"Marine Carrier"

Vince wrote:I don't think even the Atlas's could pack in 2 times their normal passenger load, let alone 3 times. Keep in mind that life support costs money, mass and volume to build and run for a passenger liner (civilian designed, built, owned and operated) in the Honorverse, so carrying 3 times the life support that you need for your normal crew complement and passenger load just doesn't make sense, when the odds are you will never use the ship to carry that big a load and therefore will never make the extra money spent back. The bean-counters (accountants and financial officers) would go nuts at the idea.

Atlas (and her sister ship) is an armed luxury liner with military grade compensator and hyper-generator. Her passenger fares reflect the premium service she provides. It would not surprise me that "Premium Service" included double or triple redundancy in life support and catering; with premium prices to cover the additional capability.

I suspect that triple redundancy in life support costs less than the military grade sensor suite, drive, compensator, and missile mounts/missiles.

IIRC, there is textev in HaE on just how many refugees Atlas can accommodate.

Weird Harold wrote:

Vince wrote:I don't think even the Atlas's could pack in 2 times their normal passenger load, let alone 3 times. Keep in mind that life support costs money, mass and volume to build and run for a passenger liner (civilian designed, built, owned and operated) in the Honorverse, so carrying 3 times the life support that you need for your normal crew complement and passenger load just doesn't make sense, when the odds are you will never use the ship to carry that big a load and therefore will never make the extra money spent back. The bean-counters (accountants and financial officers) would go nuts at the idea.

Atlas (and her sister ship) is an armed luxury liner with military grade compensator and hyper-generator. Her passenger fares reflect the premium service she provides. It would not surprise me that "Premium Service" included double or triple redundancy in life support and catering; with premium prices to cover the additional capability.

I suspect that triple redundancy in life support costs less than the military grade sensor suite, drive, compensator, and missile mounts/missiles.

IIRC, there is textev in HaE on just how many refugees Atlas can accommodate.

Sorry, your memory is playing tricks on you. There is some information on the life support capacity of the Atlas class available, but it doesn't go beyond the normal life support rating. And some of it contradicts your assertion that Atlases have 2 or 3 times their normal life support capacity rating.

Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 15 wrote:"Oh, I doubt that. If I went at all, I'd go in Artemis or Athena," he assured her, and she paused thoughtfully. Artemis and Athena were two of the Hauptman Lines' Atlas-class passenger liners. The Atlases had minimal cargo capacity, but they were equipped with military-grade compensators and impellers, and they were excellent at getting people from place to place quickly. Because Artemis and Athena had been expressly built for the Silesian run, they'd also been fitted with light missile armaments, and their high speed and ability to defend themselves against run-of-the-mill pirates made them extremely popular with travelers to the Confederacy.

Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 24 wrote:Hauptman flashed a brief, tight smile at her oblique warning. Her objections had been more explicit when he first informed her of his plans, and, despite his equally explicit order to terminate the discussion, she wasn't going to give in without one last try. Not, he admitted, that she didn't have a point. Passenger loads for Silesia had dropped radically in the last five or six months, to a point at which Artemis and Athena were barely breaking even. Of course, they'd never been exactly cheap to operate, given their out-sized crews and armaments. At barely a million tons, Artemis wasn't much bigger than most battlecruisers, but she carried three times the crew of a multimillion-ton freighter like Bonaventure, most of them ex-Navy personnel who looked after her weapons systems. She needed to run with almost full passenger loads to show a profit, which wasn't normally a problem, given the security her speed and those same weapons systems offered. Now, however, the situation was so bad even she was badly under booked, and the captain's reference to the fact was as close as she would let herself come to suggesting—again—that her boss stay the hell home where it was safe.

Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 38 wrote:Kerebin swerved towards her maddeningly effective opponent, and Stellingetti watched her plot for a moment, then commed the Combat Information Center direct.
"CIC, Citizen Commander Herrick."
"Jake, this is the skipper. Have someone compare Target One's emission signature to our data on the Manties' Atlas-class passenger liners."
"Pass—" Herrick broke off. "Christ, Skipper! If that's an Atlas, she could have up to five thousand passengers on board, and we hit her clean at least three times!"

