To cut to the chase, the Argo can carry a drop ship while being attached to a jump ship via "LosTech". LosTech being the BattleTech version of "A wizard did it."
Seriously the argo is large enough they could have just had an internal hanger big enough to fit a leopard into it. Or used drop shuttles from its two aerospace hangers to deploy mechs
No, LosTech is what happens when, to paraphrase the words of Mr. Tex, 'anything with a production capacity larger than a backyard tool shed or institute of learning larger than a magazine rack becomes a legitimate target for strategic nukes'. The Succession Wars were rather insane.
It’s a twofer or a threefer. One docking clamp for the jumpship and multiple docking clamps for dropships. It isn’t lostech. It’s redundant engineering reinforced to take the strain of a jump on multiple dropship docking clamps. It’s just jumpship engineering on a non-jump ship. Since it isn’t jumping itself, it can detach at the jump point to defend the jumpship. It will be at full power when the jumpship is effectively dead in the water recharging. It’s a poor man’s jump-capable battleship. This is likely the middle stage between the jump-capable battleships and the jumpship without any weapons.
BattleTech refers to the setting as a whole, and more specifically the mecha shooting at each other especially as the RPG as a battle simulation. MechWarrior was the character level RPG. Beyond that, the computer game names are all over the place.
The Latin script actually DOES exist in Star Wars, called "High Galactic" it was an outdated language mostly used by nobility which is why it most often snuck in at Imperial installations and for ship names that were meant to sound fancy or exotic, like how companies name cars
The K-F drive doesn't need to be "above" or "below" the star. It's just it's the usual best place to pop in. Near the plane of orbit has random stuff around that can hit the ship (and attached boats). Also jumping into any mass is a *bad thing* (tm). Other places that are kinda decent places to jump into are "pirate" points which are basically LaGrange points. Final point; when jumping into a system at one of the normal points you usually couldn't come in closer than about Jupiter's orbit. Pirate points could drop you in closer in, relatively close to a planet you want to go too. But some have junk there that can, again, make your day be bad
With Battletech (2018) set in the year 3025 there are 4 big reasons, why not more of those ships where constructed, the Amaris Civil War (2766-2779) and the first three succession wars following it. The Argo is an experimental design from 2762, starting its shake down in only 3 years before the civil war. The Inner Sphere lost much of its technical advancement during it, also called Lostech.
The Battletech classification system is a little counterintuitive if you're used to other settings - it basically comes down to how you FTL. If you use a regular K-F Drive, you are a JumpShip. If you use a Compact K-F Drive, you are a WarShip. Yes, even if you are unarmed. If you use a docking collar to piggyback on a JumpShip or WarShip, you are a DropShip.
And if you land in a smallcraft bay rather than using a docking collar, you're a shuttle. And some of the oldest Jumpships had a detachable KF drive, and they'd come into the system, get loaded by dropshuttles, then go back, bolt the KF drive back on, and hope it didn't jump away without them. Dropships were a quantum leap in safety.
@@patrickkenyon2326 which you technically couldn't do normally before the video game came out, so when canonizing the main game the product line developers had the Argo using a one-off piece of technology that ultimately couldn't increase the dropship capacity of a Jumpship, but rather offset the downside of many larger Dropships physically blocking other Docking Collars.
@@tenchraven From what I read early jumpships normally would have been classified as warships (transit drives and KF drives (which has to be compact considering normal KF drives take 90% of jumpships and does not really allow transit drives))
The Argo solution to simulated gravity is similar to how it was done in the novel Project Hail Mary by: Andy Weir. The Hail Mary used thrust to create artificial gravity while traveling to its location, once there it stopped its engines and used spin to create artificial gravity.
Ships in Ian Douglas books use the same methodology, although often with a huge "mushroom cap" of water storage as shielding against relativistic velocities.
The changeable configuration with swing hab modules, folded down when under constant thrust, swing out then spin, and when not under constant thrust was done in Jovian chronicles also. around about the mid 90's.
In one of my favored bit of lore I think from the book A mote in god's eye was that to deal with this problem they made the concept of "floor" relative. In motion the "floor" was aftward. On station it was outboard. Within various spaces most equipment, bunks, desks, etc could swing or be moved easily. So spaces had large vaulted ceilings near one wall to be later used as floor space.
I love the in-universe backstory behind the Culture's "Gravitas" running gag: another race criticized Culture ships for not having names with enough gravitas. The Culture shipmasters and Minds took that personally. "Nope, no gravitas here" is a named ship.
The battletech warships can carry dropships too like the potemkin class troop cruiser with 25 dropship collars or the mckenna class battleship with 6 dropship collars, and it was also for tactical purposes too since most large warships didn't carry much anti aerospace fighter weapons on-board, that was the assault dropships job to not just carry troops dirt side but also escort warships in system between jumps
Dropship as a term in Battletech actually refers to any ship that lacks it's own FTL drive. They dock with large, FTL-capable Jumpships, go through FTL, and are "dropped" off at the destination. Their ability to land on a planet (or lack thereof) is irrelevant.
Came here to say the same thing, albeit with more punctuation. In my youth, I built a whole SLDF patrol group, down to the dropships and carried cargo. Ran to something like 30 pages on my old dot-matrix print outs. One McKenna, one potempkin, two texases, and a whole slew of smaller warships. Even had the regiments of battlemechs, armored companies, etc. 300 and some odd total craft counting dropships. My potempkin corn cob always had pride of place right behind the flagship.
@@johnathan651 Nah, DropShips have to carry a K-F boom to interface with the JumpShip's core. Without that, _bad_ things happen to whatever is attached to the docking collars. The game just doesn't spend much time looking at ships that can't leave the system that built them.
Pretty sure that the larger franchise is called Battletech and Mechwarrior is a brand within that franchise referring to specific games and books under the Battletech brand.
Warships in BattleTech can have and jump with dropships, they can not move under thrust until the dropships detach or the docking collars get crunched.
As a KF tech and theoretical KF professor, we don’t talk about the Argo. She just starts breaking physics like a Federation science team in a tight spot. So the Argo is a hero ship. A station that can move at 1g for days.
To be fair to the Argo, all ships in Battletech have extreme efficiency fusion thrusters. Both the Leopard you use as a landing craft, and the big egg ships that mech companies like to use as a home base, can pull off the same physics hacks with their delta-V.
For reference, dropships are dropped off the jumpship when the jumpship arrives in system. That's the point they become a dropship. The Argo is not the only dropship that can't make planetfall, there's an entire class, the behemoth class, that are basically big slow cargo bubbles.
Ok, Warships can carry dropships depending on mission design. Dropships get the name from dropping from the jumpship not necessarily dropping into atmosphere.
Observation I hadn't had in over half a decade of gushing about the damn thing: The drive section actually looks wide enough to still serve as a shadow shield when the pods are unfolded. Or maybe I just forgot.
Warships can actually carry drop ships, just the module to carry dropships consumes a ship's mass allowance so smaller warships aren't designed for it. The largest capacity jumpship is actually a warship. A dropship is essentially any ship that drops off a jumpship, carried on the outside. There are also dropshuttles, which are obsolete and have to be carried internally rather than externally and were thus far more limited in size.
14:34 I really wish you would cover the BT:Aerospace tonne problem as well. BT uses tonnes to classify it's mechs which isen't a problem as long as you ignore the sq/cube problem, but in stead of just making an arbitrary rating system for aerospace, the extended the tonnes to aircraft. I try to explain that a 10 tonne aircraft is a big bitch, much less a 100 tonne fighter (boeing 757) nevermind the heaviest fighter ever made (tu-128) only weighed 24.5 tonnes.. meanwhile a 100 tonne BT fighter is a single seater the size of an a wing.. no biggie.
As soon as you started talking about ship names I went to "Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath", but you got to The Culture before I could finish typing it out.
1 The Argo is unarmed it had no weapons at all. The mention of wepons on the argo was from a desine document and was never implemented. 2. The Argo was a compleat creation of Harebrained schemes to get around the technical limits of the unity engine and was retroactively added to cannon by catalyst games
It's a good design though, and the lore they added actually makes a lot of sense. It's a better fit to the IP than the entire Jihad was, though that's not a high bar. As for the weapons, it would carry some, the game not having them is fine because it's a prototype, but in space you NEED some form of point defence just for space rocks.
