The roof and belly of a ship is naked... here's a fix.

The E wrote:If he hadn't, if he had called Honor's bluff and continued on, the end result might have been a pyrric victory for Manticore, but a victory nonetheless. 8th Fleet, with its holds full of Apollo missiles, would have finished off Tourville. He would be able to inflict a lot of damage, yes, and he might even have a shot at extracting a good deal of his forces, but the end result was pretty clear.

Let's also not forget that, for all its immobility, Hephaestus and the other stations are pretty damn hard to kill. There's a ton of missile defence, not to mention a whole lot of wedges, that you have to get through in order to kill them traditionally (which is why, you will note, the MAlignment used a thoroughly untraditional method to do this).

There was no way any of 2nd was getting out. 8th could jump in front of him and fire at him well before they can get to hyper. I can't remember the vectors well enough to see if he could threaten Manticore. He was in effective range of Sphinx, but also the MDMs at Sphinx were in range of him. Based on David's discussion of Zanzibar I really don't know why the RHN didn't shoot them up, as apparently the RHN can target orbital installations from the hyperlimit and destroying Manticores ability to make new ships will force an end to the war.

The E wrote:

MAD-4A wrote:What “thorny leagal issues”? I just said I don’t mind helping – does it help if I post “for free in this case” use any of my info from my last post “MAD-4A » Thu Mar 20, 2014 9:24 am” or this one as you like, for free. Or does he need a signed paper

As far as I know, that's exactly what he would need. To quote the FAQ:

As Mike pointed out in his post, it leads to a situation in which an author can be accused of "ripping off" someone else's idea, which can both impugn his/her honesty and even lead to ugly courtroom scenes as some non-pro attempts to sue because his or her original idea was "stolen" by a pro. (This has actually happened.) It would also be possible for a pro actually TO rip off an idea, perhaps without even realizing that he or she has done so.

& what’s the use of this forum then if everything the fans say they want he’s going to say “that’s what they want so I’m not going to do it!”? that make me not want to waste my time here anymore!

Well, these forums are here to give us all a nice little place where we can speculate about the directions of the novels, shoot the shit about what it all means, within the guidelines set out in the FAQ and moderation guidelines.

To be fair; turrets are an obvious enough idea, and have come up (and gotten shot down) often enough that I don't think there's any danger of treading on the fan-fic rule.

But one problem with turrets that hasn't been touched on recently is that they don't scale. (Or rather honorverse energy weapons don't scale the same way the real world guns did). There'd be a lot less real world interest in turreted guns if the biggest weapon anyone could make was the equivilent of a 6" gun. In that case a battleship would be more like a pre-dreadnaught (minus the 2 end turrets) because you can fit a lot more medium guns in casements than in turrets.

The Honorverse doesn't have their biggest ships carrying 8 - 12 of the biggest practical guns - they carry 50 or so of the heavy grasers plus 40 odd heavy lasers (Gryphon class SD). For weapons survivability those are distributed evenly across roughly 180,000 square meters (both broadsides + the hammerheads). As far as we know it's not possible (or at least practical) to replace several grasers with one that's as powerful the their combined output (replacing 4 or 5 6" guns with a 14" gun) so to retain that firepower you have to concentrate all those lasers and grasers into a much smaller area covered with turrets.

Now obviously being able to point turrets to either side (and a few of them fore and aft) cuts down the number of emitters you need for the same broadside or chase fire; but that's still 22 grasers and 19 lasers to mount to equal a Gryphon's broadside.


You can't put turrets all that close together (even with superfiring turrets) or there isn't room to spin them around to face the other broadside. And only a couple would have lines of sight to fire past the hammerheads in a chase weapons role.

Losing the ability to stack weapons decks above each other over 150+ vertical meters really concentrates the area you can put the weapons in.


So even if you can power them, and create gunports for them, and even if turrets are as accurate as the 'fixed mounts', you still can't seem to put enough turrets on the top and bottom of the hull to give you the firepower the classic layout did. (And covering those areas with weapons blocks all the sensors, boat bays, etc that are currently there. The sensors you could move to the now barer broadside; but you don't want your vulnerable boat bays directly exposed to hostile fire.)

