What happens to all that debris?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:Which should not be on the regular target list of any civilized nation.

Right. That means the reprogramming probably would have taken a long time, while Gogunov is screaming over your shoulder...

They probably can be set to home on transmitters.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Right. That means the reprogramming probably would have taken a long time, while Gogunov is screaming over your shoulder...

They probably can be set to home on transmitters.

Who needs to target the pods - just hit them with nukes in burn mode like you would a shoal of pods - the area effect should fry them good.

The SLN was going to target their beacons, transponders. It's in the textev I posted upstream. One of these follow up pieces of textev says the transponder will allow them to be targted by anything.

SLNS Yashima
Hypatia System

“Sir, I have that firing solution,” Captain Rochetti said quietly.

Rear Admiral Thomas Yountz turned to face his ops officer, and Rochetti cleared his throat. “We don’t have hard locks on the…targets. Not yet. The best we could do at this point is a saturation launch. It’d…take a lot of missiles, Sir.”
His voice sounded almost hopeful, Yountz realized. That was his first thought. Then he had another one, and he opened his mouth.

He closed it again. They didn’t have “hard locks”?
“Sir, I’ve glanced over Maurizio’s data,” Commodore Dantas, CruRon 4018’s chief of staff, said. “He’s right. Without hard locks, we’d need a lot of missiles to cover a volume of space that big. It’ll be at least another—” he glanced at the tactical display, where a digital time readout slid steadily downward toward the predicted arrival time of the incoming Manticoran missiles “—nine or ten minutes before their vector brings them close enough for us to get hard sensor returns.”

No doubt it would, Yountz thought. Life pods were very small targets, after all. Which was the reason they carried transponder beacons…just like the ones blinking on that same tactical display. Transponder beacons designed to help shuttles—or anything else—home in on them and their fragile cargos of survivors.

“Sir, we’re monitoring over eight thousand pod transponders.” Turner’s effort to keep her own tone reasonable and rational was obvious. “It’s going to take time to recover them all, and God knows there are probably pods out there with dead or damaged beacons.

Over eight thousand transponders! Mostly SLN's of course.

Her sister Marengo and the Indefatigable-class Edinorg were more fortunate; they survived. But they survived as hopeless wrecks. Edinorg still had her wedge, although she’d lost half a dozen nodes, and she turned brokenly away, seeking cover behind her intact consorts’ interposed wedges, while Marengo coasted onward, shedding life pods and small craft. Ontario’s back broke and her shattered hull tumbled wildly, and Re Umberto simply blew up under the pounding.

Ships that explode or are mortally wounded would simply coast, no longer accelerating. The velocity of the pods even without the extra velocity imparted by the launch would still outrun ships that are only coasting. With the imparted velocity of the launch, the ships would not overtake by coasting, having lost acceleration.

There's no need for me to do any math either. I was the victim of an unfortunate accidental experiment of the bicycle kind. I was racing a friend on a paved street with a five speed banana bike. My front wheel had not been securely fastened with the two lug nuts. My idiot friend's bike. I was pumping the bike so hard with my leg muscles the front wheel and fork was lifting off the pavement. Well, to my chagrin and horror, the front wheel CAME OFF! I watched it speed away from me and the bike so fast it wasn't funny, simply on momentum. Of course I wasn't pedaling any longer knowing what was about to happen when the front fork came down and dug into the pavement. I was only coasting. The front wheel seemed to accelerate away from the bike, even without an extra velocity imparted by a launch.

cthia wrote:Ships that explode or are mortally wounded would simply coast, no longer accelerating. The velocity of the pods even without the extra velocity imparted by the launch would still outrun ships that are only coasting. With the imparted velocity of the launch, the ships would not overtake by coasting, having lost acceleration.

Please no, without any imparted velocity (either by the thrusters or the launch), then the pods with stay in the company of the coasting wreck. If the pods were launched forward, then you are correct that a coasting ship could not overtake them; however if the bulk of the pods are launched perpendicular to the ship, then those pods will have the same forward velocity as the ship plus an additional component outward (before using their thrusters).

A wheel running on the ground has a lot of angular momentum, so will continue for some time before friction slows it (and the force of friction on it is very small; it is more likely to run into something first); whereas the part you were had much more friction, even before the fork came down.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Ships that explode or are mortally wounded would simply coast, no longer accelerating. The velocity of the pods even without the extra velocity imparted by the launch would still outrun ships that are only coasting. With the imparted velocity of the launch, the ships would not overtake by coasting, having lost acceleration.

Please no, without any imparted velocity (either by the thrusters or the launch), then the pods with stay in the company of the coasting wreck. If the pods were launched forward, then you are correct that a coasting ship could not overtake them; however if the bulk of the pods are launched perpendicular to the ship, then those pods will have the same forward velocity as the ship plus an additional component outward (before using their thrusters).

