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What happens to all that debris?

Join us in talking discussing all things Honor, including (but not limited to) tactics, favorite characters, and book discussions.
Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by tlb   » Fri Jan 21, 2022 8:08 pm

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cthia wrote:Which brings me to my new concern. If ships in hyper can see what is in n-space, but certainly ships in n-space cannot see into hyper. What prevents ships in n-space from hypering right into oncoming traffic?

tlb wrote:What makes you think that ships in hyperspace can see into normal space? I believe that I may have seen suggestions that ships in hyperspace can see the disturbance caused by objects that create hyper-limits (because you need to transit outside of the hyper-limit); but I do not recall seeing a suggestion that anything smaller than that can be seen.

cthia wrote:Well, I wasn't sure. Because a lot of things didn't add up. I did say nagging me?

At any rate, in AAC, Honor and Tourville were trying to out wait each other before hypering in. I got the impression that Honor was looking at the melee as it was happening. She could see the entire tactics play out, which made her say something like "This doesn't make sense. There has to be another shoe that is going to drop." And she was right. If she had hypered in she would have been mousetrapped. How could she see that much detail?

Plus! How could she order Theophile Kgari(?) to put her so many kilometers from a specific Fleet?

If you are talking about the action in chapter 35 of At All Costs. the reason that Honor can see all the action is that she had already moved to normal space:
"Sir, they're crossing the limit," Bibeau said. "Present velocity two-point-six-one thousand KPS. Range to Arthur ten-point-two light-minutes. Tracking makes their current accel four-point-eight-one KPS squared."
"They're staying concentrated? No detachments?"
"Pretty much, Sir. It looks like they're leaving their carriers behind with three cruisers and a LAC security patrol, but all the rest of them are headed in-system."
Durand nodded, not without a flicker of disappointment. Not that he was really surprised. He'd always thought the Merlin pods were unlikely to suck them in, but it had been worth a try. And they'd needed something to camouflage the Tarantula platforms, anway.
"Time to Arthur?" he asked.
"Assuming a zero/zero intercept and constant accelerations, approximately three hours and seventeen minutes, Sir. They'll make turnover niner-one-point-eight million klicks out in ninety-four minutes."
"Very good. Communications!"
"Yes, Sir?"
"Send Lieutenant Bibeau's data to Tarantula and instruct Lieutenant Sigourney to execute his orders."
"Aye, Sir."
* * *
"Their superdreadnoughts are starting to stir, Your Grace."
Honor broke off her conversation with Mercedes Brigham at Jaruwalski's announcement. Her own force had been headed in-system for thirty-seven minutes. Her velocity relative to the system primary was up to 13,191 KPS, and she'd come just over seventeen million kilometers since crossing the hyper limit . . . which meant she had a hundred and sixty-six million still to go.
She glanced at the plot, and noted the vector arrows which had appeared next to the tiny defensive force in orbit around Arthur. As Jaruwalski said, the starships—escorted by the swarm of LACs—were beginning to move. She studied their vector for a moment, then frowned.
"Odd," she murmured.
"Ma'am?" She looked up. Brigham stood at her elbow, where she'd been gazing at the same display, and the chief of staff arched one eyebrow as their eyes met.
"I said that's odd." Honor indicated the icons of the accelerating defenders. "They're coming to meet us, which is odd enough on its own. I would have expected them to wait for us as deep into the envelope of their system defense pods as they could. If they keep accelerating at that rate, they'll be right at the very fringe of their pods' effective range when we engage, which means accuracy will be even lower than usual. By the same token, the range to their ships will be lower for us, which means our accuracy will be greater. But not only are they coming to meet us, but from these acceleration numbers, they don't have many, if any, pods of their own on tow."