Point.

crewdude48 wrote:
I didn't see anything on compensators. All I saw was that towing something outside of your wedge reduced acceleration, and towing it within the wedge did not. This could be because of the need to project tractor beams through the kilt forces you to alter the wedge shape away from optimal configuration.

If you can put extra stuff on an SD and still have it within the compensated volume, then why don't they build SDs bigger, out to the edges of the field?

You are correct in assuming that towing pods outside the wedge requires you to alter your wedge geometry.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/si ... gton/255/0

Pearls of Weber, Why does towing pods decrease ship acceleration? wrote:From a post to ALT.BOOKS.DAVID-WEBER dated May 30, 1998:

Why does towing pods decrease ship acceleration?



Chuck has a part of it. A tractor mount can take only so much before it fails, hence the total strain you put on one must be controlled. With smaller numbers of pods, you can spread the strain between multiple tractors and thus sustain higher accelerations without wrecking a portion of your ship's hull and shedding pods. As for the LACs in HotQ, remember that it was necessary for the Peeps to use sufficient tractors to completely "zone" the LAC. This was to insure that all portions of the LACs' hulls accelerated at the same time and rate, but it was also to spread the strain on the tractor mounts.

Even more importantly, however, towing pods astern requires a tractor link through the open after aspect of the wedge. The more pods there are, the wider the open aspect has to be. The wider the open aspect is, the less efficient the impeller wedge is and the less efficient the inertial compensator becomes. As the inertial compensator becomes less efficient, the max acceleration to which you can take the drive without risking compensator failure drops. The sheer power of the drive is also a factor; you can trade off brute power for impeller wedge efficiency to a point, which is why the Peep Mars-class CAs, with humongous drive power but less efficient compensators, can tow more missile pods than a Warlock-class [I believe he meant Star Knight-class - Ed.].

I think from the above you can see that stowing missile pods internally will not have the same deforming effect on the wedge that towing them astern will entail.

Take care--
David (vanishing back into his literary slave labor camp)

Italics are the author's and editor's.

Although the new Manticoran missile pods (the ones with the built-in tractors seems to point towards having the inertial compensator field extend out further from the ship than just a few meters.

When you can have a SD limpet 500-600 pods against the hull using the pods built-in tractors, it seems to argue that the pods are inside the inertial compensator's field, unless the pods are limpeted to the hull only one layer deep. (And if they are only one layer deep, is there enough surface area on an SD for 500-600 pods?)

I have a harder time accepting an inertial compensator field that is limited to extending the shortest dimension of a missile pod beyond the ship's hull if the pods are limpeted to the hull more than one layer deep.

While the built-in tractor is designed to carry the acceleration load that it experiences when it is towed astern of the ship, it wouldn't matter if it was outside of inertial compensator field.

However if the second layer of pods is outside the field, the tractor on it will be pulling on the exterior of another pod. Can any point or area on a missile pod handle the 600g load? And even worse, what about the case where a missile pod in a second or third (or even first) layer is both partially inside and outside the compensated area? If i was an engineer designing the pods, I think this would drive me into gibbering fits. Trying to design a pod to stand up to variable forces would be a nightmare (the same factors would affect the missiles loaded inside the pod, as well as the pods on-board fusion reactor).

So I would say that the absolute minimum distance that the inertial compensator field extends beyond a ship's hull (that I can reasonably accept, since this is science fiction after all) would be the length of the shortest side of a missile pod plus a small distance (1 meter?) for any ship that physically limpets missile pods against its hull, regardless of whether the tractor holding the pod against the hull is on the pod or the ship, per missile pod layer.

Or to put it another way if the shortest length of a missile pod is X, then (I would say) the inertial compensator field should extend X + 1 meter past the hull if pods are limpeted one layer deep, 2X + 1 meter if pods are in two layers, and so on.

Vince wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:***Snip***

As I said before, the ships are not all that different in that they are all cylindrical in shape. What you are forgetting is something that Grashtel mentioned that you didn't touch on at all, and that is *the compensator. A ship's inertial compensator encloses the ship in a cylindrical field not much bigger than the widest part of the ship itself. Note that no warship hammerhead is either wider or taller than the dimensions of the main hull.

That said, my guess would be that the compensator field extends a few meters above and below the ship, but again, no more than the ships largest non-length dimension, which is why you can have something like the "conning tower" on the top of the ship (or the boat bay observation/backup control room on the bottom) still enclosed within the field.

