JeffEngel wrote:cthia wrote:I'm having a hard time viaualising this. So what does a ship do, reconfigure from sails after exiting a grav wave carrying < .16 c speeds across in a downward translation then going to impeller drives only to reconfigure to sails before reaching the other wave?
No wonder they are vulnerable to pirates. But it seems this is the one place where no freighter should ever tread alone without a naval escort. Rather humorous if you think about it, freighters are like little old ladies needing help to cross the street.
But how dangerous is it? I hate being given generalities. Is it as dangerous an undertaking as removing the safety intelocks on the engine?... however dangerous that is.
Either the movie will clear up many inconsistencies in my mind or piss me off to no end.
I don't expect a lick of help from the movie on this score, if any. Honestly, it is likely to be off on its own canon and bringing up all sorts of inconsistencies with the books and maybe plenty in itself.
To moving between grav waves - Space is BIG. Even crossing the Selker Rift, there will be vast numbers of routes to take far enough apart that a single ship won't be able to monitor two of them at a time, or even one. The PHN was using a line of ships and got lucky. I think there was some grumbling in there about their odds. If not, there could have been. And the Selker Sheer will be a threat to the warships or pirates as much as the freighters, and harder on ships trying to maintain a position rather than dodge it on the way from A to B.
It's a reminder that interstellar commerce is risky. Here, it can be risky in deep space instead of just along a grav wave or in the outer reaches of a star system. But it's not something that will get you plain killed trying.
I agree. Movies usually don't get *too* technical, because a fair amount of the audience usually isn't up on technical details anyway (even the audience for a science fiction movie); and the amount of information that would be needed to actually get them up to speed would likely take the entire movie to impart; leaving no time for the actual story.
Also, while this is more of a subjective observation, I think most folks like "MacGyverism"... ...folks having to "cobble up" something that works on the fly.
And, as noted, movies are usually *horrible* at "clearing things up" from a novel they may be based on. Not surprising, though - most novels encompass days, weeks, months, or even some number of years, while most movies are, what, 2 hours or so? Many books you couldn't even *read* enjoyably in 2 hours.
On the subject of "strained space" - ie areas of grav disturbance that doesn't allow normal "high speed" hyperspace travel - think of them as the equivalent of "choke points" in the oceans of a wet water navy. They're places where vessels have to go through, usually slowly, which may form some kind of bottleneck. So a predatory vessel is much more likely to come across it's "prey" there, rather than out on the open ocean.
Even so, however, it's true that space is vast. That's why most pirates generally operated in the fringes of various relatively undeveloped (and undefended) star systems. While you may not know where any particular ship may be coming *from*, or exactly what course it will take, you know where it's going *to*; which makes it much easier to intercept at the end of it's journey, rather than at some intermediate point.
That was the problem in Silesia, there were lots of systems, most not highly developed, and the Silesian navy, such as it was, was only present in what the Confederacy considered the most important ones. So unless a RMN or Andermani ship happened to pay a visit at the same time the pirate did, the pirates pretty much had free reign.
