Wedge sizes

Jonathan_S wrote:But what's also interesting is that the designs laid down with improved compensators do appear to be on trend-line; the increased design acceleration didn't cause a change in their design wedge size.

We do know that when an upgraded compensator is retrofitted, they also have to put in a bigger impeller drive. I can think of two possibilites.

IMO the most likely is that the wedge gravity field is either stronger or thicker, which would give a wedge more power without making it longer or wider.

The wedge field is longer and wider, but your curve dosen't show it.

Than there is the possibility of all four. It could be longer, wider, thicker and stronger. Increase each of those 10% and the total increase is 46%

darrell wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:But what's also interesting is that the designs laid down with improved compensators do appear to be on trend-line; the increased design acceleration didn't cause a change in their design wedge size.

We do know that when an upgraded compensator is retrofitted, they also have to put in a bigger impeller drive. I can think of two possibilites.

IMO the most likely is that the wedge gravity field is either stronger or thicker, which would give a wedge more power without making it longer or wider.

The wedge field is longer and wider, but your curve dosen't show it.

Than there is the possibility of all four. It could be longer, wider, thicker and stronger. Increase each of those 10% and the total increase is 46%

Well it wouldn't really be my curve that doesn't show it; it would be the numbers posted from BuNine's spreadsheet.
That curve is an auto-generated trend line from the XY scatter plot data; and that data is the wedge size from the original post and the mass from House of Steel. The only thing I did to the data was to sort the ships by mass.

So, like you, I'd bet that a stronger wedge for a given ship size doesn't result in a wider or longer wedge.


Though that said, IIRC, that while you usually upgrade nodes when you upgrade the compensator, and in fact need to to get full efficiency out of it, that you get some improvement even if you don't replace the nodes. That doesn't address you question about how the stronger wedge manifests when you do do the upgrade; just nitpicking that I don't think the wedge upgrade in mandatory.

Very cool. Now then... about those "play games with the wedge to imitate other ships, given how often we've read about that gambit.

Given the distances, it's obvious that the size isn't what folks are getting a read on, but why couldn't a smaller ship project what would appear to be a bigger military ship's wedge by playing similar games?

SharkHunter wrote:Very cool. Now then... about those "play games with the wedge to imitate other ships, given how often we've read about that gambit.

Given the distances, it's obvious that the size isn't what folks are getting a read on, but why couldn't a smaller ship project what would appear to be a bigger military ship's wedge by playing similar games?

We know decoys can - think for example at 4th (?) Yeltson where Honor had the Grayson BC's what were outsystem deploy decoys pretending to be SDs to convince Theisman to break off.

I'm not sure if a ship would have the flexibility to project a "louder" signal from it's wedge. But if not it could probably at least play like a bigger ship failed to stealth its wedge because it was accelerating too hard. That could explain the weaker than expected grav signal...

Jonathan_S wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Very cool. Now then... about those "play games with the wedge to imitate other ships, given how often we've read about that gambit.

Given the distances, it's obvious that the size isn't what folks are getting a read on, but why couldn't a smaller ship project what would appear to be a bigger military ship's wedge by playing similar games?

We know decoys can - think for example at 4th (?) Yeltson where Honor had the Grayson BC's what were outsystem deploy decoys pretending to be SDs to convince Theisman to break off.

I'm not sure if a ship would have the flexibility to project a "louder" signal from it's wedge. But if not it could probably at least play like a bigger ship failed to stealth its wedge because it was accelerating too hard. That could explain the weaker than expected grav signal...

Well we know that a heavy cruiser can project a footprint that appears to be a much larger freighter, as that tactic is used quite often as well.

George J. Smith wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:[We know decoys can - think for texample at 4th (?) Yeltson where Honor had the Grayson BC's what were outsystem deploy decoys pretending to be SDs to convince Theisman to break off.

I'm not sure if a ship would have the flexibility to project a "louder" signal from it's wedge. But if not it could probably at least play like a bigger ship failed to stealth its wedge because it was accelerating too hard. That could explain the weaker than expected grav signal...

Well we know that a heavy cruiser can project a footprint that appears to be a much larger freighter, as that tactic is used quite often as well.

Good point, at least well enough to fool pirates. And looking at the data points we can see that while the only civilian drive listed (Caravan-class freighter; the basis of Wayfarer) is significantly smaller that a military drive for the same size ship, it's still far larger than anything a CA carries. (More like the size of a BC(L)'s)

don't most people trolling for pirate ships mess with the wedge strength, not the size

Square, hmm... still don't get that. Everything else is round, except for the square wedge. Everything that makes it is round too. I also don't get why wedge nodes are in a ring around the ship rather than just at the top bottom and sides, for side walls.

But if square I guess they are square.

Dauntless wrote:don't most people trolling for pirate ships mess with the wedge strength, not the size

Yes. Because that FTL signal is visible much further away, and in real-time.

But I'd hope at least some pirates would be paranoid enough to attempt to confirm their target identification by cross checking the wedge size against the presumed ship type once they could get a good optical view of it. Especially since that's a free data-point, unlike expending a recon drone to eyeball the target.

We know warships tend to keep their wedge between them and the pirate to prevent them from seeing the hamerheads; so you'd think that would let the pirate measure how many degrees of view the wedge'd width was taking up - combine that with the range, which they'd know from grav sensors, and it's trivial math to calculate the wedge's size.

Something 70+ km smaller than you'd expect in even a small freighter should be a clue that something's not right.

You'd have to be a lot closer to the ship to do this than to measure wedge power; but I'd think you'd be able to do it from outside SDM range. (Though quite possible not before you'd built up too large a vector to break clear and evade the warship)

Jonathan_S wrote:
...

But I'd hope at least some pirates would be paranoid enough to attempt to confirm their target identification by cross checking the wedge size against the presumed ship type once they could get a good optical view of it. Especially since that's a free data-point, unlike expending a recon drone to eyeball the target.

We know warships tend to keep their wedge between them and the pirate to prevent them from seeing the hamerheads; so you'd think that would let the pirate measure how many degrees of view the wedge'd width was taking up - combine that with the range, which they'd know from grav sensors, and it's trivial math to calculate the wedge's size.

Something 70+ km smaller than you'd expect in even a small freighter should be a clue that something's not right.

You'd have to be a lot closer to the ship to do this than to measure wedge power; but I'd think you'd be able to do it from outside SDM range. (Though quite possible not before you'd built up too large a vector to break clear and evade the warship)

How do you see an impeller wedge?

I always imagined an impeller wedge was black. It doesn't seem obvious that it would radiate EM energy in any significant amount correlated to the wedge area. And if an impeller wedge is black you can't really "see" it in space unless it is occulting something else. Since space is mostly empty that will make it rather challenging to estimate wedge size at any reasonable range.