***Snip***

The compensator field extends quite a bit further than just a few meters.

Flag In Exile, Chapter 33 wrote:Honor's battlecruisers had only two missile pods apiece. That was all they could tow without massive degradation of their acceleration rates. But superdreadnoughts were big enough they could actually tractor the pods inside their wedges, where they had no effect at all on acceleration, and now each of her ships of the wall deployed a lumpy, ungainly tail of no less than ten pods. They were ugly, clumsy, and fragile, those pods—but each of them also mounted ten box launchers loaded with missiles even larger and more powerful than a superdreadnought's missile tubes could fire.

And:

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:For one thing, she'd argued for a high-speed run-in from the very start, despite some other officers' fear that such an approach could leave them with a dangerously high velocity if there were in fact, Manty ships of the wall in-system. Their concern had been that a high initial velocity would leave them with too much mometum to kill quickly if an evasive vector change were required, but Foraker had shown even less patience than usual with that argument. Even if there were ships of the wall present, she'd pointed out arctically, they would still have to generate an intercept vector, and the less time TF 12.2 took reaching its objective, the less time the Manties would have in which to intercept. In fact, the only way they could guarantee to intercept an attack on the planet Zanzibar would be for them to be in orbit around it and stay there ... in which case, TF 12.2 should see them long before they entered engagement range and would have a much higher base velocity from which to evade the defenders and go after its secondary objective: the system's asteroid extraction industry. Besides, a higher approach velocity would not only face the Manties with more difficult interception acceleration curves but force them to commit sooner and at higher power settings, which would degrade the efficiency of their stealth systems and make them far easier to detect early enough for it to do some good.
In keeping with that recommendation, she'd also argued that the retention of their own ships' full acceleration capability was more important than putting the maximum possible number of pods in space. That liveliness in maneuver, after all, was the one advantage battleships held over ships of the wall, and she refused to throw it away. So rather than tow the pods astern, she'd suggested, they should take a page from the Manties' book in the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin and tractor the pods inside the wedges of their battleships, where they would have no effect on their acceleration curves. Their battlecruisers could tractor only two pods inside their wedges, and the heavy cruisers and destroyers lacked the tractors and wedge depth to tractor any inside at all, but that was fine with her.
Some of the squadron ops officers had hit the deckhead at the very suggestion, but she had simply waited them out with a cold, almost mechanical patience. And when the hubbub had settled, she'd pointed out that battleships had been designed as general purpose workhorses, which meant, among other things, that they had more tractors on a ton-for-ton basis than any other ship type in the Republican order of battle. Each of them could tractor eleven pods — more than most superdreadnoughts, actually — tight in against their hulls. That meant that when they actually deployed them, they could still put over forty-two hundred missiles into space at once, with another three hundred eighty from the battlecruisers. In the meantime, their entire task force's ability to maneuver at full acceleration would not only make them fleeter of foot but might actually convince the defenders that they hadn't brought along any pods until it was too late.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

On the size of missile pods:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/170/0

Pearls of Weber, Missile pods as strap-on weapons? wrote:From a post to ALT.BOOKS.DAVID-WEBER dated October 18, 1998:

Missile pods as strap-on weapons?

I'd have to say that would not be a good idea. For one thing, they're bigger than some of you seem to be assuming. In point of fact, the Manties' present capital-ship missile pods are considerably larger than a pinnace or an assault shuttle. In fact, they're a little more than half the beam of a standard DD in their widest dimension, which is why Wayfarer could deploy no more of them simultaneously and why a pod-SD (by the way, I like the term; I hadn't thought of it for myself. Perhaps we should call them SD(P) from now on? <g>) can deploy even less in a salvo than Wayfarer could. The depth of the after aspect of the wedge is not much of a factor; the physical dimensions of a pod which must pass through a physical hatch are. Moreover, when used as broadside weapons, one would be required to shut down one's sidewalls while one launched (assuming one could launch from a broadside--see below), which could be a major disadvantage if one were under threat of attack at the moment of launch. Why drop the sidewall? Because unlike the fixed, conventional launcher, your pod has no "gunport" in the sidewall through which to eject the missile(s) it is blasting off.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

And finally a short answer from David:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/169/0

Pearls of Weber, Missile pods: where are they tractored? wrote:From a post to ALT.BOOKS.DAVID-WEBER dated October 18, 1998:

Missile pods: where are they tractored?

