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MaxxQBuNine — Mk28 Rebuild 007 Web
Published: 2014-01-19 02:01:08 +0000 UTC; Views: 5336; Favourites: 40; Downloads: 0
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Mk28 Condor pinnace from David Weber's Honor Harrington series of books. Original design by Thomas Marrone. 3D mesh by me for BuNine. I used Blender 2.6x for the modeling and rendering.Related content
Comments: 18
Actually, Adrian, the passage you're quoting refers to a Havenite assault shuttle - a different class of air/spacecraft than a pinnace; one that was manufactured by a different shipbuilder than its Manticoran counterpart. So Scotty's not landing "one of their own pinnaces," as you claim, but a stolen enemy craft that definitely has both counter-grav and vectored thrust.
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I am sorry to disagree with you but you are not correct. In Echoes of Honor Book One Chapter 10 pages 165 & 166 Scotty Tremaine speficically refers to landing one of their own pinnaces without using counter-grav and, although it is not specifically stated, it implies using vectored thrust.
The relevant passage reads:
"Um." Honor laid the binoculars back down and rubbed her nose in thought, then looked at Scotty. "Think you could take a shuttle through there without counter-grav?"
"Without—?" Tremaine looked at her for a moment, then inhaled sharply. "Sure," he said, far more confidently than he could possibly feel, and Honor chuckled.
"Don't get your testosterone in an uproar on me now, Scotty. I'm serious. Can you get us in there?"
"Probably, Ma'am," he said after a moment, then added, grudgingly, "but I can't guarantee it. With one of our own pinnaces, yes. But this is a big brute, Ma'am. She's a lot heavier on the controls, and I haven't really experimented with her vectored thrust yet."
"But you think you could do it."
"Yes, Ma'am."
I am sorry to be a pedant about it but I did double check and the reference is clearly there.
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Okay, so I was wrong, but again, we are talking about something we have not even worked out the details for. You're asking about vectored thrust on the RMN pinnace, which currently* has none, and referencing the use of vectored thrust on an assault shuttle from the PRN.
One does not equate with the other, and as far as implying that the RMN pinnaces have vectored thrust, I leave that as the interpretation of the reader. I can see where you might think that, but I disagree that it means RMN pinnaces have vectored thrust.
TBH, it's not something to really get worked up about. There are any number of textev details that have or will be changed as we go, due to the realities of visualization in 3D as opposed to a simple 2D line drawing, and the fact that David himself has admitted that he's not a visual writer. Some things just *can't* work the way he describes them
*This may change at some point, but I haven't touched the pinnace in a couple years, and there is every indication from my boss at BuNine that the current version of the pinnace is final. Until I hear otherwise, the current pinnace stays the way it is.
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Having being rereading some of the earlier Honor Harrington novels I came across something which raises an interesting point.
Given the location of the air breathing engines how on earth can you use them to provide vectored thrust and, more importantly, thrust for a vertical landing?
I KNOW you have provided a detailed description of how they take off and land vertically using counter grav. HOWEVER in Echoes of Honor there is here the protagonists are flying a pinnace at low level above a planetary surface WITHOUT using counter grav. Then, when they want to land Honor Harrington specifically asks if they could land in a jungle without using counter grav. Scotty Tremaine says he does not want to risk using vectored thrust. Admittedly he was using a captured Peep pinnace but he DID refer specifically to being able to do it in one of their own ships.
Thoughts please.
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We haven't gotten as far as working out details for Peep pinnaces/assault shuttles (which is what they were flying in, not a Peep pinnace), so they may very well have vectored thrust engines. The RMN pinnace does not have vectored thrust. For vertical takeoff and landing, they did (IIRC) end up using countergrav to land.
However, countergrav only negates the effects of gravity - it does *not* provide or impart any sort of motion. What it *can* do is, on a very low setting, allow a hovering craft to drop under it's own apparent weight. So the landing profile would look something like this: pinnace approaches the landing site, slowing as it gets closer, until, under countergrav, it comes to a hover. Countergrav is dropped to something like 98%. This means the pinnace, with a max loaded weight of 300 tons, would end up with an apparent weight of 6 tons at max weight. Maybe even 99%, which would give an apparent weight of only 3 tons. It drops down and the attitude is adjusted using the rcs thrusters - they're powerful enough to move a mass of 300 tons in a vacuum and microgravity, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to move the same 300 ton mass for fine adjustments on landing.
Takeoff is even easier. Set the countergrav to 100%, which removes all apparent weight, and use the thrusters to lift off. Once the desired altitude is reached, the air-breathers can kick in and allow forward motion, with the countergrav being reduced as the airspeed picks up, allowing the wings and stabilizers to handle lift and control.