"Your Grace, I know that expression," Brigham said quietly as Honor and Nimitz rejoined her.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said I know that expression. May I ask what's provoking it this time?"
"I don't know, really." Honor shrugged. "There's just . . . something wrong. It's like they're going off in all directions at once—panicky evacuation of their orbital platforms, ships heading out to meet us without even bringing along heavy pod loads, no effort to communicate with us at all, and now this FTL message traffic."
"Maybe they really are going off in all directions at once, Your Grace," Brigham suggested. "It's one thing to know the other side is scouting your system; it's another to see a force this powerful coming down on you."
"I know, I know." Honor snorted. "Maybe I'm simply being paranoid! But I just can't shake the feeling that there's something out of kilter."
"Well, Ma'am, even if Arthur is talking to someone out at Merlin, it's not like either of them were close enough to pose any sort of threat to us. For that matter, Merlin's on the entirely wrong side of Solon!"
"Exactly. So why—"
Honor broke off abruptly, her eyes suddenly widening.
"Your Grace?" Brigham asked sharply.
"Sidemore," Honor said. "They're taking a page from Sidemore!"
Brigham looked blank for a moment, then inhaled deeply.
"They'd have to have accurately predicted our objectives," she said.
"No reason they couldn't have," Honor replied almost absently, eyes intent as she stared into the depths of her tactical plot. "Not in a general sense, at least. Deciding what sorts of targets we'd be likely to hit wouldn't be that hard. Picking the exact, specific targets would probably come down to a guessing game, but it looks like someone guessed right."
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Jan 21, 2022 8:27 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:This bothers me a lot. Why would a combatant even worry about trash collecting in someone else's system. It is a nice gesture, I suppose, or a crazy one. I mean, all is fair in love and war.


Whoever remains in possession of the system after a battle is responsible for the security and safety of the civilian population and that includes traffic lanes. If nothing else, your own side is probably sending auxiliary ships after the battle and they'll thank you for there not being navigational hazards in their way. Later, the auxiliaries will be followed by civilian shipping.

If you've just taken possession of a system, there's something in it you want. Wrecking it is not usually in your interest.

And in the case of Cerberus I'm sure Honor felt some responsibility towards the prisoners that, for whatever reasons, refused to cooperate with her prison break and opted to remain behind.

She'd have cleaned up enough battle debris to make sure the remaining prisoners, and the farms that fed them, weren't going to have random chunks of ships raining down on them.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:In fact, I'd be more concerned about non-debris traffic. How do you know you're not hypering in right on top of a ship that is about to leave? I'd guess that there's an SOP for every ship to just add a bit of randomisation to the arrival. 1000 or even 10,000 km are not going to significantly delay your journey. That's about a minute more, at 500 gravities.

I suspect it's back to that navigational accuracy we saw before. When you're hypering out you have a really good idea of where the hyper limit is, so you probable enter hyper within 100km of the limit. But arriving ships, even warships, are usually targeting an emergence much further out, say 100,000km from the limit to allow for some accumulated error in the hyper-log. (Remember, they're basically using super-fancy inertial navigation because they can't see anything in normal space to take bearings or locations from; not even the hyper limit itself. So they'd rather err of the side of emerging further out than risk "bouncing" by trying to exit hyper just over the limit)


So most ships never have any reason to travel out through the "arrival area". Though some in-system traffic might, say mining ships heading out to the asteroid belts or tankers headed out to the local gas giant -- but that's probably a minority of traffic.

And even then we know ships prefer to emerge on the ecliptic, so making traffic passing the "arrival area" climb or dive away from that plane would be another way to deconflicting traffic.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 12:20 am

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tlb wrote:What makes you think that ships in hyperspace can see into normal space? I believe that I may have seen suggestions that ships in hyperspace can see the disturbance caused by objects that create hyper-limits (because you need to transit outside of the hyper-limit); but I do not recall seeing a suggestion that anything smaller than that can be seen.


Like the discussion of black holes and Schwarzschild radius in the other threads, it's likely all objects have a theoretical hyperlimit radius. It's just that anything below the mass of a gas giant (say, Neptune), that limit is inside the object's own body, so it doesn't get to actually form and therefore isn't visible in the alpha band.

Would Earth's core be dense enough that its hyperlimit is beyond its own boundaries?

Random maths based on the hyper limit table.

The ratio between the hyperlimit of a G0 and a K0 is 1.25. The typical mass of a G0 dwarf star is 1.06 solar masses and a K0 is 0.88, so the ratio is 1.20; the typical radius of a G0 is 1.1 solar radii and that of a K2 is 0.813, giving us a ratio of 1.35. Comparing a G2 to to a K2 gives us 1.26 ratio on the hyperlimit vs 1.22 on mass and 1.26 on the radius.

Now comparing a K2 to an M2: hyperlimit ratio 1.36, mass ratio 1.86 and radius ratio 1.76.

