Jonathan_S wrote:tlb wrote:I did not realize that RFC refuses to discuss this story as being the source of FTL communication. In that case, we only have David Weber and Eric Flint as authors of that part of the Honorverse inhabited by Honor Harrington herself.
It's not a horrible story -- but the phrasing of the conclusion rubbed me the wrong way.
Every engineer or scientist for the last 7 centuries who'd given even a passing through to the holy grail of faster than light communication would have jumped at the impeller wedge and Warshawski detector as the logical basis.
Right after Warshawski realized that her detector was seeing updated from impeller wedges at faster than light (which should have been almost immediately) there would have been an inevitable rush of scientists and engineers trying to turn that discovery into a workable FTL com system -- though they obviously failed. (Probably due to the size, cost, and performance limits of impeller nodes of the day -- but it's also possible the detection range on the original Warshawskis would have make for impractically short ranged FTL even if a useable data rate had been possible)
So Hempill's "revelation" shouldn't have been written as if Honor was the first person in history to realize you could use a signal that traveled faster than light to send data faster than light. But it was written like that (before she pondering how the new tech being developed might be turned to the problem of making this more practical). And that bugged me.
Instead I feel that it should have been written as Hemphill musing on how everyone had long ago given FTL comms up as one of those things that the engineering (for a practical version) just wasn't doable, despite the underlying physics being sound, but now that she's reminded of it there is all that new tech that might be turned to finally making it a practical reality.
I felt the same way, but my issue was also the timing. Honor didn't get the CA fearless until very late 1900/early 1901. According to the story, she had at least 1 cruise on the new Fearless with Cardones, before the story happened. Cardones is returned to the Farless in time for the early 1902 trip to Grayson - with early FTL drones.
Hemphill would have had to come up with a new drone design (or find a way to modify the existing hardware), iron out the details, produce the new hardware and distribute it (and the control software and training) fleet wide inside of 6 months during peace time for Honor to have it in HoQ. And this is a navy that is "cheap", not wanting to expend expensive drones or missiles.
It definitely wasn't a simple rebuild of an existing drone, as i suggested it might - from HoQ:
“Basically, Admiral,” he said, “it’s a reversion to old-fashioned Morse code. Our new-generation RDs carry an extra gravity generator which they use to create extremely powerful directional pulses. Since gravitic sensors are FTL, we have effective real-time receipt across their maximum range.”
“That’s brilliant,” a captain with Office of Shipbuilding insignia murmured. Then he frowned. “And difficult, I’d imagine.”
“It certainly is,” McKeon said feelingly. “The power requirement is enormous—our people had to develop an entire new generation of fusion plants to pull it off—and that’s only the first problem. Designing a pulse grav generator and packing it into the drone body came next. As you can probably imagine, it uses up a lot more mass than a drive unit, and it was a monster to engineer. And there are certain fundamental limitations on the system. Most importantly, it takes time for the generator to produce each pulse without burning itself out, which places an insurmountable limit on the data transmission speed. At present, we can only manage a pulse repetition rate of about nine-point-five seconds. Obviously, it’s going to take us a while to transmit any complex messages at that rate.”
That suggests years worth of effort by multiple teams and disciplines, and multiple design iterations to me, not a quick redesign and deployment inside of 6 months.