SLN, and MAlign playing catch up with Manticoran superiority

Information in my head has reacted with each other and formed a question.

Since a spider drive grabs and holds on to the alpha wall, what will happen if a warship with a big enough wedge comes close enough to it, even if the spider drive is not detected?

For instance, an LD grabs and holds onto the alpha wall. But a wedge bends the alpha wall. So, an LD will be trying to hold onto an object that is being bent by a wedge. If that bending of the wall is in the direction away from the LD, then what will be the result?

This is going to be a mouthful. It seems intuitive that an LD and a wedge will affect each other's effects in hyper. What??? They are affecting each other's "operation in hyperspace."

The wedge might negatively affect the operation of the LD's tractors. At the very least, will the LD be immobilized, perhaps momentarily? Will the spider drive be rendered inoperative? And will it have to restart?

Or will something much more disastrous occur like the LD being destroyed or severely damaged. If the LD's tractor beams are holding onto the alpha wall while the wedge is siphoning energy from the other side of that wall, will the LD get electrocuted, so to speak? LoL shrug

IINM, the LD's tractors have a range of 500,000 km. At what range does a wedge affect the alpha wall? If the wedge's effects on the alpha wall has a range of 500,000 km as well, then the impeller drive and the spider drive can affect each other at a range of 1M km.

And since this would certainly not bode well for g-torps. Then perhaps the notion doesn't hold water.

Beware double post

Spider shoots an 8 meter graser in one end of said ship out the other.

“If you can read this you are in range”

penny wrote:Information in my head has reacted with each other and formed a question.

Since a spider drive grabs and holds on to the alpha wall, what will happen if a warship with a big enough wedge comes close enough to it, even if the spider drive is not detected?

For instance, an LD grabs and holds onto the alpha wall. But a wedge bends the alpha wall. So, an LD will be trying to hold onto an object that is being bent by a wedge. If that bending of the wall is in the direction away from the LD, then what will be the result?

This is going to be a mouthful. It seems intuitive that an LD and a wedge will affect each other's effects in hyper. What??? They are affecting each other's "operation in hyperspace."

The wedge might negatively affect the operation of the LD's tractors. At the very least, will the LD be immobilized, perhaps momentarily? Will the spider drive be rendered inoperative? And will it have to restart?

Or will something much more disastrous occur like the LD being destroyed or severely damaged. If the LD's tractor beams are holding onto the alpha wall while the wedge is siphoning energy from the other side of that wall, will the LD get electrocuted, so to speak? LoL shrug

IINM, the LD's tractors have a range of 500,000 km. At what range does a wedge affect the alpha wall? If the wedge's effects on the alpha wall has a range of 500,000 km as well, then the impeller drive and the spider drive can affect each other at a range of 1M km.

And since this would certainly not bode well for g-torps. Then perhaps the notion doesn't hold water.

Beware double post

That is an interesting question of Honorverse physics.

The short answer is we don't know squared.



That said, it seems wildly unlikely that a spider "tractor", or what the text calls a spur of gravity, can reach 500,000 km. The text seems very clear that the spur is too short ranged to be a useful weapon, while 500,000 km would give it the same range as a laser or graser. I'd suspect (but again we don't know) a range of 20 to 1000 times less.

(And it occurs to me, for the nothing this is worth, that a range of around 500 km would put the spider drive's reach about on part with a wedges. Which RFC might consider a tidy bit of symmetry)

But we also don't know how far away the bending of the Alpha wall happens from a wedge. It might be no larger than the physical footprint of the wedge, it might be vast in scale. We just don't know. All we can say with any certainty is that it doesn't appear to cause any issues with wedges getting close to each other. (See Walls of Battle) But we don't know if that is because the bending doesn't extend far enough to interact or if the wedges and ships simply don't care if their respective space bending overlaps. <shrug>




My personal and uninformed guess on this is that RFC won't want to deal with this. And seems to me the easiest way to avoid doing so would seem to be to claim that the bending is restricted to the no larger than the size of a wedge, and a spider drive has no greater reach than the span of a wedge, and so the issue is moot because you'd get a (destructive) wedge to spur interaction before you'd have to worry about the spur's anchor point bending out from under it.

Jonathan_S wrote:My personal and uninformed guess on this is that RFC won't want to deal with this. And seems to me the easiest way to avoid doing so would seem to be to claim that the bending is restricted to the no larger than the size of a wedge, and a spider drive has no greater reach than the span of a wedge, and so the issue is moot because you'd get a (destructive) wedge to spur interaction before you'd have to worry about the spur's anchor point bending out from under it.

