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So Why Didn't the Rings Have Ejection Seats (Technical Discussion Thread)


Heir of the Void

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So, after finishing the book, one pertinent question sticks in my mind.

Why didn't the Acclivity Rings have their own ejection systems?

We know that the Rings are the limiting factor on the Defiant's ability to field forces, as they have large numbers of fighters apparently grounded do to lack of parts, and manpower can't be the issue as they haven't actually implemented conscription. So preserving the rings is paramount, but having pilots die trying to regain control of failing ships is a bad way of doing it, as they usually fail, which seems to mean the ring is usually lost. Egro, a system which mechanically preserves some fraction of the Rings is highly describable, but absent. 

We know it's possible to eject from a fighter, when they bother to do it, and a human is a lot squishier than a disc of rocks, so it's not as if it can't be done. Obviously, if the ring gets shot out from under you, there's nothing to be done, but this is intended to solve for the various other cases where literally any other system has failed catastrophically.

The most basic form of such an arrangement would be as follows. 

The Acclivity Ring is mounted on a slab on the ventral side of the Fighter, in its customary location. This slab is flush with with hull, but connected to the rest of the ship by a series of heavy fixtures rigged with pyrotechnic fasteners. The power and control buses for the Acclivity Rings are routed along these, with their own pyrotechnic severing devices. Pyrotechnic fasteners are a proven and reliable technology in the modern era, and can be build to handle the massive structural loading the fixings holding the various stages of a chemical rocket together, so there shouldn't be an issue there. This might require the ship to be designed, or re-designed, around the system, but the Rings are important enough for that to be worthwhile. 

This slab mounts the hinges that hold the ring, and the servomotors (presumably) used to position it. The purpose of the slab is to provide a easy unit that can be ejected wholesale with the ring on it, and to provide a housing for the recovery equipment.

Unless the ring is several times denser than the hull material, the geometry of the arrangement means that the center of gravity will be far from the ring and inside the slab. This is desirable, as it means the whole unit will orient to either be sideways or to with the ring up in free-fall. This can be manipulated by weighting, and either works. The function is as follows. 

The pilot ejects, and the Ring Ejection System triggers automatically. The explosive bolts blow, and the Ring/slab unit is blown off the falling fighter. After a few seconds to re-orient, solid-rocket boosters fire to blow the ring clear of the combat zone. This step is optional, but it makes it harder for the xeno scum to chase down the Ring, which they may or may not be inclined to do. 

Once the SRBs cut out, the slab launches a series of streamers to increase drag and begin slowing down the slab as it falls. This cancels the lateral velocity of the SRBs and slows the fall. At this point, the Ring descends, possibly deploying a drogue shoot at some point. It may or may not also deploy a regular parachute - all this depends on the velocity profile, which depends on a lot of other factors. 

Landing, is facilitated by inflatable impact cushion, of the sort presently used to land larger payloads on Mars. This gives a lot more flexibility in terms of acceptable surface velocity, and increases the odds of a safe landing for the Acclivity Ring. After a delay to allow the Krell to retreat, a radio beacon activates for recovery.

Thoughts? Discussion on other aspects of the technology of the setting?

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Part of it might be that they didn't see that as an option, since they may not have known how to attach an acclivity ring to a ship mid-creation instead of just making it all at once, or they just didn't have time, since that would probably increase resource drain and time to create the ships, whereas the next attack could come at any time and they needed to churn ships out ASAP.

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7 minutes ago, Invocation said:

Part of it might be that they didn't see that as an option, since they may not have known how to attach an acclivity ring to a ship mid-creation instead of just making it all at once, 

Given that the rings are mounted on a hinge rather than being an integral part of the structure of the ship, they're almost certainly attached at some point in the assembly process. And unless the ships are cast in a single piece, which seems unlikely given that Rig was able to get wing parts for M-bot. Plus we know the boosters, at least, at added seperately, so it seems reasonable to assume the Fighters are assembled from components. 

11 minutes ago, Invocation said:

or they just didn't have time, since that would probably increase resource drain and time to create the ships, whereas the next attack could come at any time and they needed to churn ships out ASAP.

Added emphasis mine - it absolutely would. 

