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How To Abandon Ship?

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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by Theemile   » Thu Nov 09, 2017 11:11 am

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Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.


Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by PeterZ   » Thu Nov 09, 2017 11:21 am

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Theemile wrote:
Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.


Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...


As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Nov 09, 2017 11:57 am

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cthia wrote:Also, the ejection sequence does not have anything to do with how much time-to-holy-hell is left on the reactor. The reactor is going to blow when it damn well pleases and the ejection may not even clear the ship, let alone the radius of the sidewalls in some cases.

Actually it does. Ejection is only used as a last ditch attempt to save the ship; when there isn't time to cut the fuel feed to the reactor and the automatic shutdown failsafes haven't worked.

If the reactor wasn't just about to explode there would be time to cut the fuel and starve the fusion reaction - safeing the reactor without the damage and risk of blowing the side off the ship and then applying massive acceleration to an already unstable grav bottle.
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Thu Nov 09, 2017 1:58 pm

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Vince wrote:Don't make the mistake of expecting a nuclear explosion (in this case, an Honorverse gravity fusion reactor) to correspond to a normal explosion. A normal explosion will cause any other available fuel to ignite, combust and/or detonate. A nuclear explosion will do the same, but will not cause any other fuel not already present at the site of the initial fusion reaction to undergo nuclear fusion and produce a nuclear yield. In order to produce a nuclear fusion reaction, either today or in the Honorverse (either in stars or hydrogen bombs), the hydrogen must be uniformly compressed and heated to a literally astronomical degree. If the compression isn't uniform, the hydrogen will escape and fusion will not occur. And explosions, once the initial nuclear yield occurs, are chaotic, not uniform.


Second this. Look at a current-era hydrogen bomb. They don't pile lithium deutride around a fission device, they use the energy of the fission device to compress the lithium deutride and then they use a second fission device inside it to initiate fusion.

Note that they can pile uranium around a fusion device to increase the yield but the uranium doesn't undergo a chain reaction. It's simply fissioning due to the neutron flux from the fusion device. Such jackets are not bomb grade material, they can even be depleted uranium.
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by cthia   » Thu Nov 09, 2017 6:58 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:
cthia wrote:Also, the ejection sequence does not have anything to do with how much time-to-holy-hell is left on the reactor. The reactor is going to blow when it damn well pleases and the ejection may not even clear the ship, let alone the radius of the sidewalls in some cases.

Actually it does. Ejection is only used as a last ditch attempt to save the ship; when there isn't time to cut the fuel feed to the reactor and the automatic shutdown failsafes haven't worked.

If the reactor wasn't just about to explode there would be time to cut the fuel and starve the fusion reaction - safeing the reactor without the damage and risk of blowing the side off the ship and then applying massive acceleration to an already unstable grav bottle.


You are discussing two different sequences...

1. Shutdown sequence.
2. Ejection sequence.

There may be some overlap. Such as the aforementioned cutoff of fuel before ejection which may serve to both minimize explosion and or increase time to critical. But it is still part of the shutdown sequence, as you perform the exact same steps in the exact same order as if you were shutting down. As in a nuclear power plant, the SCRAM button is an emergency shutdown switch which is also a part of the normal shutdown.

The term is usually cited as being an acronym for safety control rod axe man, which was supposedly coined by Enrico Fermi when the world's first nuclear reactor was built under the spectator seating at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, but NRC Historian Tom Wellock suggests that the acronym was invented after the fact, and that it was first used as a reference to the slang, to 'scram' (to run). It could also stand for "Safety Control Rods Activation Mechanism" or "Control Rods Actuator Mechanism", both of which are probably backronyms. "Scram" is English slang for leaving quickly and urgently, which has been cited as the original basis for the use of scram in the technical context.


I am a Civil Engineer and did some work at a particular plant. Having been onsite, I was fortunate enough to be invited to sit in on a simulated trip similar to this one.

Then another in another state like this one.

A completely unrelated loss of offsite power simulation.

Even nicer.

That was years ago. Since then, I became addicted to nuclear power plant operation. Which led me to the very nice simulation for the Windows environment developed by AE4RV.com. It is the only reason I bought a Windows computer.


Which brings me to my point. Once she is ejected, there is no control of time to critical. Which means that she may blow before she clears the ship or sidewalls. Or before she reaches minimum safe distance.


SHUTDOWN

In a nuclear reactor, shutdown refers to the state of the reactor when it is subcritical by at least a margin defined in the reactor's technical specifications. Further requirements for being shut down may include having the reactor control key be secured and having no fuel movements or control systems maintenance in progress.

The shutdown margin is defined in terms of reactivity, frequently in units of delta-k/k (where k is taken to mean k-effective, the effective multiplication factor) or occasionally in dollars (the dollar is a unit equal to the change in reactivity needed to go from critical to prompt critical). Shutdown margin can refer either to the margin by which the reactor is subcritical when all control rods are inserted or to the margin by which the reactor would be shut down in the event of a scram. Hence, care must be taken to define shutdown margin in the most conservative way in the reactor's technical specifications; a typical research reactor will specify the margin when in the cold condition, without xenon. Under this specification, the shutdown margin can be simply calculated as the sum of the control rod worths minus the core excess.

