KEYHOLE REFIT

Brigade XO wrote:How about a slightly differnt look at the LAC passing tac data to an M23 command missile? What about GhostRiders? FTL is FTL. At some point in an engagement you are going to try and have your Recon drones lurking about close to the enemy and if a GhostRider can push data to an M23 command missile, that does save time from having it go back and get digested by the commanding SHIP before getting sent out to the Apollo units.
Yeah the GRs involved have just given away position but 1) how close are they and 2) can your opponent lock them up with missile fire....GRs are notoriously hard to see/find so unless somebody is sitting right on top of one, the only other thing is to saturate a proposed area with missile and hope one of them kills the GR by getting a bing off it and targeting it or gets a wedge kill. Every bird you send after a GR is one you can't through at the ships that are sending volleys at you.

I would say that, for whatever unexplained reason, that "FTL is FTL" is no more true that "radio is radio".

We know for lightspeed links that CM fire control can't talk to anti-ship missiles (and vice versa), and voice coms can't talk to either.

That seems to be slightly less true for FLT since, after all, Honor did manage to push some updates through a Hermes buoy during the BoM. But, on the other hand, ships can talk to GR drones via FTL and can push multiple video streams for communication, and yet we've given to understand that they have zero ability to talk to any ACM via FTL without a Keyhole II.

Yet, it would be quite useful if a ship towing Apollo pods could use FTL to talk to even a few. (Imagine a Roland able to use a few FTL Apollo pods like a sniper). And yet, when they talk of trying to bodge some kind of pseudo Apollo link for BCs it's all about Hermes buoys; not the ship's own FTL links.

So there's probably some reason that the FTL from GR drones isn't actually capable to linking directly to the FTL transceiver of the ACMs. (Even though, as you point out, it'd be really useful if it could)

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:

kzt wrote:With each LAC towing 2 million tons of pods of course they can control them. All of them. It’s magic.

2 million tons? Each Lac was towing a container of 300 pods. My BOE calculation indicates that the missiles in those pods would total about 300 thousand tons, perhaps as much as 500 thousand tons. Do you have a number for the weight of a missle pod? I couldn't find one in my brief search.

It's Never been said - but the mass of 14 Mk 16s is ~1350 Tons, so we've been pegging the minimum size of a Pod at ~2500 Tons. (14 missiles, 14 launchers, 1 fusion reactor, hydrogen for a month at standby levels, a tractor beam, RCS, control systems, and physical structure.) I would call it more, but unfortunately, the mass almost seems magical, changing with the needs of the plot. (it must be made of Plot-tonium!)

Given that mass, 300 of them comes to at least .75 Mt, plus the mass of that CUUM (or whatever it is called). 350 Pods takes up the back 1/2 of a 1.8 Mton Battlecruiser, so we're talking about a pod carrier the size of a light cruiser or a small CA, so we could easily be talking about each massing a million tons fully loaded or more, depending on the actual mass of the pods.

5000 tons per pod.

But why do your Cruisers and BCs need engines? It's clear they can just be towed around by a single LAC faster and invisibly. You can save a lot of money that way.

And a half dozen should be able to tow an SD(P). Though why you'd even want an SD(P) when each LACs can carry and fire the pod core of an SD(P) without those extra few thousand crewmen is unclear to me.

kzt wrote:5000 tons per pod.

But why do your Cruisers and BCs need engines? It's clear they can just be towed around by a single LAC faster and invisibly. You can save a lot of money that way.

And a half dozen should be able to tow an SD(P). Though why you'd even want an SD(P) when each LACs can carry and fire the pod core of an SD(P) without those extra few thousand crewmen is unclear to me.

Modern Manty Pods need to be less than 5K tons, or else 350 of them mass as much as an Agamemnon BC (1.75 Mtons.)

Personally, I believe 5Ktons is a plausable # for a Pod, but it's obviously not correct, or a Agamemnon would mass more or carry fewer pods.

That circles back to what the mass is on a mk 23D and E.

A Mk 19 (pre-war laserhead capital missile) massed 130 tons, where a Mk 26/27 (HaE era Capital Missile) massed 120 tons. a 3 drive missile masses more than a single drive missile, but less than 3 capacitors, 3 drives and 1 warhead & control unit.

comparison, the Mk 13 (78 tons) and the Mk 16a-d (94 tons). Both had the same warhead. But the extra 16 tons garnered 1 extra set of nodes, some extra chassis mass, and swapped the capacitor core for the reactor - the same reactor in the Mk 23.

So we can guess that the Mk 27 - Mk 23 jump was probaly more than 16 tons, but less than 32 tons (because the reactor didn't grow.), so cutting the 2nd node jump in 1/2, I'd say that the Mk 23 massed at least 144 tons each.

We know that latest non-apollo flatpacks can fire 12 of them, so that pod has 1728 tons of missiles, 400 or so tons more than the mk 16 pod. (which really does not get us anywhere, but sets a new floor for the pod mass.)

Theemile wrote:Personally, I believe 5Ktons is a plausable # for a Pod, but it's obviously not correct, or a Agamemnon would mass more or carry fewer pods.

