs before creeping stealthily back up to the gamma bands and heading back for New Berlin.

So it seems likely that the higher the hyper band you start in the longer it takes to complete exiting from hyper; because you've got more bands to drop through on the way.

Crash transitions sound like they're more about the starship's velocity than about time to transition bands; but I think the "slow translation" of Artemis was about how long crossing downwards across the Gamma wall took; rather than her velocity (since she'd still be coasting at the same velocity as when she shut her engines down to let Wayfarer change course in company with the decoy to fool the Peeps about the liner's location). So it seems ships can probably lengthen how long cracking each wall takes - but we don't know if normal and crash transitions use the same wall cracking time (in addition to the later's higher ship velocity)

It's probably seconds to transition out of your initial hyper band (which will remove you from the sensors of anybody with that band) but it's clearly multiple minutes to cross all the bands and get to normal space if it took Honor's convoy 4 minutes just to cross the Beta bands. So from the Delta bands we might guess it could have taken Honor's convoy around 12 to 15 minutes from initiating the transition out of the Delta bands until they reached normal space. (But that's juts a guess based on the only time we do have, for the Beta bands. We don't know how long it took to cross the Gamma before that or Alpha bands afterwards)





As for sending out a "flare". Yes Honor used a ship wedge as an early FTL signal. But the issue with using that, or FTL comms should the ship have it, upon ending up back in normal space is one of range. If you're close enough for anybody to pick up that FTL signal you're close enough to pretty quickly motor over there through normal space. During Honor's fight against Thunder of God in HotQ we saw that at that time warships' sensors couldn't see another ship's wedge at twenty-four and a half light-minutes (and that's no attempt to hide - it's simply beyond sensor range). And nobody can see a "flare" you send with your wedge if they're so far away they can't see anything from your wedge.

Now a system like Manticore has massive system level sensors that could see a hyper emergence over IIRC about 6 light months. There's a hint that those same sensors might not be able to see an impeller wedge over a single light month - but that may have been musing about a warship under stealth, rather than someone trying to signal with their wedge.
So let's be extra generous and consider what it means if they can see the hyper emergence or the using the wedge as a "flare" for an entire LY. That's still likely close enough to the system that the signaling ship could make it there through normal space without assistance. (And in the handful of systems with such a sensitive sensor array an emergence that far out would be investigated as a matter of course no mater what the arriving ship did - the arrival is already a "flare")

But if you were stuck several LY away from any inhabited system the you're simply too far for anything you did to send up an FTL signal to be detected. If the system had radio telescopes you might be able to get someone's attention with old fashioned radio - but then they wouldn't get that signal for several years and we're back to the problem that ships don't routinely carry supplies for years. That far out from a system you need to get yourself back using your hyper generator - and if it's broken beyond your ability to repair then you're almost certainly going to die since you'd be beyond both useful communication/"flare" range and beyond (non-hyper) self-rescue range.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:I think we're talking past each other, compounded by my lack of total understanding.

I was responding in part to what I understood you to say that if forced to drop out of hyper before scheduled, you'd be lost. And I don't understand why you would be lost. Stranded maybe, but not lost.

And, inducing from there, if unscheduled exits from hyper results in you being lost, then whether you can get back into hyper or not should be a moot point, since you don't know from where you're entering hyper. IOW, I thought you were saying unscheduled exits totally screwed up your bearing. If I misunderstood, which is likely, my apology in advance.

We might have misunderstood your original question and then you misunderstood us. In my answer I was responding to being forced out of hyperspace because of a broken hyperspace generator. Under that circumstance, you would know where you were in normal space (because of the "hyper log" that keeps track of the correspondence between hyperspace location and normal space location). The problem is that knowing where you are is no good, if you do not have the resources to travel to someplace inhabited in the course of the rest of your life. In that case you are missing, presumed lost. In Torch of Freedom, they were lucky to be able to build a replacement part. In another thread I speculated that for them, it might have been better if the failing generator had left them in hyperspace; because then they continue to their destination and find a place where traffic in hyper would encounter and help them.

In HAE, there is the other situation where the space liner was forced to make a transition between bands, so the Havenite ships (which had lost track of their position) would not be able to find them in that band. Then they later transitioned back and rescued the personnel from the wrecked Wayfarer and the PRH ship. That is serious because of the armed ships chasing you, not because you have lost your way.

Jonathan_S wrote:^This.

I wasn't trying to say the ship was "lost" in that the crew didn't know where they were. I agree that thanks to the hyper log they'll know where they are pretty accurately even on an unplanned exit from hyper.

The problem is entirely if you are stuck in normal space (due to a broken hyper generator) and you're ALSO more than say a LY or two from that nearest inhabited system. Without access to hyper it'd take you hundreds of times longer than normal to cover that distance, and so you'll run out of supplies and die before getting there.

I understand that. At that point, you are essentially a Generation ship without the supplies. I just didn't understand why you'd be "lost." Not knowing where you are is different from knowing where you are, but without enough gas. Thanks.

Jonathan_S wrote:That's a good question.

MY first though was to wonder if all the ships could crowd in close so a single central ship maxes out its hyper generator to jump the formation as an single event (kind of like how Thunder and Principality were able to pop LACs into hyperspace with her). However I realized 2 problems with that. One, those ships were only able to cover 6 km out from their hull so you'd need to be very tightly packed. And two, which compounds the first, each ship presumably still needs its sails rigged to survive that close to the transit point; meaning there's no possible way to cram them that close.

While searching for an RFC post on an entirely different topic I ran across something interesting that would also definitely strike down this idea.

runsforcelery: 12-Jun-2012 SPOILER – finding the torch wormhole’s destination wrote:When a hyper generator's translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field's designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be "x" meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field's area of effect and its mass affects the translation. The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there's usually some safety margin built into it, but it can't handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage "overload" before the hyper generator "departs from its mounts in multiple directions," as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.

Jumping even one additional ship is going to be way over that 6% "overload" and would result in a very unpleasant failure even if the sail crowding issue could be resolved.

Just sharing this as something interesting that I'd completely forgotten about.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:That's a good question.

MY first though was to wonder if all the ships could crowd in close so a single central ship maxes out its hyper generator to jump the formation as an single event (kind of like how Thunder and Principality were able to pop LACs into hyperspace with her). However I realized 2 problems with that. One, those ships were only able to cover 6 km out from their hull so you'd need to be very tightly packed. And two, which compounds the first, each ship presumably still needs its sails rigged to survive that close to the transit point; meaning there's no possible way to cram them that close.

While searching for an RFC post on an entirely different topic I ran across something interesting that would also definitely strike down this idea.

runsforcelery: 12-Jun-2012 SPOILER – finding the torch wormhole’s destination wrote:When a hyper generator's translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field's designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be "x" meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field's area of effect and its mass affects the translation. The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there's usually some safety margin built into it, but it can't handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage "overload" before the hyper generator "departs from its mounts in multiple directions," as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.

Jumping even one additional ship is going to be way over that 6% "overload" and would result in a very unpleasant failure even if the sail crowding issue could be resolved.

Just sharing this as something interesting that I'd completely forgotten about.

It still seems doable, at least something has the hair on the back of my neck standing.

Admittedly when I proposed the possibility of a disaster I was thinking about how densely packed Stephanie Gram was stacking 'em at BoM. It seems to me if a mass transit is taking place on one end, there's nothing (other than ASC) which would prevent another ship on the other side of the junction to be part of the sardine can. And since there is no wedge in front of it, it has the right of way.