"What if" after HH09

Jonathan_S wrote:HH02 implies that it lies in a grav wave - since Fearless and her convoy are still under Warshawski sail when they start their descent into the Grayson (well, the Yeltsin system where Grayson is) from the Delta bands [HH2:Ch5] - and Fearless doesn't reconfigure back to impeller wedge until after they've entered normal space (just outside the F6's hyper limit)

HH02:Ch11 also mentioned two ships arriving "radiating the blue glory of hyper transit from their Warshawski sails"

Since you don't use sails outside of a grav wave (or wormhole terminus) the ships wouldn't have been under sail until the Yeltsin system sat in a grav wave.

OTOH HH02:Ch22 implies that even without a sail Troubadore could make it from Yeltsin back to Manticore - but she'd have to do so under impellers and wouldn't be able to rise above the Gamma bands. So maybe the 'wave Honor rode to Yeltsin just barely brushed the system, so Troubadour could have gone far enough in normal space to avoid it when entering hyper. Or maybe it doesn't extend below the Delta bands, so Alpha, Beta, and Gamma can be traversed near Yeltsin without working sails.
(That later wouldn't entirely explain why ships arrive at Yeltsin with their sails deployed -- but maybe continuous descent, starting from within the 'wave, explains that)

(And I just checked HH03 where the freighter makes it to Yeltsin before being killed, and I don't see anything about grav waves or sails. The point of view is entirely from the GNS Jason Alvarez, patrolling within the Yeltsin system -- and she just sees the impeller sources as the freighter and it's pursuers appear in normal space.

The companion, House of Steel, doesn't seem to mention Grav Waves at all; much less which system(s) exist within them. However if you want it electronically it is available - Amazon will sell you a Kindle copy, or you can buy it directly from Baen's website (https://www.baen.com/house-of-steel.html) and then download it in various formats (epub, mobi, pdf, rtf, etc.)

In HoS chapter 2 , it mentions that the wave they are traveling in is a very narrow one, ("barely a half light-month deep and a light-month wide") meaning a warship traveling at 60% light in normal space could travel past the Grav wave in less than 2 weeks, and even less if Yeltsin is at the edges of the wave.

Reflame wrote:Btw. how can I get access to the companions? Is the content on the web, or would I have to buy that book physically...?

Sorry Reflame, I forgot to answer the last part -

House of Steel is available at US Amazon https://www.amazon.com/s?k=house+of+Steel&crid=3COWEUP6O72RR&sprefix=house+of+steel%2Caps%2C197&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

The Jayne's intelligence books and SITS game settings/ship books are available at Drive Through RPG https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/

Davids FAQs and Collected pearls of Knowledge are here:
https://jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com/

Jonathan_S wrote:OTOH HH02:Ch22 implies that even without a sail Troubadore could make it from Yeltsin back to Manticore - but she'd have to do so under impellers and wouldn't be able to rise above the Gamma bands. So maybe the 'wave Honor rode to Yeltsin just barely brushed the system, so Troubadour could have gone far enough in normal space to avoid it when entering hyper. Or maybe it doesn't extend below the Delta bands, so Alpha, Beta, and Gamma can be traversed near Yeltsin without working sails.
(That later wouldn't entirely explain why ships arrive at Yeltsin with their sails deployed -- but maybe continuous descent, starting from within the 'wave, explains that)

(And I just checked HH03 where the freighter makes it to Yeltsin before being killed, and I don't see anything about grav waves or sails. The point of view is entirely from the GNS Jason Alvarez, patrolling within the Yeltsin system -- and she just sees the impeller sources as the freighter and it's pursuers appear in normal space.

The companion, House of Steel, doesn't seem to mention Grav Waves at all; much less which system(s) exist within them. However if you want it electronically it is available - Amazon will sell you a Kindle copy, or you can buy it directly from Baen's website (https://www.baen.com/house-of-steel.html) and then download it in various formats (epub, mobi, pdf, rtf, etc.)

