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Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?

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Re: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by Galactic Sapper   » Tue Jan 07, 2020 2:18 am

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TFLYTSNBN wrote:During the account of Honor sneaking up on the State Sec ships at the Battle of Cerbus, Weber indirectly revealed the mass ratio of Hororverse warships. It was about 25% IIRC. From this we can estimate fuel burn rate in Kg/s and hence power rate.

I wonder if that mass is considered in the tonnage ratings listed for ships, since we also have to consider that some of them carry significant percentages of their mass as missiles as well. I'm beginning to think an unloaded hull has about the same density as a zeppelin.
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Re: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Tue Jan 07, 2020 9:53 am

TFLYTSNBN

kzt wrote:
TheMadPenguin wrote:
About tankage: Hydrogen density is not easy to come by. Per litre/Kg, the densest hydrogen storage is not LH2, but CH4 (Methane) NH40H (ammonium compounds) and metallics (chromium Hexahidride). Science being a moving thing that it is, Cr(NH4)6 might be feasible as high-density hydrogen storage.

Water shouldn't be disregarded either.



Carbon-Tetra-Deuteride would be an excellent candidate.
You can separate out the Deuterrium for the fusion reactor then inject the Carbon into the exhaust stream to augment thrust.
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Re: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jan 07, 2020 2:54 pm

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Galactic Sapper wrote:I wonder if that mass is considered in the tonnage ratings listed for ships, since we also have to consider that some of them carry significant percentages of their mass as missiles as well. I'm beginning to think an unloaded hull has about the same density as a zeppelin.


We discussed this a month or two ago in some thread with a completely unrelated title (aren't they all?): what is the dry mass of a 6-million-ton freighter? Is it 6 million tons? Or is just a set of trusses, spars and a pair of impeller rings massing less than 200 thousand tons? If it's the former, what is the mass of a fully laden freighter then?

I argued that the numbers we hear must have been the fully laden masses (for warships, including consumables, bunkerage and ammo). Others argued that the numbers we hear are basically the armour.
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Re: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by kzt   » Tue Jan 07, 2020 3:10 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:I argued that the numbers we hear must have been the fully laden masses (for warships, including consumables, bunkerage and ammo). Others argued that the numbers we hear are basically the armour.

Actually, it's volume.

The Great Resizing

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: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by Galactic Sapper   » Tue Jan 07, 2020 7:47 pm

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kzt wrote:Actually, it's volume.

Because of course the ship's actual mass will change considerably during the course of a battle. An Agamemnon's mass will drop by well over half if it expends all of its pods and counter missiles during an engagement. Other classes can change by more than a third pretty easily.
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Re: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by SharkHunter   » Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:05 pm

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Really enjoying this thread, and noticed a bit about "prolong" as it applies to the Honorverse. Apparently the med-tech involved is somewhere short of a century old in Manticore at the opening of the series; King Roger didn't have it but QEIII does. Protector Benjamin chose not to when in school, all of his children have it.

My thought being, prior to prolong, uncontrolled population growth would have been as toxic to a new planetary system as the last two hundred years have been on Earth. So even with a few centuries in place, there would be a certain amount of cultural inertia in place where conspicuous reproduction would have been frowned upon.

With Prolong in place, I'm thinking that galactic exploration in the Honorverse should be "about to go crazy", once the OFS supported oligarchies get the boot put on them by the GA... with EVERY wormhole owning system turning into major emigration points. Thoughts?
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Re: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Jan 10, 2020 4:17 pm

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SharkHunter wrote:Really enjoying this thread, and noticed a bit about "prolong" as it applies to the Honorverse. Apparently the med-tech involved is somewhere short of a century old in Manticore at the opening of the series; King Roger didn't have it but QEIII does. Protector Benjamin chose not to when in school, all of his children have it.


King Roger definitely did. He wasn't 3rd gen prolong, but he was either first or second generation. His reign was expected to be very long as he was the first monarch to be a prolong recipient.

His mother, Queen Samantha, wasn't a recipient.

As for the Graysons, the problem was that Benjamin Mayhew was too old already by the time the reforms took place and the treatment became available to the population. The Protector and the Steadholders probably had enough wealth to pay for it themselves if they wanted to, as Grayson had been in contact with the outside world, though sporadically, since 1793 PD. But doing so was probably politically unwise, so they didn't.

My thought being, prior to prolong, uncontrolled population growth would have been as toxic to a new planetary system as the last two hundred years have been on Earth. So even with a few centuries in place, there would be a certain amount of cultural inertia in place where conspicuous reproduction would have been frowned upon.

With Prolong in place, I'm thinking that galactic exploration in the Honorverse should be "about to go crazy", once the OFS supported oligarchies get the boot put on them by the GA... with EVERY wormhole owning system turning into major emigration points. Thoughts?


I disagree. The carrying capacity of a full star system is in the order of quadrillions. Just start building space habitats and you don't even need to rely on centrifugal gravity if you have artificial gravity. Instead, use rotation to provide day-night cycles.

Grayson definitely had the technology to do so. They had lots of orbital farming to supplement the food supply, as farming on toxic grounds was expensive. What stopped them was a very high mortality rate and probably a cultural/religious tenet of being forced to remain on the planet of Austin Grayson (same as Masadans' "this planet is God's" but less extreme).

But I do agree that exploration should considerably grow now.
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Re: Why are Honorverse Heavy Industries off Planet?
Post by George J. Smith   » Fri Jan 10, 2020 5:24 pm

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SharkHunter wrote:
Snip...

With Prolong in place, I'm thinking that galactic exploration in the Honorverse should be "about to go crazy", once the OFS supported oligarchies get the boot put on them by the GA... with EVERY wormhole owning system turning into major emigration points. Thoughts?


A lot of the previous emigration was from systems that were in the sights of OFS, people were moving outwards all the time to get away from OFS, with OFS being disbanded it remains to be seen how that trend will be affected.
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