A wheel running on the ground has a lot of angular momentum, so will continue for some time before friction slows it (and the force of friction on it is very small; it is more likely to run into something first); whereas the part you were had much more friction, even before the fork came down.

I stand corrected. I can see why perpendicular pod launches would be trailing the debris field.

The force of friction on my face and body was very large. My face was hideous less than two weeks before the beginning of school. I loathed the prospect of attending school after that summer accident. Somehow, my face healed without a sign, and also my body. The doctor had to cut my clothes off of me which made me scream like a banshee. He says to me, "I'm afraid what is to come is going to be a lot worse." He sprayed antibiotic all over the wounds. My screams were heard across the globe. Did you hear them too? LOL

cthia wrote:Ships that explode or are mortally wounded would simply coast, no longer accelerating. The velocity of the pods even without the extra velocity imparted by the launch would still outrun ships that are only coasting. With the imparted velocity of the launch, the ships would not overtake by coasting, having lost acceleration.

tlb wrote:Please no, without any imparted velocity (either by the thrusters or the launch), then the pods with stay in the company of the coasting wreck. If the pods were launched forward, then you are correct that a coasting ship could not overtake them; however if the bulk of the pods are launched perpendicular to the ship, then those pods will have the same forward velocity as the ship plus an additional component outward (before using their thrusters).

cthia wrote:I stand corrected. I can see why perpendicular pod launches would be trailing the debris field.

I think it is important to note that designers might not set up pods to ever launch forward, because there could be ships being abandoned that still have a wedge. In that particular case, any pod launched forward would have the greatest danger of destruction by that wedge. The other pods would naturally escape out the open stern aspect.

tlb wrote:I think it is important to note that designers might not set up pods to ever launch forward, because there could be ships being abandoned that still have a wedge. In that particular case, any pod launched forward would have the greatest danger of destruction by that wedge. The other pods would naturally escape out the open stern aspect.

in which case pods would only have been given a couple m/s delta V initially to clear the ship, but insufficient to run into the wedge 30-60 km away.

If life pods are routinely launched perpendicular to the direction the ship is traveling (hopefully the ship has not roateded 90º to open it's boadside and anything launched from the engaged side is boing to be both overrun by the ship and have to deal with the launches of missile from the mothership) then they will move away from where they were launched both in the direction the mother ship was going but off at approx 90º from the line of flight. The question becomes how likely the pod is to get in the way of a beam from a lazerhead targeted at the ship, or is it far enough away from any laserhead detonation to not suffer damage from the warhead blast and or far enough away from it's mothership so it doesn't get destroyed or passengers killed if a fusion bottle lets go.

If the launching ship is still under acceleration then the loger it takes for any one of those theree things to happen, the better off the pod is even if it is only moving sideways at the velosity imparted by it's launcher and not any thruster activity.
I am going to speculate that a life pod leaving a damaged warship is possibly going to default to some serious thruster burn at least for a short while to take it out of any catatstrophic failure with it's mother ship and to get out of the way of any weapons trying to hit said mothership. Time & distance is the best protection from becoming a battle casulaty or killed by your own ship.

What the pods actualy do once lauched but without a "pilots" overide is not clear to me.
A pinnice or shuttle, on the otherhand, is going to be piloted and even if the pilot doesn't light up the impeller on the pinnace, they are going to have to use thrusters to clear the ship before they could use the impellers. So, run for it- unless you have some reason to suspect otherwise, 90º away from your mothership is probably the best direction though if you knew where the attack was comming from you MIGHT try 90º off the vector if the pursuing ships. Depends. Either way, distance from the target and time. THEN you have to think about calling for help and rescue.

Brigade XO wrote:If the launching ship is still under acceleration then the loger it takes for any one of those theree things to happen, the better off the pod is even if it is only moving sideways at the velosity imparted by it's launcher and not any thruster activity.

And it gets worse if the ship is actively performing evasive manoeuvres. In that case, its position and velocity vectors are changing in all directions, not just along the baseline direction of motion. And those are probably bigger changes than the pod can effect itself, so it's likely to collide with the floor or roof of the wedge before it clears the wedge. If a ship dedicates 2% of its acceleration to randomness, that's 13 gravities for a Nike.

I presume that you simply can't launch pods while evading. For one thing, if you have to evade, then the enemy missiles are far too close and your crew is actually safer within the ship's armour.

Missiles, which don't have to carry humans inside, can probably out-accelerate the ship's evasion. They have to: unlike pods, you do want to fire CMs while evading.

You should be able to launch either forward or aft if you've rolled ship, no?