Missile pods, when tractored inside the wedge to avoid accel penalties, are normally inside the sidewalls of the towing ships. The distance between the hulls of ships of BC and above is large enough to squeeze a pod into it, although their broadside armament would normally be blocked and nonfunctional (especially the energy weapons) while the pods were present. The same is true of the Peeps' Warlord-class CA [I think DW means the Mars-class -Ed.], but that's only because it's a Real Big CA.

Italics are the author's and editor's.

All of this taken together suggests that the volume the inertial compensator field encompasses extends sideways out to the sidewalls from the ship (for an SD, less than 10,000 meters, but apparently not much less than 10km) and presumably also extending vertically up and down by the same amount.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/100/0

Excerpt from Pearls of Weber, Wedge geometry wrote:The sidewall is normally generated at a range of less than 10,000 meters from the actual ship, which means that, in the case of our SD from the example above, the sidewall will be 143 kilometers inside the outer "edges" of the wedge.

Italics are the author's.

As crewdude said, nothing in what you quoted says anything about the compensator field - it's all about towing pods inside a *wedge*.

Also, don't try to tell me about the size of a pod. I've built several for BuNine, in designs based off the original Russ Isler work, and in newer flat-pack designs. They're big, but they're not *that* big, and even if they *do* need to be inside the compensator field (which I don't agree with), the field obviously extends far enough to enclose the gravitic array blades (maybe - that one is still up in the air both here and with BuNine), and on anything from a BC on up, that should be just enough to fit a pod. However, since there is textev that has even DDs (LACs? I can't recall) towing pods, I think that goes far enough to show that the pods don't need to be enclosed by the compensator field.

@vince: IMO only, I think the compensator field is a straight cylinder shape - no tapers "built-in", in which case, the farther out you get from the straight center-hull section, the "deeper" the compensator field. That means that maybe 20 meters into the tapers, you might be able to stack pods two deep. maybe even by the time you get close to the impellers, you'll be able to go three deep (personally, I doubt it, but it might be close).

I'm thinking only in terms of SD-sized ships - obviously, things might be different on smaller ships with correspondingly smaller comp fields.

Speaking of the tapers, the dorsal and ventral surfaces of them are fairly open, compared to the broadsides and the the center-hull top and bottom. Just a couple of radiator panels and the lifeboat hatches, so there wouldn't be much of an issue with tractoring pods there. Also, if I'm right about the compensator field being a true cylinder in shape, then it would extend much farther above and below, allowing pod-stacking there as well (since the ship is wider than it is tall).

Edit: I just checked my builds of the flat-pack-style pods, and their smallest dimension is only 8 meters. Going by the x+1 meter rule suggested upthread, then the comp field needs to extend less than 10 meters out from the widest part of the ship. That's more or less in line with my thinking. The only things I can think of that would (might?) extend past the comp field are the gravitic array blades. On my Fearless mesh, the longest blade extends about 8 meters out from the broadside surface, which nicely places it inside the theorized comp field limit.

Figure maybe twice that for an SD (not sure as we haven't gotten far enough to start "building" SDs). If the distance the field affects stays the same for all ships, regardless of size (not saying it does, we don't know), then roughly half of the longest blade on an SD would be outside the field. OTOH, if the reach of the field extends linearly with the size of the ship... well, I'd say you could easily stack several flat-pack pods inside the field with no worries.

Edit #2: I just recalled some textev that backs me up - Honor's pinnace tractored to the hull of Warneke's repair ship. Assuming the pinnace was tractored with the landing gear extended, that would mean that the comp field extends, at a minimum on that ship, six meters (the gear adds a meter to the height). Add another meter for safety, as mentioned before, and you get seven meters. The fact that that particular issue wasn't even brought up in textev as something they should be considering tells me that the clearance was more than the bare minimum (with a one meter safety margin) required.

Unless the pinnace had its own comp field up and running, in which case, all bets are off. Of course, that then starts the debate on whether two or more compensator fields can overlap.