We did once have plans to use vectored thrust vanes similar to those used on the Harrier, but ended up dropping them for various reasons, not least of which was we felt we didn't need the extra complexity.
Also, IIRC, Scotty's objection to using the vectored thrust was to avoid FODding out the engines. In case you're not sure what that means, FOD stands for Foreign Object Damage. Everybody who works around jet aircraft, whether military or civilian, has FOD control beaten into them from day one, including walking the entire length of a runway looking for anything like loose wires, dropped screws, nuts, bolts or other trash that can damage or destroy an air-breathing jet engine. Scotty was trying to land in a jungle, with all the loose branches, twigs, small rocks, and dirt that can be considered FOD hazards. When I was in the Air Force, there was a guy who had a $15 set of darts in his field jacket, which he had left near the main landing gear of an F-111. After the work on the aircraft was finished, he picked up his jacket and left. Later, the aircrew arrinved at the plane to take it out for a training mission. Once the engines were spooled up, there was enough suction to pick up the dart set that had fallen out of the guys jacket, and ingest it into the port engine, causing major damage to the engine, at a cost of some $75,000.
Considering Honor and Scotty only had two viable aircraft, and no facilites to repair any damage, I'd say that Scotty's worry was well-founded.
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Well, like I said, I think the SABRE is only available through installing a mod, but that's easy enough to do. I just don't know which mod it is.
It's an okay game. It's got a bit of a learning curve, since it's based on actual orbital mechanics. The aerodynamics model is a bit basic, though. For example, adding streamlined nose cones to boosters doesn't actually decrease drag. Drag is calculated by the number of parts on your rocket or aircraft, rather than actual aerodynamics. OTOH, the KSP mod community is pretty active, and if you add the Ferram Aerospace mod, it adds in drag as it should be calculated, and fixes a lot of other vehicle stability issues, making things somewhat more difficult. Deadly Re-entry is another mod that adds more realism, by making re-entry... well, more deadly. In the vanilla game, it pretty much doesn't matter what angle or what speed you enter the atmosphere, or even if you've got solar panels attached - your craft will land safely, and intact. DRE fixes that.
They're getting ready to add a new update that will include the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) that was co-developed with NASA, based on their own mission planning for that sort of thing. This add-on will allow asteroids to end up on a collision course with the home planet, and you have to build a ship to go to it and make sure it *doesn't*.
I said earlier that it's an "okay" game. What I meant was that at first it was quite fun and challenging, but once you get the basics down, it gets a bit monotonous, especially in career mode. Missions are played out in real time, although there *is* a "time warp" feature to speed things up, but depending on your ship design, can cause or increase problems with floating point errors. This can end end up with you spacecraft more or less self-destructing.
Best thing to do is to check out YouTube for Scott Manley's various video series' dealing with KSP - he has several series, and you can kill a week or two easily just watching them. One good thing about the game is that if you buy now, it's only $27 (the game is still in development, but finished enough to be stable - I've never had a crash or game-stopping bug), and when new versions come out, there's no additional charge. One of the downsides is that it uses the Unity game engine, which doesn't have a stable 64-bit version for Windows or Mac. The Linux version of KSP is good to go on 64-bit, but until Unity gets a stable 64-bit Win/Mac version, you're stuck with 4gb RAM, which disappears rapidly when adding mods. There *are* mods to reduce texture sizes to help reduce RAM usage, but that only goes so far.
I played it pretty much non-stop for a few weeks, but I haven't touched it at all over the last two weeks. YMMV, though, and the sandbox mode can be a bit more fun, since you start out with all available parts and can just build whatever and do whatever. Career mode requires you to collect science points to spend on unlocking new tech. Anyway, I suggest checking out the videos I mentioned above, as well as the official forums that are linked on the main page. From there, you shouldn't have any problems finding the mods you might like. The demo is based on v0.18, whereas the current "full" version is 0.23. The ARM add-on is being called 0.23.5, and the 0.24 release is "soon™".
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Interesting. Reminds me of Planetary Annihilation, a game whose release date is When Its Ready. The answer to any question along the lines of "When will [promised feature] be added?" is also usually "Soon" (quotes included).
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From the way we've talked about it, a pinnace takes off using countergrav. That's the *only* way for it to get off the ground, although countergrav doesn't actually move it anywhere - it just counters the force of gravity. The turbines cut in, moving the ship forward. If its flight is meant to stay in atmosphere, then once the wings provide normal lift, the CG cuts out and the pinnace flies like you would expect any aircraft to. To get to orbital flight, I would guess (we haven't gone into great detail about it, so this is basically my own speculation on how it might work) that the CG stays on, while the turbines push the craft fast enough to basically reach high altitude. Because the craft is effectively weightless - due to the CG - the turbines are a bit more efficient. By the time the atmosphere is thin enough to starve the turbines, the pinnace should be high enough to activate the wedge.
