What happens to all that debris?

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

Except there isn’t room in the hammerheads for launch tubes. So no way to launch to pods forward or aft of the ship.

Pretty sure the pods are going to have to come out of the dorsal and ventral aspects of the ship. So up and down; not fore and aft.

Jonathan_S wrote:

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

Except there isn’t room in the hammerheads for launch tubes. So no way to launch to pods forward or aft of the ship.

Pretty sure the pods are going to have to come out of the dorsal and ventral aspects of the ship. So up and down; not fore and aft.

Indeed. I was about to log back in and amend that the drawing MaxxQ provided doesn't show any pod chutes fore or aft. But if there were, they could launch while rolled. Also, I almost included something I was thinking in the How to Abandon Ship thread that upon entering an inhabited system, the system might include a beacon that pods could use to automatically home in to a location when possible. But then, enemy missiles could use a system's homing beacon as well.

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.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

I would have to see an analysis to determine if the pods are better off inside or outside of the wedge when under missile fire. My best guess is that they are better off outside of the wedge, since the missiles are trying to hit the ship; so being inside puts them closer to the target and closer to the explosions of shrapnel if the ship is hit.

True that a ship performing evasion maneuvers can accelerate much more strongly than a pod, but the effect of those maneuvers might not be apparent until the pod has cleared the open aft aspect. If nothing else, the ship should first accelerate forward to clear the pods before turning or twisting.

cthia wrote:Indeed. I was about to log back in and amend that the drawing MaxxQ provided doesn't show any pod chutes fore or aft. But if there were, they could launch while rolled. Also, I almost included something I was thinking in the How to Abandon Ship thread that upon entering an inhabited system, the system might include a beacon that pods could use to automatically home in to a location when possible. But then, enemy missiles could use a system's homing beacon as well.

Do remember that firing on emergency pods (or even ships without wedges) is considered illegal by multiple interstellar accords. This is equated with piracy by all legal governments, and we have never seen this anywhere else in the series. This is war crimes of the highest order, and not a standard military tactic.

The beacons would be equal to a red cross on a medic or vehicle. Even though we know they make a object stand out and becomes an easy target, we WANT them to stand out so no one hits them ( and hopefully rescues them before their life support gives out.)

cthia wrote:Indeed. I was about to log back in and amend that the drawing MaxxQ provided doesn't show any pod chutes fore or aft. But if there were, they could launch while rolled. Also, I almost included something I was thinking in the How to Abandon Ship thread that upon entering an inhabited system, the system might include a beacon that pods could use to automatically home in to a location when possible. But then, enemy missiles could use a system's homing beacon as well.

Do remember that firing on emergency pods (or even ships without wedges) is considered illegal by multiple interstellar accords. This is equated with piracy by all legal governments, and we have never seen this anywhere else in the series. This is war crimes of the highest order, and not a standard military tactic.

The beacons would be equal to a red cross on a medic or vehicle. Even though we know they make a object stand out and becomes an easy target, we WANT them to stand out so no one hits them ( and hopefully rescues them before their life support gives out.) This is hands up, the waving white flag, etc. - It is not supposed to be fired on and an emergency beacon would mark it as such.

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.

Theemile wrote: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.

Would that work for certain if they can't be localized, therefore targeted? Even Gogunov entertained how small a target a pod is. Whenever missile pods were destroyed with nukes, they were localized first, thus, it was possible to target them. Gogunov would have had as much of the same trouble as he had targeting the life pods' beacons which were out of the Javelin's range—plus the added problem having to resort to saturation strikes with a limited missile supply—as he would have had trying to target such a small target without being localized, with nukes, in such a large volume of space. Plus I'd bet pods are, at least somewhat, hardened against radiation.

I'd bet dollars to donuts the invincible arrogance of the SLN doesn't even bother carrying nukes. Certainly not against the Manties.

tlb wrote:I would have to see an analysis to determine if the pods are better off inside or outside of the wedge when under missile fire. My best guess is that they are better off outside of the wedge, since the missiles are trying to hit the ship; so being inside puts them closer to the target and closer to the explosions of shrapnel if the ship is hit.

True that a ship performing evasion maneuvers can accelerate much more strongly than a pod, but the effect of those maneuvers might not be apparent until the pod has cleared the open aft aspect. If nothing else, the ship should first accelerate forward to clear the pods before turning or twisting.

I said inside the armour (inside the ship), not inside the wedge. I agree with you that a pod inside the wedge but outside the ship is in a very vulnerable position, since that's exactly where missiles are trying to target. From a few thousand km away, the missile might be aiming at any hunk of metal it finds inside the wedge. And besides, even the millisecond-duration beam moves considerably if you take the missile and the ship's velocities into account.

