Jonathan_S wrote:Presumably. And in exchange for greatly increased risk you'll get somewhat better performance.
(For simplicity I'm going to ignore acceleration time and in-system manouvering as they should be irrelevant to the variable of hyper generator safety - though Truman was probably also redlining her compensator which I should calculate as it affects total passage time)
Even so, unless acceleration has a much larger impact than I assume, I can't get the numbers to make sense for Truman's speed run back to Manticore in HotQ.
It's only 31 light-years between Manticore and Grayson so even a warship traveling sedately down in the Eta bands (2576 c) needs less than 106 hours at full speed make the hyper transit.
We're told turning off all the interlocks let the damaged light cruiser Apollo "cut thirty hours off the old passage record". But to cover that distance in even 76 hours you need 3575 c. Which is basically warship in Iota bands speed (3600 c), substantially better than we're told a warship can do in the Theta bands (3000 c).
So already seems implausible even if we assume the old passage record was made loafing around in Eta bands.
It we assume is was set in the Theta bands, where warships can go (and dispatch boats routinely utilize) the hyper passage time should be under 91 hours at full speed. Chopping that to 61 hours would require a multiplier of 4500 c; exceeding what a streak drive can do (Kappa bands - 4354 c)
So something seems is screwy in HotQ. But like I said redoing the full calc, assuming no compensator safety margin might clear that up. I'll see if I can find time with my spreadsheets to run that.
Okay, going back to my reference material and attempting to do the full calcuations.
Apollo started out at Blackbird, within Uriel's 5 LM hyper limit. As what I believe is an Apollo-class CL her standard 80% accel was 418.8 G.
And for all of these we assume the small grav wave we know lies near Grayson on the way to Manticore either is too far, or too low a band, to be helpful.
Normal leisurely transit
Assume warship stays at 80% accel and only uses Eta bands
Boost for 111 minutes at 80% accel gets you 5 LM out (and up to 27.034 km/s)
Jump up to the Eta bands drops your velocity to roughly of that 0.00431% - 1.1659 km/s
Then 738 minutes to 0.6c (12 hours 18 minutes)
Then another 5960 minutes (99 1/3 hours) at 0.6c to reach Manticore
Then dropping back to n-space drops Apollo's velocity to 7.75 km/s (but she can now radio for help; her trip is complete)
Total transit time 6809 minutes (113.48 hours)
Emergency transit w/ hyper generator interlocks in place
Boost for 100 minutes at 100% accel (517.8 gees) gets you 5 LM out (and up to 30,448 km/s)
Jump up to the Theta bands drops your velocity to roughly 0.00207% of that - 0.630 km/s.
Then 591 minutes to 0.6c (9 hours 51 minutes)
Then another 5139 minutes (85.6 hours) at 0.6c to reach Manticore
Then dropping back to n-space drops Apollo's velocity to 3.72 km/s (but she can now radio for help; her trip is complete)
Total transit time 5800 minutes (96.66 hours)
So a savings, over a leasurly cruise, of 16.82 hours just from the higher hyper band and the full accel. We just need another 13.18 hours from the generator safety interlocks. That would reduce the effective times c multiplier from the 3575 c calculated before to "only" 3547.5 c.
A reduction of almost 0.77% - and still almost the speed of the Iota bands.
So factoring in acceleration time still doesn't explain how the hell Apollo managed to shave 31 hours off. (Unless the old record was set down in maybe the Epsilon or Zeta bands - but then the majority of the improvement wouldn't be any surprise) I remain baffled.