BTW, how was Yeltsin colonised? Via slow boat like Manticore or via hyperspace? Because those colonists would have arrived before Adrienne Warshawski was born, so they wouldn't have sails or detectors to find those waves in the first place. In fact, that's why colony ships used to be sub-light.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rev. Austin Grayson and his people did take the risk and went via hyper. They may have lucked out at the time. Or maybe the grav waves aren't permanent.

Or their hyper-capable ship didn't use impellers...

Pretty sure Yeltsin was slow boat. There is a decent amount of backstory in HotQ.

kzt wrote:Pretty sure Yeltsin was slow boat. There is a decent amount of backstory in HotQ.

Right - Cryosleep slowboat. the religion was an anti-technical one, so they set out specifically with a limited technology set. So the fact they developed the viral DNA update that saved the colony with what they had on hand was close to miraculous.

Theemile wrote:

kzt wrote:Pretty sure Yeltsin was slow boat. There is a decent amount of backstory in HotQ.

Right - Cryosleep slowboat. the religion was an anti-technical one, so they set out specifically with a limited technology set. So the fact they developed the viral DNA update that saved the colony with what they had on hand was close to miraculous.

To be fair - RFC said they were very favorable to technology used for health and medical; so they brought a lot of that along. (Hence having the tools to create the DNA update to try to adapt to an environment with so much ambient heavy metals)

But anti-tech isn't why they came via slowboat. The timeline points out that they left Earth about 4 centuries before the first hyper-drive was invented. Slowboat was the only boat back then.

(In contrast, the timeline shows Manticore's slowboat colonization left about 4.5 centuries after Grayson's -- just late enough for the early (extremely risky) hyper-capable scouts to check out the system and bring back first-hand survey results)

Jonathan_S wrote:But anti-tech isn't why they came via slowboat. The timeline points out that they left Earth about 4 centuries before the first hyper-drive was invented. Slowboat was the only boat back then.

(In contrast, the timeline shows Manticore's slowboat colonization left about 4.5 centuries after Grayson's -- just late enough for the early (extremely risky) hyper-capable scouts to check out the system and bring back first-hand survey results)

Oh, I had my timelines wrong. I thought they had left after the Jason. I had "10th century PD" in my mind and, knowing that Grayson had been established for nearly a millennium prior to rediscovery, I was thinking they had left around the year 900 PD.

Instead, "10th century PD" is when they arrived. If the Wiki is right (I could check HoS), Rev. Austin Grayson left Earth in 314 PD and arrived in the Yeltsin System in 988, a 674-year trip, whereas the Jason colony ship left in 775 PD. I'm not clear on when hyperspace was discovered, but Manticore had been surveyed by a hyper-capable ship in 753 before Jason departed.

I probably mixed up with Haven, whose colonisation all indications say departed Earth after Jason and arrived before Jason arrived in Manticore. Or maybe they didn't come from Earth... we don't have Haven's colonisation history. Given how well organised Haven was at Péricard's time and for centuries thereafter, it must have been an exceptionally well-funded expedition, which doesn't exactly match "post Final Wars Earth." So maybe Haven is a Beowulf daughter colony?

Well, they might have been. They were the bright and shining hope in the verge until they went socialist.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Instead, "10th century PD" is when they arrived. If the Wiki is right (I could check HoS), Rev. Austin Grayson left Earth in 314 PD and arrived in the Yeltsin System in 988, a 674-year trip, whereas the Jason colony ship left in 775 PD. I'm not clear on when hyperspace was discovered, but Manticore had been surveyed by a hyper-capable ship in 753 before Jason departed.

I went and tracked down the source of the hyper drive date in the timeline.

