NEXT GENERATION SDs

Relax wrote:Next Question, why could they not just install a hypergenerator that now is able to hit the Iota bands on a 16Mton fort and for acceleration use fusion power + grav plates and if they have to bring a ship that holds nothing but hydrogen between systems, why not? May as well bring another ship carrying nothing but Pods MDM/CM with platforms to move said pods around behind the Fort and it then dissapears into hyper while you sit outside the hyper limit.

Jonathan_S wrote:

jaydub69 wrote:All very interesting speculation. A thought... wasn't Tourville's flagship SD at the first BOM a bit over 9 M tons? Been a while since I've read that book but I wanna say it was 9.2 Mtons.

I'm looking through 'At All Costs' and not finding that. In fact the only mention of his flag ship's size I can find it the following generic statement.

At All Costs - Ch 62 wrote:Lester Tourville sat at his desk for several seconds, looking around his day cabin, feeling the massive megaton bulk of RHNS Guerriere around him.

However, I didn't stop there - I did a full text search [for " tons", " ton ", "-ton", and "megaton"] through all the ebooks I have and I think I found what you were thinking of -- then Foraker's flagship:

War of Honor - Ch 10 wrote:"close" was a relative term aboard something the size of Sovereign of Space. The superdreadnought was the next best thing to nine million tons of battle steel and armor. She was also the first unit of the biggest and most powerful class of warships the Republic of Haven had ever built, although it probably wouldn't hold that distinction for long. The plans for the follow on Temeraire class were well into the final approval stage

Problem is that's kind of imprecise. Is "next best thing to nine million tons" more or less than 8.78 million tons? If more; how much more?



And for even more fun -- we know that even by the start of the 2nd war the RHN had its own improved compensators; though they weren't as good as Manticore and Grayson's latest. But did they follow the same tech path, and do their tonnage inflection points have to be in the exact same spots in the curve?

Because as I recall it's not clear how they got those improved compensators -- (though I'm pretty sure they must have had them before Erewhon dropped out of the original Manticoran alliance and signed a peace and mutual defense treaty with Haven); but whether they came from independent research, military/industrial espionage, and/or reverse engineering of captured 1st war RMN/GSN vessels/wrecks we just don't know.

Now FWIW the wiki claims that RHNS Guerriere was a Sovereign of Space-class SD(P); and the text certainly implies that (plus I don't think any of their 2nd gen SD(P), the Temeraires, were in service yet).

But even if we had Guerriere's acceleration we'd lack anything reasonable to compare it to as we don't have data points on anything else Haven designed at the same time. (This is where 'House of Lies', the Haven focused counterpart to 'House of Steel', might be really useful)

Jonathan_S wrote:

Relax wrote:Next Question, why could they not just install a hypergenerator that now is able to hit the Iota bands on a 16Mton fort and for acceleration use fusion power + grav plates and if they have to bring a ship that holds nothing but hydrogen between systems, why not? May as well bring another ship carrying nothing but Pods MDM/CM with platforms to move said pods around behind the Fort and it then dissapears into hyper while you sit outside the hyper limit.

Why use fusion power? The 16 mton fort already has a wedge (which it can create with its Beta nodes)

Okay, it lacks Alpha nodes, so even if it got a hyper generator it couldn't use wormholes or grav waves; but that's be equally true if you build one that used fusion rockets instead of a wedge.

And those forts are (presumably) already using grav plates to cushion acceleration when they do need to reposition; so if you wanted them to self-deploy between stars all you appear to need to add is the hyper generator (oh, and probably some additional navigation equipment -- they've no reason to have a hyperlog installed at the moment. But I assume that's trivial to add)

Actually - since we know that a ship can overload its hyper generator to bring along into hyper anything within kilometers of itself if you really wanted to you could take an current fort and fly it between the stars -- you'd just need a normal ship to accompany it to get it in and out of hyper and provide the (advanced inertial) navigation between the stars. (Not great for an attack - but an interesting trick to reposition forts if your strategic needs radically changed. Or possibly if, for some reason, you didn't want to build/assemble them in place in the system they'd ultimately be defending)

Theemile wrote:Remember my Sovereign of Space post awhile back?

The RHN Fleets were seen moving at 4.8KPS
4.8 KPS = 489.8 g
Assuming this behavior was a 90% comp setting,
100% = 544.2 g
Or an efficiency of >130%

Exact Mass was never shown - nor what the exact class actually was - 2nd Fleet was treated homogenously in the text, So it's possible that 2nd and 5th fleets were each homogenous, but different classes, or all the same class, or even just 5th was heterogenous, as few exact stats were given on that fleet.

Relax wrote:Next Question, why could they not just install a hypergenerator that now is able to hit the Iota bands on a 16Mton fort and for acceleration use fusion power + grav plates and if they have to bring a ship that holds nothing but hydrogen between systems, why not? May as well bring another ship carrying nothing but Pods MDM/CM with platforms to move said pods around behind the Fort and it then dissapears into hyper while you sit outside the hyper limit.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:Next Question, why could they not just install a hypergenerator that now is able to hit the Iota bands on a 16Mton fort and for acceleration use fusion power + grav plates and if they have to bring a ship that holds nothing but hydrogen between systems, why not? May as well bring another ship carrying nothing but Pods MDM/CM with platforms to move said pods around behind the Fort and it then dissapears into hyper while you sit outside the hyper limit.

Why would you transport hydrogen between stars? It's the most common element in the universe, at 90% of the mass. Any system of worth will have a nearby gas giant where you can mine said hydrogen from.

And you know what else any star system has that possesses a lot of hydrogen? A star. It even supplies the power you need to starlift material out of it!

So if you intend to stay in that system any meaningful amount of time, you'd probably bring a dedicated ship to do the extraction and refining. We haven't heard about this piece of infrastructure in the Honorverse, but it must exist, because the ships we do know about are hydrogen (or deuterium) hogs. So there must be a massive infrastructure in any developed system, and even minor ones must have something, otherwise they'd never attract any freighter. This means this type of infrastructure is relatively cheap too. It must be an off-the-shelf thing that any Fringe system can buy and include in their initial colony package, at least the ones that don't intend on going on a restricted technology path (neo-Amish).

Now, I am assuming it's somewhat portable. It's possible that, despite being cheap and widespread, it's a cumbersome thing that takes weeks to set up. So if you're in a system for a week only, like as a forward operating base, you probably need to bring your own tankers in the fleet train. But that's probably a good idea anyway because you can't be sure you'll have access to an enemy's infrastructure -- you could fail to win.