***Snip***

"Helm, take us to maximum military power," she said, and felt her officers' shock, despite their desperate circumstances, for Artemis had never maxed her drive since her trials. At maximum military power, the fail-safes were off-line, leaving zero tolerance for compensator fluctuation, and if the compensator failed, every human being aboard Artemis, including Fuchien's passengers, would die. But—
"Aye, aye, Skipper. Coming to maximum military power."

Italics are the author's, boldface text is my emphasis.

Honor Among Enemies, Chapter 39 wrote:"The hell you say!" Hauptman shot back, but then he paused. She could almost see him throttling back his own temper, and his voice was marginally calmer when he went on. "My presence on this channel doesn't prevent you from speaking to Captain Fuchien," he said, "and my question remains. Why can't you take us off?"
"Because," Honor said with icy precision, "our nominal life support capacity is three thousand individuals. We still have nineteen hundred crew aboard, and our enviro systems have also been damaged. I doubt I have sufficient long term capacity for my own people, far less the entire company of your vessel. Now either clear this channel or keep your mouth shut, Sir!"

***Snip***

"Now, Captain," Honor went on more calmly. "What does your life support look like?"
"Undamaged," Fuchien said, only her slight, humorless smile betraying her reaction to the way Honor had slapped her employer down. "We've lost three beta nodes, some of our lifeboats, and ten percent of our point defense, but aside from that—and the hyper generator—we're in decent shape. So far."
"What's your passenger list?"
"We're running light. I've got about twenty-seven hundred, plus the crew."
"Understood." Honor rubbed the tip of her nose, feeling Nimitz's whiskers brush gently against the back of her neck while his support poured into her, then nodded.
"All right, Captain, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to transfer all nonessential personnel to your ship, since you've got the life support to handle them. Then—"

Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

Note that Honor had a only 1,900 personnel still on board, if she had immediately transferred everyone to Artemis (normal life support limit of 5,000 passengers plus life support for the crew), Artemis would still not have a full passenger load (2,700 passengers + Honor's crew of 1,900 = only 4,600 passengers for Artemis plus Artemis's crew with their additional life support is less than Artemis's maximum passenger load of 5,000 plus her crew.

However, Honor did not immediately transfer everyone to Artemis (and some volunteered to stay behind without telling Honor-either giving their place in the evacuation list or just staying on board Wayfarer. And a lot died when Achmed came in to attack. Even with the POWs from Achmed and Vaubon, much fewer than 1,900 made it to Artemis.

More Than Honor, The Universe of Honor Harrington, (1) Background (General) wrote:Then, in 1384 pd, a physicist by the name of Shigematsu Radhakrishnan added another major breakthrough in the form of the inertial compensator. The compensator turned the grav wave (natural or artificial) associated with a vessel into a sort of "inertial sump," dumping the inertial forces of acceleration into the grav wave and thus exempting the vessel's crew from the g forces associated with acceleration. Within the limits of its efficiency, it completely eliminated g force, placing an accelerating vessel in a permanent state of internal zero-gee, but its capacity to damp inertia was directly proportional to the power of the grav wave around it and inversely proportional to both the volume of the field and the mass of the vessel about which it was generated. The first factor meant that it was far more effective for starships than for sublight ships, as the former drew upon the greater energy of the naturally occurring grav waves of hyper-space, and the second meant it was more effective for smaller ships than for larger ones. The natural grav waves of hyper-space, with their incomparably greater power, offered a much "deeper" sump than the artificial stress bands of the impeller drive, which meant that a Warshawski Sail ship could deflect vastly more g force from its passengers than one under impeller drive. In general terms, the compensator permitted humans to endure acceleration rates approaching 550 g under impeller drive and 4-5,000 g under sail, which allows hyperships to make up "bleed-off" velocity very quickly after translation. These numbers are for military compensators, which tend to be more massive, more energy and maintenance intensive, and much more expensive than those used in most merchant construction. Military compensators allow higher acceleration—and warships cannot afford to be less maneuverable than their foes—but only at the cost of penalties merchant ships as a whole cannot afford.
In practical terms, the maximum acceleration a ship can pull is defined in Figure 2.
These accelerations are with inertial compensator safety margins cut to zero. Normally, warships operate with a 20% safety margin, while MS safety margins run as high as 35%. Note also that the cargo carried by a starship is less important than the table above might suggest. The numbers in Figure 2 use mass as the determining factor, but the size of the field is of very nearly equal importance. A 7.5 million-ton freighter with empty cargo holds would require the same size field as one with full holds, and so would have the same effective acceleration capability.

Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

Artemis had a military grade inertial compensator and hyperspace generator (as well as military grade impellers and Warshawski sails). Both the hyper generator and the inertial compensator represent a single point of failure (a ship only carries one of each) for an Honorverse impeller drive / Warshawski sail hyper-ship.

The inertial compensator is a critical part of life support for an impeller drive ship under acceleration (turning the passengers and crew into anchovy paste is contraindicated for a ship's owner that wants to make money).

If you want 3 times the life support capacity in an Atlas class passenger liner, you would need to restrict the ship's acceleration to 33% of its maximum, or only 165 gravities. Which doesn't seem to fit with the description of the speed of the Atlases.

If you were captain of Artemis or Athena (a BC sized ship), and you restricted your maximum acceleration to only 165 gravities (which is only marginally faster than the normal safe acceleration rate (with a35% safety margin) of 123.5 gravities of a 7 million to 8.5 million ton freighter in merchant service), I suspect Klaus Hauptman would have some choice words to say to you. In fact, I would think that tongue-lashing would put White Haven's dressing down of Janacek to shame. You would be lucky to get out of his presence with just your ears being a raging inferno. More likely than not, you would be reduced to a flaming grease spot in front of him by the time he got done with you.

Vince wrote:
If you want 3 times the life support capacity in an Atlas class passenger liner, you would need to restrict the ship's acceleration to 33% of its maximum, or only 165 gravities. Which doesn't seem to fit with the description of the speed of the Atlases.

This is not supported by the available text, though. There are no indications that a compensator that is running at 10 or 30% of capacity is less likely to fail than one run at 80%; all we know is that going above 80 for prolonged periods runs into risk areas.

In addition, I cannot remember a single instance of spontaneous compensator failure being mentioned anywhere (there are instances of failure due to combat damage, but I think those are special cases).

Life support capacity, in other words, is not dependant on compensator strength. A ship that is maxing out its atmosphere regeneration capability can still be run at the maximum safe speeds its compensator, if you recall the Hades evacuation, compensator capacity is never brought up as a factor, whereas breathable Atmo definitely is.

The E wrote:

Vince wrote:
If you want 3 times the life support capacity in an Atlas class passenger liner, you would need to restrict the ship's acceleration to 33% of its maximum, or only 165 gravities. Which doesn't seem to fit with the description of the speed of the Atlases.

This is not supported by the available text, though. There are no indications that a compensator that is running at 10 or 30% of capacity is less likely to fail than one run at 80%; all we know is that going above 80 for prolonged periods runs into risk areas.

In addition, I cannot remember a single instance of spontaneous compensator failure being mentioned anywhere (there are instances of failure due to combat damage, but I think those are special cases).

Life support capacity, in other words, is not dependant on compensator strength. A ship that is maxing out its atmosphere regeneration capability can still be run at the maximum safe speeds its compensator, if you recall the Hades evacuation, compensator capacity is never brought up as a factor, whereas breathable Atmo definitely is.

Exactly, and even if it were true you can opt to have double or triple redundancy in one area without having it in all areas.

For an in-universe example, Destroyers have double redundancy on fusion reactors (they can run everything on one, but carry two) but still have no redundancy on hyper generators or alpha nodes (lose 1 alpha node, from either ring, and you can't maneuver in a grav wave or use a wormhole). And they certainly don't go around at no higher than 50% compensator power.

Compared to, say, a spare hyper generator additional life support is fairly economical in volume and power requirements. And wealthy passengers are probably (somewhat) more understanding about limping home after getting jumped by pirates than they are of slowly suffocating afterwards - so ensuring you can keep them in breathable air seems like it should be a bit of a priority.

