Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

dragoongfa wrote:At the speeds involved even when 'stationary' the maneuvering thrusters should be enough to be able to move away from the ejected nacelle. The distance that should be covered would be depended on the yield of the explosion but I think that 1000 kilometers should be more than sufficient for a safety distance.
Let's assume that's a good number for safe distance. Starting velocity is irrelevant, because it will be the same for the engine and the rest of the hull; only acceleration matters. Let's say you have two seconds after separation to reach minimum safe distance of 1,000 km. That would require an acceleration of:

s = 1/2 at^2
t = 2*60 sec
s = 1,000,000m
a = 2s/t^2 = 2,000,000/14400 = 138.88 m/s^2 = 14.17 g

14g is almost half of the maximum acceleration for most Loroi ships with two working main engines. I don't think I've ever specified what the maximum acceleration of the maneuvering thrusters is, but it's certainly less than 5g (and probably less than 1g). So a ship with one working engine might be able to get away, but one with no engines probably couldn't. Winter Tide was without main power at the time of the reactor failure, and so being able to cut the engine loose would probably not have saved her.
dragoongfa wrote:I never said it would be easy, dedicated salvaging should be part of the operational and procurement doctrine of the navy in question.
Well, that's the thing: it has to be easy, or it doesn't make economic sense. You've outlined a whole set of new classes of ships which would be very expensive to build and maintain (and the increased logistics and lower speed of which would add significant new restrictions on fleet movement); unless the value of salvaged hulls exceeds the cost of this system, then it's a waste of resources. Since the Loroi engage primarily in hit and run warfare, in most situations they do not "hold the field" to allow such salvage operations to take place. For example, such a system would not have been able to salvage Winter Tide and Thunderbolt.

It may be significant that no modern navy on Earth has ever had such a system.
Hālian wrote:How big is a loroi warship engine?
If you mean the engine nacelles, they tend to be about 30% the length of the ship, not including the thrust vanes.

If you mean the reactors and drives themselves, they take up a large portion of the nacelle. You can get a rough sense of the relative size from this schematic:

Image

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Werra »

How effective is the Wave Loom against planetary targets?

And how did Stillstorm, unfavoured as she is, get to command such a big ship?

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Werra wrote:How effective is the Wave Loom against planetary targets?
It's effective, but so are most of the standard weapons. Damaging the surface of a planet is really easy at this tech level, if you can get into range.
Werra wrote:And how did Stillstorm, unfavoured as she is, get to command such a big ship?
Stillstorm got to be a group commander by being very good at her job; SG51 is an elite unit with a superb combat record, despite being made up of misfits and outcasts. In wartime a sensible leadership makes use of all its assets, even if they are unpopular.

A group commander rates a command ship. But as command ships go, Tempest is fast but outdated, the last of her class, with substandard protection and a problematic primary armament. I doubt there were many who wanted her.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Werra »

Arioch wrote: It's effective, but so are most of the standard weapons. Damaging the surface of a planet is really easy at this tech level, if you can get into range.
The AoE doesn't affect this? Could be a fearsome terror weapon if it did.

Which leads me to the question, did Stillstorm manage to raid Umiak frontier worlds?
Arioch wrote:A group commander rates a command ship. But as command ships go, Tempest is fast but outdated, the last of her class, with substandard protection and a problematic primary armament. I doubt there were many who wanted her.
She got it second hand?

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

To be fair, planetary atmospheres tend to turn any high energy space weapon into an AoE weapon of mass destruction.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Werra wrote:
Arioch wrote: It's effective, but so are most of the standard weapons. Damaging the surface of a planet is really easy at this tech level, if you can get into range.
The AoE doesn't affect this? Could be a fearsome terror weapon if it did.
It does, but it's not special in this regard. Torpedoes, high-velocity AMM's, and taimat or antimatter bombs will all do catastrophic damage to the surface of a planet.
icekatze wrote:To be fair, planetary atmospheres tend to turn any high energy space weapon into an AoE weapon of mass destruction.
Yep.
Werra wrote:Which leads me to the question, did Stillstorm manage to raid Umiak frontier worlds?
In the Steppes theater, the Umiak populated worlds are well behind the front lines, so Loroi raids have mostly been against client races' territory (Morat and Lurs, chiefly). It's very likely that Stillstorm participated in at least one of these raids.
Werra wrote:
Arioch wrote:A group commander rates a command ship. But as command ships go, Tempest is fast but outdated, the last of her class, with substandard protection and a problematic primary armament. I doubt there were many who wanted her.
She got it second hand?
Yeah, she was not the ship's first commander.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by dragoongfa »