A friend of mine is working on a sci fi universe of his own, and the Argo was a huge inspiration for how he wanted to do ship design. He loved the transitional pods idea, and having both spin and thrust gravity on a ship seemed like a cool idea to him
Moving parts. Moving parts that hold inhabited portions of the ship . Potentially dangerous point failure source. Especially in a vessel that is likely to be shot at.
They’re glorified door hinges. If a screw coming out threatens the ship in any way, not only are there bigger concerns to be worried about, but they have no business building ships in the first place. That would be a flaw on the existential level of space travel as a concept.
@@ornerylurker8296 Hinges fail . Hinges are a stress point. These particular hinges are supporting many tons. A stress fracture could result in death for many crew.
Yes. Pray tell HOW does a broken hinge kill everybody living inside of sealed, shielded, reinforced, and environmentally self contained canisters entirely independent of said hinges in every way except what bones connect to which others.
@@ornerylurker8296By being ruptured when it tears free? Maybe from hitting other parts of the ship? Of course a smart design wouldn't have *all/most* of the stress on the hinge(s) while under thrust, and would have multiple redundant fasteners.
Fair, I wasn't aware of the exploration use of the Argo but definitely got the FOB side of things that might possibly be able to make a planetary landing if required. Definitely never qualified as a dropship as it lacked both the armour and armament required for the job. Important thing to note about jumpships - they are unarmed by agreement only simply because they cannot be replaced, the factories no longer exist in the Inner Sphere. Meanwhile the Clans never agreed to any of this shit and their jumpships are effectively armed carriers who only don't nuke you from orbit because they consider is to be "dishonourable" (while using tech literally centuries ahead of the Inner Sphere is perfectly reasonable). Also the Taurian Concordat never agreed as they still have armed jumpships and jump capable warships but they got screwed over by the Cappellans so have a simple of approach of saying "Get off my lawn" but making sure it has teeth.
MechWarrior is a series of videogames set in the BattleTech universe, and also the name of the tabletop role-playing system set in the same, which is designed to be interoperable with the rest of the tabletop games in the setting. There are a number of non-atmospheric dropships that aren't capable of landing on planets with any significant atmosphere. Instead, they tend to be used for deliveries to space stations or meetups with other ships in orbit.
If you have not heard of the Sojourn audio series published by the people from the SpaceDock RUclips channel you need to look it up. Other then their FTL the ship designs follow hard sifi rules, their is a lot of back story and world building, and the characters are well written.
Do note that Warships and Jump Ships in the Battletech universe (yes, Dockmaster, that's name of the setting. Mechwarrior refers to both the pilots of the combat dedicated Mechs - the battlemechs - as well as the game where the player gets to play being a Mechwarrior) have the choice of having Grav Decks for the centrifugal gravity. And they even take into account how these Grav Decks are locked into place when Warships that have them are in transit.
Actually, the reason that drop ships and jump ships are never targeted is because they don’t know how to build them anymore so there is a treaty called the treaty of Aries, which prevents any of the major powers that being the inner sphere from destroying them because once they’re gone, they’re gone sort of the same thing with HPG stations which is hyper pulse generators, which is the way they communicate think of AT&T or Mabel the stars deny deny attack treaties that everybody assigned and that if you break those treaties even a mercenary group, you’re pretty much down in persona non grata in the inner sphere
7:10 Something like Red Cross? God please help me... No They are Comstar, yours friendly comunication company. Its even in their slogan "Comstar... Because you have no choice" Nobody will be stupid enought to piss off Comstar, because if you do, you can send your messages by radio and wait few generations for reply, same with travel. If you wanna get somewhere, you need jump ship and nobody else remember how that works anymore. If you want to compare them to something, then Spacing Guild from Dune is probably closest.
ComStar is just the phone company. They don't run FTL trucking, and they'd probably be thrilled if everybody else blew the shit out of each other's JumpShips, because then they _could_ move into that spot. Also, by the early 31st century, ComStar no longer had a monopoly on interstellar communications, even if the alternatives weren't up to the same quality as ComStar's HPGs.
Been a BT player for 35 years. Yes, math is a weird and a "ton" seems to be as much about volume as mass. Warships in Battletech usually have docking collars, as they can't land. It make the dropships more like dropshuttles, but that is pedantic. The Argo is unique in it's classification- it's a warship that is basically without weapons and needing a jumpship herself. There are other "dropships" that are too big/fragile to land, even on a moon, so they use shuttles as lighters. In theory they could dock with another dropship, but not with another dropship and then a jumpship. The Argo is a case of the lore outrunning the rules, which has never happened before... except... AI... Cloning... Ostscout... Exterminator... yeah... it happens a lot.
if i remember a funny thing in BattleTech, there are a few vessels categorized as warships even though they have no weapons and are not equipped with anything even close to combat equipment, but because they have a compact jump drive, its a warship.
For the confusing mess: Battletech is the original tabletop war game, and generally the setting as a whole (plus a couple random video games). Mechwarrior is the spin-off tabletop roleplaying game, and the long running series of sim style video games (plus the abomination of a Wizkids collectable heroclix style game that nearly killed off the entire franchise). Plus you have Aerotech which is the spin-off game for atmospheric and space combat that scales from fighters to warships. I think that's all the -techs...
The Sojourn's Tripathia and other ships would like to have some words... Technically Gundam's Argama also has a similar idea with its extendable centrifuge blocks. Edit: For the LosTECH thing. The idea apparently was mentioned way back in an old 80s era book but was never given rules. And Dropship, Warship, and Jumpship also get their terms from their expected usage and their construction methods.
I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I'd bring it up. Back in either the 60's or 70's I think it was AMC made a really cool model kit, the Pilgrim Explorer.
@@markfergerson2145no that was the Leif Erickson, also known as the UFO Mystery Ship. The Pilgrim Observer was an Apollo related space station/interplanetary explorer. And it was MPC who did the Pilgrim Observer and AMT who did the Leif Erickson
The Childers Series of books by Richard F. Weyand uses starships where the crewed portions of the vessels are cylinders spaced around the ship. The gravity under thrust is down in the cylinders. Once they reach a orbit, the swing out the cylinders 90 degrees to the rest of the hull, interconnect them with tubular passages and rotate the entire ship to provide gravity. Time to leave orbit, fold everything up, and get only way. Only time anyone is in free fall is during the transitions. While complicated, its much simpler to rotate the entire ship then one single section. This design also avoids the whole under thrust vector issues.
Battletech was the original name for the battle chess style of play in Battletech, Areotech and Citytech. Mechwarrior was when the RPGish rules were added to the series. Hopefully that helps settle some of the confusion.
when designing my own forward colony ship I didn't even realize gravity under thrust would even be a problem. Instead I was focusing on the habitation ring being too large to be structurally sound for a very early-generation exploratory vessel, so instead I made 2 general quarters pods each outfitted with a command cupola, and these would rotate on the hardpoints they'd attach to on the arms of the ship, and they'd rotate opposite of each other so the vessel wouldn't deviate from its position/course. I also made it only those pods to reduce the cost of the replacement parts and maintenance. Sure, it'd still take extensive amounts of labor to troubleshoot faults or repair/replace broken parts, but they'd be a lot cheaper to manufacture than if it were a whole habitation ring rotating about the ship's spinal axis. Don't worry, each of the cupolas would each come with their own life support/hydroponics module, which would rotate independently of the "upstairs" living quarters... which now that I think about it that part's unnecessary, and the life support should be part of the same structure as the main living/command module. Oh well, I was building with legos and having fun with it.
@@LAJ-47FC9 That's fair. But the NCC-1701-no-bloody-a-b-c-or-d had a swimming pool. I have to assume the D had one as well, just because it's the luxury cruiseliner of warships.
They had in mission "Events" that would affect your next few missions. One was the hab-pod ring was vibrating or misaligned or something to that sort. And you could either fix it for a moral bonus or ignore it for a penalty. It came up a couple of times when I played through. Funny how they worked that specific complexity into the game.
