cthia wrote:There can't be anything associated with a charging issue or it would be given in the specs. When Home Fleet is sitting in orbit, any significant time to recharge capacitors would have to be given. And since sitting in orbit is the only time I can see even a remote possibility of having discharged capacitors, I'll use it as an example. Or rather, it is the lesser of the other evils. Unless anyone else can give me any other opportune time for intentional capacitor downtime?
It's the same: any time they aren't needed and won't be in a pinch. The only question is when those times come. You seem to imply "never."
Your notion of having to abort the process of building the field - or the process being aborted for you for whatever reason - is part and parcel to my insistence the capacitors ever remain charged. It goes double for starting the wedge. If for any reason the process fails or has to be aborted, or is aborted for you, there simply must be enough juice in the car battery for restarts.
If the capacitors are needed to start the wedge and the wedge start fails, then it stands to reason the capacitors were drained and need to be recharged again. This is how Travis got the criminals not to abscond with a Havenite battlecruiser.
Even if you had capacity for two wedge starts, it wouldn't make sense. The wedge would simply be started in half the time.
Once the wedge is up, you may recharge the capacitors again, if you have further need of them.
Let's also consider what ship functions is dependent on the high burst of power from the capacitors.
- wedge start
- entering hyper
- transiting wormholes?
- firing PDLCs
- graser fire
- other?
The only one we are absolutely sure is the wedge start. All the rest is speculation, including entering hyper, for which I am to blame. We know PDLCs and grasers can't fire continuously and it's reasonable to assume that energy is the reason, at least for the grasers. But there could also be a thermal component: unless you led the focusing rods and power delivery systems cool down between shots, they will melt and you'll have no graser to fire with, even if you can supply the energy.
There's also no reason to assume that they are the
same capacitors. If they were the same, you'd have to dimension them for the largest discharge need, which may make them unnecessarily expensive. For example, I think it's likely that starting the wedge needs the most energy, but the grasers need more power (bigger discharge rate). So you'd dimension the capacitor grasers for very high power dump.
Moreover, you'd put those capacitors close to where they're needed, not centralised somewhere on the ship. Doing the latter would mean you need power distribution systems to take the energy where it's needed, and again rated for the biggest power needs.
None of this means that those more capacitors would remain discharged. But having more of them to me means you have more power needs that need to be balanced.
With the exception of transiting, every other function of the capacitor must be ready instantly. With the exception of starting the wedge, they might all be called upon at once (it isn't inconceivable wedge startup may be going on while the other systems are in use as well). If the capacitors are discharged during this event of maximum demand (even if not fully charged) something is going to suffer. You don't want to be in a position where you are fighting with, and against, inefficient power. At any rate, to finish my thought, ships sitting in orbit with mains discharged are totally useless against runaway freighters, freighter kamakazes, errant debris from any OB like attacks, yadda yadda yadda.
What you said is true only if you're right that everything you listed requires capacitors to operate. As I indicated above, aside from the wedge, we don't know it to be true for anything else. Everything else could be directly powered from the fusion reactors.
PDLCs can fire 16 shots every 2 seconds, for an extended period of time. Grasers can fire every N seconds, for an extended period of time. That means that, even if there were a need to charge a capacitor for them to fire, that charge can be built up, at worst, in N seconds for grasers and 0.125 seconds for each laser in the PDLC. And this is only the worst case, where the charge is the limiting factor. If it is thermal, then a graser or PDLC could go from zero to firing in less time. This tells me those systems are as close to directly powered as possible, or they charge so quickly that it makes no difference.
One final thing: we're talking about capacitors, not batteries. Everything you've said would make a lot of sense if we were talking about batteries: keep them charged at all times. If the power generation fails, you get some extra time to fix them. And you can tap on their reserves if you need to. But capacitors are designed to build up some energy and then release quickly. The terminology doesn't fit.