But the problem here isn't the total cost, it's that the rings are a bottleneck on the total number of ships they can launch at all, full stop. Without acclivity rings to provide anti-grav, more hulls are worthless, because they can't be flown. At the present state, they need more Rings to launch more ships, which is why Ironsides ordered the large-scale operation to protect the falling shipyard. Cost only becomes an issue once they can't afford to build as many ships as they have rings, sort of like how pilot count only matters once they don't have a ship for every man who can fly. 

Obviously, of course, preserving pilot skill is another matter - losing fewer dedicated, experienced pilots because they aren't trying to save their Rings is another benefit of such an arrangement. 

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I can't quote anything right now because I'm on my phone, but Rig 1) was a special case, seen as a prodigy by the engineering people and 2) those were old-ish wing parts, scavenged off of scrapped ships that couldn't be repaired.

Another thing about their mindset on why they don't do your idea: they don't have time. By any stretch of the imagination. Adding something that complex would require a recalibration of the apparatus that makes the ships to accomadate the new mechanisms, bulking the ships up, which means every pilot for every ship has to go through a new round of training to adjust to the new patterns of airflow and movement drag, not to mention that the time it would take them to recalibrate is time that they can't produce ships. That's time they don't have.

It would, ironically, be beneficial to allow more ships to be destroyed and less rings acquired in the short term, because then the Krell might leave them alone, all the while they can be building this stuff in secret just below the surface. Yes, the rings are a bottleneck, but there's always going to be a bottleneck one way or another. Too many rings, not enough material for the rest of the ship portion (even discounting test ships for the idea you're suggesting) or not enough pilots of caliber enough to use these new ships correctly.

Test ships is a whole separate issue. What do you think the Krell are going to do when they realize the humans might not need to raid for the acclivity rings anymore? If they have a stockpile, they have the ability to reverse engineer them, which puts them over the line of where they need to be to stay alive in the eyes of the Krell. Even if they didn't do that, they probably wouldn't succeed on the first try. The moment a new ship from the humans comes out, the Krell are going into full Can-Of-Raid procedure.

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Other than the issue with the Krell capturing them; I'm not sure why the rings aren't built to separate. While i like your plans for the release mechanism, I'm not sure if another system is even needed. Most of the falling debris has rings that still work but have ran out of power. Just mounting the ring and a small power source together could be enough to save the ring so long as the Krell couldn't shoot it down. 

That could easily change the tactic from don't eject, to don't eject until you are clear.

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1 hour ago, kmosiman said:

Other than the issue with the Krell capturing them; I'm not sure why the rings aren't built to separate. While i like your plans for the release mechanism, I'm not sure if another system is even needed. Most of the falling debris has rings that still work but have ran out of power. Just mounting the ring and a small power source together could be enough to save the ring so long as the Krell couldn't shoot it down. 

That could easily change the tactic from don't eject, to don't eject until you are clear.

You're not wrong. The rings can obviously survive the fall (and the impact) - and the mention of working Acclivity Stone being found in the 'core' of fallen debris would suggest that the heating of atmospheric reentry is more responsible for the loss of falling rings than sudden deceleration. The only objection I'd make is that we don't really know what percentage of rings survive that fall. If there are billions of rings in the debris belt (not out of the question, given its size), then the survival ratio may be on par with the rate of people surviving falls from airplanes - but we use parachutes for a reason. 

Ultimately, we don't know, so it seems better to air on the side of safety and maximized returns. 

And you are correct about tactics.

9 hours ago, Invocation said:

was a special case

Like the same people who built starfighters in caves while dodging alien bombardments? It's not like they all took cyanide after the first battle of Alta. It's only been a decade or so - some of them might even still be around.

9 hours ago, Invocation said:

they don't have time

They've had eleven years of open operations. They obviously have an abundance of time.

9 hours ago, Invocation said:

Adding something that complex would require a recalibration of the apparatus that makes the ships to accomadate the new mechanisms, bulking the ships up, which means every pilot for every ship has to go through a new round of training to adjust to the new patterns of airflow and movement drag, 

But they're willing to tolerate this cost for a pilot ejection system, when by any rational analysis the ring is by far more important. Humans can be produced cheaply with unskilled labor; rings can't be produced at all. The logic of sacrificing pilots to save rings is entirely sound; the issue is that they usually can't.