@@xxxlonewolf49 That's why I like the fan theory that whatsherface science girl is a barely disguised ROM agent collecting data while working as the main engineer.
Battletech does tend to try to make sense with their vehicles. That said, I wonder what the writers were thinking with some of their submarine designs. You see, they have your usual nuclear boats in both fission and fusion flavors and that's well and good. They also have some submarines that run on internal combustion engines which could make some sense as we still have diesel boats that we use for situations where a nuke boat is either too expensive or overkill or whatever. The problem with the Battletech diesel subs? They're not diesel-electrics. They just run straight combustion cycle. This is a problem because sometimes a sub can't exactly operate at surface or snorkel depths so you need to carry an oxidizer on board to run deep. So what did they select for this air-independent propulsion system? High Test Peroxide. Granted, we used HTP towards the end of WWII for the same purposes but those were one-off experimental designs that were fairly quickly abandoned given how HTP has a tendency to be enthusiastically unpleasant compared to running liquid oxygen or other more stable oxidizer sources.
the argo not really an drop ship. it’s an mobile base designed for exploration ships. that’s been retrofitted “that’s why you find different tonage” to do other jobs like support combat mission within an system after being dropped off by an jump ship. or to be used with in a system as an makeshift space station. but it’s not original design for war just old it was from the star league era the highest point of the inter sphere technology age and expansion into solar system
Interesting , Thank You . And to think that in the game , you do a mission to salvage her after she crashed 200 years ago . After the mission , the patron gives the mercinary company the ship to use in missions, and ocasionaly missions for the patron . very brief and compressed . a fun game if you like that type
Honestly Battletech is so wierd about scale in so many places. But as far as surface ships go, the largest I can find are 85 tons which for a Navy ship is really small since destroyers come in at a few thousand (2100 long tonnes for uss Fletcher)
The construction rules allow for up to 300 tons for watercraft. Mind, that may no longer be canon because that same book allowed for BattleMechs as small as 10 tons, and subsequent rules have changed that figure to 20.
I love how I am able to listen to this well thought out video on the Argo. All the while playing the mod "Rogue Tech" for said game. The Dock Master makes a fair point. Why does it seem like so few space fairing ships take a cue from the Argo?
At least in setting, because grav plates were invented. Same goes for halo, where the UNSC and covenant both have artificial gravity. then there are more fantastical settings like star wars. Only settings with hard sci-fi rules in place that need to design ships as skyscrapers to allow gravity under thrust, would designs such as the argo be needed given their extra mechanical complexity when in orbit of a planet, long term.
Would like to hear your indepth thoughts on the Baron, a Destroyer class ship in BattleTech, that fails its role in many ways because of... I'd rather leave more of the fun part to you.
I think the Dockmaster has already mentioned earlier that anime and animated movies in general might be left out of the content at least for now... ...As much as I'd like to see something like the Captain Harlock's Arcadia reviewed, both anime and 3d versions, though especially the 3d one, as it pays so much more attention to the details of the ship's mechanics.
There are in fact a handful of spacecraft designs for interplanetary flight IRL (or hard-er sci-fi) which have gimballed centrifuges akin to those on the Argo. There's a classic model kit called the pilgrim observer which, has some issues in regards to radiation safety, but has its centrifuge arms on pivots such that it can keep down being down in regards to the floor when it does an engine burn (albeit as they're short burns at only a fraction of a gee the arms need not angle down a full 90 degrees). It can be done with centrifuge rings too if sections of them can be rolled to angle right for thrust gravity. There are numerous examples of all of these on the website atomic rockets.
That bit about having 3 folding and rotating habitation modules and what they do depending on thrust or spin 🚀➡ look up the _Pilgrim Observer_ designed by G. Harry Stine of model rocket hobby fame and marketed as a plastic model kit by MPC starting in 1970.
I'm willing to bet it has (had) jump capability before it was crashed on that moon where The Not-so Dread Pirate Miss Nasty found it. They were busy scavenging for stuff and pulled the jump drive parts first because they were the most valuable. They got sold before our intrepid merc's could take over the entire base on with a medium lance. The "pirates" probably also took any weapons that were on it, because they were also pretty valuable on the black market. So yes, OP I agree, and think HBS should have stuck those bits of wisdom in some of the "decision points" in game.
The folding habitation pod was a thing in Zeta gundam in 1985. Admittedly it was a thing on a single ship, the argama, but it was the main characters ship.
I think the rotating hab 'gravity deck' at least is jumpship tech. But the transition to and from thrust gravity just feels like I should have seen it everywhere in sci-fi before without actually being everywhere. I think a gundam series may have done it without a pivot by just pulling stuff in and not pivoting for thrust gravity? A lot of hard sci-fi settings don't seem to treat orbiting with much attention.
The Sojourn (Spacedocks audio drama) actually has multiple ships with almost exactly this set up (mostly warships)! First one that comes to mind is the Tripathia-class third rates.
All the strain of the spinning doesn't need to be taken up by the hinge. You can have clamps that engage once the pods are extended and before you start to spin.
Batteltech is the table top war game, where you strategically control one lance of BattelMechs. Mechwarrior is the TTRPG, where you play a character in the Batteltech universe. About the math, it is best to know just enough to play the game, but not so much as to know what the math represents. The math needs a complete overhaul and rebalancing, but that would take many months of work. People seem to love the game with bad math, so bad math it shall have.
A yes, the great space blimp. I did like the idea of this ship but thought it should have been armed. It did manage most of the issues of gravity and power.
from my understanding they are the same universe. Battletech is the table top game and mechwarrior is the TTRPG. Unless it's morden video games where battletech is the statargey game and mech warrior is the fps
In The Expanse (tv show, not surenin the books), Tycho Station has an outer habitat ring that uses spin gravity when the station is, well stationary. But the station can move and the habitat ring can rotate to orient the decks for thrust gravity.
In the early books it is never mentioned, and if it is mentioned in the show I don't see how it would work with that single massive drum section. Maybe sections of the drum's floor lift up at an angle, like a staircase?
@@MrQuantumInc There's an outer habitat ring around the drum that can change orientation. I don't think it was addressed in the show but was in the BTS lore of the design and I think either BTS footage or channels like Spacedock addressed it.
3:40 Since you didn't ask, I'll explain. It is the Battletech setting. Mechwarrior is a term in universe for a Battlemech''s pilot, as well as the name of the FPS game series in that universe. The SEGA game is an outlier.
The Argo was a late Star League era design and a bit revolutionary. Built in 2762, unfortunately the Star League would basically fall apart due to a coup in 2766 only 4 years later. This is why only one was built because the Succession Wars started and a lot of technology was lost between then and recreation of tech or records of how to engineer some things found in 3028. By the mid 3000s when the game in question takes place the major states were only just starting to manufacture jumpships at a rate of more than a handful a year again, and started building warships once more. They hadn't been able to do that for the last 250 to 300 years because the first targets of massive nuclear strikes in the First (of 4) Succession War was warship capable ship yards. The battletech lore and the history of the human sphere is complex and gets fiddly at times.
System Defense Boat. That’s the term you’re looking for. It’s a non-jump heavy warship that can detach after a jump to defend the jump ship while it recharges. It can also give cover to advancing dropships attached to it. The hatchway problem is solved by airlock corridors. You access it through the top when it’s spinning or through the side when it is folded in. When folded in, the corridor to the top is open to space, only sealing when it folds out. The side hatch is likewise an external airlock when folded out. The problem is going to lie in the rotating section. It can’t be sealed or it couldn’t spin. It also can’t be open, or it would depressurize. It would have to have multiple rings moving at a slower rotation to be able to move personnel through it to the non-spinning portions of the ship, via a gondola that would cross from a ring moving slightly faster or slower than the ring you are on. It would require multiple moving parts being replicated multiple times, like a bearing ring inside a bearing ring inside a bearing ring. Only the farthest inside and outside ring would have the airlock for the gondola to attach to. The gondola would also require an internal structure to allow it to rotate when it neared the gravity of the farthest outside ring, because otherwise the shifting gravity crossing the rings would shift the load of its cargo as made the crossing. That’s a lot of moving parts to have to deal with. If any one part failed, the whole thing would grind to a halt. If one of the center rings seized up, using a gondola between them would be jarring at the least or catastrophic at the worst. It’s definitely an interesting puzzle from an engineering standpoint.