That's a part of the HV physics that is broken as described.

The masses as we're told seem to be the "dry weight" of the vessel, without any internal cargo, equipment, electronics, people, fuel, or anything. It's merely a proxy for volume.

Maybe the in-universe physics also has some measure of how the mass is distributed in that volume. That is, a sphere of the same volume might have a higher "mass" than the equivalent cylindrical ship. The mass may simply be a very good first-order approximation, like the indicated air speed is on heavier-than-air craft and how the stresses and stall speed apply.

Or like how we may measure pressure (air or water) in units of length.

Is the honorverse mass of 500 cubic meters of polystyrene foam and 500 cubic meters of Iridium the same?

Inquiring minds want to know!

kzt wrote:Is the honorverse mass of 500 cubic meters of polystyrene foam and 500 cubic meters of Iridium the same?

Inquiring minds want to know!

More that an 8-million-tonne freighter is still 8 million tonnes for the purpose of acceleration and wormhole crossing, whether it's full of uncompressed hydrogen or full of depleted uranium.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:Is the honorverse mass of 500 cubic meters of polystyrene foam and 500 cubic meters of Iridium the same?

Inquiring minds want to know!

More that an 8-million-tonne freighter is still 8 million tonnes for the purpose of acceleration and wormhole crossing, whether it's full of uncompressed hydrogen or full of depleted uranium.

More than Honor claims that a compensator's "capacity to damp inertia was directly proportional to the power of the grav wave around it and inversely proportional to both the volume of the field and the mass of the vessel about which it was generated". However that was before the Great Resizing when warship densities were fixed by fiat.

And despite that sentence we've never seen a warship or freighter accelerate more quickly when empty. So it seems, in practice, the limit is from the volume not the (loaded) mass.

(I guess it's not impossible that freighter, which we've actually seen very little of the operation of, have some cargo mass limit past which it does being affecting acceleration. But if so it must be high enough that it isn't a major operational issue. It's also, I guess, possible that pushing the combined tonnage over that limit might lead to additional wear on the compensator -- which might be a reason we never seem to see freighters operating 'overloaded'; no owner wants to shorten the intervals between the expensive overhauls of it)

But that's all speculation in an attempt to explain why the compensators, in practice, don't see to operate as we'd expect from their description.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:Personally, I believe 5Ktons is a plausable # for a Pod, but it's obviously not correct, or a Agamemnon would mass more or carry fewer pods.

That's a part of the HV physics that is broken as described.

The masses as we're told seem to be the "dry weight" of the vessel, without any internal cargo, equipment, electronics, people, fuel, or anything. It's merely a proxy for volume.

Maybe the in-universe physics also has some measure of how the mass is distributed in that volume. That is, a sphere of the same volume might have a higher "mass" than the equivalent cylindrical ship. The mass may simply be a very good first-order approximation, like the indicated air speed is on heavier-than-air craft and how the stresses and stall speed apply.

Or like how we may measure pressure (air or water) in units of length.

Which in turn means that we really know nothing, can infer nothing, and are just wasting our time.

Yeah, sounds about right.

Jonathan_S wrote:More than Honor claims that a compensator's "capacity to damp inertia was directly proportional to the power of the grav wave around it and inversely proportional to both the volume of the field and the mass of the vessel about which it was generated". However that was before the Great Resizing when warship densities were fixed by fiat.

And despite that sentence we've never seen a warship or freighter accelerate more quickly when empty. So it seems, in practice, the limit is from the volume not the (loaded) mass.

(I guess it's not impossible that freighter, which we've actually seen very little of the operation of, have some cargo mass limit past which it does being affecting acceleration. But if so it must be high enough that it isn't a major operational issue. It's also, I guess, possible that pushing the combined tonnage over that limit might lead to additional wear on the compensator -- which might be a reason we never seem to see freighters operating 'overloaded'; no owner wants to shorten the intervals between the expensive overhauls of it)

But that's all speculation in an attempt to explain why the compensators, in practice, don't see to operate as we'd expect from their description.

I am not sure that is true, it appears to me that a reasonable explanation can be made just by the characteristics of the compensator.

We have been told that the wedge could theoretically accelerate a ship to the maximum speed set by particle shielding almost instantaneously; but that it and everything in it would be destroyed, because that would exceed the capability of the compensator. So it is compensator efficiency that sets the maximum acceleration. We know that the compensator efficiency is dependent on the total mass of the ship and its contents; being relatively flat for most of the mass range and then dropping rapidly as some maximum mass is approached. Any ship bigger has to use gravity plates to counter the acceleration, which greatly reduces the maximum permitted acceleration.

So for any ship from a frigate to a super dreadnought and any freighter in this range, the acceleration of an empty ship is essentially the same as that of a loaded ship, because the compensator efficiency is basically flat for normal mass ranges. This might seem counter-intuitive, but remember that the theoretical acceleration of the wedge is much much higher than would be survivable; the limit is set by the compensator, whose efficiency is only slightly mass dependent within normal mass ranges.

You can also think of a ship using gravity plates to counter acceleration, because the same limitation applies: the maximum acceleration is set by the gravity plates, not the mass of the ship.