As for what happens to the pod, I'd expect it to cease moving with the ship once it clears the compensator field, not the wedge. Compared to the wedge, the field is "skin tight" to the ship. Space does not appear to have any special properties in the volume limited by the roof and floor wedges and their projections fore, aft, port and starboard. If it did, contact nukes would probably fail just by entering the wedge volume.

Remember also when a MAlign graser torpedo flew within one ship's wedge during the Oyster Bay attack. Maybe the couple hundred g extra acceleration isn't enough to destroy the torpedo by gravity shear, but it could definitely throw the aim off.

cthia wrote:Would that work for certain if they can't be localized, therefore targeted? Even Gogunov entertained how small a target a pod is. Whenever missile pods were destroyed with nukes, they were localized first, thus, it was possible to target them. Gogunov would have had as much of the same trouble as he had targeting the life pods' beacons which were out of the Javelin's range—plus the added problem having to resort to saturation strikes with a limited missile supply—as he would have had trying to target such a small target without being localized, with nukes, in such a large volume of space. Plus I'd bet pods are, at least somewhat, hardened against radiation.

I'd bet dollars to donuts the invincible arrogance of the SLN doesn't even bother carrying nukes. Certainly not against the Manties.

Gogunov's actions, even if they hadn't been recorded in the flag bridge's recorders and retrieved by HMS Angrim, would have been too much to explain away. First, there were no legitimate targets in the vicinity of the pods any more. Missiles had stopped flying by this point, so even civilian sensors could tell it was over.

Maybe he could excuse by saying that civilian sensors couldn't see the stealthed ships, but SLN's could. Then we have the second problem: unless he was explicitly trying to target the pods, destroying so many pods couldn't happen by accident. It would have to be intentional.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Would that work for certain if they can't be localized, therefore targeted? Even Gogunov entertained how small a target a pod is. Whenever missile pods were destroyed with nukes, they were localized first, thus, it was possible to target them. Gogunov would have had as much of the same trouble as he had targeting the life pods' beacons which were out of the Javelin's range—plus the added problem having to resort to saturation strikes with a limited missile supply—as he would have had trying to target such a small target without being localized, with nukes, in such a large volume of space. Plus I'd bet pods are, at least somewhat, hardened against radiation.

I'd bet dollars to donuts the invincible arrogance of the SLN doesn't even bother carrying nukes. Certainly not against the Manties.

Gogunov's actions, even if they hadn't been recorded in the flag bridge's recorders and retrieved by HMS Angrim, would have been too much to explain away. First, there were no legitimate targets in the vicinity of the pods any more. Missiles had stopped flying by this point, so even civilian sensors could tell it was over.

Maybe he could excuse by saying that civilian sensors couldn't see the stealthed ships, but SLN's could. Then we have the second problem: unless he was explicitly trying to target the pods, destroying so many pods couldn't happen by accident. It would have to be intentional.

I don't think Gog gave a shit. He was definitely planning to target the pods. It was personal for Gog. A relative of his was killed in one of the earlier confrontations of the war. Byng? Crandall?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I said inside the armour (inside the ship), not inside the wedge. I agree with you that a pod inside the wedge but outside the ship is in a very vulnerable position, since that's exactly where missiles are trying to target. From a few thousand km away, the missile might be aiming at any hunk of metal it finds inside the wedge. And besides, even the millisecond-duration beam moves considerably if you take the missile and the ship's velocities into account.

As for what happens to the pod, I'd expect it to cease moving with the ship once it clears the compensator field, not the wedge. Compared to the wedge, the field is "skin tight" to the ship. Space does not appear to have any special properties in the volume limited by the roof and floor wedges and their projections fore, aft, port and starboard. If it did, contact nukes would probably fail just by entering the wedge volume.

Remember also when a MAlign graser torpedo flew within one ship's wedge during the Oyster Bay attack. Maybe the couple hundred g extra acceleration isn't enough to destroy the torpedo by gravity shear, but it could definitely throw the aim off.

Yes, you did say within the armor; but that seems like an even worse situation than staying within the wedge. You are positing that after the abandon ship command has been given, the launching of pods ceases while the ship maneuvers violently. I do not know how that would be possible unless the abandon ship command had been unnecessary. If the ship is in such danger that it needs to be abandoned, then that danger will worsen with the approach of hostile missiles; making the need to abandon even greater.

PS. It is my recollection the the torpedo was destroyed by the wedge.