@@SacredCowShipyards That’s what I described. If the hub is spinning, it has to have some sort of conveyance between the moving parts and non-moving parts. If the spinning portion is moving at even 1 km per hour (which might not create 1g), that’s 16 meters per minute or .27 meters per second. It would be jarring, if not impossible, to move cargo or personnel between the sections when it takes 1 second for the outer portion to shift over a little under an imperial foot. You would need a sort of mailbag catch between the sections to move a gondola between the inner and outer pressurized compartments. That would give you a non-moving inner section and a moving outer section, just to make the transfer of material and personnel less dangerous. Stepping down the speed of the rotation with slower-moving rings in the middle would make the transfer smoother, but adds extra moving parts. And that doesn’t even take into account the hook and track mechanism that would transfer the gondola between rings. You would also have to have multiple gondolas moving simultaneously across the middle so that you didn’t have all of them on one side, adding to the engineering nightmare. And then there is the problem of powering the drive in the central rings. They would either need their own power source to operate or find another way to transfer electricity to them. That would create an electrified “third rail” unless they were independently powered. If you used a static discharge as a power source, the center rings would eventually cause a lightning discharge. It would be a giant alternator, constantly giving off a static discharge. That’s probably not the wisest of engineering, but it would look amazing until it grounded out in other portions of the ship or cooked off the motors causing it to spin. It would look like being inside a Tesla coil as you moved between sections.
The hub not only will be at null-g at its core, it can't rotate fast enough to generate 1g, or you'd kill everyone at the rim. Step off, stabilize, move on.
@@SacredCowShipyards the “step off” part is the difficulty. You can’t have an airlock between moving sections. Anything flexible enough to compensate slip won’t be stiff enough to retain pressure. You might be able to cheat by exposing the whole thing to vacuum between them, but you’re still talking about building two separate hulls, connected by the mechanisms that cause the rotation. You’re basically looking at a space station with a separate, attached drive section. Even the slightest gravity at the center of the space station component would hinder getting to the drive section because of the momentum. You might be able to jump at 0.1 g, but what is the diameter of the hub? The size of the machinery and the diameter of the hub would increase the gravity at the top (center) of the spinning section. And all of that still runs into the nightmare scenario of having 1g to rimward of the hub, but the rotation to create that artificial gravity might potentially create gravity on the walls to trailing as a side-effect. And if it is built to have gravity to trailing, the centrifugal force will add additional gravity 90 degrees from “down”. It would be easier to spin the whole ship to reduce the complexity. That would let you focus on the gyroscopic bits to prevent having two “downs”. It’s a good idea, but I don’t think it would work quite as intended. Every problem you solve creates another problem to solve.
If you can find one, I would recommend examining a record player on your planet, specifically one that can run a full 12 inch platter. The specific speed differential between the edge of the pvc - assume it to be 1G-equivalent, for the exercise - and the edge of the sticker will be helpful.
Oh neat. Honestly started thinking I was crazy if no one else seriously considered the concept. Hell, solving the problem of getting in and out of the hinged parts is equally brain dead easy; stick an L bend in the middle of it and extend the ship side opening into an arc. Could probably even get away with just using an umbilical tube hidden in the shadow of the pods. Maintenance is only going to be concerned about keeping the parts mobile and ensuring the integrity of the outer casing anyway. After that you only really have use for an airlock at the far end of the pod that engages with the central hull when fully folded back. It’s just a glorified cargo container on a door hinge after all, no matter how jank the solution is it’s going to be pretty straightforward and cheap. Near as I can tell, the reason it doesn’t appear much is because most sci-fi designers don’t actually care. It’s not as futuristic and fancy as artificial gravity generators and spinning rings. But on the opposite end of the spectrum of design philosophy are people who think ANY complexity is too much and therefore bad and will invariably lead to guaranteed imminent doom. But like,… it’s literally just the equivalent of one of those arctic research and exploration vehicles. It excels in finding novels ways to make even the most mundane features even more pragmatic.
Not true, Tycho Station in The Expanse used both spin and thrust gravity. It had centrifugal hab sections, but they were gimballed so they could be spun down and reoriented so the floors pointed "down" when the station was under thrust to its next job location.
Would meke sense for the rotating pods to have atatchment points at the hinge end to. That way the hinges must only carry the full strain when the ship switches from drive to parking.
The gravity design is kind of similar to the design of the ship in Neil Stephenson's "Anathem." That ship is built like a massive sphere, with other spherical compartments inside. Each compartment is partially filled with water, and the crew live in floating structures within the compartments. This allows it to not only carry a massive water supply for it's crew, but also allows the contents of individual compartments to reorient depending on if the ship is under thrust, or in orbit and using spin gravity. I believe he mentions the hydrodynamics issues with this setup and how long it takes to transition from one state (thrust gravity) to another (spin gravity), but that's not a huge deal as the ship is an inter-universe exploration vessel meant to carry people for generations, not a warship.
One of my favourite all time ships for space exploration, the design would fit almost any sci-fi except the really hardcore hard sci-fi, where the issue of thrust to mass and enough remas would ruin it XD
I have seen a similar folding grav-hab design before (possibly influenced by this, I'm not sure), from an acquaintance I've since lost contact with. He got pretty fucking wild with near future designs. The first one was just a regular Orion Drive battleship. Then came the design I just mentioned, which was a nuclear saltwater rocket. And then he decided to meme on Mike Sparks by designing an ICBM-deliverable M113 Gavin-based drop pod.
The original BattleTech* was a tabletop tactical game and the name BattleTech is typically used for the franchise as a whole. MechWarrior was an RPG released as a companion to the tactical game (Mech pilots are also known as MechWarriors.) For the computer games MechWarrior titles are generally cockpit sims for fighting as a MechWarrior. BatteTech titles are typically anything else, but there are exceptions. *Actually, the first edition was release as BattleDroids. But that name hasn't been used since.
What I've been wondering is with all the advances made in the 21st century, how big would an actual organic crew actually be in the 31st? Wouldn't most of the functions be automated by that point?
The Battletech lore has a period of technological loss. Heavily automated systems would be "lostech" and would require very dedicated and knowledgeable techs to keep functioning. At least in the beginning.
The big thing with the BattleTech universe's tonnage is that huge amounts of materials are replaced with (to us) fantastical super-materials. Mechs are massive, but their tonnage is insanely low for their durability and strength due to being some kind of sci-fi magic metal, which Ferro-Fibrous armor is an upgrade to by being *even lighter* but also needing much more bulky attachment points for its protective value. Additionally, most spaceships are a mix of these super-materials and fairly normal materials, making it head-scratchingly aggravating to try puzzling out why some things are their mass they are, because you have no idea what percentage of ultralight, super-durable super-materials a given ship is made out of; we just know that the outermost layer of most dropships is the same armor used on battlemechs, with REALLY thick layers of insulation sandwiched between that and the internal plating and ducting. Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this is a good or coherent way to figure out masses for these vessels, just explaining the mechanics behind WHY it's so baffling. Not even in-universe character would likely be able to tell you the exact composition (not that it's consistent between vessels anyways, because many of them are repaired in a 'whatever is available' fashion)
@@SacredCowShipyards Indeed you do! For most of the original writers and designers being Engineering students, there is a shocking amount of thought put into cool materials science... and very little into how it would work in the real world. It's a mind-boggling mix of "oh, wow, that'd totally work if you could make that material!" and "there is no way using a material with those properties would have that result." Like... Plasma weapons aren't just 'energy weapons', they actually require ammunition, but since plasma is easy to make from any material you can, well, plasmate, the ammunition is lightweight bricks of high density plastics, making it one of the most affordable weapons in its damage range. But then the LAV Mechs exist and I have to hold my head in my hands at the fact that someone tried to make a VTOL Urbanmech fighter plane. W-what were these people on? And can we get enough to share with the entire class, please?
well gravity decks that reorient for spin or thrust show up in Gundam as early as Zeta Gundam's Argama class (and settings that raid Gundam for notes) and more than a few others.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
To cut to the chase, the Argo can carry a drop ship while being attached to a jump ship via "LosTech". LosTech being the BattleTech version of "A wizard did it."