So whatever equation this is, it's not directly proportional to mass or radius. Especially since the table has an entry for a red giant, which has a hyperlimit of 5.64 light-minutes, but a red giant may be as massive as G-type stars (that's the Sun's destiny and it won't have lost that much mass before going to that stage). Oh, and 5.64 light-minutes is likely to be inside the red giant's radius.

The other hyperlimit we know is Jupiter's, at 3 light-minutes. Jupiter mass is just under one thousandth of the Sun's mass: the hyperlimit ratio is about 7, but the mass ratio is 1048. Saturn is 30% of Jupiter's mass, Uranus just 4.5% and Neptune is 5.3%. Given the slow drop in the hyperlimit, I'd expect then Saturn to still have a 2-light-minute limit and the other two giants to be around 1. Earth, at 0.3% of Jupiter's mass or 6.9% that of Uranus, would have a hyperlimit measured in a handful of light-seconds... it it were outside the Sun's limit, which makes the point moot.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 3:49 am

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tlb wrote:
cthia wrote:Which brings me to my new concern. If ships in hyper can see what is in n-space, but certainly ships in n-space cannot see into hyper. What prevents ships in n-space from hypering right into oncoming traffic?

tlb wrote:What makes you think that ships in hyperspace can see into normal space? I believe that I may have seen suggestions that ships in hyperspace can see the disturbance caused by objects that create hyper-limits (because you need to transit outside of the hyper-limit); but I do not recall seeing a suggestion that anything smaller than that can be seen.

cthia wrote:Well, I wasn't sure. Because a lot of things didn't add up. I did say nagging me?

At any rate, in AAC, Honor and Tourville were trying to out wait each other before hypering in. I got the impression that Honor was looking at the melee as it was happening. She could see the entire tactics play out, which made her say something like "This doesn't make sense. There has to be another shoe that is going to drop." And she was right. If she had hypered in she would have been mousetrapped. How could she see that much detail?

Plus! How could she order Theophile Kgari(?) to put her so many kilometers from a specific Fleet?

If you are talking about the action in chapter 35 of At All Costs. the reason that Honor can see all the action is that she had already moved to normal space:
"Sir, they're crossing the limit," Bibeau said. "Present velocity two-point-six-one thousand KPS. Range to Arthur ten-point-two light-minutes. Tracking makes their current accel four-point-eight-one KPS squared."
"They're staying concentrated? No detachments?"
"Pretty much, Sir. It looks like they're leaving their carriers behind with three cruisers and a LAC security patrol, but all the rest of them are headed in-system."
Durand nodded, not without a flicker of disappointment. Not that he was really surprised. He'd always thought the Merlin pods were unlikely to suck them in, but it had been worth a try. And they'd needed something to camouflage the Tarantula platforms, anway.
"Time to Arthur?" he asked.
"Assuming a zero/zero intercept and constant accelerations, approximately three hours and seventeen minutes, Sir. They'll make turnover niner-one-point-eight million klicks out in ninety-four minutes."
"Very good. Communications!"
"Yes, Sir?"
"Send Lieutenant Bibeau's data to Tarantula and instruct Lieutenant Sigourney to execute his orders."
"Aye, Sir."
* * *
"Their superdreadnoughts are starting to stir, Your Grace."
Honor broke off her conversation with Mercedes Brigham at Jaruwalski's announcement. Her own force had been headed in-system for thirty-seven minutes. Her velocity relative to the system primary was up to 13,191 KPS, and she'd come just over seventeen million kilometers since crossing the hyper limit . . . which meant she had a hundred and sixty-six million still to go.
She glanced at the plot, and noted the vector arrows which had appeared next to the tiny defensive force in orbit around Arthur. As Jaruwalski said, the starships—escorted by the swarm of LACs—were beginning to move. She studied their vector for a moment, then frowned.
"Odd," she murmured.
"Ma'am?" She looked up. Brigham stood at her elbow, where she'd been gazing at the same display, and the chief of staff arched one eyebrow as their eyes met.
"I said that's odd." Honor indicated the icons of the accelerating defenders. "They're coming to meet us, which is odd enough on its own. I would have expected them to wait for us as deep into the envelope of their system defense pods as they could. If they keep accelerating at that rate, they'll be right at the very fringe of their pods' effective range when we engage, which means accuracy will be even lower than usual. By the same token, the range to their ships will be lower for us, which means our accuracy will be greater. But not only are they coming to meet us, but from these acceleration numbers, they don't have many, if any, pods of their own on tow."