However, the text-ev Vince provided about how limited Artemis's life support was after taking damage does tend to indicate that she didn't have the level of redundancy I was speculating. (Or else she was specifically unlucky there in where her damage occurred - though given that she lost no passangers I'm not sure it would really count as all that unlucky).

Jonathan_S wrote:

The E wrote:This is not supported by the available text, though. There are no indications that a compensator that is running at 10 or 30% of capacity is less likely to fail than one run at 80%; all we know is that going above 80 for prolonged periods runs into risk areas.

In addition, I cannot remember a single instance of spontaneous compensator failure being mentioned anywhere (there are instances of failure due to combat damage, but I think those are special cases).

Life support capacity, in other words, is not dependant on compensator strength. A ship that is maxing out its atmosphere regeneration capability can still be run at the maximum safe speeds its compensator, if you recall the Hades evacuation, compensator capacity is never brought up as a factor, whereas breathable Atmo definitely is.

Exactly, and even if it were true you can opt to have double or triple redundancy in one area without having it in all areas.

For an in-universe example, Destroyers have double redundancy on fusion reactors (they can run everything on one, but carry two) but still have no redundancy on hyper generators or alpha nodes (lose 1 alpha node, from either ring, and you can't maneuver in a grav wave or use a wormhole). And they certainly don't go around at no higher than 50% compensator power.

Compared to, say, a spare hyper generator additional life support is fairly economical in volume and power requirements. And wealthy passengers are probably (somewhat) more understanding about limping home after getting jumped by pirates than they are of slowly suffocating afterwards - so ensuring you can keep them in breathable air seems like it should be a bit of a priority.

However, the text-ev Vince provided about how limited Artemis's life support was after taking damage does tend to indicate that she didn't have the level of redundancy I was speculating. (Or else she was specifically unlucky there in where her damage occurred - though given that she lost no passangers I'm not sure it would really count as all that unlucky).

Artemis's life support was undamaged, Wayfarer's was damaged.

For an example of the best maintained inertial compensator in the entire RMN suddenly failing, see What Price Dreams in the Worlds of Honor anthology.

I don't understand why you would spend the money and mass/volume on environmental life support (for an example of how big these units can be, see In Enemy Hands where a single atmosphere scrubber is being transferred to Prince Adrian on a pinance--it took up the majority of the pinance's cargo bay) that is far in excess of what could reasonably be expected to be ever used.

And why would a civilian (highly sensitive to cost) ship waste money on life support capacity far above and excess to needs (every bit of mass/volume given to excess life support capacity takes away from mass/volume that can be utilized to carry paying passengers--remember that Artemis and Athena"needed to run at nearly full passenger loads to show a profit"--direct quote) when the navies of the Honorverse don't do the same? Especially when you consider that naval ships life support capacity is more likely to be lost due to battle damage.

Vince wrote:For an example of the best maintained inertial compensator in the entire RMN suddenly failing, see What Price Dreams in the Worlds of Honor anthology.

Which was set when, 1651 PD? 270 years ago from the perspective of the current Honorverse? I should think that, although compensator tech progressed slowly, it did make some strides towards being more reliable in that time period.

I don't understand why you would spend the money and mass/volume on environmental life support (for an example of how big these units can be, see In Enemy Hands where a single atmosphere scrubber is being transferred to Prince Adrian on a pinance--it took up the majority of the pinance's cargo bay) that is far in excess of what could reasonably be expected to be ever used.

And why would a civilian (highly sensitive to cost) ship waste money on life support capacity far above and excess to needs (every bit of mass/volume given to excess life support capacity takes away from mass/volume that can be utilized to carry paying passengers--remember that Artemis and Athena"needed to run at nearly full passenger loads to show a profit"--direct quote) when the navies of the Honorverse don't do the same? Especially when you consider that naval ships life support capacity is more likely to be lost due to battle damage.

No need to get excessive with the boldface and the font sizes there, we can read what you're writing perfectly well

As for your question, why would any civilian shipping enterprise, even today, build in any safety mechanisms that would compromise cargo capacity? Insurance. Lawsuits (and the fear of them). Shipbuilding regulations. What's more of a danger to the bottom line, a few places lost to safety equipment and redundancy, or (for example) being told that vessels of that class cannot operate in a given jurisdiction?

