What happens to all that debris?

Brigade XO wrote:

These probably were two of the ballistic packages comming in.

ZVar wrote:

cthia wrote:Ok, there are missile bays. Check. There are boat bays. Check. Why aren't there life pod bays? Considering the process MaxxQ laid out undoubtedly incorporates a lot of waiting, It seems to me there should be pod bays. The pods must be loaded from a central location(s) like the missiles are loaded. Barring a lack of space because they are stored like sardines, it seems it would be faster if the escaping crew could hightail it on down to the pod bays, load up, then bolt.

Here's an explanation that fixes both the empty pods being launched and waiting for a pod to show...

Ok, pods are stored in a rifle magazine type manor. Either one on top of the other so one tube takes launches from multiple decks. Deck 1, deck 2, deck 3, etc. When say decks 1,2, and 4 are full, but deck 3's pod is empty because battle damage makes it impracticable to get to it, or simply no one alive to get there, the system will go ahead and launch deck 1's pod, and deck 2's drops and gets launched, then deck 3's drops and is launched so it clears the queue so the pod from deck 4 is launched.

If they use a vertical configuration the same applies, but pod 1, 2 ,3, 4 are all near one department, the pods 5, 6, 7, 8 are near the next compartment, etc going from say fore to aft in the ship. Same concept. Pods 1,2,3 are launched, pod 4 is empty because no one alive to fill it, then the mass drivers, or thrusters, or whatever launches them simply so it's clearing the queue for the next one.

ZVar wrote:Here's an explanation that fixes both the empty pods being launched and waiting for a pod to show...

Ok, pods are stored in a rifle magazine type manor. Either one on top of the other so one tube takes launches from multiple decks. Deck 1, deck 2, deck 3, etc. When say decks 1,2, and 4 are full, but deck 3's pod is empty because battle damage makes it impracticable to get to it, or simply no one alive to get there, the system will go ahead and launch deck 1's pod, and deck 2's drops and gets launched, then deck 3's drops and is launched so it clears the queue so the pod from deck 4 is launched.

If they use a vertical configuration the same applies, but pod 1, 2 ,3, 4 are all near one department, the pods 5, 6, 7, 8 are near the next compartment, etc going from say fore to aft in the ship. Same concept. Pods 1,2,3 are launched, pod 4 is empty because no one alive to fill it, then the mass drivers, or thrusters, or whatever launches them simply so it's clearing the queue for the next one.

cthia wrote:Actually I think think this is a brilliant hypothesis. It appears I need to pull a Steve Harvey and take the crown away from tlb. Albeit, I couldn't understand why your system needs to launch Deck 3's pods simply to clear the queue. However, it could be that some of the pods, even if only one of them, are filled and need to be launched just in case. At any rate, your configuration and explanation holds water in my book. Anyone disagree? If not, tlb, I'll need that crown back. Like Steve Harvey, it hurts me more than it hurts you. LOL

I wonder, if this happens in an uninhabited system and the occupied pods still have fuel, and empty pods are in reach, can they be caught and boarded without compromising life support?

MaxxQ wrote:There are several pods per tube, each pod holds five people. A pod lines up with a hatch, people get in, and the pod is ejected. The next pod moves into place, lather rinse, repeat.

ZVar wrote:Here's an explanation that fixes both the empty pods being launched and waiting for a pod to show...

Ok, pods are stored in a rifle magazine type manor. Either one on top of the other so one tube takes launches from multiple decks. Deck 1, deck 2, deck 3, etc. When say decks 1,2, and 4 are full, but deck 3's pod is empty because battle damage makes it impracticable to get to it, or simply no one alive to get there, the system will go ahead and launch deck 1's pod, and deck 2's drops and gets launched, then deck 3's drops and is launched so it clears the queue so the pod from deck 4 is launched.

If they use a vertical configuration the same applies, but pod 1, 2 ,3, 4 are all near one department, the pods 5, 6, 7, 8 are near the next compartment, etc going from say fore to aft in the ship. Same concept. Pods 1,2,3 are launched, pod 4 is empty because no one alive to fill it, then the mass drivers, or thrusters, or whatever launches them simply so it's clearing the queue for the next one.

tlb wrote: Anyway, I already pawned the crown. If we follow MaxxQ, then the empty pods are released when the ship breaks up.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Yup. This also reduces the number of holes in the armor for the pods.

cthia wrote:At any rate, explosions carried inside a shaft from bomb-pumped lasers has to have the effect of a very high-powered microwave oven. Are we certain some pods were empty, or simply appeared to be empty.

“Yeah, but it looks bad,” she replied. Not only was there no beacon, but even the running lights designed to guide searchers visually to it were dead. Nor did their passives detect any EM signature from it at all.
Doesn’t mean anything, she told herself doggedly. Only been four or five hours. Pod may be dead, but Navy skinsuits’re good for a lot longer than that on internal resources, and the pod’s rad and heat shielding’d hide their signatures. If somebody got aboard it in the first place, she might still be—
She chopped that thought off. There was no point fooling herself, and it would only make the inevitable hurt worse. In fact, she found herself hoping this was one of the pods which had launched empty. They had a sufficient honor guard of dead heroes aboard already

cthia wrote:What I meant is this. If bomb-pumped lasers of any concentration travel down a reinforced steel shaft, it is going to be highly concentrated and nuke the occupants inside a pod. The result may be indistinguishable goo that the S&R teams just don't recognize. You ever played around with a microwave and live creatures? I haven't either, but I've heard things.

Brigade XO wrote:

Vince wrote:Regarding the torpedoes that Bernike encountered: One flew through the inside of Bernike's wedge, another impacted the belly of the wedge.

I doubt those were Graser Torpedoes. To have been effective as described for torpedoes, they would have had to decelerate to some very low velocity to engage the station. The GT's were nearby the station and slewing around to chop up or though sections.

These probably were two of the ballistic packages comming in.

Shadow of Victory, Chapter 36 wrote:Even the inner reaches of a star system represent a vast volume, against which even the largest spacecraft is very, very tiny. On the face of things, collisions and near collisions between spacefaring vessels were low-probability events, even for those moving along well-traveled shipping lanes. They weren’t made any more likely by the fact that an active impeller wedge was among the galaxy’s most…energetic energy signatures, which made it very hard for even the least attentive sensor tech to not see one coming. And, of course, Astro Traffic Control kept a very close eye on the multi-billion tons of military and civilian shipping passing through the Manticore Binary System at any given moment.
But the interlopers slicing into the heart of the Manticore System at twenty percent of light-speed, cutting straight through the heart of the primary shipping lane from the Draco Seven gas facility, didn’t care about ATC, and their lead wave wasn’t using an impeller wedge to accelerate. It was using something the Royal Manticoran Navy had never heard of, and it was unlikely any other sensor tech—especially any civilian tech, with commercial-grade sensors—would ever have noticed the tiny gravitic anomaly which had drawn Zinaida Merkulov’s attention. She hadn’t felt any sense of alarm, really; only the inveterate curiosity which had led her to her career in the first place. It was an itch she lived to scratch, and she’d redirected the sensors Klaus Hauptman had been kind enough to provide for her personal use towards it.
She never actually “saw” the incoming graser torpedoes at all, but she’d tracked those gravitic anomalies coming straight at her ship and extrapolated their trajectory in the nick of time.
The rest of the Manticore Binary System was less fortunate.

tlb wrote:An X-ray laser beam does not work the same as a microwave oven. The actual result would not be good for the occupants of a pod, but that is mainly because it will blast the pod apart (and its contents); not because it will super-heat water molecules.