Forts & Energy Weapons

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:Compensators - that is the issue here. Forts do not have them due to their size, anything over ~12 Mtons would have negative move numbers if they used compensators. That is why Forts use Grav plates to negate mass - meaning all forts have a normal movement rate of ~50 gs and an emergency rate of 100-120 gs (with 5-6 Gs getting to the Crew.)

And it is the compensated field that negates mass inside the wedge. Meaning - every pod tractored to a fort should reduce it's ability to move. Not knowing current masses, a few dozen should quickly push the movement of a fort to zero - if that many.

Actually it's extending the compensation field being distorted that slows ships down when towing pods. Without them I don't think the wedge cares how much mass it's moving - so towing pods shouldn't directly slow the fort down. On the other hand the grav plates can't affect the acceleration the towed pods experience - so if the fort makes a 100g emergency run any pod it's towing experiences 100 gees. I'm not sure a pod's tractor and components are rated to take anything near that since they normally experience 0-1g. To avoid damage to the pods a fort might be limited to, say, 5-10 gees of acceleration when towing pods -- but whatever the accel should be able to tow as many pods as can grab on without it affecting that accel.

Theemile wrote:We know that when the pods are deployed outside the wedge, they slow down the ship.
We know when the pods are inside the compensated field, they do not slow down the ship.
We know if you carry too many pods, they extend outside the compensated field and slow down the ship - Is that disturbing the compensation field, or is it just being outside the field? The wedge area is Vast and mostly empty even for a destroyer, one would assume that someone had thought to build distanced tractor that held pods "out there" in the area outside the compensated field but still under the wedge - which would hold thousands of pods even for a destroyer.

Do pardon my bold.

Regardless of which it is, the net effect is obviously the same. But my intuitive guess would be because it is outside the compensation field, since being outside the field would equate to having "no compensation."

However, I was under the impression the LACs were towed outside the wedge.

Annachie wrote:

cthia wrote:And in peace time, like now, there's not even a shell of laser platforms. Shouldn't they at least remain in peace time as well, but inactivated?

Probably something to do with maintenance costs.

cthia wrote:I considered that, but thought maintenance costs would be drastically reduced if not active. I'm certain I'm wrong, but that was my thought.

How are laser platforms kept on station?

Annachie wrote:You'd think standard station keeping thrusters.
Which means refueling.

Do you think the maintenance ships will be heavily stealthed. Also applies to maintenance ships for missile pods in system defence roles.

Interesting question Annachie. Obviously station keeping thrusters. But that's part of the high maintenance cost. A bit inefficient and more of a pain in the ass. What other option is there? Glad you asked. I've always wondered why dedicated tractors couldn't keep pods on station. If so it'd be a lot cheaper, convenient and practical.

But it wouldn't exactly be stealthy. As Annachie correctly hints should be.

But should there necessarily be a consideration towards stealth? I think every navy knows that Manticore deploys pods in the vicinity of forts and I don't think forts are stealthy platforms. But if not, I'd like to know why.

forts stealthy? doubtful but pods should be.

why? forts have sidewalls and wedges and PDLC and armour. pods are VERY fragile as we have seen time and again in the books, so by rights a ship doing maintenance should have some stealth so that any innocent looking freighter/dispatch boat that goes through the junction can't immediately tell others where the pods were.

Dauntless wrote:forts stealthy? doubtful but pods should be.

why? forts have sidewalls and wedges and PDLC and armour. pods are VERY fragile as we have seen time and again in the books, so by rights a ship doing maintenance should have some stealth so that any innocent looking freighter/dispatch boat that goes through the junction can't immediately tell others where the pods were.

Why bother? The pods aren't close enough to the junction to be hit with energy fire, and missiles would take long enough to get there for the ready forts to target and launch from those pods. For ships, the pods being heavily stealthed makes sense. Not as much so for fixed defenses. Everyone knows they're around somewhere, right?

Or they could rely on concealment rather than stealth. Instead of having pods floating free near the forts, have a few freighter-looking ships that consist of a thin core linking drive ends with layers upon layers of pods linked to that core. The pod maintenance people can stay on the ship with direct access to the pods - no potentially revealing boats working among the pods. At need the ships spew pods in every direction and the core can run or take up position as a block ship for the industrial/shipping/control stations near the junction. Think of it as an extreme variant of an ammunition ship.

This way the pods can be physically linked to the ship core rather than having to tractor themselves all the time.

cthia wrote:Interesting question Annachie. Obviously station keeping thrusters. But that's part of the high maintenance cost. A bit inefficient and more of a pain in the ass. What other option is there? Glad you asked. I've always wondered why dedicated tractors couldn't keep pods on station. If so it'd be a lot cheaper, convenient and practical.

We don't actually know how long a tractor emitter can continuously run. Obviously the ship mounted ones on Thunder of God were able to run for the few days it took to tow LACs from Masada to Grayson - but even then one suffered major damage from overstress and had to be rebuilt.

So I'm not sure using continuous tractors would actually be less maintenance intensive than a fuel tank of thruster fuel which needs periodic fueling. Plus of course running a tractor beam requires a lot more power than a gas thruster, so you either need a onboard power plant running to power the tractor or beamed power. The onboard plant or large stored power probably exhausts at least as fast as thruster fuel would and if it's a microfusion plant those seem to have fairly limited operational lives before requiring major service. (And regardless of the power source the energy use of running the tractor will inevitably generate waste heat build-up in the pod making it easier to spot).