A pinnace wedge is pretty small, only a couple-three kilometers on a side (if you assume the wedge is square, as it's usually depicted - but not in the comic), unlike the 300km wedges on an SD, so at this point, there's no real worry about affecting planetary atmosphere, and I would certainly hope that there is enough comm traffic between the crew and ground stations to make sure no one else is nearby. At that point, it's just a matter of using the wedge to get where you're going. Also, unless the pinnace is flying on its side, the wedge is "shallower" than its width or length - something like almost half - and I would also assume that for pinnaces or similar craft, there might even be special flight corridors.
Sorry if this doesn't answer your questions satisfactorily. We haven't yet gone into great detail on an actual flight profile.
I've got a couple of videos posted on YouTube that involve the Condor. One is a takeoff sequence, and the other has it doing an approach, flyaround, and finally docking with the HMS Fearless. If I can figure out how to post videos here, I'll try to get them up. The problem is that those two are the third and fifth videos I've ever done (the first two I haven't released yet, if ever, and the fourth was a first-run of the fifth, and will never be posted), and since I'm pretty much self-taught in Blender, I still haven't gotten to the point of being able to do things like RCS puffs and such that would be needed to make it maneuver like it does in the second video.
To heck with it... I'll throw them in this post, and try later on to get them on my regular page here.
youtu.be/fy8e-3lrKGE
youtu.be/uEiGEeq8SiI
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Sorry about the late reply, I got really busy for a few weeks and DA kind of fell to the wayside. Your answer sounds pretty good to me - keeping in mind that "the author reserves the right to have a better idea" (I love that saying, for some reason).
What got me wondering was an article on the Skylon spaceplane, being designed by Reaction Engines, which uses an engine they call SABRE that functions as an air-breathing turbine in the lower atmosphere and then switches over to rocket mode once the oxygen concentration has dropped enough.
And the videos are pretty dang cool, too. For posting them here, I thought all you had to do was upload them the same way you upload images; having never done it before, though, I'm afraid I can't be of much help. When you figure it out, tell me how it works - I have a few things that may eventually be worth uploading, if I ever find enough time to finish them. Which is a big "if", but still. Miracles can happen.
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I would just like to raise the following point
The air breathing turbines mounted on the rear fuselage cannot be SABRE engines, or at least in their current iteration, as the compressor faces are clearly visible. The SABRE uses a conical moveable centrebody with 2 shock Axisymmetric Intake with the heat exchangers positioned immediately behind them leading to the compressor.
From what I have read and seen on television the precooler heat exchanger is the heart of the engine & it is this that enables it to function.
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They don't have to be SABRE engines to have the same functionality as SABRE engines. This is the far-future we're talking about, after all. But since they are air-breathing only anyways, it's a moot point.
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Yeah, I know about the SABRE. It's actually available (as a mod, I think) in the game "Kerbal Space Program" - kerbalspaceprogram.com/ One of the other guys in BuNine (goes by ThomasTheCat here at DA) got me interested in it. Anyway, I don't know if any of the other guys in BuNine have thought about it, so for now, the answer is pretty much what I already mentioned. 👍: 0 ⏩: 1
For posting the videos here, I tried again after I added the links to my last post, but they won't post because every time I try to post them, I have to select a category, and I keep getting an error saying that the category I select isn't supported. Not the *file* type, because I've tried with different file-types, but the *category*.
As for the "better idea" phrase, I would say that Weber could also use the phrase, "the author reserves the right to dump bad ideas". This is, of course, in reference to TWTMNBN.
I'd heard of the game, but I didn't know the SABRE was in it. I've also never played it. Is it good?
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Are the engines on the sides exclusively air-breathing turbines, or do they also incorporate rocket motors?
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They're pretty much a hybrid design, acting as turbines in atmosphere, and can be used as rockets, although endurance is pretty short. They would generally only be used that way for emergencies. For example, getting away from a ship that's about to blow.
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So what does the pinnace use between when it's high enough that there isn't enough atmosphere for the turbines but low enough that it can't activate the impeller wedge?
Assuming there is such a gap, at least. It just seems to me that the point at which a turbine begins to starve would be closer to the planet than you'd want to be when bringing up your wedge. I could be mistaken, but then, that's the point of asking questions!
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