MaxxQ wrote:Speaking of the tapers, the dorsal and ventral surfaces of them are fairly open, compared to the broadsides and the the center-hull top and bottom. Just a couple of radiator panels and the lifeboat hatches, so there wouldn't be much of an issue with tractoring pods there. Also, if I'm right about the compensator field being a true cylinder in shape, then it would extend much farther above and below, allowing pod-stacking there as well (since the ship is wider than it is tall).

I got the impression that the hull had to taper there because of grav issues during wedge startup of the alpha nodes (and possibly also during shutdown); that the startup flux would shred anything that stuck up above the taper.

If so then you'd have to temporarily drop any pods tractored against the taper every time you raised your wedge, then tractor them back in place once it was up and stabilized.


That's not a major drawback, after all ships spend a lot of time with the wedge fully up and relatively little starting and stopping it.


And I guess worst case, if you were surprised and had raise wedge and run, before tractoring them back, you'd just fire off those dropped pods first

MaxxQ wrote:As crewdude said, nothing in what you quoted says anything about the compensator field - it's all about towing pods inside a *wedge*.

Also, don't try to tell me about the size of a pod. I've built several for BuNine, in designs based off the original Russ Isler work, and in newer flat-pack designs. They're big, but they're not *that* big, and even if they *do* need to be inside the compensator field (which I don't agree with), the field obviously extends far enough to enclose the gravitic array blades (maybe - that one is still up in the air both here and with BuNine), and on anything from a BC on up, that should be just enough to fit a pod. However, since there is textev that has even DDs (LACs? I can't recall) towing pods, I think that goes far enough to show that the pods don't need to be enclosed by the compensator field.

@vince: IMO only, I think the compensator field is a straight cylinder shape - no tapers "built-in", in which case, the farther out you get from the straight center-hull section, the "deeper" the compensator field. That means that maybe 20 meters into the tapers, you might be able to stack pods two deep. maybe even by the time you get close to the impellers, you'll be able to go three deep (personally, I doubt it, but it might be close).

I'm thinking only in terms of SD-sized ships - obviously, things might be different on smaller ships with correspondingly smaller comp fields.

Speaking of the tapers, the dorsal and ventral surfaces of them are fairly open, compared to the broadsides and the the center-hull top and bottom. Just a couple of radiator panels and the lifeboat hatches, so there wouldn't be much of an issue with tractoring pods there. Also, if I'm right about the compensator field being a true cylinder in shape, then it would extend much farther above and below, allowing pod-stacking there as well (since the ship is wider than it is tall).

Edit: I just checked my builds of the flat-pack-style pods, and their smallest dimension is only 8 meters. Going by the x+1 meter rule suggested upthread, then the comp field needs to extend less than 10 meters out from the widest part of the ship. That's more or less in line with my thinking. The only things I can think of that would (might?) extend past the comp field are the gravitic array blades. On my Fearless mesh, the longest blade extends about 8 meters out from the broadside surface, which nicely places it inside the theorized comp field limit.

Figure maybe twice that for an SD (not sure as we haven't gotten far enough to start "building" SDs). If the distance the field affects stays the same for all ships, regardless of size (not saying it does, we don't know), then roughly half of the longest blade on an SD would be outside the field. OTOH, if the reach of the field extends linearly with the size of the ship... well, I'd say you could easily stack several flat-pack pods inside the field with no worries.

Edit #2: I just recalled some textev that backs me up - Honor's pinnace tractored to the hull of Warneke's repair ship. Assuming the pinnace was tractored with the landing gear extended, that would mean that the comp field extends, at a minimum on that ship, six meters (the gear adds a meter to the height). Add another meter for safety, as mentioned before, and you get seven meters. The fact that that particular issue wasn't even brought up in textev as something they should be considering tells me that the clearance was more than the bare minimum (with a one meter safety margin) required.

Unless the pinnace had its own comp field up and running, in which case, all bets are off. Of course, that then starts the debate on whether two or more compensator fields can overlap.

Quite possibly the compensator field extends even further:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/134/0

Pearls of Weber, LACs as parasites wrote:From an email posted to Baen's Bar Honorverse dated September 5, 2004:

LACs as parasites

[T]he notion of LAC parasites. They're being called "battleriders" this time around, and the suggestion is that they could be transported on the exteriors of non carriers as a way to give, say, a cruiser a teeny LAC squadron of its own and also as a way to transport them to areas where they are needed without tying up carriers. There's also been a suggestion that it might be possible to build a modular LAC bay which could be loaded in and out of a standard freighter hold (and JMT freighters, in particular) to turn any freighter into a temporary CVE. Also, if the modular concept is feasible, could the modules then be operated independently or "strapped onto" another structure at their destination in order to create an instant "Henderson Field."



