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Pod layers.

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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Sat Nov 12, 2022 8:24 pm

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Six rails for SD(P), both RHN and RMN. Four rails for BC(P)s.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Nov 13, 2022 1:42 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
tlb wrote:The question I have is about the hyperspace jump (including the wormhole transition): does that affect either a pod tractored to the hull or one tractored at a distance? Is that a reason for Kuzak's failure?


They shouldn't be able to make a hyper transition with pods outside of the hull. We know the generators don't extend more than a handful of km from the hull. MNS Thunder of God could ferry the Masadan LACs to Yeltsin's Star only because they were limpeted to the hull.

Dunno if 6 km is just a handful; but that's what Thunder and Principality could do back in 1903 (also don't know how RMN hypergenerators in 1921 compare to Havenite generators from 1903) -- but that's actually quite a volume of space.

Sure, it is far smaller than the area inside the wedge (heck, even the sidewalls are 10km out from the ship) -- so something within 6km is really close. But it's not quite just things limpeted to the hull.

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Hmm. It just occurs to me that the streak drive is (IIRC) described as a brute force solution to cracking the higher hyper level walls. I wonder if that translates to more power and a wider redlined radius than a "standard" military hyper generator...
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Theemile   » Mon Nov 14, 2022 9:23 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
tlb wrote:The question I have is about the hyperspace jump (including the wormhole transition): does that affect either a pod tractored to the hull or one tractored at a distance? Is that a reason for Kuzak's failure?


Warships Ships carrying limpeted pods through short jumps in hyper (the self-tractored modern type) has become a standard for the RMN. Forex, Mike carried them over the wall in New Tuscany. I guess the big question is can they carry them that way through a grav wave? Also it does not appear they can carry them through a wormhole (can tractors even work in an emergence wave?

Also, there is a protocol to emergency evac LACs from enemy territory when the CLACs are not available - large modern combatants will have them tractored en mass to their hulls and jump out. It's supposed to be a short jump - if the CLACS are not available at the rendezvous, the LACS will be evacuated and abandoned.

Let's not forget, a Pod is only about 20m x 8m. If they are immediately adjacent to the hull, they should be covered by the conpensator field on a modern warship (which probably has a larger compensated field because it is designed for this)
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Somtaaw   » Thu Dec 01, 2022 5:26 am

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Theemile wrote:Also, there is a protocol to emergency evac LACs from enemy territory when the CLACs are not available - large modern combatants will have them tractored en mass to their hulls and jump out. It's supposed to be a short jump - if the CLACS are not available at the rendezvous, the LACS will be evacuated and abandoned.


Was that a Pearl? Because when Thunder was tugboating LACs through hyper, the crews specifically had to offload because the tractored LAC's weren't compensated. That's also why during an acceleration into (or out of) hyper, one of the Masadan LACs had a large oxygen tank tear loose and cannonballed through the entire hull which wrecked it.

This is why LACs have escape cutters, if they gotta emergency evac the LACs and the CLACs aren't there, they can abandon the LACs and fly almost directly aboard the hyper-capable ships. Being cutters, they don't have wedges, so you can have more of them approach simultaneously. The bare minimum is the cutters have to get inside the shuttle bays itself, which puts them inside the hull and therefore within the compensator field.

So the worst-case scenario evacuation would be not even hard-docking the cutters, you just tractor as many as you can physically hold within the bay and then jump out. It wouldn't be comfortable, and I'm sure there would be both injuries and damage to the hangar, but in an emergency it could be done to evac the crews.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Dec 01, 2022 10:32 am

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Somtaaw wrote:
Theemile wrote:Also, there is a protocol to emergency evac LACs from enemy territory when the CLACs are not available - large modern combatants will have them tractored en mass to their hulls and jump out. It's supposed to be a short jump - if the CLACS are not available at the rendezvous, the LACS will be evacuated and abandoned.