We also don't know how often the missiles themselves require routine maintenance - for all we know it may be trivial for a system defense pod to have a large enough fuel tank that the thrusters to keep it from drifting too far off station can last longer than the suggested maintenance interval on the pod and missile components - making alternate designs for station keeping pretty much moot.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Interesting question Annachie. Obviously station keeping thrusters. But that's part of the high maintenance cost. A bit inefficient and more of a pain in the ass. What other option is there? Glad you asked. I've always wondered why dedicated tractors couldn't keep pods on station. If so it'd be a lot cheaper, convenient and practical.

We don't actually know how long a tractor emitter can continuously run. Obviously the ship mounted ones on Thunder of God were able to run for the few days it took to tow LACs from Masada to Grayson - but even then one suffered major damage from overstress and had to be rebuilt.

So I'm not sure using continuous tractors would actually be less maintenance intensive than a fuel tank of thruster fuel which needs periodic fueling. Plus of course running a tractor beam requires a lot more power than a gas thruster, so you either need a onboard power plant running to power the tractor or beamed power. The onboard plant or large stored power probably exhausts at least as fast as thruster fuel would and if it's a microfusion plant those seem to have fairly limited operational lives before requiring major service. (And regardless of the power source the energy use of running the tractor will inevitably generate waste heat build-up in the pod making it easier to spot).

We also don't know how often the missiles themselves require routine maintenance - for all we know it may be trivial for a system defense pod to have a large enough fuel tank that the thrusters to keep it from drifting too far off station can last longer than the suggested maintenance interval on the pod and missile components - making alternate designs for station keeping pretty much moot.

Modern RMN missile pods fire fusion missiles (Mk 23D, E, F, G, Mk 16) which require a fusion reactor to spin up, so any Mk 23 pod will have a live fusion reactor and require servicing roughly every month to refuel and repair the fusion reactor.

So every pod could have tractors and fusion powered thrusters.

Theemile wrote:Modern RMN missile pods fire fusion missiles (Mk 23D, E, F, G, Mk 16) which require a fusion reactor to spin up, so any Mk 23 pod will have a live fusion reactor and require servicing roughly every month to refuel and repair the fusion reactor.

So every pod could have tractors and fusion powered thrusters.

For the SD(P) pods I'm sure you're right, they're normally deployed only for relatively short periods so a 1 month or so clock on the pods reactor isn't a huge limitation.

But I've wondered if the laser fusion plants used in pinnaces and shuttlecraft can produce the necessary plasma to jump-start the microfusion reactor on a Mk23/Mk16. We know that small craft like that are capable of autonomously starting up their onboard reactors - but can they jumpstart the microfusion plants which can't self-start.

Could a system defense pod, which after all is designed for long endurance, and isn't so size constrained, use a combination of capacitors and laser fusion plants for longer service times?

Most of the time floating there they need very little power, and they could periodically fire up the relatively big shuttle plant to refill the capacitors then shut it back down. But that only works if, when given the activation order, they can fire up that shuttle fusion plant and use it to jumpstart the missiles. If they could get the service interval on system defense pods up to 6 months or a year that would make the vast shoals of them we see much more practical.

Jonathan_S wrote:For the SD(P) pods I'm sure you're right, they're normally deployed only for relatively short periods so a 1 month or so clock on the pods reactor isn't a huge limitation.

David has done a bit of a retrocon and the limitation on pod life are 1) the reactor fuel and 2) The limited durability of the pod electronics outside the armor of a hull.

BTW, David doesn't seem to like it when you suggest that the RMN offer some sort of prize to develop some sort of power connection for devices mounted on the hull. Maybe some sort of flexible connection that connects to some sort of port on the hull and a port on the pod?

I'm willing to entertain a very high possibility that Malign forts are stealthy.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Interesting question Annachie. Obviously station keeping thrusters. But that's part of the high maintenance cost. A bit inefficient and more of a pain in the ass. What other option is there? Glad you asked. I've always wondered why dedicated tractors couldn't keep pods on station. If so it'd be a lot cheaper, convenient and practical.

We don't actually know how long a tractor emitter can continuously run. Obviously the ship mounted ones on Thunder of God were able to run for the few days it took to tow LACs from Masada to Grayson - but even then one suffered major damage from overstress and had to be rebuilt.

So I'm not sure using continuous tractors would actually be less maintenance intensive than a fuel tank of thruster fuel which needs periodic fueling. Plus of course running a tractor beam requires a lot more power than a gas thruster, so you either need a onboard power plant running to power the tractor or beamed power. The onboard plant or large stored power probably exhausts at least as fast as thruster fuel would and if it's a microfusion plant those seem to have fairly limited operational lives before requiring major service. (And regardless of the power source the energy use of running the tractor will inevitably generate waste heat build-up in the pod making it easier to spot).

We also don't know how often the missiles themselves require routine maintenance - for all we know it may be trivial for a system defense pod to have a large enough fuel tank that the thrusters to keep it from drifting too far off station can last longer than the suggested maintenance interval on the pod and missile components - making alternate designs for station keeping pretty much moot.

They were towing LACs thru hyper. Shouldn't the difficulties of towing pods in normal space scale down quite a bit? The total mass of the shoals of pods may exceed the mass of the LACs, but they will be towed in normal space at much lower velocities. If up to the task, tractors can be serially locked on and initiated, then rotated between clumps once they begin to move. In that manner, beam emitters won't exceed mass tolerance or lock-on distance.