"Your Grace, I know that expression," Brigham said quietly as Honor and Nimitz rejoined her.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said I know that expression. May I ask what's provoking it this time?"
"I don't know, really." Honor shrugged. "There's just . . . something wrong. It's like they're going off in all directions at once—panicky evacuation of their orbital platforms, ships heading out to meet us without even bringing along heavy pod loads, no effort to communicate with us at all, and now this FTL message traffic."
"Maybe they really are going off in all directions at once, Your Grace," Brigham suggested. "It's one thing to know the other side is scouting your system; it's another to see a force this powerful coming down on you."
"I know, I know." Honor snorted. "Maybe I'm simply being paranoid! But I just can't shake the feeling that there's something out of kilter."
"Well, Ma'am, even if Arthur is talking to someone out at Merlin, it's not like either of them were close enough to pose any sort of threat to us. For that matter, Merlin's on the entirely wrong side of Solon!"
"Exactly. So why—"
Honor broke off abruptly, her eyes suddenly widening.
"Your Grace?" Brigham asked sharply.
"Sidemore," Honor said. "They're taking a page from Sidemore!"
Brigham looked blank for a moment, then inhaled deeply.
"They'd have to have accurately predicted our objectives," she said.
"No reason they couldn't have," Honor replied almost absently, eyes intent as she stared into the depths of her tactical plot. "Not in a general sense, at least. Deciding what sorts of targets we'd be likely to hit wouldn't be that hard. Picking the exact, specific targets would probably come down to a guessing game, but it looks like someone guessed right."

Wrong passage. It is Eighth Fleet's cavalry scene. This would be right before Honor and Tourville decide to hyper in and Kuzak dies from smoking crack.

Tourville is waiting to mousetrap Eighth Fleet. And Honor is hesitating because her spider senses are tingling. It is as if they both can see the action as it unfolds, before they even hyper in.

Honor wins the waiting game because Tourville goes ahead and hypers in. And someone says to Honor, "Seems you were right, Your Grace. There was another shoe."

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: What happens to all that debris?
Post by munroburton   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 7:56 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:Like the discussion of black holes and Schwarzschild radius in the other threads, it's likely all objects have a theoretical hyperlimit radius. It's just that anything below the mass of a gas giant (say, Neptune), that limit is inside the object's own body, so it doesn't get to actually form and therefore isn't visible in the alpha band.

Would Earth's core be dense enough that its hyperlimit is beyond its own boundaries?

Random maths based on the hyper limit table.

The ratio between the hyperlimit of a G0 and a K0 is 1.25. The typical mass of a G0 dwarf star is 1.06 solar masses and a K0 is 0.88, so the ratio is 1.20; the typical radius of a G0 is 1.1 solar radii and that of a K2 is 0.813, giving us a ratio of 1.35. Comparing a G2 to to a K2 gives us 1.26 ratio on the hyperlimit vs 1.22 on mass and 1.26 on the radius.

Now comparing a K2 to an M2: hyperlimit ratio 1.36, mass ratio 1.86 and radius ratio 1.76.

So whatever equation this is, it's not directly proportional to mass or radius. Especially since the table has an entry for a red giant, which has a hyperlimit of 5.64 light-minutes, but a red giant may be as massive as G-type stars (that's the Sun's destiny and it won't have lost that much mass before going to that stage). Oh, and 5.64 light-minutes is likely to be inside the red giant's radius.

The other hyperlimit we know is Jupiter's, at 3 light-minutes. Jupiter mass is just under one thousandth of the Sun's mass: the hyperlimit ratio is about 7, but the mass ratio is 1048. Saturn is 30% of Jupiter's mass, Uranus just 4.5% and Neptune is 5.3%. Given the slow drop in the hyperlimit, I'd expect then Saturn to still have a 2-light-minute limit and the other two giants to be around 1. Earth, at 0.3% of Jupiter's mass or 6.9% that of Uranus, would have a hyperlimit measured in a handful of light-seconds... it it were outside the Sun's limit, which makes the point moot.