Was that a Pearl? Because when Thunder was tugboating LACs through hyper, the crews specifically had to offload because the tractored LAC's weren't compensated. That's also why during an acceleration into (or out of) hyper, one of the Masadan LACs had a large oxygen tank tear loose and cannonballed through the entire hull which wrecked it.

This is why LACs have escape cutters, if they gotta emergency evac the LACs and the CLACs aren't there, they can abandon the LACs and fly almost directly aboard the hyper-capable ships. Being cutters, they don't have wedges, so you can have more of them approach simultaneously. The bare minimum is the cutters have to get inside the shuttle bays itself, which puts them inside the hull and therefore within the compensator field.

So the worst-case scenario evacuation would be not even hard-docking the cutters, you just tractor as many as you can physically hold within the bay and then jump out. It wouldn't be comfortable, and I'm sure there would be both injuries and damage to the hangar, but in an emergency it could be done to evac the crews.

I'm having trouble finding it, but I recall the same thing.
However one simple solution, if you only need to breach the hyper wall, is for the SD they're all stuck to simply to restrict its acceleration 1g or so.

It wasn't the jump into (or out of) hyper that broke the Masadan LACs, it was towing them between systems outside a ship's compensator field - where they were presumably subject to dozens of gees of acceleration (even assuming the Peep ships kept their accel down to a relative crawl).

But for the emergency evacuation there's no need for that. First you don't need to fly anywhere near as far as another star system, just far enough to meet back up with your CLACs; so it wouldn't be so painful even if you did keep your acceleration down to 1g while carrying the LACs. Second the Manticoran/Grayson LACs have enough endurance to fly themselves that far, so they'd just need a hyper capable ship to jump them into (and back out of) hyper and provide navigation (as they'd also lack a hyperlog inertial navigation system)**. Third, while tractored to the hull of a large ship like an SD they're probably inside it's compensator field anyway. So there's no need for them to be towed along at high accel.

However, while I couldn't find the exact pearl about this I did find a quasi related one, which must imply this emergency evacuation is possible. LACs as parasites -- if an RMN LAC is capable of riding around as a parasite for an entire deployment, including through hyper, then it must be able to hang on just long enough to get out of a hostile system into hyper.

Also we've seen LACs do this. The Charles Ward and the Hali Sowle each at one time transported externally docked LACs through hyper.
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** Assuming the system wasn't in a grav wave; if it was then I don't think this trick works.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Theemile   » Thu Dec 01, 2022 11:52 am

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Somtaaw wrote:
Theemile wrote:Also, there is a protocol to emergency evac LACs from enemy territory when the CLACs are not available - large modern combatants will have them tractored en mass to their hulls and jump out. It's supposed to be a short jump - if the CLACS are not available at the rendezvous, the LACS will be evacuated and abandoned.


Was that a Pearl? Because when Thunder was tugboating LACs through hyper, the crews specifically had to offload because the tractored LAC's weren't compensated. That's also why during an acceleration into (or out of) hyper, one of the Masadan LACs had a large oxygen tank tear loose and cannonballed through the entire hull which wrecked it.

This is why LACs have escape cutters, if they gotta emergency evac the LACs and the CLACs aren't there, they can abandon the LACs and fly almost directly aboard the hyper-capable ships. Being cutters, they don't have wedges, so you can have more of them approach simultaneously. The bare minimum is the cutters have to get inside the shuttle bays itself, which puts them inside the hull and therefore within the compensator field.

So the worst-case scenario evacuation would be not even hard-docking the cutters, you just tractor as many as you can physically hold within the bay and then jump out. It wouldn't be comfortable, and I'm sure there would be both injuries and damage to the hangar, but in an emergency it could be done to evac the crews.


1) Cutters were only in Shrike As and have been dropped in Shrike Bs (>95%) of the Shrike production), Ferrets and Katanas.

2)I don't know if it was a Pearl, but David did mention it on this forum abut 5-6 years ago.