There's no inherent reason why LACs couldn't "ride" the exterior of a larger vessel's hull. Well, no reason a Manticoran LAC couldn't. A Havenite LAC doesn't have the onboard endurance to make it practical to [be] transported for any great distance with its crew on board, so there'd have to be additional personnel space sufficient to carry the LACs' crews, as well. There'd also be the fact that in the absence of a physical interlock system similar to that used in the CLAC fighter bays, you'd be up the creek in a hurry if the mooring tractors failed under acceleration. Whereas the loss of a missile pod tractored to the outside of a hull would be inconvenient, the loss of a LAC -- and its entire crew -- would probably be considered just a tad more serious.

The numbers of LACs you could transport this way would not be large, unless you were using a very large ship, like a superdreadnought. I certainly wouldn't think that you could transport worthwhile numbers on anything much smaller than an old-style Havenite battleship. And carrying them that way would lead to all sorts of problems in the form of interference with sensors, communications links, weapons bays, etc. You'd have to have provision for launching the LACs in a hurry if you had to clear for action, and that could be a problem, since you'd pretty much have to strike your own wedge long enough for the LACs to get clear and bring their wedges up. In an "ambush" scenario, that could be inconvenient, to say the least.

Having said all of that, however, this might be a way to transport a small number of LACs -- replacements, let's say, for a LAC group which has taken combat losses -- to a forward base, or a way of recovering LACs after the [de]struction of or damage to their CLAC. Or, for that matter, if the LACs in question have to be gotten away into hyper faster than they can be reunited with their carriers. I don't see it as any sort of routine application, but I don't see anything inherently impossible about it, since LACs are small enough to fit inside the compensator field of the ships to which they would be tractored.

There's nothing inherently impossible about the concept of modular fighter bays, and I've actually thought about it off and on. The system may eventually make an appearance in the series, but I'm still mulling over the question of whether or not I want it to.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

House of Steel lists the Shrike-B & Ferret LACs as 72 x 20 x 20 meters, the Shrike (no longer in service) & Katana LACs as 71 x 20 x 20 meters.

Also closely related to the above post by David is in

****SPOILER**** Click and drag to see spoiler text

Cauldron of Ghosts, Chapter 36

The personnel tubes and umbilicals detached. The battered and bedamned looking freighter (whose hyper generator had been thoroughly overhauled after its recent mainte-nance issues, thank you very much) drifted clear of Parmley Station on carefully metered bursts from her maneuvering thrusters. Hali Sowle was in no enormous hurry, and it took several minutes for her to gain enough clearance to go to her main fusion-powered reaction thrusters and accelerate away from the station at a sedate twenty gravities’ acceleration. (Ganny El was frugal—some might even have gone so far as to use the term chintzy—with her reactor mass.) At that rate, it took her a leisurely fifty-five seconds to clear the manda-tory three hundred-kilometer deep impeller-free safety zone around the station. The two Turner-class frigates, the Gabriel Prosser and the Denmark Vesey, kept pace with her until all three vessels crossed the perimeter and shut down thrusters. Then they rolled slightly as her heavy-lift tractors reached out, locked them up, and settled them into their jury-rigged nests on her flank.
Three more minutes passed as the frigates each locked a personnel tube to the far larger freighter and tested them for pressure and security. The frigates were fully self-contained and self-sufficient starships, of course, but why should their crews stay penned up inside their tiny hulls when much larger open spaces were available (within reason, of course) aboard Hali Sowle? Pressure checks satisfactorily completed, each frigate’s CO gave the freighter’s command deck the go ahead. Then—
“That’s that, Parmley. We’re out of here,” Ganny El announced over the com. The Hali Sowle’s wedge came up and the freighter leapt instantly to one hundred and seventy gravities. Five minutes later, she was nearly eighty thousand kilometers out, headed for the hyper limit at over five hundred kilometers per second.

****End quote****

Italics are the author's, boldface, underlined and large font text is my emphasis.