The E wrote:As for your question, why would any civilian shipping enterprise, even today, build in any safety mechanisms that would compromise cargo capacity? Insurance. Lawsuits (and the fear of them). Shipbuilding regulations. What's more of a danger to the bottom line, a few places lost to safety equipment and redundancy, or (for example) being told that vessels of that class cannot operate in a given jurisdiction?

The goal is safety of the passengers and crew-members. The question is how much money/mass/volume should devoted to achieving that goal.

Let's look at a current example in the real world, the automobile.

The speed limit for cars range up to 65 miles per hour on most Interstates in the United States.

Should automakers be required to have safety mechanisms built into cars that would allow the driver and passengers to survive a crash with a stationary object when the car is traveling at 130 mph (a 2x safety factor)?

Do they currently?

Are they required to do so, or face not being allowed to sell the car that can't ensure the safety of the lives of the driver and passengers?

If they don't, are not required to do so, why should they?

What keeps them from doing so, if they don't?

I would say that providing a 2x safety margin is cost prohibitive.

Keep in mind the Honorverse is not the Apollo program, where duplicating systems imposed a relatively smaller cost/mass/volume penalty, and where cost was less of an issue than the safety of the astronauts. Civilian passenger liners and freighters have to show a profit, or they just won't run (as explained to Admiral Caparelli by Klaus Hauptman earlier in Honor Among Enemies).

Also, consider what a 20% life support safety margin would be for an Atlas that normally carries 5,000 passengers. It is the amount of life support that 1,000 additional passengers would utilize. Since life support is distributed throughout the ship, if you loose the environmental capability to support 1,000 passengers, I would say you have probably suffered damage to your ship that has effectively destroyed it (remember, the Atlas is a civilian ship, without the armor coffer-damning scheme of a military vessel).

Vince wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Exactly, and even if it were true you can opt to have double or triple redundancy in one area without having it in all areas.

For an in-universe example, Destroyers have double redundancy on fusion reactors (they can run everything on one, but carry two) but still have no redundancy on hyper generators or alpha nodes (lose 1 alpha node, from either ring, and you can't maneuver in a grav wave or use a wormhole). And they certainly don't go around at no higher than 50% compensator power.

Compared to, say, a spare hyper generator additional life support is fairly economical in volume and power requirements. And wealthy passengers are probably (somewhat) more understanding about limping home after getting jumped by pirates than they are of slowly suffocating afterwards - so ensuring you can keep them in breathable air seems like it should be a bit of a priority.

However, the text-ev Vince provided about how limited Artemis's life support was after taking damage does tend to indicate that she didn't have the level of redundancy I was speculating. (Or else she was specifically unlucky there in where her damage occurred - though given that she lost no passangers I'm not sure it would really count as all that unlucky).

Artemis's life support was undamaged, Wayfarer's was damaged.

For an example of the best maintained inertial compensator in the entire RMN suddenly failing, see What Price Dreams in the Worlds of Honor anthology.

I don't understand why you would spend the money and mass/volume on environmental life support (for an example of how big these units can be, see In Enemy Hands where a single atmosphere scrubber is being transferred to Prince Adrian on a pinance--it took up the majority of the pinance's cargo bay) that is far in excess of what could reasonably be expected to be ever used.

And why would a civilian (highly sensitive to cost) ship waste money on life support capacity far above and excess to needs (every bit of mass/volume given to excess life support capacity takes away from mass/volume that can be utilized to carry paying passengers--remember that Artemis and Athena"needed to run at nearly full passenger loads to show a profit"--direct quote) when the navies of the Honorverse don't do the same? Especially when you consider that naval ships life support capacity is more likely to be lost due to battle damage.

Oops, that'll teach me to read and post before I'm fully awake.