I think that I should have made myself clear that I am not arguing for the Loroi having such a salvage, repair and reclamation system but for the validity of the system itself. Such a system is doctrinal by nature, requiring decades of procurement and procedures to become effective. If the Loroi didn't have such a system before the war they certainly couldn't afford to implement it during the war.
Arioch wrote: Let's assume that's a good number for safe distance. Starting velocity is irrelevant, because it will be the same for the engine and the rest of the hull; only acceleration matters. Let's say you have two seconds after separation to reach minimum safe distance of 1,000 km. That would require an acceleration of:

s = 1/2 at^2
t = 2*60 sec
s = 1,000,000m
a = 2s/t^2 = 2,000,000/14400 = 138.88 m/s^2 = 14.17 g

14g is almost half of the maximum acceleration for most Loroi ships with two working main engines. I don't think I've ever specified what the maximum acceleration of the maneuvering thrusters is, but it's certainly less than 5g (and probably less than 1g). So a ship with one working engine might be able to get away, but one with no engines probably couldn't. Winter Tide was without main power at the time of the reactor failure, and so being able to cut the engine loose would probably not have saved her.
If I was a crew member I would have hoped that the Captain wouldn't have taken chances and would have elected to cut the engine as soon as it was deemed unsalvageable :P

One of my pet peeves in sci-fi storytelling is trying to 'save/stabilize' the reactor. A captain's duty is to the nation and the crew, taking risks in warfare is natural but in many stories the commanding officers take extreme risks when they could have elected to cut their loses and save what they could.

In the case of cutting the engine to save the rest of the ship I would hope that the ejected nacelles would have been ejected at least a minute before the estimated meltdown and that the failsafe systems would still be working independently to minimize the destruction.
Well, that's the thing: it has to be easy, or it doesn't make economic sense. You've outlined a whole set of new classes of ships which would be very expensive to build and maintain (and the increased logistics and lower speed of which would add significant new restrictions on fleet movement); unless the value of salvaged hulls exceeds the cost of this system, then it's a waste of resources. Since the Loroi engage primarily in hit and run warfare, in most situations they do not "hold the field" to allow such salvage operations to take place. For example, such a system would not have been able to salvage Winter Tide and Thunderbolt.

It may be significant that no modern navy on Earth has ever had such a system.
The reason as to why no navy ever had or even plans to have such a system is because of the very nature of the medium naval ships operate in. One cannot salvage anything of worth from a sunk warship, water is extremely corrosive and no equipment that we can design can survive after being fully submerged into water for even a few seconds. This is the reason I brought the tank as an analogy. Tanks don't have this issue and they can easily be salvaged if the damage they received is repairable, in WW2 and all wars where tanks were fielded, a significant number if not the majority of the loses suffered were salvaged provided that the field was held for the amount of time necessary to repair or tow the vehicles to safety.

This is why warships in space should be like tanks in terms of survivability. They cannot be sunk like naval ships which would render them irrevocably lost, to irrevocably lose a spaceship it would have to suffer extreme amounts of damage: broken to pieces, reactor explosion or pounded to scrap. As long as the superstructure of the ship is relatively undamaged they ship is repairable even if it cannot move on its own power.

How many ships would such a system actually save to pay for itself? That could be debated until the heat death of the universe as long as we don't field warships in space. I personally think that the loss to salvage ratio would be comparable to my tank analogy.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

dragoongfa wrote:If I was a crew member I would have hoped that the Captain wouldn't have taken chances and would have elected to cut the engine as soon as it was deemed unsalvageable :P

One of my pet peeves in sci-fi storytelling is trying to 'save/stabilize' the reactor. A captain's duty is to the nation and the crew, taking risks in warfare is natural but in many stories the commanding officers take extreme risks when they could have elected to cut their loses and save what they could.
I think a captain's primary duty is to accomplish her mission. I agree that combatants need to know their own value and not throw themselves away needlessly, but combatants who are concerned first and foremost about their own safety will not be very effective war fighters.