The Hali Sowle is a tramp freighter, described in Torch of Freedom as around 1 million tons:

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 63

This was the first time the two of them had ever been alone, since they met on the tarmac of the spaceport. The months they'd spent since their escape from Mesa drifting on the Hali Sowle had been the equivalent of months spent in the most densely populated apartment in creation. You'd think that a freighter massing slightly over a million tons would have enormous empty reaches, but . . . it didn't. Or, rather, it did . . . but it was a working commercial vessel, nothing more. Despite the capaciousness of its huge cargo holds, the living quarters were small and Spartan.

****End quote****

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.


****End SPOILER****

Hope this helps shed some light on how BuNine is thinking on how far out the inertial compensator field extends from a ship's hull.

Note: If anyone replies to this post, please either:

Delete the spoiler text from your reply.

Or move the spoiler text outside of the quote tags when you reply.

Or if you quote the spoiler text, change the color tag value from BBBBBB to AAAAAA so that the spoiler text will remain invisible without selecting it against the darker background of the quoted text.

Duckk wrote:If David wants help, he'll ask for it from the BuNine.

well that's who I meant & how does someone become one of these "BuNine"?

MAD-4A wrote:

Duckk wrote:If David wants help, he'll ask for it from the BuNine.

well that's who I meant & how does someone become one of these "BuNine"?

Here's a brief wiki article about BuNine. That might (partially) answer your questions.

MAD-4A wrote:

Duckk wrote:If David wants help, he'll ask for it from the BuNine.

well that's who I meant & how does someone become one of these "BuNine"?

You get asked by the head of BuNine, who is *not* David Weber.

In my case, someone sent Tom Pope a mention of some 3D models (of the Harrington-class SD(P)) I had been doing on my own at Sci-Fi Meshes*. He took a look and thought what I was doing was good enough (even though it was mostly wrong) to invite me. That will have been six years ago on the 23rd of this month. At the time, BuNine didn't have anybody doing 3D modeling for them, or if anyone was, it was very basic.

Anyway, if Tom feels that someone has something to contribute, he'll ask them to join.

Several of us in BuNine post here on occasion, but myself and one other (you know who you are ) post here the most. He doesn't advertise it like I do, but he posts pretty often on a daily basis.

*Unfortunately, none of the posts there survived a forum crash from a couple years ago, although oddly enough, Tom's PMs to me from six years ago are still in my inbox.

Jonathan_S wrote:… that's still 22 grasers and 19 lasers to mount to equal a Gryphon's broadside…

of course (at the risk of it “never being allowed to be cannon” – which a simple waiver check to “intellectual property” in the forum sign-up I think would mitigate this issue.) nobody mentioned that it had to be all or nothing. Just because some (or even most) are moved to turrets, doesn’t mean some broadside mounts can’t be retained. Look at the HMS Monmouth - Battle of Coronel – (as 1 example - yes it a cruiser not a SD) with 14 main guns 4 are in twin turrets but the other 10 are in Casemates 9 gun broadside.

Jonathan_S wrote:You can't put turrets all that close together (even with super-firing turrets) or there isn't room to spin them around to face the other broadside. And only a couple would have lines of sight to fire past the hammerheads in a chase weapons role.

actually you generally can – 2-3 each end top & bottom – I always imagined the 1st would be ON the hammerhead. Though the purpose of the hammerhead is to provide extra room fore & aft for chase weapons, which the turrets would reduce, though you would still need chase PD (missiles are now off- bore so they aren’t needed in the ends either). Plus there’s the whole “but that’s not how it should be [look]” mentality of the established navy brass. There is no real need for the Iowa class to have had wooden decks. Why did a modern battleship have a wooden main deck? Well the official reason was “metal is slippery” but they had upper levels with exposed/wet metal decks. When steel/Iron ships came out, there was a general lack of acceptance (during the war it was a necessity in the US but other countries not so much). There was a general “This isn’t right! Decks should be wood” mentality so metal main decks were covered in wood to make the high brass feel better “now this is a ship”. And the tradition continued until fireproof non-skid replaced wood decks on carriers & then smaller ships fallowed with no-one noticing (or caring – “wood decks are from old battleships”) so even if hammerheads were no longer needed for offensive armament, the tendency would be to retain them for “defensive armament” (and recognized looks) {sorry if that was a tangent – also directed at above discussion on hull shape regarding merchies}