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.