My personal idea on this is that the bending happens strictly within the wedge, between the two bands. The 3d space (or maybe even 4d space-time) are bent to implement the acceleration/deceleration. And the bending of the alpha wall is just a side effect, unintended, but also unavoidable (or not worth the additional effort of avoiding it).

markusschaber wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:My personal and uninformed guess on this is that RFC won't want to deal with this. And seems to me the easiest way to avoid doing so would seem to be to claim that the bending is restricted to the no larger than the size of a wedge, and a spider drive has no greater reach than the span of a wedge, and so the issue is moot because you'd get a (destructive) wedge to spur interaction before you'd have to worry about the spur's anchor point bending out from under it.

My personal idea on this is that the bending happens strictly within the wedge, between the two bands. The 3d space (or maybe even 4d space-time) are bent to implement the acceleration/deceleration. And the bending of the alpha wall is just a side effect, unintended, but also unavoidable (or not worth the additional effort of avoiding it).

Wedges can be a single band (civilian wedges usually are).

Theemile wrote:

markusschaber wrote:My personal idea on this is that the bending happens strictly within the wedge, between the two bands. The 3d space (or maybe even 4d space-time) are bent to implement the acceleration/deceleration. And the bending of the alpha wall is just a side effect, unintended, but also unavoidable (or not worth the additional effort of avoiding it).

Wedges can be a single band (civilian wedges usually are).

Depends on what he means by "the two bands"

More Than Honor describes the early wedge as "a pair of stressed bands in normal-space, one "above" and one "below" the mounting ship"

On Basilisk Station describes the difference between civilian and military as "Civilian impeller drives generated a single stress band in each aspect; military impeller drives generated a double band and filled the space between them with a sidewall, for good measure."

So a civilian impeller has two bands, one above the ship and one below; while a military impeller technically has 4 -- two (apparently parallel to each other) above and another two below.

So "between the two bands" might mean in the normal space pocket the ship rides in between the dorsal and the ventral bands; or it might mean in the sidewall filled gap between a military impeller's pair of bands on each aspect.

Jonathan_S wrote:My personal and uninformed guess on this is that RFC won't want to deal with this. And seems to me the easiest way to avoid doing so would seem to be to claim that the bending is restricted to the no larger than the size of a wedge, and a spider drive has no greater reach than the span of a wedge, and so the issue is moot because you'd get a (destructive) wedge to spur interaction before you'd have to worry about the spur's anchor point bending out from under it.

markusschaber wrote:My personal idea on this is that the bending happens strictly within the wedge, between the two bands. The 3d space (or maybe even 4d space-time) are bent to implement the acceleration/deceleration. And the bending of the alpha wall is just a side effect, unintended, but also unavoidable (or not worth the additional effort of avoiding it).

Here is a quote from Pearls of Weber in FAQ at the top of the forum page:

Energy-siphon effect wrote:Whenever an impeller drive vessel activates its wedge, whether in normal-space or hyper-space, it "bends" space around itself. Remember that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction itself is essentially a huge gravity anomaly which actually breaches the barrier between normal-space and hyper-space in a fixed, localized phenomenon. It is the "bending" effect on the Alpha wall, for example, which makes it possible to detect and track impeller footprints in real-time at ranges of up to several light-minutes. The same phenomenon operates in hyper- space, except that the hyper-wall being bent isn't necessarily the Alpha wall; it's whatever the next higher hyper-wall may be.

When the wall is bent, energy is siphoned across it from the "higher" hyper band on its other side. Hyper-space is an area of inherently higher energy levels, and the siphon effect could be considered a sort of strictly limited, primitive ancestor of the "core tap" in the Mutineers' Moon Universe. The initial power for the wedge has to come from internal sources -- current generation and stored power. Once the initial energy investment is made, something like 60% of the energy necessary to maintain and power the wedge is drawn through the "siphon" effect. Warshawski sails, because of their interaction with the gravity ways in which they are used, provides a substantially more powerful version of the siphon effect; that's why a ship moving under sail can provide its total energy budget through its sails, whereas a ship moving under impeller wedge cannot.

The siphon effect is operable anywhere, anytime. The ability to raise a wedge, which interacts with the hyper wall, is not the same thing as being able to translate an entire starship across that hyper wall.

Note particularly that the "bending" of the wall is required for the energy siphon, so there is no energy siphon effect for a spider drive. My guess is that the bending is limited to the area of the wedge, because that is where the field is strongest.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:Information in my head has reacted with each other and formed a question.

Since a spider drive grabs and holds on to the alpha wall, what will happen if a warship with a big enough wedge comes close enough to it, even if the spider drive is not detected?

For instance, an LD grabs and holds onto the alpha wall. But a wedge bends the alpha wall. So, an LD will be trying to hold onto an object that is being bent by a wedge. If that bending of the wall is in the direction away from the LD, then what will be the result?

This is going to be a mouthful. It seems intuitive that an LD and a wedge will affect each other's effects in hyper. What??? They are affecting each other's "operation in hyperspace."