3) Thunder was a pre-1900 Havenite BC. We're talking a modern SD with advanced comps, advanced node design (ie beta squared nodes and plenty of spare power) and a comp field designed to hold items close to the hull. Remember from Monica, an Avalon could carry more self limpeted pods than a Star Knight, because modern designs have features to allow more, larger items into the compensated field so as not to restrict acceleration.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Thu Dec 01, 2022 2:42 pm

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The compensator field extends some distance from the hull. Far enough on a RMN SD that you can stack layers of pods without having the top ones torn apart by acceleration. You could velcro pods to to hull instead of using tractors, because they are in free fall.

So yes, you can pull the LACs onto the flat areas of the hull where they would stack pods and it's fine for a short trip. In theory you could weld the LAC to the SD (and you don't need a very stong weld as it will be in free fall the whole time) and send the crew inside and keep the LAC, but past a few LACs (or pods) the SDs combat capability rapidly drops.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Theemile   » Thu Dec 01, 2022 3:23 pm

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kzt wrote:The compensator field extends some distance from the hull. Far enough on a RMN SD that you can stack layers of pods without having the top ones torn apart by acceleration. You could velcro pods to to hull instead of using tractors, because they are in free fall.

So yes, you can pull the LACs onto the flat areas of the hull where they would stack pods and it's fine for a short trip. In theory you could weld the LAC to the SD (and you don't need a very stong weld as it will be in free fall the whole time) and send the crew inside and keep the LAC, but past a few LACs (or pods) the SDs combat capability rapidly drops.


This isn't expected to be used much - it's the emergency evac protocol - either the CLAC is busy at another in-system rendezvous point grabbing LACS or has been destroyed and you are just trying to get everything out of the system ASAP.

Combat is a tertiary concept at moments like these, the LACs are supposed to go to a "secure" rendevous point in systems for the extraction. Then, it's jump the big ships in - have all the LACs tractor themselves to the evac ships, and jump out 10ish minutes later when the Hyper generator is completed cycling. Then figure out WTF you are going to do next when you see what shows up at the rendezvous point.

I would assume you can do this with Fleet Train units (ammo ships, supply ships, FSVs and the rest) but that would assume that the raid completely went sideways, insufficient heavy combatants remain, and those ships are the only remaining way to extract the LACs. Very suboptimal, but sometimes the needs drive.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Dec 01, 2022 4:55 pm

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Theemile wrote:This isn't expected to be used much - it's the emergency evac protocol - either the CLAC is busy at another in-system rendezvous point grabbing LACS or has been destroyed and you are just trying to get everything out of the system ASAP.

Combat is a tertiary concept at moments like these, the LACs are supposed to go to a "secure" rendevous point in systems for the extraction. Then, it's jump the big ships in - have all the LACs tractor themselves to the evac ships, and jump out 10ish minutes later when the Hyper generator is completed cycling. Then figure out WTF you are going to do next when you see what shows up at the rendezvous point.

I would assume you can do this with Fleet Train units (ammo ships, supply ships, FSVs and the rest) but that would assume that the raid completely went sideways, insufficient heavy combatants remain, and those ships are the only remaining way to extract the LACs. Very suboptimal, but sometimes the needs drive.

I had the impression it would more likely to be used in a situation where the CLACs had detached their brood to screen a raiding fleet (a standard tactic), and now the fleet is retreating under fire. It's not safe to bring the CLACs back in and land all the LACs -- not while the fleet is still taking fire.

So instead the fleet would retreat, as a body with its LAC screen, across the hyper limit and then, between incoming salvos, the LACs would quickly tractor on to the biggest of the surviving ships and everybody would hyper out. Once safely in hyper you can send a destroyer to go summon the CLACs from their safe location to rendezvous and properly board the LACs.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Thu Dec 01, 2022 5:13 pm

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I'd agree. Hyper nav is not precise. Plus or minus a few million KM is kind of a problem when you have to do a rendezvous under fire with probably no more than a few hundred meters/sec delta.
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