Seriously the argo is large enough they could have just had an internal hanger big enough to fit a leopard into it. Or used drop shuttles from its two aerospace hangers to deploy mechs
No, LosTech is what happens when, to paraphrase the words of Mr. Tex, 'anything with a production capacity larger than a backyard tool shed or institute of learning larger than a magazine rack becomes a legitimate target for strategic nukes'. The Succession Wars were rather insane.
It’s a twofer or a threefer. One docking clamp for the jumpship and multiple docking clamps for dropships. It isn’t lostech. It’s redundant engineering reinforced to take the strain of a jump on multiple dropship docking clamps. It’s just jumpship engineering on a non-jump ship.
Since it isn’t jumping itself, it can detach at the jump point to defend the jumpship. It will be at full power when the jumpship is effectively dead in the water recharging. It’s a poor man’s jump-capable battleship.
This is likely the middle stage between the jump-capable battleships and the jumpship without any weapons.
Lostech is literally lost tech lol
Is it really that controversial?
It just sounds like "Big ship extend field to smaller ship, but not to another big ship".
Fun fact: GM invented commercially viable fusion engines in the Battletech universe.
Btw, that supposedly happened in 2020 according to the timeline, so they've been hiding it from us for 4 years.
@@StefanAmarisDidNothingWrongThose jerks! Give us our fusion!
@@CptJistuce Unfortunately in this timeline the researcher who invented it died from Covid.
@@FakeSchrodingersCat Dagnabbit!
BattleTech refers to the setting as a whole, and more specifically the mecha shooting at each other especially as the RPG as a battle simulation.
MechWarrior was the character level RPG.
Beyond that, the computer game names are all over the place.
Till the recent RPG system "BattleTech: A Time of War"
yeah, the BattleTech video game itself is almost exclusively about the mech combat, it leaves out all the other important things
In the game the Argo is a former exploration vessel, a mobile space station would be more accurate. Never intended for anything resembling combat .
I -demand- _request_ a deep dive in the whole Boeing fiasco. I would expect the dockmaster to have some insight into that.
Here! Here!
That reminds me. I'm gonna have to rewatch his Titanic submarine talk.
Well Boeing can't make the dock master have an accidental suicide, bit they might do something about it's connection to our internet.
Holy crap, that'll be brutal.....I'll fetch the popcorn.
@@blackc1479 Considering the Dockmaster's mechanical nature I suspect he'd be more happy with mixed _nuts._
The specifically Naval AC-10 is different from normal AC-10 in that the NAC-10 is essentially an AC-100 by standard damage scaling.
The Latin script actually DOES exist in Star Wars, called "High Galactic" it was an outdated language mostly used by nobility which is why it most often snuck in at Imperial installations and for ship names that were meant to sound fancy or exotic, like how companies name cars
And the greek stuff is Tionese if I remember.
Right up until George Lucas released the Special Editions and replaced the instances of it with the standard Aurebesh.
And the Greek Alphabet is Tionese. We need to make him read the full epic poem of Xim the Despot
Reminds me of High Gothic being English in Warhammer 40k.
@@FrederickApollyon
English is a strain of low gothic. High Gothic is really awful latin reverse engineered from science textbooks
The K-F drive doesn't need to be "above" or "below" the star. It's just it's the usual best place to pop in. Near the plane of orbit has random stuff around that can hit the ship (and attached boats). Also jumping into any mass is a *bad thing* (tm).
Other places that are kinda decent places to jump into are "pirate" points which are basically LaGrange points.
Final point; when jumping into a system at one of the normal points you usually couldn't come in closer than about Jupiter's orbit. Pirate points could drop you in closer in, relatively close to a planet you want to go too. But some have junk there that can, again, make your day be bad
With Battletech (2018) set in the year 3025 there are 4 big reasons, why not more of those ships where constructed, the Amaris Civil War (2766-2779) and the first three succession wars following it. The Argo is an experimental design from 2762, starting its shake down in only 3 years before the civil war.
The Inner Sphere lost much of its technical advancement during it, also called Lostech.
The art at 4:00 makes me think the ship is named ARG(zero) because the O/0 is narrower than the other letters of the font.
The Battletech classification system is a little counterintuitive if you're used to other settings - it basically comes down to how you FTL.
If you use a regular K-F Drive, you are a JumpShip.
If you use a Compact K-F Drive, you are a WarShip. Yes, even if you are unarmed.
If you use a docking collar to piggyback on a JumpShip or WarShip, you are a DropShip.
And if you land in a smallcraft bay rather than using a docking collar, you're a shuttle. And some of the oldest Jumpships had a detachable KF drive, and they'd come into the system, get loaded by dropshuttles, then go back, bolt the KF drive back on, and hope it didn't jump away without them. Dropships were a quantum leap in safety.
The Argo is a Drop ship that carries another Drop ship.
See, not confusing at all!
@@patrickkenyon2326 which you technically couldn't do normally before the video game came out, so when canonizing the main game the product line developers had the Argo using a one-off piece of technology that ultimately couldn't increase the dropship capacity of a Jumpship, but rather offset the downside of many larger Dropships physically blocking other Docking Collars.
@@logion567 I just assumed the Argo was meant to carry a Fighter, not a Leopard.
@@tenchraven From what I read early jumpships normally would have been classified as warships (transit drives and KF drives (which has to be compact considering normal KF drives take 90% of jumpships and does not really allow transit drives))
The Argo solution to simulated gravity is similar to how it was done in the novel Project Hail Mary by: Andy Weir. The Hail Mary used thrust to create artificial gravity while traveling to its location, once there it stopped its engines and used spin to create artificial gravity.
Ships in Ian Douglas books use the same methodology, although often with a huge "mushroom cap" of water storage as shielding against relativistic velocities.
The changeable configuration with swing hab modules, folded down when under constant thrust, swing out then spin, and when not under constant thrust was done in Jovian chronicles also. around about the mid 90's.
And more recently by The Sojourn (Spacedocks audio drama, although it has it's own channel now too).
Boeing:
Explains why the whole ship had to be rebuilt throughout the game.
I mean it DID crash into a moon, that didn't help in terms of what needed to be repaired.
@@Destroyer_V0 IIRC it wasn't _crashed,_ but rather landed quite hard. And than continued to decay durung decades (if not centuries) of neglect.
In one of my favored bit of lore I think from the book A mote in god's eye was that to deal with this problem they made the concept of "floor" relative. In motion the "floor" was aftward. On station it was outboard. Within various spaces most equipment, bunks, desks, etc could swing or be moved easily. So spaces had large vaulted ceilings near one wall to be later used as floor space.
Ah, such a beautiful ship. I kept a wallpaper of her after playing the game. Staring at the pods slowly spinning is just relaxing
I love the in-universe backstory behind the Culture's "Gravitas" running gag: another race criticized Culture ships for not having names with enough gravitas. The Culture shipmasters and Minds took that personally.
"Nope, no gravitas here" is a named ship.
The battletech warships can carry dropships too like the potemkin class troop cruiser with 25 dropship collars or the mckenna class battleship with 6 dropship collars, and it was also for tactical purposes too since most large warships didn't carry much anti aerospace fighter weapons on-board, that was the assault dropships job to not just carry troops dirt side but also escort warships in system between jumps
Dropship as a term in Battletech actually refers to any ship that lacks it's own FTL drive. They dock with large, FTL-capable Jumpships, go through FTL, and are "dropped" off at the destination. Their ability to land on a planet (or lack thereof) is irrelevant.
Came here to say the same thing, albeit with more punctuation. In my youth, I built a whole SLDF patrol group, down to the dropships and carried cargo. Ran to something like 30 pages on my old dot-matrix print outs. One McKenna, one potempkin, two texases, and a whole slew of smaller warships. Even had the regiments of battlemechs, armored companies, etc. 300 and some odd total craft counting dropships. My potempkin corn cob always had pride of place right behind the flagship.