You also apparently missed the part where they produced several different classes of ships, including one used soley to transport valugely-defined 'valuable cargo', along with several different classes of specialized combat ships. You're assuming that they have zero R&D capacity, and that's simply... not true. 

Beyond that, by this logic, transitioning models of fighter aircraft during a war is never a good idea, when that simply doesn't appear to be true. New pilots can be trained on new aircraft, and they obviously have the manpower to rotate pilots through training periods. 

9 hours ago, Invocation said:

not to mention that the time it would take them to recalibrate is time that they can't produce ships.

Which is just wrong. R&D is a completely different process than manufacturing, and while there might be some lag time while you retool factories, that's only going to impact a small fraction of your total component assembly lines, so you can account for that by planning your moves well. They obviously aren't producing at full capacity anyway, because they have enough anti-gravity systems to field them, as evidenced by the statements of several characters that they'd be able to field 'hundreds' of additional ships with the Acclivity Rings from the shipyard. Ergo, it should be possible to work overtime to build up a surplus of the components whose production lines need retooling so assembly doesn't need to stop. 

9 hours ago, Invocation said:

It would, ironically, be beneficial to allow more ships to be destroyed and less rings acquired in the short term, because then the Krell might leave them alone, all the while they can be building this stuff in secret just below the surface.

This depends of knowledge they don't have until the end of the book, so it can't be used for judging their decisions in the period before the Battle of Alta, or the decade between the battle and the events of the book.

That also assumed the Krell don't decide to drop a lifebuster on Alta Base and wipe out Igneous. Even if they could evaluate the base, they'd lose the Apparatus which, according to the prologue, provides the smelted metal that forms the foundation of their industrial base. Why they haven't been producing mining gear and machine tools to distribute their population into more caverns I don't know (they many not have a large enough population to sustain an industrial society without the Apparatus), but the core issue is that they need to maintain enough throw weight to prevent the Krell from nuking their ability to fight at all. 

9 hours ago, Invocation said:

Yes, the rings are a bottleneck, but there's always going to be a bottleneck one way or another.

Tactical nihilism has a flaw here - there is an observable difference between a narrow bottleneck and a wider one. A wider bottleneck is universally preferable, as it allows higher maximum throughput, which you can choose not to use, and having the option is always better than not having one.

And, once again, they obviously see getting more rings as being, if not paramount, then at least a high priority. If they didn't need more rings, Ironsides wouldn't have bet all the marbles on the falling shipyard. Discussions of public choice theory aside, the actions of the characters, who know more of the specifics of their industrial situation than we do, indicates rings are valuable.

10 hours ago, Invocation said:

or not enough pilots of caliber enough to use these new ships correctly.

Yeah, but by reducing total casualties, you increase the average level of pilot experience by reducing the mean time it takes for a pilot to get killed. And that's assuming a re-designed ship is somehow automatically harder to operate, which is absurd. They seem to roll out new models and different classes without issue, so there's no reason to assume one of their ships sits at some sort of local maxima of usability. 

10 hours ago, Invocation said:

What do you think the Krell are going to do when they realize the humans might not need to raid for the acclivity rings anymore?

Why do they need to know? The humans managed to get their fleet operational and hide it from the Krell, so they should be able to conduct some modifications in effective secrecy. 

And presumably they'd keep doing what they've been doing, attacking the humans to keep them from focusing on anything else. But again, the Defiants don't know that until the very end, and can't be expect to make decisions to game a system they don't even know exists. 

10 hours ago, Invocation said:

The moment a new ship from the humans comes out, the Krell are going into full Can-Of-Raid procedure.

Citation needed. The Lago, the Val, and the Slattra-classes all seemed to be more or less tolerated. And they're already going nuclear on suppression, and their own laws seem to prohibit them from dropping rocks. 

