Re: [GZG] Thrusting in the Cherryverse

John Atkinson wrote:
>
>Which one of her universes?  And where does she drop enough technical
>about the starships to give us something to work with?
>
>Just asking, because I just don't remember her dealing with that sort
>of crunchy goodness.

Nah, she's not like David Weber.

The universe in question would be the one shared by the
Merchanter stories (Alliance/Union/Mazianni) and the Compact
(Chanur). You can pick out bits and pieces, but you have to
read just about all the books to do so. Which can be good,
because it gives you some creative freedom to interpret it
as you wish rather than being bound by what happened on page
453 of book 7 or something.

Some notes I sent to Ed Carmien (the cherryhlister who made
the original query that Recursive Loop is following up on):

I find that straight conversions from tonnage or size, or
by counting weapons, don't work. It's better to start with
the role of each ship for a rough idea of mass.

The Compact species don't really have 'war' ships, just
pirates and pirate catchers, and Pyanfar seemed rather
worried about the prospect of a human warship getting into
the Compact. So the Kif and Mahendosat ships are probably
just frigate/destroyers, all you need for either role.

Merchanters would come in all sizes, from tiny insystemers
to frigate/destroyer sized small traders/rimrunners to
giants like Dublin. None of them would have much hull
integrity though, as hull boxes really represent resisting
power to damage rather than accomodation. (I suppose the
big merchanters might be pretty tough though.)

Each ridership being worth six fighters is a good idea.
Very agile and difficult to hit, and if nobody else uses
fighters then they're pretty dangerous too.

I'd thought of riders as destroyer sized ships with
no FTL drive, pretty good main drive, armoured, carrying
beams, submunition packs or maybe a pulse torpedo. FT
has rules for ships being hauled around in FTL by others:
the 'tug' ship, here a Mazianni carrier, has to spend an
extra 1 mass on FTL drive for every 5 mass of ship being
taken along. So a carrier with 24 extra points of mass
spent on FTL could haul four mass 30 riderships along
with it.

The later Alliance/Union books have Union (at least) armed
merchanters, which sound like scaled down carriers with
weapons and protection but no riderships. They sound about
right for cruiser roles. Rimrunners don't seem to get into
combat if they can help it, so are probably frigate or
destroyer sized.

Carriers themselves are obviously big and impressive. The
smaller ones like Norway should be at least dreadnoughts,
and monsters like Europe and Africa would presumably be
superdreadnoughts.

When deciding on drive ratings, it's not so much maximum
speed, more turning ability and acceleration. Insystem
ships are always incredibly clumsy, so I'd say drive-1.
Merchant ships are a bit faster because they can use the
vanes to speed up or slow down, but still don't dodge about
acrobatically so would be drive-2. Actual warships with
bigger engines would be drive-4 at most: nobody in Cherryh
books zips about like White Stars in B5.

For weapons, light beams or light gun equivalents seem
to be carried by everybody, only one or two for the small
merchants. The nearest thing to a railgun in FT is the
pulse torpedo, fairly good range with a destructive punch.
(Unless you're willing to mix technologies and use K-guns.)
Carriers fired missile swarms in The Sandman, The Tinman,
and the BettyB, which sound like FT salvo missiles. In
Rimrunners, the not-too-big Loki "throws missiles" at a
Mazianni ship, but again you could interpret that loosely.

Protection I'm not so sure about. Point defense systems
are reasonable if carriers are firing missiles, Kif ships
have armour. The shields around FTL ships seem intended
to protect against debris hazards rather than weapons,
but you could argue that they could be used for that too,
especially on carriers.
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