@@johnathan651 Nah, DropShips have to carry a K-F boom to interface with the JumpShip's core. Without that, _bad_ things happen to whatever is attached to the docking collars. The game just doesn't spend much time looking at ships that can't leave the system that built them.
Pretty sure that the larger franchise is called Battletech and Mechwarrior is a brand within that franchise referring to specific games and books under the Battletech brand.
Warships in BattleTech can have and jump with dropships, they can not move under thrust until the dropships detach or the docking collars get crunched.
Warships can mount K-F hardpoints, but many don't. the Potemkin troop cruiser, for example, can transit with 25 dropships.
As a KF tech and theoretical KF professor, we don’t talk about the Argo. She just starts breaking physics like a Federation science team in a tight spot. So the Argo is a hero ship. A station that can move at 1g for days.
To be fair to the Argo, all ships in Battletech have extreme efficiency fusion thrusters. Both the Leopard you use as a landing craft, and the big egg ships that mech companies like to use as a home base, can pull off the same physics hacks with their delta-V.
For reference, dropships are dropped off the jumpship when the jumpship arrives in system. That's the point they become a dropship. The Argo is not the only dropship that can't make planetfall, there's an entire class, the behemoth class, that are basically big slow cargo bubbles.
Ok,
Warships can carry dropships depending on mission design.
Dropships get the name from dropping from the jumpship not necessarily dropping into atmosphere.
Observation I hadn't had in over half a decade of gushing about the damn thing: The drive section actually looks wide enough to still serve as a shadow shield when the pods are unfolded.
Or maybe I just forgot.
Warships can actually carry drop ships, just the module to carry dropships consumes a ship's mass allowance so smaller warships aren't designed for it. The largest capacity jumpship is actually a warship.
A dropship is essentially any ship that drops off a jumpship, carried on the outside.
There are also dropshuttles, which are obsolete and have to be carried internally rather than externally and were thus far more limited in size.
14:34 I really wish you would cover the BT:Aerospace tonne problem as well. BT uses tonnes to classify it's mechs which isen't a problem as long as you ignore the sq/cube problem, but in stead of just making an arbitrary rating system for aerospace, the extended the tonnes to aircraft. I try to explain that a 10 tonne aircraft is a big bitch, much less a 100 tonne fighter (boeing 757) nevermind the heaviest fighter ever made (tu-128) only weighed 24.5 tonnes.. meanwhile a 100 tonne BT fighter is a single seater the size of an a wing.. no biggie.
oh many warships and even some jumps do have similar habitat pods but it’s internal to keep them protected.
As soon as you started talking about ship names I went to "Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath", but you got to The Culture before I could finish typing it out.
1 The Argo is unarmed it had no weapons at all. The mention of wepons on the argo was from a desine document and was never implemented.
2. The Argo was a compleat creation of Harebrained schemes to get around the technical limits of the unity engine and was retroactively added to cannon by catalyst games
It's a good design though, and the lore they added actually makes a lot of sense. It's a better fit to the IP than the entire Jihad was, though that's not a high bar. As for the weapons, it would carry some, the game not having them is fine because it's a prototype, but in space you NEED some form of point defence just for space rocks.
A friend of mine is working on a sci fi universe of his own, and the Argo was a huge inspiration for how he wanted to do ship design. He loved the transitional pods idea, and having both spin and thrust gravity on a ship seemed like a cool idea to him
Moving parts.
Moving parts that hold inhabited portions of the ship .
Potentially dangerous point failure source.
Especially in a vessel that is likely to be shot at.
They’re glorified door hinges. If a screw coming out threatens the ship in any way, not only are there bigger concerns to be worried about, but they have no business building ships in the first place. That would be a flaw on the existential level of space travel as a concept.
@@ornerylurker8296 Hinges fail .
Hinges are a stress point.
These particular hinges are supporting many tons.
A stress fracture could result in death for many crew.
Yes. Pray tell HOW does a broken hinge kill everybody living inside of sealed, shielded, reinforced, and environmentally self contained canisters entirely independent of said hinges in every way except what bones connect to which others.
@@ornerylurker8296By being ruptured when it tears free? Maybe from hitting other parts of the ship? Of course a smart design wouldn't have *all/most* of the stress on the hinge(s) while under thrust, and would have multiple redundant fasteners.
Fair, I wasn't aware of the exploration use of the Argo but definitely got the FOB side of things that might possibly be able to make a planetary landing if required. Definitely never qualified as a dropship as it lacked both the armour and armament required for the job.
Important thing to note about jumpships - they are unarmed by agreement only simply because they cannot be replaced, the factories no longer exist in the Inner Sphere. Meanwhile the Clans never agreed to any of this shit and their jumpships are effectively armed carriers who only don't nuke you from orbit because they consider is to be "dishonourable" (while using tech literally centuries ahead of the Inner Sphere is perfectly reasonable).
Also the Taurian Concordat never agreed as they still have armed jumpships and jump capable warships but they got screwed over by the Cappellans so have a simple of approach of saying "Get off my lawn" but making sure it has teeth.
Just went back to playing this game the other day. The in game animations do a good job of capturing everything that you discussed.
" land on its tail as god and Heinlein intended"
So very true
MechWarrior is a series of videogames set in the BattleTech universe, and also the name of the tabletop role-playing system set in the same, which is designed to be interoperable with the rest of the tabletop games in the setting.
There are a number of non-atmospheric dropships that aren't capable of landing on planets with any significant atmosphere. Instead, they tend to be used for deliveries to space stations or meetups with other ships in orbit.
This sistem is used in the sci-fi Audio Drama series Sojourn, specifically on the Tripathia Class Tird-Rate Ship of the Line.
If you have not heard of the Sojourn audio series published by the people from the SpaceDock RUclips channel you need to look it up. Other then their FTL the ship designs follow hard sifi rules, their is a lot of back story and world building, and the characters are well written.
Ah, I was wondering how far I would have to scroll to find a Sojourn comment. The answer: way too far!
Do note that Warships and Jump Ships in the Battletech universe (yes, Dockmaster, that's name of the setting. Mechwarrior refers to both the pilots of the combat dedicated Mechs - the battlemechs - as well as the game where the player gets to play being a Mechwarrior) have the choice of having Grav Decks for the centrifugal gravity. And they even take into account how these Grav Decks are locked into place when Warships that have them are in transit.
Actually, the reason that drop ships and jump ships are never targeted is because they don’t know how to build them anymore so there is a treaty called the treaty of Aries, which prevents any of the major powers that being the inner sphere from destroying them because once they’re gone, they’re gone sort of the same thing with HPG stations which is hyper pulse generators, which is the way they communicate think of AT&T or Mabel the stars deny deny attack treaties that everybody assigned and that if you break those treaties even a mercenary group, you’re pretty much down in persona non grata in the inner sphere
DropShips are fair game; JumpShips are sacrosanct. At least since the last shipyard for them went boom a few centuries back.
7:10 Something like Red Cross? God please help me... No They are Comstar, yours friendly comunication company. Its even in their slogan "Comstar... Because you have no choice" Nobody will be stupid enought to piss off Comstar, because if you do, you can send your messages by radio and wait few generations for reply, same with travel. If you wanna get somewhere, you need jump ship and nobody else remember how that works anymore. If you want to compare them to something, then Spacing Guild from Dune is probably closest.
ComStar is just the phone company. They don't run FTL trucking, and they'd probably be thrilled if everybody else blew the shit out of each other's JumpShips, because then they _could_ move into that spot.
Also, by the early 31st century, ComStar no longer had a monopoly on interstellar communications, even if the alternatives weren't up to the same quality as ComStar's HPGs.
That is a really smart solution, I am surprised nobody else has adopted it.
Been a BT player for 35 years. Yes, math is a weird and a "ton" seems to be as much about volume as mass. Warships in Battletech usually have docking collars, as they can't land. It make the dropships more like dropshuttles, but that is pedantic. The Argo is unique in it's classification- it's a warship that is basically without weapons and needing a jumpship herself. There are other "dropships" that are too big/fragile to land, even on a moon, so they use shuttles as lighters. In theory they could dock with another dropship, but not with another dropship and then a jumpship. The Argo is a case of the lore outrunning the rules, which has never happened before... except... AI... Cloning... Ostscout... Exterminator... yeah... it happens a lot.