We know another gas giant's hyper limit. Uriel, orbiting Yeltsin's Star, has one of 5 light minutes.

We tried this before, when I wanted to figure out how vast Sagittarius A*'s hyper limit would be. It can't be resolved, because the hyper limit table was based on spectral class, rather than mass alone. Yes, mass affects a star's luminosity, but so does its temperature and that's derived from its age and internal composition.

As you have already noticed, any star between type M-A would turn into a red giant eventually, with largely the same mass it had, just spread over a wider area. As Wikipedia says of the spectral sequence:
Because the classification sequence predates our understanding that it is a temperature sequence, the placement of a spectrum into a given subtype, such as B3 or A7, depends upon (largely subjective) estimates of the strengths of absorption features in stellar spectra. As a result, these subtypes are not evenly divided into any sort of mathematically representable intervals.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by tlb   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 8:24 am

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cthia wrote:Which brings me to my new concern. If ships in hyper can see what is in n-space, but certainly ships in n-space cannot see into hyper. What prevents ships in n-space from hypering right into oncoming traffic?

tlb wrote:What makes you think that ships in hyperspace can see into normal space? I believe that I may have seen suggestions that ships in hyperspace can see the disturbance caused by objects that create hyper-limits (because you need to transit outside of the hyper-limit); but I do not recall seeing a suggestion that anything smaller than that can be seen.

cthia wrote:Well, I wasn't sure. Because a lot of things didn't add up. I did say nagging me?

At any rate, in AAC, Honor and Tourville were trying to out wait each other before hypering in. I got the impression that Honor was looking at the melee as it was happening. She could see the entire tactics play out, which made her say something like "This doesn't make sense. There has to be another shoe that is going to drop." And she was right. If she had hypered in she would have been mousetrapped. How could she see that much detail?

Plus! How could she order Theophile Kgari(?) to put her so many kilometers from a specific Fleet?

tlb wrote:If you are talking about the action in chapter 35 of At All Costs. the reason that Honor can see all the action is that she had already moved to normal space:

cthia wrote:Wrong passage. It is Eighth Fleet's cavalry scene. This would be right before Honor and Tourville decide to hyper in and Kuzak dies from smoking crack.

Tourville is waiting to mousetrap Eighth Fleet. And Honor is hesitating because her spider senses are tingling. It is as if they both can see the action as it unfolds, before they even hyper in.

Honor wins the waiting game because Tourville goes ahead and hypers in. And someone says to Honor, "Seems you were right, Your Grace. There was another shoe."

Same explanation. Her ship has transited the wormhole and is sitting in the resonance zone watching the action after Diamato's scout force was chased away. From chapter 66:
"Oh my God," Mercedes Brigham said softly as the plot abruptly altered. The FTL feed from the recon platforms made what had just happened all too hideously clear.
"You were right, Your Grace," Rafael Cardones said flatly. "They aren't stupid."
Honor didn't reply. She was already turning to the sidebars of her own tactical display. Sixteen of her thirty-two superdreadnoughts were still in Trevor's Star, as were all of Samuel Miklós' carriers and thirty of her battlecruisers. She looked at the numbers for perhaps one heartbeat, then turned back to her staff.
"Mercedes, send a dispatch boat back to Trevor's Star. Inform Admiral Miller that he's in command and that he's to hold all of our battlecruisers there. Tell him he's responsible for covering Trevor's Star until we get back to him. Then instruct Judah to bring Admiral Miklós' carriers and all the rest of the wallers through in a single transit."
Her voice was crisp, calm, despite her own shock, and Brigham looked at her for a moment, then nodded sharply.
"Aye, aye, Your Grace!"
"Theo," she continued, pointing one index finger at Commander Kgari, "start plotting a new micro-jump. We'll go straight from here; no dogleg. I want us at least fifty million kilometers outside these newcomers. Seventy-five to a hundred would be better, but don't shave it any closer than fifty."
Kgari looked at her for a moment, and she tasted his shock. She was allowing him a much larger margin of error than Admiral Kuzak had allowed Third Fleet's units, but she was also requiring him to jump straight from a point inside the RZ to one on its periphery. Safety margin or no, astrogation that precise was going to be extraordinarily difficult to deliver, given the fact that his start point's coordinates were going to be subject to significant uncertainty, whatever he did.
From chapter 68:
Honor Alexander-Harrington's eyes were brown ice as Theophile Kgari, in a virtuoso display of astrogation, dropped the massed superdreadnoughts of Eighth Fleet exactly where she'd told him to in a single jump right out of the center of the resonance zone.
She didn't look at the pathetic remnants of Third Fleet's icons. Didn't even glance at the other icons, representing Lester Tourville's task force. She had attention only for Genevieve Chin's superdreadnoughts, and her voice was a frozen soprano sword.
"Engage the enemy, Andrea," Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington said.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:10 am