The Artimis-class liners are selling their security in unsafe areas. They're already spending a lot of money on things to make their passengers safer (and feel safer, and feel their safety is worth the price they're being charged) - military grade drive and hypergenerator, sidewalls, ECM, decoys, missiles, grasers, CMs, PDLCs, armor, and the oversized crew to maintain and fight those systems. I could easily see additional life support redundancy being just one more overhead that they include as part of making their customers feel that their (pricy) fees are justified to travel in speed and relative safety in dangerous parts of the universe.

As for having to run nearly full to turn a profit, that's pretty much universally true for passanger liners. But that's because they tend to set ticket prices to that level to make them easier to sell. It would most likely be true if Artemis had twice its actual overhead costs, or half of them. (Now if it had to cover twice the costs it might have a harder time achieving near capacity)

Also, my thinking was that a lot of the life support functions were relatively clustered, so the redundancy allows you to provide full life support if your primary air handling / scrubbing room was the one that took a laserhead hit. (IOW I'm presuming that a couple unluck golden bbs could knock out a large fraction of life support and put you back on emergency canned air if you didn't have significant redundancy)
I think I got that from the description of Honor's escape from Hades where Ashes of Victory included the bit about how "The massive redundancy designed into warship life-support systems" allowed the captured warships to be "packed [...] to the deckheads" with escapees. And I assumed that if Artemis had a warship's weapons, defenses, and armor that it would also have it's massively redundant life support. [edit: although I just went back and looked at Echoes of Honor says "warships always have more reserve life support than anything else in space, even military transports [...] The RMN's designers always assume warships are going to take damage, for example, so they build as much redundancy as they can into the core survival systems. We could increase nominal crew sizes by at least fifty percent and still have some reserve." so that wasn't quite as much as I was thinking, even for warships]

I doubt passenger liners going along safer routes would have the kind of life support redundancy I was talking about, but they also wouldn't have the defenses and weapons systems of an Artemis.

Again with the life support...



An average adult needs 2 pounds of food, 4 pounds of oxygen and 4 pounds of water per day. Two tons of non-recycleable life support per person is more than enough for a year. So a hundred thousand tons of non-recyclable life support is enough for fifty thousand people for a year.
Now, for the living space. A Sovereign-class cruise ship has extravagant living space for 3.500 people and crew in under 80 kilotons, including engine space. So 50.000 people and crew, living in extravagant shipboard space, need some 1,15 megatons.




So 1,3 megatons is all you need for exceptional living conditions and supplies for 50.000 people for 1 year. Since the largest Honorverse ships can be as much as 10 megatons, with up to 60% devoted to the primary role, you could easily have 200.000 marines on a single ship.

Vince wrote:The goal is safety of the passengers and crew-members. The question is how much money/mass/volume should devoted to achieving that goal.

Let's look at a current example in the real world, the automobile.

The speed limit for cars range up to 65 miles per hour on most Interstates in the United States.

Should automakers be required to have safety mechanisms built into cars that would allow the driver and passengers to survive a crash with a stationary object when the car is traveling at 130 mph (a 2x safety factor)?

Do they currently?

Ah - not sure that it's relevant at this point, but this thread's already wandered far, far from topic anyway - but a 130 MPH crash into a stationary object is pretty much the same as a 65 MPH head-on crash with another vehicle heading in precisely the opposite direction at 65 MPH.

Few of us are likely to crank it up to 135 MPH and hit something - well, the hitting something part may be likely at that speed, but reaching that speed is not. But two cars in 65 MPH each head-on collisions, that's frightfully likely.

Is it at all practical to design cars to keep passengers safe then? I am no engineer, so all I have is a WAG, but my WAG is no. But when it comes to automobile safety, the industry, the consumers, and the government all accept quite a bit of risk, likely because the costs of more safety are so front-and-center in our lives and the risks get pushed to the back of our heads or downplayed. We fear terror attacks, nuclear plant malfunctions, and Ebola which kill so very, very few of us so very rarely, and get into our beloved death machines and engage in hundreds of occasions in which a slight error on our part or that of total strangers may kill or maim us with nary a worry.

So - what do people fear when it comes to interstellar passenger travel? That's going to be what Artemis and the like are built to avoid. I suspect life support packing it in is going to carry less dread than pirates for passengers, and that a comfortable margin for normal use will satisfy the owners, insurers, and licensing authorities.