MaxxQ wrote:***Snip***
As I said before, the ships are not all that different in that they are all cylindrical in shape. What you are forgetting is something that Grashtel mentioned that you didn't touch on at all, and that is *the compensator. A ship's inertial compensator encloses the ship in a cylindrical field not much bigger than the widest part of the ship itself. Note that no warship hammerhead is either wider or taller than the dimensions of the main hull.
That said, my guess would be that the compensator field extends a few meters above and below the ship, but again, no more than the ships largest non-length dimension, which is why you can have something like the "conning tower" on the top of the ship (or the boat bay observation/backup control room on the bottom) still enclosed within the field.
***Snip***
The compensator field extends quite a bit further than just a few meters.
Flag In Exile, Chapter 33 wrote:Honor's battlecruisers had only two missile pods apiece. That was all they could tow without massive degradation of their acceleration rates. But superdreadnoughts were big enough they could actually tractor the pods inside their wedges, where they had no effect at all on acceleration, and now each of her ships of the wall deployed a lumpy, ungainly tail of no less than ten pods. They were ugly, clumsy, and fragile, those pods—but each of them also mounted ten box launchers loaded with missiles even larger and more powerful than a superdreadnought's missile tubes could fire.
And:
Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:For one thing, she'd argued for a high-speed run-in from the very start, despite some other officers' fear that such an approach could leave them with a dangerously high velocity if there were in fact, Manty ships of the wall in-system. Their concern had been that a high initial velocity would leave them with too much mometum to kill quickly if an evasive vector change were required, but Foraker had shown even less patience than usual with that argument. Even if there were ships of the wall present, she'd pointed out arctically, they would still have to generate an intercept vector, and the less time TF 12.2 took reaching its objective, the less time the Manties would have in which to intercept. In fact, the only way they could guarantee to intercept an attack on the planet Zanzibar would be for them to be in orbit around it and stay there ... in which case, TF 12.2 should see them long before they entered engagement range and would have a much higher base velocity from which to evade the defenders and go after its secondary objective: the system's asteroid extraction industry. Besides, a higher approach velocity would not only face the Manties with more difficult interception acceleration curves but force them to commit sooner and at higher power settings, which would degrade the efficiency of their stealth systems and make them far easier to detect early enough for it to do some good.
In keeping with that recommendation, she'd also argued that the retention of their own ships' full acceleration capability was more important than putting the maximum possible number of pods in space. That liveliness in maneuver, after all, was the one advantage battleships held over ships of the wall, and she refused to throw it away. So rather than tow the pods astern, she'd suggested, they should take a page from the Manties' book in the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin and tractor the pods inside the wedges of their battleships, where they would have no effect on their acceleration curves. Their battlecruisers could tractor only two pods inside their wedges, and the heavy cruisers and destroyers lacked the tractors and wedge depth to tractor any inside at all, but that was fine with her.
Some of the squadron ops officers had hit the deckhead at the very suggestion, but she had simply waited them out with a cold, almost mechanical patience. And when the hubbub had settled, she'd pointed out that battleships had been designed as general purpose workhorses, which meant, among other things, that they had more tractors on a ton-for-ton basis than any other ship type in the Republican order of battle. Each of them could tractor eleven pods — more than most superdreadnoughts, actually — tight in against their hulls. That meant that when they actually deployed them, they could still put over forty-two hundred missiles into space at once, with another three hundred eighty from the battlecruisers. In the meantime, their entire task force's ability to maneuver at full acceleration would not only make them fleeter of foot but might actually convince the defenders that they hadn't brought along any pods until it was too late.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.
On the size of missile pods:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/170/0Pearls of Weber, Missile pods as strap-on weapons? wrote:From a post to ALT.BOOKS.DAVID-WEBER dated October 18, 1998:
Missile pods as strap-on weapons?
I'd have to say that would not be a good idea. For one thing, they're bigger than some of you seem to be assuming. In point of fact, the Manties' present capital-ship missile pods are considerably larger than a pinnace or an assault shuttle. In fact,
they're a little more than half the beam of a standard DD in their widest dimension, which is why
Wayfarer could deploy no more of them simultaneously and why a pod-SD (by the way, I like the term; I hadn't thought of it for myself. Perhaps we should call them SD(P) from now on? <g>) can deploy even less in a salvo than
Wayfarer could. The depth of the after aspect of the wedge is not much of a factor; the physical dimensions of a pod which must pass through a physical hatch are. Moreover, when used as broadside weapons, one would be required to shut down one's sidewalls while one launched (assuming one
could launch from a broadside--see
below), which could be a major disadvantage if one were under threat of attack at the moment of launch. Why drop the sidewall? Because unlike the fixed, conventional launcher, your pod has no "gunport" in the sidewall through which to eject the missile(s) it is blasting off.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.
And finally a short answer from David:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/169/0Pearls of Weber, Missile pods: where are they tractored? wrote:From a post to ALT.BOOKS.DAVID-WEBER dated October 18, 1998:
Missile pods: where are they tractored?
Missile pods, when tractored inside the wedge to avoid accel penalties, are normally inside the sidewalls of the towing ships. The distance between the hulls of ships of BC and above is large enough to squeeze a pod into it, although their broadside armament would normally be blocked and nonfunctional (especially the energy weapons) while the pods were present. The same is true of the Peeps' Warlord-class CA [I think DW means the Mars-class -Ed.], but that's only because it's a Real Big CA.
Italics are the author's and editor's.
All of this taken together suggests that the volume the inertial compensator field encompasses extends sideways out to the sidewalls from the ship (for an SD, less than 10,000 meters, but apparently not much less than 10km) and presumably also extending vertically up and down by the same amount.
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/100/0Excerpt from Pearls of Weber, Wedge geometry wrote:The sidewall is normally generated at a range of less than 10,000 meters from the actual ship, which means that, in the case of our SD from the example above, the sidewall will be 143 kilometers inside the outer "edges" of the wedge.
Italics are the author's.
).