Though the 0.6c speed limit mentioned in the quote from the universe of Honor Harrington was talking about warships and the rare fast freighters or liners. We saw during Honor Among Enemies that most merchant chips don't carry military grade rad shielding and so are limited to 0.5c in hyper; and similarly don't carry military grade hyper generators and so are limited to the Delta bands.tlb wrote:ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's an easy calculation: 0.6c / (150 * earth gravity). Type that on Google. Answer: 1.415 days or nearly 34 hours. That's acceleration and deceleration, since you don't want to crash translate every time, though you may shave off a couple of hours at the end. And those pairs may not be once per voyage, since you may need to translate down to catch a grav wave or something.
There may be some crews that accept that, but I don't think it's more than a blip in the statistics.
What would make that better would be to have genetically-modified people to tolerate higher accelerations in comfort or to put the crew in semi-stasis while the ship accelerates on its own. The former seems unlikely in the current political context and the latter seems unlikely in the Honorverse.
Also, would a ship without compensators even be able to enter a grav wave? They'd detect them via the Warshawskis, but if they can't enter them, the trips would be much longer. Doesn't seem acceptable for merchant shippers' bottom lines.
But you do not really want to get to half of that, because .3c is the absolute max velocity to make a transition into hyperspace. I do not remember exactly, but commercial vessels can go past the Beta band.
However once in hyper the 0.3c limit doesn't matter any more; and even the newest RMN warships don't have the acceleration to breach 0.3c on a normal trajectory from planet to hyper limit. These hypothetical ultra-mega freighters wouldn't ever have to worry about that. They'd still be plenty slow when they reached the hyper limit; they'd do their prolonged acceleration once they'd climbed to the Delta band. (Pointless to spend extra time accelerating at lower levels since you lose so much of that velocity crossing each hyper wall)
Still, even at that lower 0.5c maximum speed I doubt a specialized ultra-mega ship crew would care to spend a bit over a day at 5 gees subjective boosting up to that velocity, just to trim a couple days off a long voyage (admittedly the more you have to change velocity the more the time difference adds up)
Galactic Sapper wrote:I'd have to look up the reference and math it out, but as a ballpark putting a 20 MT fort (plus ~5 MT carrier kinda like a matryoshka doll that fits over the fort) would only lock the Junction down for an hour or so. Annoying but hardly something that can't be scheduled around.
You estimated way too high. I worked out quite a while ago that, based on the datapoints RFC gave us for Junction lockdown the forumla is actually pretty simple.
And it says for 25 mtons you'd lock down a leg of the Junction for 1000 seconds (16.67 minutes)
NOTE: This is only known to apply to Manticore's Junction, other wormholes have lower maximum tonnages and might have different scaling factors or functions on their lockdown times!
To get the time a given tonnage locks down the junction is (the max 10 is because there is always a minimum 10 second lockdown):
<seconds locked down> =MAX(10; 1.6 * <mtons>^2)
Going the other way to get the time a given tonnage you just flip it around (this one doesn't have error checking, so it'll give you a theoretical tonnage for less than 10 seconds; even though that tonnage would still produce a 10 second lockdown)
<mtons> = SQRT(<seconds locked down>/1.6)