Hey, if Pan Am flies people to the space station in 2001, Boeing surely will stay around to make starships in 3000 and change.
Alot of warships come with Docking collars for dropships aswell
Technically the Argo drops stuff from a jump point into planetary orbit. She just can't "drop" into atmosphere.
It mobile space station it has 3 dock 1begin for docking jump ship
if i remember a funny thing in BattleTech, there are a few vessels categorized as warships even though they have no weapons and are not equipped with anything even close to combat equipment, but because they have a compact jump drive, its a warship.
For the confusing mess: Battletech is the original tabletop war game, and generally the setting as a whole (plus a couple random video games). Mechwarrior is the spin-off tabletop roleplaying game, and the long running series of sim style video games (plus the abomination of a Wizkids collectable heroclix style game that nearly killed off the entire franchise). Plus you have Aerotech which is the spin-off game for atmospheric and space combat that scales from fighters to warships. I think that's all the -techs...
It's the Battledroids universe.
Between george lucas and harmony gold, FASA couldn't catch a break.
Battletech timeline has already diverged in 1988 where the USSR collapsed in BT universe.
The Sojourn's Tripathia and other ships would like to have some words...
Technically Gundam's Argama also has a similar idea with its extendable centrifuge blocks.
Edit: For the LosTECH thing. The idea apparently was mentioned way back in an old 80s era book but was never given rules.
And Dropship, Warship, and Jumpship also get their terms from their expected usage and their construction methods.
I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I'd bring it up. Back in either the 60's or 70's I think it was AMC made a really cool model kit, the Pilgrim Explorer.
Was that the one with its own little shuttle with a nose reminiscent of a duck’s beak?
That was a great model kit.
I believe it's referred to as the pilgrim observer
@@markfergerson2145no that was the Leif Erickson, also known as the UFO Mystery Ship.
The Pilgrim Observer was an Apollo related space station/interplanetary explorer.
And it was MPC who did the Pilgrim Observer and AMT who did the Leif Erickson
@@JimmyBlether I think you're right. I've seen pictures of it a few times, my dad says he thinks he had it back in the day.
The Childers Series of books by Richard F. Weyand uses starships where the crewed portions of the vessels are cylinders spaced around the ship. The gravity under thrust is down in the cylinders. Once they reach a orbit, the swing out the cylinders 90 degrees to the rest of the hull, interconnect them with tubular passages and rotate the entire ship to provide gravity. Time to leave orbit, fold everything up, and get only way. Only time anyone is in free fall is during the transitions. While complicated, its much simpler to rotate the entire ship then one single section. This design also avoids the whole under thrust vector issues.
Battletech was the original name for the battle chess style of play in Battletech, Areotech and Citytech. Mechwarrior was when the RPGish rules were added to the series. Hopefully that helps settle some of the confusion.
when designing my own forward colony ship I didn't even realize gravity under thrust would even be a problem. Instead I was focusing on the habitation ring being too large to be structurally sound for a very early-generation exploratory vessel, so instead I made 2 general quarters pods each outfitted with a command cupola, and these would rotate on the hardpoints they'd attach to on the arms of the ship, and they'd rotate opposite of each other so the vessel wouldn't deviate from its position/course. I also made it only those pods to reduce the cost of the replacement parts and maintenance. Sure, it'd still take extensive amounts of labor to troubleshoot faults or repair/replace broken parts, but they'd be a lot cheaper to manufacture than if it were a whole habitation ring rotating about the ship's spinal axis.
Don't worry, each of the cupolas would each come with their own life support/hydroponics module, which would rotate independently of the "upstairs" living quarters... which now that I think about it that part's unnecessary, and the life support should be part of the same structure as the main living/command module. Oh well, I was building with legos and having fun with it.
It's a portable moon base!
I saw the Argo as something like a space-floating dock or barracks ship
Probably one of my favourite ships in sci-fi, and not just for the practicality. Does the Enterprise have a swimming pool? Does Voyager?
Actually, the Enterprise DOES! The Enterprise D goes one step farther and has entire decks flooded for aquatic crew.
@@CptJistuce Cetacean Ops doesn't count, it's not a recreational space. Desperately covering for forgetting about Cetacean Ops? No, surely not.
@@LAJ-47FC9 That's fair. But the NCC-1701-no-bloody-a-b-c-or-d had a swimming pool. I have to assume the D had one as well, just because it's the luxury cruiseliner of warships.
@@CptJistuce ... I knew the OG had a bowling alley, but a pool? Okay, wow.
The sun deck was immediately astern of the deflector dish.
I'm sure it was fine.
They had in mission "Events" that would affect your next few missions.
One was the hab-pod ring was vibrating or misaligned or something to that sort. And you could either fix it for a moral bonus or ignore it for a penalty. It came up a couple of times when I played through.
Funny how they worked that specific complexity into the game.
If the Argo had more weapons...she'd be reaching warships area & summoning ComStar to fuck it up...take it or destroy it.
The Argo was Star League era and had a data base full of lost Star League facilities, Comstar is going to want it anyway.
@@jlokison but didn't...because catalyst sucks & doesn't know the basic lore.
@@xxxlonewolf49 That's why I like the fan theory that whatsherface science girl is a barely disguised ROM agent collecting data while working as the main engineer.
ruclips.net/video/Tv_zfZ09d4w/видео.html
@@jlokison make more sense than most of the in game pilots AI that have zero care for their own lives
Battletech does tend to try to make sense with their vehicles. That said, I wonder what the writers were thinking with some of their submarine designs. You see, they have your usual nuclear boats in both fission and fusion flavors and that's well and good. They also have some submarines that run on internal combustion engines which could make some sense as we still have diesel boats that we use for situations where a nuke boat is either too expensive or overkill or whatever. The problem with the Battletech diesel subs? They're not diesel-electrics. They just run straight combustion cycle. This is a problem because sometimes a sub can't exactly operate at surface or snorkel depths so you need to carry an oxidizer on board to run deep. So what did they select for this air-independent propulsion system? High Test Peroxide. Granted, we used HTP towards the end of WWII for the same purposes but those were one-off experimental designs that were fairly quickly abandoned given how HTP has a tendency to be enthusiastically unpleasant compared to running liquid oxygen or other more stable oxidizer sources.
Battletech drop ships don't drop cargo on a planet, they drop off of jumpships.
the argo not really an drop ship. it’s an mobile base designed for exploration ships. that’s been retrofitted “that’s why you find different tonage” to do other jobs like support combat mission within an system after being dropped off by an jump ship. or to be used with in a system as an makeshift space station. but it’s not original design for war just old it was from the star league era the highest point of the inter sphere technology age and expansion into solar system
Interesting , Thank You . And to think that in the game , you do a mission to salvage her after she crashed 200 years ago . After the mission , the patron gives the mercinary company the ship to use in missions, and ocasionaly missions for the patron . very brief and compressed . a fun game if you like that type
Honestly Battletech is so wierd about scale in so many places. But as far as surface ships go, the largest I can find are 85 tons which for a Navy ship is really small since destroyers come in at a few thousand (2100 long tonnes for uss Fletcher)
The construction rules allow for up to 300 tons for watercraft. Mind, that may no longer be canon because that same book allowed for BattleMechs as small as 10 tons, and subsequent rules have changed that figure to 20.
Battletech doesnt really do surface ship there a thing but aerospace Fighter going to make pop fast
I love how I am able to listen to this well thought out video on the Argo. All the while playing the mod "Rogue Tech" for said game.
The Dock Master makes a fair point. Why does it seem like so few space fairing ships take a cue from the Argo?
At least in setting, because grav plates were invented. Same goes for halo, where the UNSC and covenant both have artificial gravity. then there are more fantastical settings like star wars.
Only settings with hard sci-fi rules in place that need to design ships as skyscrapers to allow gravity under thrust, would designs such as the argo be needed given their extra mechanical complexity when in orbit of a planet, long term.
Would like to hear your indepth thoughts on the Baron, a Destroyer class ship in BattleTech, that fails its role in many ways because of... I'd rather leave more of the fun part to you.
I suggest looking at Space Battleship Yamato in the anime both the classic and reboot versions again, because there's alot that you're missing.