Minimum shutdown margin can be calculated in the same way as shutdown margin, except that the negative reactivity of the most reactive control rod and non-scramable rods is ignored. This definition allows the reactor to be designed so that it remains safely shut down even if that most reactive control rod becomes stuck out of the core.

A reactor is in cold shutdown when, in addition, its coolant system is at atmospheric pressure and at a temperature below 100 °C (210 °F). This temperature is low enough that the water cooling the fuel in a light water reactor does not boil even when the reactor coolant system is de-pressurized.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by cthia   » Fri Nov 10, 2017 5:18 am

cthia
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Are any of the crew ever told the truth?

"There's a nuclear bomb onboard mate. And she has a tendency to want to blow."

"There's a nuclear bomb onboard mate. Piss her off and she'll have a meltdown."

"There's a nuclear bomb held in captivity mate. And she has a tendency to try and escape."

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by cthia   » Fri Nov 10, 2017 7:56 am

cthia
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Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2014 1:10 pm

Theemile wrote:
Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.


Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...
PeterZ wrote:As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.

I wonder how that translates to point defense? If ports are always open for missiles then perhaps it is the same for point defense? And autocannons and lasers need a certain arc to perform adequately, which means a fairly large open port to accommodate the degree of movement?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Nov 10, 2017 9:13 am

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PeterZ wrote:[As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.
Huh, that’s not how I understood them to work. I thought each weapons mount carriered was equipped with hardware to open a hole in the sidewall whereever needed. For missile tubes that’s always the same spot, but energy mounts seem to have come limited ability to deflect their beams; and of course PDLCs swivel to aim anywhere is vast arcs. (Also for energy mounts to gunport is filled by the mounts final grav lense, proj3cted forward from themount - but that presumably doesn’t provide and protection if incoming fire happened to hit that exact spot in the instant after it forms and before the energy mount fires)
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by Vince   » Fri Nov 10, 2017 9:51 am

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Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.
Theemile wrote:Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...
PeterZ wrote:As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.
cthia wrote:I wonder how that translates to point defense? If ports are always open for missiles then perhaps it is the same for point defense? And autocannons and lasers need a certain arc to perform adequately, which means a fairly large open port to accommodate the degree of movement?

Gunports in the sidewall are open on a transitory basis only, and to get a hit through an open gunport is quite difficult:
The Short Victorious War, Honor Harrington's Navy, NAVAL DESIGN AND DOCTRINE wrote:Although no "holes" could exist in an impeller stress band, portals (known to naval spacers as "gunports") could be opened in a vessel's sidewalls to permit unobstructed fire of its own weapons. In theory, gunports represented dangerous chinks in its defenses; in practice, the targets were too small and fleeting—they were "open" only long enough for a shot to be fired through them—to be deliberately targeted. Nonetheless, it was not unheard of (though it was very rare) for a lucky shot to penetrate an open gunport.
Even a freak gunport hit, however, wasn't guaranteed to inflict damage. The maximum safe velocity in n-space was approximately .8 c for a ship with military-grade particle and radiation shielding, whereas merchantmen normally relied on much weaker—and less massive—shield generators, trading lower maximum speeds for greater cargo capacity. But speed wasn't the only reason military shielding was so much more powerful, for it was also used to fill the area between the sidewall and hull and could lessen or even negate the effect of a hit which managed to pierce the primary defense.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.
-------------------------------------------------------------
History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.
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Re: How To Abandon Ship?
Post by cthia   » Fri Nov 10, 2017 7:17 pm

cthia
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Posts: 14951
Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2014 1:10 pm

Theemile wrote:
Brigade XO wrote:I understand that the "gunport" in the sidewalls are created by the equipment on the ship opening them in the sidewall and that it would be extreemly bad luck for some enemy missile to happen to detonate it's laserhead at just the correct moment for one of the beams of energy to go through an open gunport.
There must be seperate systems for each of the gunport (both shipkiller tubes and CM tubes as well as possible drone tubes) such that you only open ports for tubes that are being fired.
Since we are talking about being in the middle of an engagement and damage is being suffered, probably on both sides, what happens if the equipment that creates one of the gunports fails (electronics etc) and while the systems cycles when that tube is fired, the gunport isn't actualy opened (power to the circuit but not enough to open a hole in the sidewall) and the weapons is launched and starts through the cycle to power up and engage it's impellers?
You you get the weapon detonating inside the sidewall (I suppose that would depend on when the warhead armes after fireing) or would the sidewall destroy it- and what would the resulting release of energy "inside" on the ship side of the sidewall do to the ship?

Just curious. Somebody must have a thought on this.


Sidewalls were designed in response to the impeller missile - the sidewall is powerful enough to blow out the nodes on the missile and shred the physical body almost instantly.

I would think that a missile that missed it's gunport would just get swallowed by the sidewall out of hand. ...eerrp...
PeterZ wrote:As I understand it, the gun ports are always open. These ports are part of the sidewall generators' programmed settings. They are too small to allow missiles to enter, but energy weapons can fire in through them at any time.

This seems to be intuitive. The destructive stilletos of energy emanating from laserheads have to be at the perfect angle to enter into the port, where a few degrees off effects a larger degree shot. Akin to the minute movements of a sniper throwing his shot off by yards or miles.

Plus, a particular ship's attack plans, "We'll go with William Tell at 75M klicks," probably maneuvers for optimum defensive as well as offensive orientation.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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