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Thanks for the passage and explanation tlb. It is always good to reread that. I adore AAC. That bugle sound of the cavalry coming always gives me goosebumps. It is what spurred the parody of Honor at the Bat over in the humor thread.

I didn't think Honor was in n-space because I couldn't understand why that large of a force coming out of the junction couldn't be seen by the Peeps. And who else would a force that large be. And if indeed Tourville was waiting in hyper to mousetrap Honor, then surely he could see the action. But I suppose he could have a ship waiting to hyper back out with the news.

Anyway, you put me back on balance. It was nagging at me. And also, admittedly, I didn't know what hell the RZ was.

BTW, in what book(s) is that detail explained?

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: What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:40 am

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cthia wrote:]About killing large debris with PDLCs. If a ship in hyper cannot detect debris fields that shouldn't be there - and since downward translations cause a significant moment of a lack of concentration - the process should be automated. But what if you hyper right on top of a very large chunk of junk? Will the sensors always have time to discern between firing on junk or a disabled Yacht?


ThinksMarkedly wrote:The chance of hypering right on top of a debris field is literally astronomical.

Civilian vessels, especially merchants, don't translate exactly on the hyperlimit. Their navigation isn't that good. Warships and probably some civilian fast couriers will try to translate at the hyperlimit on the least-time course to their destination. That's the only location where a translation could be predicted. But a warship would not do that on an enemy system, because it's predictable (unless you're thumbing your nose at them, like Honor did in Galton). They'd do only where the destination is known to be safe, which means your friendlies have cleared it of possible debris.

It could be that you're just unlucky, that you hypered in right after an accident and therefore the other ship registers as debris. That doesn't mean your computers will immediately register it as a hazard and shoot at it. For one thing, as you said, you've just lost 92% of your velocity, so the debris wouldn't be moving at you.

In fact, I'd be more concerned about non-debris traffic. How do you know you're not hypering in right on top of a ship that is about to leave? I'd guess that there's an SOP for every ship to just add a bit of randomisation to the arrival. 1000 or even 10,000 km are not going to significantly delay your journey. That's about a minute more, at 500 gravities.

Or hypering right on top of a ship having engine problems with the hood up; or bonnet, to my friends across the pond. It could be waiting on the side of the road for a tow truck in the form of a tug.

Come on, the debris field in as busy a port as the MBS can actually be real bonafide ships ready to hyper out. They aren't actual debris... yet.

At any rate, it should happen quite a bit in what should be the busiest port in the Galaxy, especially if it is simply left up to chance.

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: What happens to all that debris?
Post by tlb   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 12:27 pm

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cthia wrote:Thanks for the passage and explanation tlb. It is always good to reread that. I adore AAC. That bugle sound of the cavalry coming always gives me goosebumps. It is what spurred the parody of Honor at the Bat over in the humor thread.

I didn't think Honor was in n-space because I couldn't understand why that large of a force coming out of the junction couldn't be seen by the Peeps. And who else would a force that large be. And if indeed Tourville was waiting in hyper to mousetrap Honor, then surely he could see the action. But I suppose he could have a ship waiting to hyper back out with the news.

Anyway, you put me back on balance. It was nagging at me. And also, admittedly, I didn't know what hell the RZ was.

BTW, in what book(s) is that detail explained?