However, in this case I think you're assuming perfect information in a chaotic situation. Winter Tide's captain died in mid-sentence reporting that she thought the situation could be brought under control, so clearly she didn't think the engine was unsalvageable. A captain that drops her engines the moment she takes damage won't remain a captain for very long.
dragoongfa wrote:In the case of cutting the engine to save the rest of the ship I would hope that the ejected nacelles would have been ejected at least a minute before the estimated meltdown and that the failsafe systems would still be working independently to minimize the destruction.
Situations in which a catastrophic failure is inevitable and unstoppable yet perfectly predictable more than a few seconds into the future are rare outside Hollywood scripts.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Werra »

dragoongfa wrote:They cannot be sunk like naval ships which would render them irrevocably lost, to irrevocably lose a spaceship it would have to suffer extreme amounts of damage: broken to pieces, reactor explosion or pounded to scrap. As long as the superstructure of the ship is relatively undamaged they ship is repairable even if it cannot move on its own power.
Any large scale salvage operation practically forces the enemy to render ships unsalvageable.
With the powers starships throw around, it costs the other side very little to do that to a ship drifting essentially dead in space.
Which happened with allied tanks on the western front actually.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by dragoongfa »

Werra wrote:
dragoongfa wrote:They cannot be sunk like naval ships which would render them irrevocably lost, to irrevocably lose a spaceship it would have to suffer extreme amounts of damage: broken to pieces, reactor explosion or pounded to scrap. As long as the superstructure of the ship is relatively undamaged they ship is repairable even if it cannot move on its own power.
Any large scale salvage operation practically forces the enemy to render ships unsalvageable.
With the powers starships throw around, it costs the other side very little to do that to a ship drifting essentially dead in space.
Which happened with allied tanks on the western front actually.
That's why maintaining control of the battlefield is paramount. In the midst of battle the enemy will always prioritize to combat the greatest threat in the field without dispersing their available firepower to run down stragglers and give the finishing blows to otherwise knocked out ships, as doing so invites defeat in detail.

As long as an organized and capable force is in the field one cannot salvage their own derelicts nor can they destroy or even capture the enemy derelicts themselves.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Hālian »

Arioch wrote:
Werra wrote:
Arioch wrote:A group commander rates a command ship. But as command ships go, Tempest is fast but outdated, the last of her class, with substandard protection and a problematic primary armament. I doubt there were many who wanted her.
She got it second hand?
Yeah, she was not the ship's first commander.
Who was?
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by cacambo43 »

Hālian wrote:
Arioch wrote: Yeah, she was not the ship's first commander.
Who was?
Who cares, if it's not relevant to the story?

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

I don't know how deeply the audience is going to get into Stillstorm's stormy history, or the history of the Tempest, but if it participated in the Semoset campaign and survived, then Stillstorm may have taken command from a younger captain.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by GeoModder »

icekatze wrote:hi hi

I don't know how deeply the audience is going to get into Stillstorm's stormy history, or the history of the Tempest, but if it participated in the Semoset campaign and survived, then Stillstorm may have taken command from a younger captain.
Probably a promoted younger captain at that, with dibs on a brand new ship.
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Hālian »

cacambo43 wrote:
Hālian wrote:
Arioch wrote: Yeah, she was not the ship's first commander.
Who was?
Who cares, if it's not relevant to the story?

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

icekatze wrote:I don't know how deeply the audience is going to get into Stillstorm's stormy history, or the history of the Tempest, but if it participated in the Semoset campaign and survived, then Stillstorm may have taken command from a younger captain.
Tempest was part of the Mk.2 Vortex production run after Semoset, specifically intended to be command ships for fast attack groups. Officers are normally rotated regularly out of the raider groups, so Tempest would have had a sequence of commanders before Stillstorm.
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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

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Arioch wrote:Don't fret, it's the end of the month. New pages are coming.
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Drop the pages, buddy, or the gibson gets it.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Zorg56 »

Do loroi know snowboarding?

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Zorg56 wrote:Do loroi know snowboarding?
I can imagine cold areas of Deinar that could develop something like skis or snowshoes, and I could even imagine some Loroi doing it for fun.

But snowboarding? I hope not.

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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

Post by Werra »

The Loroi send their Dirals into a lot of different environments. What is their approach to variance in the natural hazard levels? I imagine a nice piece of land with year long harvest is easier than some ice world or similar.

When Loroi call Alex 'captain' are they using 'torret' or a word that's not also a Loroi fleet rank?

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