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You would need to attach a parachute to the Aclivity Ring in order to safely eject it.  Because we know virtually nothing about Aclivity Rings, it's possible that there are technical reasons why that's simply not feasible.  Additionally, I suspect that a ring falling to the ground at a speed slow enough for it to survive the landing would make an easy target for the Krell drones.  And we know that the Krell do specifically attempt to destroy rings.

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I find it hard to imagine that a ship would ever be falling with an undamaged acclivity ring. One ring is enough to single handedly hover the whole ship, so as long as it's still working, the ship won't be crashing, and it seems pointless to spend so much effort to eject destroyed rings.

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20 minutes ago, HeyLookItz said:

I find it hard to imagine that a ship would ever be falling with an undamaged acclivity ring. One ring is enough to single handedly hover the whole ship, so as long as it's still working, the ship won't be crashing, 

But then why all the attention given to pulling ships out of uncontrolled descents? There are plenty of reasons for a ship to be falling other than ring damage (power system failure, booster damage, structural failure, destruction of control surfaces/systems, loss of control linkages to key system components, atmospheric scoop failure, etc), and we know from the story that ships absolutely do fall with functional Acclivity Rings.

24 minutes ago, HeyLookItz said:

and it seems pointless to spend so much effort to eject destroyed rings

It's really a trivial amount of effort. It could potentially be done with an aftermarket kit attached to one of the ring hinges, but that has some drawbacks.

And if ejection is so much trouble, why bother ejecting pilots?

3 hours ago, junior said:

Because we know virtually nothing about Aclivity Rings, it's possible that there are technical reasons why that's simply not feasible.

So you attach a parachute to something attached to the ring, as previously discussed. It's an easy fix. 

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I like your point about ejecting Pilots. Considering that the rings are more valuable than the Pilot and that Pilots are often grounded if they eject (Cadets are at least, not sure how many strikes a full Pilot gets); it seems like a waste to include the function. Might as well save weight and leave the ejector out. That way a Pilot has to try and land it. 

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The fighters weren't designed by Defiants, right? So maybe for whoever designed them, the acclivity rings weren't so valuable. Installing the ejection system for the acclivity rings would require major modifications that are probably beyond Defiant engineers skill. 

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4 hours ago, sin165 said:

The fighters weren't designed by Defiants, right?

There's no indication of that. We know from the prologue that they built them themselves.

Maybe you're thinking of the Apparatus they use to refine ore?

4 hours ago, sin165 said:

Installing the ejection system for the acclivity rings would require major modifications that are probably beyond Defiant engineers skill. 

if they didn't dismiss Rig's proposal for a gyroscopically mounted cockpit out of hand, then they can probably make pretty substantial modifications. That system would almost certainly require the entire ship to be rebuilt around it, as you would need a spherical socket into which a smaller sphere containing the cockpit would be mounted, with enough space in between them for the machinery required for the cockpit to rotate freely, which would be a pretty sizable volumetic increase, and also require completely reshaping the cockpit.

But that was implied to be viable, so they seem to have the ability to re-design their ships. 

19 hours ago, kmosiman said:

Might as well save weight and leave the ejector out. That way a Pilot has to try and land it. 

Brutal. But not necessarily wrong.

That said, there are some morale benefits to a pilot knowing the ejector seat is there, but those might not apply if they've been conditioned not to use it.

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You don't actually need a parachute, since the things can hover. Just eject it and have a feedback loop with an altimeter and you can have it descend until it touches down relatively gently.

This might never have been considered though, due to the toxic atmosphere of "die trying to save the ship or you're a coward". It's a perfect solution, but one that went against the culture.

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Some factors to consider when looking at an ejection system are that

  1. The Acclivity rings are likely much heavier than even a human+seat+flight suit combination, requiring a much larger parachute for a soft landing.
  2. There appear to be a number of reasons to mount the ring to the bottom of the craft, making ejection of the ring somewhat more complex due to needing to get the ring clear of the craft.
  3. The hovering ability appears to require power, so if you have the power for the ring to hover, you have the power to make a safe descent in the craft.

My impression is that the toxic "die trying to save the ship or be a coward" mentioned is a combination of the cultural feedback from the attempted reduction in the scale of "Chase"'s offense with the fact that the ships are both survival critical and some parts effectively require entering combat with the Krell to aquire.

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