Suspension of Disbelief.

KZT wrote:

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open.

Tenshinai wrote:
Not if the material NEEDS a certain "thickness" to achieve that ridiculous strength.

I suggest opening a very basic mechanics of engineering book from ANY publisher combined with a materials properties book from ANY publisher at your elbow.

The only reason said walls might be thick, is because it costs more to make cylindrical hollow columns than to make them solid due to the cost of the material(energy prices in the Honorverse are absurdly low), is negligible compared to the cost of labor. I highly doubt this as it only takes one person making a machine to make a hollow column and every construction company will be forced to either make their own equivalent machine or buy an equivalent machine as it means everyone else with said machines can not only under bid you at the outset, but can also build faster, as transportation costs are less and less time, along with installation costs less along with less time. Gets back to labor.

For an RD to get to a 0-0 intercept with 0 initial velocity at 70Mkm, it requires under 30 minutes.

Home Fleet had what? An hour? Solon, had either 30 minutes or an hour plus depending on how you wish to describe the battle space.

Getting RD's to a 0-0 intercept under both scenarios is quite easy.

The ships are certainly over-engineered--why in the world are they so strong as to survive a compensator failure?

The buildings, though--they seem to be built to last centuries. Making them vastly stronger than they need to stand up might be a good idea.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: Those towers are ridiculously strong.

David seems to think that everyone is trying to design a hardened fortress with everything he's done. The ships being two to three+ orders of magnitude stronger than they need to be, the towers able to stand up to midrange nuclear contact bursts.

Extra material costs money, reduces usable volume and increases build time. There is a reason why people don't design aircraft to survive being flown through skyscrapers or bridges to handle someone parking an aircraft carrier on it.

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:the Cerama-crete or whatever he's using in place of the concrete of today, David has just made ridiculously strong, tensile, and other engineering crap to make it the next best thing to indestructible (excluding KEWs, and specially designed pocket nukes in the basement designed to blow directly up)

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open. You might have noticed that people don't make the steel columns holding up a high rise the same size as the brick column you would need if you were to use bricks?

Sometimes you can't, though. Consider ordinary concrete--it has a minimum thickness because code requires the rebar to be at least two inches below the surface.

saber964 wrote:Not quite that bad I remember a scene in Apollo 13 were Lovall was going on about the LEM's navigation computer having 1800 lines of code, my wrist watch has more computing power.

I've got more than 1,800 lines of code up on one screen as I write this--and that's just one file of many in the program. How is that supposed to be impressive??

SharkHunter wrote:Suspension of disbelief?

I'd say the Battle of Manticore, taking out all of Home Fleet and leaving ZERO reserve, and then not firing a cascade of missiles early to stop Haven from deploying pods. At the very worst they would have disrupted the "donkey" based salvos. Once they knew Haven had MDM pods, the idea that with all of the RMN's tactical experience they wouldn't have already gamed something like that out at ATC to protect Manticore and home fleet seems unconscionable.

Furthers the plot yes, but realistically, no. Not with two of the three planets within easy missile strike range of the hyper limit for that type of long-range missile fire.

Given MDM engagement range you don't get to kill pods anymore--they'll be fired long before the missiles get there.

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:the Cerama-crete or whatever he's using in place of the concrete of today, David has just made ridiculously strong, tensile, and other engineering crap to make it the next best thing to indestructible (excluding KEWs, and specially designed pocket nukes in the basement designed to blow directly up)

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open. You might have noticed that people don't make the steel columns holding up a high rise the same size as the brick column you would need if you were to use bricks?

Loren Pechtel wrote:Sometimes you can't, though. Consider ordinary concrete--it has a minimum thickness because code requires the rebar to be at least two inches below the surface.

You may want to place the steel one-third of the depth down from the top of slab. Both are accepted. What it depends on is what your needs are -- crack control vs structural strength.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The buildings, though--they seem to be built to last centuries. Making them vastly stronger than they need to stand up might be a good idea.

Hmm, I wonder if part of the building's exterior wall strength is due to all the aircars flying by in close proximity.

If you had a code requirement that a, say, 200 mph aircar crash not penetrate into the living area of the apartment it hit that would require way more toughness or resilience of wall than required to simply hold the building up...

Relax wrote:KZT wrote:

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open.

Tenshinai wrote:
Not if the material NEEDS a certain "thickness" to achieve that ridiculous strength.

I suggest opening a very basic mechanics of engineering book from ANY publisher combined with a materials properties book from ANY publisher at your elbow.

The only reason said walls might be thick, is because it costs more to make cylindrical hollow columns than to make them solid due to the cost of the material(energy prices in the Honorverse are absurdly low), is negligible compared to the cost of labor. I highly doubt this as it only takes one person making a machine to make a hollow column and every construction company will be forced to either make their own equivalent machine or buy an equivalent machine as it means everyone else with said machines can not only under bid you at the outset, but can also build faster, as transportation costs are less and less time, along with installation costs less along with less time. Gets back to labor.

You won't find it in a basic book. There you'll only find, well... the basics. After that you have to step up to the plate and take a real swing, where many students strike out.

The basic course is called...

Statics - Study of forces acting in equilibrium on rigid bodies.

Pass it, then comes the wind up and the pitch...

Strength of Materials (simply Strength to students) you keep the assumption of bodies in equilibrium, but you drop the "rigid" assumption. Because, well, life moves. Cables stretch, buildings sway, joists bend, etc.

Strength is anything but basic. It is a very difficult course to grasp and pass. More students flunk Strength than any other engineering course. It's a grave digger. A career changer. There's a joke - Strength is a very strong course as strong as the strength it teaches. It has to be, because it is the most dropped course! lol

Incidentally, all engineering students take the exact same courses through their lower junior year. I had a 5 yr civil engineering course study which consisted of a lower and upper junior year. I graduated a year early with summer school and full loads. Strength is taken your third year, if you're on schedule.

There could be many factors of why the ceramecrete was so thick. Specs could have called for it for so many reasons. If you know our very own concrete and building practices you wouldn't find it difficult to believe without knowing the on-site building conditions. There are more than ten different types of concrete. Each has its advantages. My specialty is bridges. So I work with lots of pozzolanic cement -- underwater pours!

There are Sulphates resisting Cement: It is prepared by maintaining the percentage of tricalcium aluminate below 6% which increases power against sulphates. It is used in construction exposed to severe sulphate action by water and soil in places like canals linings, culverts, retaining walls, siphons etc.

Sometimes you're up against several aggravating factors which demands higher than normal design standards. What you find in books are a roadmap. Not set in stone. What affects that, is curing, weather, temperature, porosity, etc. etc. etc. etc.

I could talk about it forever and not do it justice. Suffice it to say, without having the technical specs of the ceramecrete -- we're only guessing.

After all is said and done, you break out your CBR (California bearing ratio) machine and break a few cores.

And just the discussion of that process is long winded.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

saber964 wrote:Not quite that bad I remember a scene in Apollo 13 were Lovall was going on about the LEM's navigation computer having 1800 lines of code, my wrist watch has more computing power.

I've got more than 1,800 lines of code up on one screen as I write this--and that's just one file of many in the program. How is that supposed to be impressive??

You have to whisk yourself back in time. It was impressive. You have to consider the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) was a 2 MZ 16-bit machine with 2048 words RAM. Juggle your 1800 lines of code on that! You won't be running another program with, either! And if your coding skills isn't extraordinaire... forget about the 1800 lines of code.