Also in At All Costs, chapter 62:
The Junction's position also put it over eleven light-hours from Manticore-B, which created Home Fleet's commander's second problem. But, fortunately, Manticore-B also lay far outside the resonance zone—the volume of space between the Junction and Manticore-A in which it was virtually impossible to translate between hyper-space and normal-space. Any wormhole terminus associated with a star formed a conical volume in hyper, with the wormhole at its apex and a base centered on the star and twice as wide as its hyper limit, in which hyper-space astrogation became less than totally reliable. The bigger the terminus or junction, the stronger the resonance effect . . . and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, with its multiple termini, was the largest ever discovered. The resonance zone it produced was more of a tsunami, and it didn't just make astrogation "less than reliable." It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible. Any translation out of the resonance zone risked serious astrogational uncertainty, and any translation into the zone would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide. But since the Manticore Binary System's secondary component lay outside the resonance (and would for the next few hundred years or so), Home Fleet had actually been closer from its position covering the Junction—in terms of travel time—to Manticore-B than to Manticore-A.
As for Manticore-A, the planets of Manticore and Sphinx—Home Fleet's major inner-system defensive obligations—had been well inside the same resonance zone when he took up command of Home Fleet, with Manticore, with its smaller orbital radius, steadily "overtaking" Sphinx as it moved towards opposition. Each planet spent half its year inside the zone, and Sphinx's year was more than five T-years long. That meant it took thirty-one T-months to cross through the RZ, and it had been almost in the middle of the zone when he took up his command.

As we see however, "next to impossible" is not the same thing as completely impossible; just as "mostly dead" is not the same thing as completely dead.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Jan 22, 2022 1:10 pm

ThinksMarkedly
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Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2019 11:39 am

cthia wrote:Thanks for the passage and explanation tlb. It is always good to reread that. I adore AAC. That bugle sound of the cavalry coming always gives me goosebumps. It is what spurred the parody of Honor at the Bat over in the humor thread.

I didn't think Honor was in n-space because I couldn't understand why that large of a force coming out of the junction couldn't be seen by the Peeps. And who else would a force that large be. And if indeed Tourville was waiting in hyper to mousetrap Honor, then surely he could see the action. But I suppose he could have a ship waiting to hyper back out with the news.


Tourville wasn't waiting in hyper. He was deep in the hyperlimit and at this time had already fought Home Fleet and was taking fire from Third Fleet under Adm. Kuzak. You're thinking of Adm. Genevieve Chin.

The reason Adm. Chin had been in hyper was that she could attack all Alliance forces from behind. At this point, Tourville could see Home and Third Fleets. And Third Fleet had a few Invictus with Keyhole II (Adm. McKeon's division or squadron), which means Tourville's Second Fleet was taking heavy damage. They couldn't tell where Eighth Fleet was. It was possible Eighth hadn't been at Trevor's Star and had instead exited to attack somewhere in Haven space. So after waiting what they thought was enough, they sent a destroyer that had been in n-space back into Alpha to bring Adm. Chin and Fifth Fleet in.

Honor later arrived with Eighth. She wasn't waiting in hyper either. She made the fastest transit possible from the Junction to Manticore space. She did drop 70 million km out from Adm. Chin, who at this point was still outside the hyperlimit, meaning Eighth Fleet dropped very far from the limit too. The Hermes network between Manticore-A and the Junction was still operating and messages took barely 7 minutes one-way, so Honor had all the information she needed to attack before she left the Junction.


The Havenites could have made FTL messages too, but they'd need them carried by ship. That means it couldn't be as fast as Hermes. The way communications could have worked would be with two small Q-ships. One would observe Eighth Fleet beginning to show up and then come to the inner system to advise that yes, Eighth is eventually coming. The second would come when Eighth was mostly completely massed and was actually coming.

But even then, this strategy wouldn't (or didn't) work, for two reasons. First, Tourville and Second Fleet were taking heavy damage from Third Fleet, especially because of those Apollo missiles McKeon had. He needed Chin to come in and relieve him, lest there be nothing left of Second in the inner system, which would leave Chin and Fifth Fleet to face the remnants of Home, Third and Eighth Fleet from three different directions. Remember also that Eighth Fleet had been away from the terminus on the other side, so there was a long while when none of those ships had shown up at the Junction, so Tourville called Chin in.

And second, Honor made the mass transit and then came in without a dogleg. The second Q-ship wouldn't have known in advance those ships were coming until they did, at which point it would make the translation up to Alpha and come into the inner system. And they wouldn't come directly because it was indeed too risky, as posted above. That means this ship would have begun its transit late and Honor would have beat it to the inner system. Besides, it was a moot point anyway because Chin had already transited in.
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