Honorverse ramblings and musings

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:Which raises another funky issue.

SOP for every navy in the Honorverse is to put the crew in skin suits and pump at least some of the air when you go to General Quarters. Given that servicing the suits (either with an automated system or (ick!) manually) will take a nonzero amount of time, you could in theory catch a ship (and crew) with their collective pants around their ankles.

Perhaps you could use the Lorelei decoys to lead a system defense force on a long, tedious stern chase before they finally reveal themselves. Then when the hypothetical force realizes it has been had and give it some time to leave GQ your strike force hypers in.

This is analogous to what happened to Nagumo's carriers at a place called Midway.

This idea wouldn't work if the servicing time for a skin suit is minutes, but would work if it were measured in hours.

pnakasone wrote:The simple solution for this problem would be to have at least one spare suit per person.

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:The simple solution for this problem would be to have at least one spare suit per person.

You could cycle it fairly fast. Use a high pressure detergent wash to get gross contamination off, dry it in vacuum, then flood the system with ethylene dioxide to sterilize it. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, right: "At room temperature it[ethylene dioxide] is a flammable, carcinogenic, mutagenic, irritating, and anaesthetic gas, with a misleadingly pleasant aroma."..."It is extremely flammable and explosive and is used as a main component of thermobaric weapons".

Ok, maybe gamma irradiation?

pnakasone wrote:

kzt" quote="pnakasone wrote:The simple solution for this problem would be to have at least one spare suit per person.

You could cycle it fairly fast. Use a high pressure detergent wash to get gross contamination off, dry it in vacuum, then flood the system with ethylene dioxide to sterilize it. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, right: "At room temperature it[ethylene dioxide] is a flammable, carcinogenic, mutagenic, irritating, and anaesthetic gas, with a misleadingly pleasant aroma."..."It is extremely flammable and explosive and is used as a main component of thermobaric weapons".

Ok, maybe gamma irradiation?

pnakasone wrote:

kzt" quote="pnakasone wrote:The simple solution for this problem would be to have at least one spare suit per person.

You could cycle it fairly fast. Use a high pressure detergent wash to get gross contamination off, dry it in vacuum, then flood the system with ethylene dioxide to sterilize it. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, right: "At room temperature it[ethylene dioxide] is a flammable, carcinogenic, mutagenic, irritating, and anaesthetic gas, with a misleadingly pleasant aroma."..."It is extremely flammable and explosive and is used as a main component of thermobaric weapons".

Ok, maybe gamma irradiation?

saber964 wrote:

pnakasone wrote:
The extra suit adds redundancy so no matter how much of a cycle time skinsuits need between uses you would have one available.

Can't have spare skinsuits per person it too expensive. IIRC Honorverse skinsuits are custom fitted to the wearer and are part of your personal equipment list. IIRC in EoH they tried to find a skinsuit for Honor but we're unable to do so. They also have emergency skinsuits.

Jonathan_S wrote:]Emergency spacesuits - those aren't skinsuits. Those will keep you alive, but way less functionality than skinsuits.

However I'm not convinced that cost (or storage space) is a sufficient bar to prevent Honorverse navies from issuing two pairs of skinsuits. Any naval repair yard or naval station would have the necessary suit fabbers to alter or build skinsuits - and a second skinsuit is cheaper than a new trained crewmember. So you'd have to crunch the numbers and see how often a second suit would save lives to see if it's worth doing -- or if that money / shipboard volume would be save more lives (or improve effectiveness) more if spend on something else.

pnakasone wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:]Emergency spacesuits - those aren't skinsuits. Those will keep you alive, but way less functionality than skinsuits.

However I'm not convinced that cost (or storage space) is a sufficient bar to prevent Honorverse navies from issuing two pairs of skinsuits. Any naval repair yard or naval station would have the necessary suit fabbers to alter or build skinsuits - and a second skinsuit is cheaper than a new trained crewmember. So you'd have to crunch the numbers and see how often a second suit would save lives to see if it's worth doing -- or if that money / shipboard volume would be save more lives (or improve effectiveness) more if spend on something else.

One thing is I believe that the RMN drills its crews in full battle conditions more frequently then most navies do. So having a spare suit in case a enemy is rude enough to show up after a dill is simply good thinking.

I think we are making a bigger deal of "custom fitted" then it really is.With the exception of the codpiece most the rest of a skin suit components could be made in a range of standard sizes that are then given final adjustments to fit the person their for.