The wedge might negatively affect the operation of the LD's tractors. At the very least, will the LD be immobilized, perhaps momentarily? Will the spider drive be rendered inoperative? And will it have to restart?

Or will something much more disastrous occur like the LD being destroyed or severely damaged. If the LD's tractor beams are holding onto the alpha wall while the wedge is siphoning energy from the other side of that wall, will the LD get electrocuted, so to speak? LoL shrug

IINM, the LD's tractors have a range of 500,000 km. At what range does a wedge affect the alpha wall? If the wedge's effects on the alpha wall has a range of 500,000 km as well, then the impeller drive and the spider drive can affect each other at a range of 1M km.

And since this would certainly not bode well for g-torps. Then perhaps the notion doesn't hold water.

Beware double post

That is an interesting question of Honorverse physics.

The short answer is we don't know squared.



That said, it seems wildly unlikely that a spider "tractor", or what the text calls a spur of gravity, can reach 500,000 km. The text seems very clear that the spur is too short ranged to be a useful weapon, while 500,000 km would give it the same range as a laser or graser. I'd suspect (but again we don't know) a range of 20 to 1000 times less.

(And it occurs to me, for the nothing this is worth, that a range of around 500 km would put the spider drive's reach about on part with a wedges. Which RFC might consider a tidy bit of symmetry)

But we also don't know how far away the bending of the Alpha wall happens from a wedge. It might be no larger than the physical footprint of the wedge, it might be vast in scale. We just don't know. All we can say with any certainty is that it doesn't appear to cause any issues with wedges getting close to each other. (See Walls of Battle) But we don't know if that is because the bending doesn't extend far enough to interact or if the wedges and ships simply don't care if their respective space bending overlaps. <shrug>




My personal and uninformed guess on this is that RFC won't want to deal with this. And seems to me the easiest way to avoid doing so would seem to be to claim that the bending is restricted to the no larger than the size of a wedge, and a spider drive has no greater reach than the span of a wedge, and so the issue is moot because you'd get a (destructive) wedge to spur interaction before you'd have to worry about the spur's anchor point bending out from under it.

Doh! Just a few clicks upstream kzt said that David said that the LD's tractor's had the range of PDLCs. What, 100,000 km?

If a wedge does interfere with a spider drive's operation then g-torps would go haywire before they reach attack range. If not explode. So, there can't be interference, lest it is with a much more powerful wedge. But I certainly won't rule it out. Thanks for the responses. I was pulling my hair out.

penny wrote:Doh! Just a few clicks upstream kzt said that David said that the LD's tractor's had the range of PDLCs. What, 100,000 km?

If a wedge does interfere with a spider drive's operation then g-torps would go haywire before they reach attack range. If not explode. So, there can't be interference, lest it is with a much more powerful wedge. But I certainly won't rule it out. Thanks for the responses. I was pulling my hair out.

Yes, a tractor beam might well have the range of a PDLC, but that does not mean that the spider drive needs to reach out that far to work. Even though the beam is very strong (compared to normal tractor beams), it still must attenuate some with distance. So why reach the full theoretical distance when the Alpha wall is right at hand? The beam does not need to reach out more than a few kilometers in order to pull the ship ahead and I hope the LD would not get within 100 kilometers of a warship with an active wedge.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Doh! Just a few clicks upstream kzt said that David said that the LD's tractor's had the range of PDLCs. What, 100,000 km?

If a wedge does interfere with a spider drive's operation then g-torps would go haywire before they reach attack range. If not explode. So, there can't be interference, lest it is with a much more powerful wedge. But I certainly won't rule it out. Thanks for the responses. I was pulling my hair out.

Yes, a tractor beam might well have the range of a PDLC, but that does not mean that the spider drive needs to reach out that far to work. Even though the beam is very strong (compared to normal tractor beams), it still must attenuate some with distance. So why reach the full theoretical distance when the Alpha wall is right at hand? The beam does not need to reach out more than a few kilometers in order to pull the ship ahead and I hope the LD would not get within 100 kilometers of a warship with an active wedge.

You mean 100,000 kilometers?

Seems like rather extraneous information from the author if it has no significance. It begs the question of just how far the beam does extend before breaching hyperspace. And exactly how is the maximum range ever reached if before the maximum range is reached hyperspace is breached. Does the LD have an idle/neutral gear where the LD's tractors do not breach hyperspace? It would seem logical that the LDs tractors could be utilized as, well, normal tractor beams for towing / grabbing objects in n-space.

Something else, IINM, there are several tractor beams grabbing hold of the alpha wall. Are each of those beams grabbing hold of the same area on the wall?

It also seems intuitive, in an emergency that any ship's tractor beam can interfere with an LDs tractor's operation.