Covered In Bees

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@R.C. <richardjacole84@hotmail.com> on 2018-09-29 13:09:40 wrote

Do the drives have to fire off-axis to compensate for the mass of the buckler, or is the rest of the ship laid out to be mass-heavy to port to balance it out? Also, does it have both fusion and antimatter pion drives to allow a choice between high thrust (with fusion) and high exhaust velocity and delta-v (with antimatter pion)?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-10-15 19:57:46 wrote

On the first, both. Well, not so much fire off-axis as are located somewhat off-axis to compensate for what the mass adjustment does not.

On the second, the fusions - at the outer edge of the drive cluster - also provide additional maneuverability in terms of vectoring, and mean that running out of antimatter doesn’t leave it dead in space, which is important because refining He3 and deuterium in situ is a lot easier than refining antimatter.

@ahd <horatio@puntbow.net.au> on 2018-09-30 01:10:25 wrote

Don’t suppose I could assume that the Invictus is a supercarrier of this general outline give or take an order of magnitude, with many deckloads of admiralty sandwiched between command and engineering?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-10-15 19:52:54 wrote

Invictus does carry more AKVs than average for defensive purposes, but it’s heavily specialized for C3I functions rather than direct or indirect offense.

@Scott <scott.kenny@gmail.com> on 2018-09-30 03:07:45 wrote

One would hope that a tendency towards putting a ship up close and personal with the enemy would be identified long before someone was promoted to Flight Commander in the first place, since lighter ships are commanded by lower ranks here. The Commanding Officer still gets the courtesy-title of Captain, though, with any ground-forces O3 captains get a social promotion to ‘Major’ and any naval O6 Captains get called ‘Commodore’ while onboard.

There is only EVER one ‘Captain’ onboard, and that’s the Boss of the Boat.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-09-30 17:25:40 wrote

They organize things a little differently in the IN, as you might expect given the language designers’ distaste for ambiguity. There, “Flight Commander” (see: here) is exclusively a position, that of the boss of the boat, and “Captain” is strictly a rank title for IN O-7s in branches other than Flight Ops, which has “Group Captain” instead. And the ground forces don’t have a “Captain” rank, per the table of ranks: here.

In the case of these carriers, the Flight Commander is entirely in charge of the carrier; but the information load is far too heavy to expect them to also manage the operations of 43,000 AKVs. So they have their own operations, and an on-board mission commander to coordinate the big picture, treating the carrier plus its AKVs as essentially a squadron in its own right.

@Scott <scott.kenny@gmail.com> on 2018-10-01 03:33:33 wrote

Yeah, the naval captain rank versus naval captain position versus ground captain rank leads to quite a bit of amusement in the USN, too. It manages to confuse Marines that haven’t had a sea tour yet!

US Space Force is probably going to get saddled with the USAF’s rank structure, up until we get 20+ people in starship crews (and probably not until we lose a full starship due to a personnel issue that any Navy has had sorted out for a thousand years but no Air Force has ever had to deal with).

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-09-30 18:27:32 wrote

(And yeah, they try and sort that out at the Academy. Aggressive line officers get FFs and DDs, where such qualities are more useful.)

@Ru <shearwater+eldraeverse@gmail.com> on 2018-09-30 13:54:14 wrote

It is interesting that there appears to be no equivalent of a catapult or other carrier mounted boost system for the AKVs, given that preserving as much as possible of their delta-V would seem to be a valuable design goal. One could conceivably use the point defenses as a beam or pellet-stream propulsion system, but that might be a little clunky given that they’d be optimized for, y’know, point defense. The vector control system would work too, but for that irritating inefficiency thing…

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-09-30 18:24:25 wrote

Oh, it’s there: but it’s not listed as a separate system because, well, every flight deck has a launch/landing accelerator.

@Ru <shearwater+eldraeverse@gmail.com> on 2018-10-01 03:43:31 wrote

Right, but a launch system capable of boosting an AKV to a userful velocity would be difficult to distinguish from a large mass driver, which isn’t something I see on the armament list.

@Robert Houghton <sudragon2k3@gmail.com> on 2018-10-01 04:59:49 wrote

There’s probably a protocol for dropping something like the beer fridge from the enlisted ranks rec room into the catapult in an emergency…

@Ru <shearwater+eldraeverse@gmail.com> on 2018-10-01 06:44:29 wrote

I draw your attention to the following document, paragraph 16:

Things You Are No Longer Allowed To Do In The Imperial Military Service

@John D. Bell <jdb@systemsartisans.com> on 2018-10-01 10:31:54 wrote

In re paragraph 16, and Robert’s assumption that it’s an emergency -

If things have gotten so dire that you are flinging random mass at the enemy, no one should be laughing.

Grim smiles, possibly. See also “shooting your wad”.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2018-10-01 10:32:58 wrote

“Case shot and langrage!”

@John D. Bell <jdb@systemsartisans.com> on 2018-10-01 11:33:07 wrote

langrage?

Damn, I didn’t know the beer was that strong!

@Ru <shearwater+eldraeverse@gmail.com> on 2018-10-01 14:05:13 wrote

<

blockquote>If things have gotten so dire that you are flinging random mass at the enemy, no one should be laughing.

If you’re on a 3 million tonne warship that is designed to operate as part of a fleet of other warships and be run by people who’ve glued their brains to a postsophont superintelligence and you’ve found yourself fighting against a foe so powerful that it wiped out all of that and yet left you, the fridge and the catapult all operational and in a position where they might usefully be used together… well. The laughter is probably coming from the comedian who put together that particular training simulation.

@Robert Houghton <sudragon2k3@gmail.com> on 2018-10-02 03:01:38 wrote

kobiyoshi Maru is not a brand of Japanese Beer.

@Robert Houghton <sudragon2k3@gmail.com> on 2018-10-02 03:08:53 wrote

This is true. perhaps we should be using a pallet of ‘MRE (Ravioli, tinned)’