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Forum terms

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Re: Forum terms
Post by Nyssa   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 3:49 pm

Nyssa
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Handwavium is used to refer to a necessary but impossible bit of technology. Sometimes it is used to explain things, such as tractor beams, grav plates, near infinite heat storage units, etc. It comes from a scene in the Safehold Series where either Merlin or Caleb says that if they all tell the same story and wave their hands to distract the listeners, everybody will believe what they are told.
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Re: Forum terms
Post by Nyssa   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 4:26 pm

Nyssa
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Would someone care to explain the Great Re-sizing?
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Re: Forum terms
Post by Nyssa   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 4:27 pm

Nyssa
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Would someone care to explain the Great Re-sizing?
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Re: Forum terms
Post by kzt   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 4:29 pm

kzt
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Nyssa wrote:Would someone care to explain the Great Re-sizing?

From somewhere on Baen:

One of the first interactions with David that we had was trying to rationalize a ship design engine that could be used to make ships in the game. We started with the mass and acceleration curves in the appendix at the back of On Basilisk Station, and then started working out (from the lengths, and Russ Isler’s drawings) volumes.

As a general rule, if the outer shape remains the same, linear dimensions go up at the cube root of volume. In David’s books, we had superdreadnoughts running at around 65x the mass of destroyers…and were roughly 11x the linear dimensions, when they should have (assuming equal density) been about 4x the length/width/depth. (The cube root of 65 is a smidge over 4.) Clearly, something was amiss – to keep the listed dimensions and the listed mass, the superdreadnought needed to have its density drop by a factor of 20, which would make it not quite as dense as cigar smoke.

So, with great trepidation, we approached David with the fact that we’d found an error. He said that, yeah, someone had pointed that out to him in book four or thereabouts, which was part of the reason why he’d stopped putting in quite so many specifications on ships, along with the fact that Honor was focusing more on being an admiral rather than direct ship handling.

Taking the listed dimensions of a Reliant-class battlecruiser (HMS Nike), we built a spreadsheet to calculate the approximate volume That spreadsheet was later generalized to estimate the volume of an entire range of ship sizes using the basic Honorverse hull form, with parameters that could be set for different length-to-beam ratios, hammerhead sizes and even the shapes of the hammerheads. After presenting David with a range of options for hull density, he agrees that a density of 0.25 as an average for a fully loaded ship was about right for the setting.
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Re: Forum terms
Post by Weird Harold   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 4:31 pm

Weird Harold
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Nyssa wrote:Would someone care to explain the Great Re-sizing?


RFC is a historian and an author. He is not a mathematician and got the size/displacement of ships wrong originally.
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

(Now if I could just find the right questions.)
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Re: Forum terms
Post by The E   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 4:36 pm

The E
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Nyssa wrote:Handwavium is used to refer to a necessary but impossible bit of technology. Sometimes it is used to explain things, such as tractor beams, grav plates, near infinite heat storage units, etc. It comes from a scene in the Safehold Series where either Merlin or Caleb says that if they all tell the same story and wave their hands to distract the listeners, everybody will believe what they are told.


The term, like it's variant unobtanium, is much older than that.
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Re: Forum terms
Post by Theemile   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 6:45 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:
Nyssa wrote:Would someone care to explain the Great Re-sizing?


RFC is a historian and an author. He is not a mathematician and got the size/displacement of ships wrong originally.


So to correct it, the group who made the SITS game looked and found that the most mentioned ship statistic mentioned in the books was the mass. So they kept the mass and the hull form ratios, and using the basic density David chose, built the ship's dimensions around that.

So any ship length, width, beam, or draught mentioned prior to the Great Resizing (~2005) is suspect.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Forum terms
Post by runsforcelery   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 7:26 pm

runsforcelery
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Location: South Carolina

Theemile wrote:
Weird Harold wrote:
RFC is a historian and an author. He is not a mathematician and got the size/displacement of ships wrong originally.


So to correct it, the group who made the SITS game looked and found that the most mentioned ship statistic mentioned in the books was the mass. So they kept the mass and the hull form ratios, and using the basic density David chose, built the ship's dimensions around that.

So any ship length, width, beam, or draught mentioned prior to the Great Resizing (~2005) is suspect.



Yeah. The real problem was a misplaced exponential notation in my original run of the numbers. Did you know there's a significant difference in the back oral you get if you square a number instead of cubing it? Go figure! :shock:


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Forum terms
Post by pboer323   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 7:28 pm

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If you really want to understand the terms, you can follow the rabbit hole at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Shipping. Once you start, you will end up in many different areas and lost hours
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Re: Forum terms
Post by pboer323   » Fri Sep 15, 2017 8:22 pm

pboer323
Midshipman

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Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado

pboer323 wrote:If you really want to understand the terms, you can follow the rabbit hole at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Shipping. Once you start, you will end up in many different areas and lost hours

Then you can start on this tread... http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/L ... Honorverse
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