It was in More Than Honor's infodump 'The Universe of Honor Harrington'. Specifically mentioned in both subsections '(1) Background (General)' and '(3) The Mechanics of the Diaspora'

The later was more detailed, and I'll quote some relevant bits here:

More Than Honor wrote:A further boost to colonization came about in 725 pd with the advent of the first hyper drive. The casualty rates among early hyperships were so severe that it took a rather daredevil mentality to go aboard one[...]
But what the hyperships provided was a survey vehicle which could travel more than sixty times as fast as a sublight ship, and the people who went in for discovering and exploring (as opposed to settling) new worlds had just the sorts of mentalities to risk hyper travel.

So Manticore's colony ship, Jason left just 50 years after the hyper-drive was invented. However we know in that time a hypership survey crew did visit the Manticore system; and the Manticore colony bid on the rights to that system based on those survey results.


Of other interest it also says

More Than Honor wrote:It is believed that the first Warshawski Sail colony ship was the Icarus, which departed Old Earth on September 9, 1284 pd [...] (and, despite its name, provided over two centuries of dependable, reliable service before it was finally scrapped in 1491 pd), but for well over five hundred years, the dichotomy of FTL hypership survey expeditions and sublight hibernation colony transports remained the standard.

So at that point, with Warshawski sail (and we know that the grav-shear sensing Warshawski detectors predated them slightly) it appears that the colonization effort switching from single-use ships to chartering a fast (~250c) hypership to drop off your proto-colony and then head back to pick up another expedition.

Also, playing with the rest of the numbers given in MTH text we know that those early hyperscouts generally limited themselves to an entry speed of 0.23c and cruised at around 50c effective.
(From elsewhere I recall they used hydrogen ram scoops to fuel that normal-space run-up; but those scoops didn't function in hyper; so they'd need to use stored on-board fuel to accelerate there)

They clearly aren't doing that in just the Alpha bands. That'd require pushing themselves to 0.8c -- something that even modern Honorverse ships can't survive in hyperspace. (Not to mention requiring a truly ludicrous amount on onboard fuel to achieve with a fusion reaction drive).

My best guess is that they used the Beta bands, as I think (at that time) the Gamma bands would count as one of the deadly "higher hyper bands" that "were declared off limits".

And they wouldn't want to waste the residual velocity they carried into hyper; so they'd almost certainly aim for their destination before beginning their run up to 0.23c and initial transition.

The transition into the Alpha bands would bleed off 92% of their velocity; leaving them at 5,516 KPS (0.018c), or 1.14c effective velocity (thanks to the 62x velocity multiplier there).

Transitioning up to the Beta bands would bleed off another 84.64%; leaving them at 847 KPS (0.0028c), or 2.17c effective velocity (thanks to the Beta bands, massive jump to to 767x velocity multiplier). At that point, to get up to the stated 50c effective they'd need to use their onboard fuel to boost up to about 19,500 KPS (0.065c)!

However if they could get into the Gamma bands that would be a net win because the effect of their limited onboard fuel would be magnified. Transitioning there would bleed off another 77.87%; leaving them at just 188 KPS, or 0.92c effective. However to reach the stated 50c effective top speed they'd only need to achieve 10,150 KPS (0.034c). That would let them get away with carrying only about half the fuel as needed in the Beta bands. But, as I said, I don't think they could actually survive entering the Gamma bands.


(They definitely weren't going above Gamma, as even in Travis Long's day -- many centuries later -- warships weren't able to travel higher than Gamma)

And, as noted in the book, the good news is that their velocity gets bleed off again dropping down the bands; so they don't need to reserve vast amounts on fuel to decelerate at the far end. (Though they'd need enough fuel remaining to boost back out of the system when they leave -- you've got to get a good starting velocity before your hydrogen scoops pass breakeven and start refilling your tanks as you accelerate)

----
Note - the higher precision bleed-off percentages come from the text of MTH. The 'speed by hyper band' table rounds them off to whole numbers.

Also, there's no point in burning fuel in any intermediate hyper band; after transition you'd only retain a fraction of the velocity -- whereas if you saved that fuel to acceleration post-transition you'd get to keep that full velocity. The only reason it makes sense to accelerating first in normal space is that you're not using on-board fuel; so even the small percentage of velocity you carry over is worth something.