Jonathan_S wrote:That's a good question.
MY first though was to wonder if all the ships could crowd in close so a single central ship maxes out its hyper generator to jump the formation as an single event (kind of like how Thunder and Principality were able to pop LACs into hyperspace with her). However I realized 2 problems with that. One, those ships were only able to cover 6 km out from their hull so you'd need to be very tightly packed. And two, which compounds the first, each ship presumably still needs its sails rigged to survive that close to the transit point; meaning there's no possible way to cram them that close.
Jonathan_S wrote:While searching for an RFC post on an entirely different topic I ran across something interesting that would also definitely strike down this idea.Jumping even one additional ship is going to be way over that 6% "overload" and would result in a very unpleasant failure even if the sail crowding issue could be resolved.runsforcelery: 12-Jun-2012 SPOILER – finding the torch wormhole’s destination wrote:When a hyper generator's translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field's designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be "x" meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field's area of effect and its mass affects the translation. The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there's usually some safety margin built into it, but it can't handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage "overload" before the hyper generator "departs from its mounts in multiple directions," as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.
Just sharing this as something interesting that I'd completely forgotten about.
cthia wrote:It still seems doable, at least something has the hair on the back of my neck standing.
Admittedly when I proposed the possibility of a disaster I was thinking about how densely packed Stephanie Gram was stacking 'em at BoM. It seems to me if a mass transit is taking place on one end, there's nothing (other than ASC) which would prevent another ship on the other side of the junction to be part of the sardine can. And since there is no wedge in front of it, it has the right of way.
That raises another question about the maneuver in Storm from the Shadows, chapter 51, where the Sharks made two group transitions of 10 ships each.
At the moment, Kolstad was concentrating all of her own attention on the readouts which showed the exact position of every unit of Topolev's task force, literally down to the last centimeter. All twenty of his ships were tractored together into two big, ungainly formations, nine hundred kilometers apart, as they floated with the closest thing possible to a zero velocity relative to one another and to the normal-space universe they'd left three months earlier.
So they cannot be jumping under just one hyper generator (according to RFC's text); therefore they have to have coordinated all of the generators to operate simultaneously. Also they must have turned off their sails before moving together.