How To Abandon Ship?

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:*Though I personally don't know how Ajax's drive being up only on her forward rings would affect her sidewalls? Unless it's intuitive, leaving only forward sidewalls.

A single ring can produce a weaker, but as far as I know, full sized wedge. And the sidewalls should be happy to tie into whatever strength wedge the ship is producing.

On the other hand nobody was shooting at Ajax during the length period they were evacuating non-essential crew - so I assume that they'd have lowered the sidewalls for that operation. (There'd be plenty of time to snap the sidewalls back up if someone launched missiles at them)

cthia wrote:The introduction of Apollo must have really wreaked havoc for the Havenites in so many ways, even while abandoning ship.

Evacuating with the sidewalls down, then suddenly faced with the reality of ballistic missile drives coming back online is a shitty proposition.

"Oh shit!"

"We did already!"

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:The introduction of Apollo must have really wreaked havoc for the Havenites in so many ways, even while abandoning ship.

Evacuating with the sidewalls down, then suddenly faced with the reality of ballistic missile drives coming back online is a shitty proposition.

"Oh shit!"

"We did already!"

:D
Just remember that Ajax, as a BC(P), does have Keyhole II so it' can't do full Apollo. And in that battle was carrying Mk16s, so it couldn't even do half Apollo.

Though ballistic missiles shouldn't be that much of a surprise if originally launched from a ship you were fighting. You'd see their earlier drives go down and have a pretty solid idea of their direction and speed of coating. (Not necessarily good enough to target them, but good enough to know when and where to keep an eye for their terminal drives to pop online). What made Ajax's attack such a surprise is the drives never came up, they rolled pods and left them unlaunched, then lured the RHN ships down onto them. (During the end of the Battle of Jutland a worry about the Germans doing something similar by rolling mines to cover their retreat kept the RN's Grand Fleet from charging straight after them)

But still I suspect part of the reason the crew was ordered to abandon ship early was to avoid looking like they got in a cheap shot then bailed out to avoid the consequences. (Not entirely unlike how it was a bad idea for a sniper to pick off someone in an approaching force and then immediately try to surrender)

"Missile trace!" Frazier Adamson barked suddenly, and Lester Tourville's belly muscles clenched.

What was left of Third Fleet had stopped firing when he did. Were they insane enough to resume the action? If they did, he'd have no choice but to—

"Sir, they're coming in from outside the zone!" Adamson said.

"What?" Molly DeLaney demanded incredulously. "That's ridiculous! They're a hundred fifty million klicks away!"

"Well, they're coming in on us now anyway," Tourville said sharply as Guerriere's missile defense batteries began to fire once more.

Theemile wrote:

cthia wrote:When gunports are taken out, that represents holes in the sidewall? I am certain that a ship would not want to take-on any more enemy fire at that location.

Utilizing the Star Trek template again, it would be similar to the damage reports given to the captain. "We've sustained damage to the forward shields Captain."

Which conceivably enables the captain to maneuver the ship while fighting in a manner that least exposes the forward shields to further hits. Which makes me wonder if in the Honorverse these damage reports has to be quickly assessed by commanders like Harrington in their maneuvers. Seems a lot to quickly digest while fighting and there is bound to be errors in maneuvers, like with Sword Simmons fighting Fearless.

In the case of gun ports lost on Havenite ships, I wonder if Apollo has the ability to "see" these ports or holes in the sidewalls and can adjust attack, or note the existence of these holes and send the info upstream to the ship for subsequent launches.

I know. I know. Star Trek is in my bones. I boldly went where no man had gone before. It is a long trek back!

You cannot "take out" a sidewall gun port, it's function of the sidewall around it. You can shoot through it when it is open, or burn out the sidewall it is a part of. But you cannot individually destroy a gun port.

glott wrote:
You may not be able to take out a sidewall gun port, but sidewall generators can be destroyed, or at least damaged. I don't remember off-hand if a generator going down creates an actual gap in the sidewall or just weakens it. But AFAIR there were a number of times, particularly in one-on-one battles, where a report that a sidewall generator has gone down is followed by the ship maneuvering, either by rolling or changing heading, to protect its weakened flank.

But going back to the sidewall generators, does anyone know how big they are? Or where they're located on a ship. I assume, that since they are apparently multiple ones in each broadside, that they are evenly spaced along that broadside, but I could be wrong. And presumably, the Bow/Stern sidewall generators are bigger than the "flank" sidewall generators (as well as being located in or near the hammerhead ends of the ship).

One of the reasons I've been thinking about sidewall generators is that I'm trying to decide if that rare beast , an armed merchantship, would be equipped with them.

Relax wrote:How to abandon ship: While running: SCREAM:
ABANDON SHIP! ABANDON SHIP!
WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!! ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGG
SPACE HAMPSTERS ARE INVADING! AHOY MATEY!
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

cthia wrote:Just thought of something. Ships that can eject the reactor has to lower the sidewalls to do so, regardless of an incoming attack. I wonder what the minimum acceleration has to be in order to safely eject, where the resulting explosion wouldn't damage your own sidewalls (or destroy the ship if they are still down). Which again begs for the necessary cycle time of completely killing then reinitiating sidewalls.

There obviously is enough cycle time to achieve it, or acceleration is such that the worry is low. Even so, it doesn't intuitively seem to be a given.

Unless again, some "synchronization/interrupter" computer handles everything. Even so...

On Basilisk Station, Chapter 31 wrote:"Got it!" Santos shouted as she bridged the last circuit and started to slide out from under the console. Now all she had to do was cut the fuel feed and—
Fearless twisted and leapt. The savage motion picked the engineer up and smashed her down. The side of her helmet crashed against the deck, and she grunted in shock, stunned for just an instant.
It was an instant she didn't have. She blinked back into focus, and her mouth went desert dry. She couldn't hear the alarm in Fusion One's vacuum, but she could see the numbers flashing blood-red on the panel. The mag bottle was going, counting down with lightning speed, and there was no longer time to kill the plasma flow.
She rolled across the deck, trying not to think, knowing what she had to do, and drove her hand toward the scarlet bulkhead switch.
"Jesus Christ, we got her!" Jamal screamed. "We nailed the bitch!"
* * *
The emergency jettisoning charges hurled the entire side of Fusion One out into space a microsecond before the ejection charges blew the reactor after it. There had to be a delay, be it ever so tiny, lest a faltering mag bottle be smashed against an intact bulkhead and liberate its plasma inside the ship. But small as that delay was, it was almost too long.
Dominica Santos, Allen Manning, and Angela Earnhardt died instantly. The dying containment field failed completely just as the reactor housing blew through the opening, and the terrible fury of a star's heart erupted back into the compartment as well as out. Fusion One vanished, along with seven hundred square meters of Fearless's outer hull, Missile Two, Laser Three, Point Defense One, Rad Shield One, all of her forward fire control sensors, and her forward port sidewall generators, and forty-two of Fearless's surviving crewmen died with them. A streamer of pure energy gushed out of the dreadful wound, and the light cruiser heaved bodily up to starboard in maddened response.