I think the Dockmaster has already mentioned earlier that anime and animated movies in general might be left out of the content at least for now...
...As much as I'd like to see something like the Captain Harlock's Arcadia reviewed, both anime and 3d versions, though especially the 3d one, as it pays so much more attention to the details of the ship's mechanics.
There are in fact a handful of spacecraft designs for interplanetary flight IRL (or hard-er sci-fi) which have gimballed centrifuges akin to those on the Argo.
There's a classic model kit called the pilgrim observer which, has some issues in regards to radiation safety, but has its centrifuge arms on pivots such that it can keep down being down in regards to the floor when it does an engine burn (albeit as they're short burns at only a fraction of a gee the arms need not angle down a full 90 degrees).
It can be done with centrifuge rings too if sections of them can be rolled to angle right for thrust gravity. There are numerous examples of all of these on the website atomic rockets.
That bit about having 3 folding and rotating habitation modules and what they do depending on thrust or spin 🚀➡ look up the _Pilgrim Observer_ designed by G. Harry Stine of model rocket hobby fame and marketed as a plastic model kit by MPC starting in 1970.
No One will ever convince me the Argo isn't supposed to be a JumpShip
I'm willing to bet it has (had) jump capability before it was crashed on that moon where The Not-so Dread Pirate Miss Nasty found it. They were busy scavenging for stuff and pulled the jump drive parts first because they were the most valuable. They got sold before our intrepid merc's could take over the entire base on with a medium lance. The "pirates" probably also took any weapons that were on it, because they were also pretty valuable on the black market. So yes, OP I agree, and think HBS should have stuck those bits of wisdom in some of the "decision points" in game.
@@gofoats I'm willing to accept it wasn't a military WarShip but ya Pirates selling a Jump drive on a salvaged ship would make sense
Hey that's something I did in ksp and Just generally thinking about the problem of how do you do a long term ship.
The folding habitation pod was a thing in Zeta gundam in 1985. Admittedly it was a thing on a single ship, the argama, but it was the main characters ship.
Actually at this point Battletech is an Alt History because...where tf are my nuclear fusion reactors GM?
They're waiting to unveil them with some early mark Bolo.
I think the rotating hab 'gravity deck' at least is jumpship tech. But the transition to and from thrust gravity just feels like I should have seen it everywhere in sci-fi before without actually being everywhere. I think a gundam series may have done it without a pivot by just pulling stuff in and not pivoting for thrust gravity? A lot of hard sci-fi settings don't seem to treat orbiting with much attention.
The Sojourn (Spacedocks audio drama) actually has multiple ships with almost exactly this set up (mostly warships)! First one that comes to mind is the Tripathia-class third rates.
All the strain of the spinning doesn't need to be taken up by the hinge. You can have clamps that engage once the pods are extended and before you start to spin.
Batteltech is the table top war game, where you strategically control one lance of BattelMechs.
Mechwarrior is the TTRPG, where you play a character in the Batteltech universe.
About the math, it is best to know just enough to play the game, but not so much as to know what the math represents. The math needs a complete overhaul and rebalancing, but that would take many months of work. People seem to love the game with bad math, so bad math it shall have.
A yes, the great space blimp. I did like the idea of this ship but thought it should have been armed. It did manage most of the issues of gravity and power.
DP9 game "The Jovian Chronicles" is pretty cool, a lot of the larger spaceships have a similar swinging habit pods
from my understanding they are the same universe. Battletech is the table top game and mechwarrior is the TTRPG. Unless it's morden video games where battletech is the statargey game and mech warrior is the fps
In The Expanse (tv show, not surenin the books), Tycho Station has an outer habitat ring that uses spin gravity when the station is, well stationary. But the station can move and the habitat ring can rotate to orient the decks for thrust gravity.
In the early books it is never mentioned, and if it is mentioned in the show I don't see how it would work with that single massive drum section. Maybe sections of the drum's floor lift up at an angle, like a staircase?
@@MrQuantumInc There's an outer habitat ring around the drum that can change orientation. I don't think it was addressed in the show but was in the BTS lore of the design and I think either BTS footage or channels like Spacedock addressed it.
@@MrQuantumInc ruclips.net/video/dqJfQsWgseM/видео.htmlsi=APJLmO_BN_ZY8Cy0
Spacedock's breakdown
3:40 Since you didn't ask, I'll explain. It is the Battletech setting. Mechwarrior is a term in universe for a Battlemech''s pilot, as well as the name of the FPS game series in that universe. The SEGA game is an outlier.
The Argo was a late Star League era design and a bit revolutionary. Built in 2762, unfortunately the Star League would basically fall apart due to a coup in 2766 only 4 years later. This is why only one was built because the Succession Wars started and a lot of technology was lost between then and recreation of tech or records of how to engineer some things found in 3028.
By the mid 3000s when the game in question takes place the major states were only just starting to manufacture jumpships at a rate of more than a handful a year again, and started building warships once more. They hadn't been able to do that for the last 250 to 300 years because the first targets of massive nuclear strikes in the First (of 4) Succession War was warship capable ship yards.
The battletech lore and the history of the human sphere is complex and gets fiddly at times.
System Defense Boat. That’s the term you’re looking for. It’s a non-jump heavy warship that can detach after a jump to defend the jump ship while it recharges. It can also give cover to advancing dropships attached to it.
The hatchway problem is solved by airlock corridors. You access it through the top when it’s spinning or through the side when it is folded in. When folded in, the corridor to the top is open to space, only sealing when it folds out. The side hatch is likewise an external airlock when folded out.
The problem is going to lie in the rotating section. It can’t be sealed or it couldn’t spin. It also can’t be open, or it would depressurize. It would have to have multiple rings moving at a slower rotation to be able to move personnel through it to the non-spinning portions of the ship, via a gondola that would cross from a ring moving slightly faster or slower than the ring you are on. It would require multiple moving parts being replicated multiple times, like a bearing ring inside a bearing ring inside a bearing ring. Only the farthest inside and outside ring would have the airlock for the gondola to attach to. The gondola would also require an internal structure to allow it to rotate when it neared the gravity of the farthest outside ring, because otherwise the shifting gravity crossing the rings would shift the load of its cargo as made the crossing.
That’s a lot of moving parts to have to deal with. If any one part failed, the whole thing would grind to a halt. If one of the center rings seized up, using a gondola between them would be jarring at the least or catastrophic at the worst.
It’s definitely an interesting puzzle from an engineering standpoint.
Or just only transfer things in the hub.
@@SacredCowShipyards That’s what I described. If the hub is spinning, it has to have some sort of conveyance between the moving parts and non-moving parts. If the spinning portion is moving at even 1 km per hour (which might not create 1g), that’s 16 meters per minute or .27 meters per second. It would be jarring, if not impossible, to move cargo or personnel between the sections when it takes 1 second for the outer portion to shift over a little under an imperial foot.
You would need a sort of mailbag catch between the sections to move a gondola between the inner and outer pressurized compartments. That would give you a non-moving inner section and a moving outer section, just to make the transfer of material and personnel less dangerous. Stepping down the speed of the rotation with slower-moving rings in the middle would make the transfer smoother, but adds extra moving parts. And that doesn’t even take into account the hook and track mechanism that would transfer the gondola between rings. You would also have to have multiple gondolas moving simultaneously across the middle so that you didn’t have all of them on one side, adding to the engineering nightmare.
And then there is the problem of powering the drive in the central rings. They would either need their own power source to operate or find another way to transfer electricity to them. That would create an electrified “third rail” unless they were independently powered. If you used a static discharge as a power source, the center rings would eventually cause a lightning discharge. It would be a giant alternator, constantly giving off a static discharge. That’s probably not the wisest of engineering, but it would look amazing until it grounded out in other portions of the ship or cooked off the motors causing it to spin. It would look like being inside a Tesla coil as you moved between sections.
The hub not only will be at null-g at its core, it can't rotate fast enough to generate 1g, or you'd kill everyone at the rim. Step off, stabilize, move on.
@@SacredCowShipyards the “step off” part is the difficulty. You can’t have an airlock between moving sections. Anything flexible enough to compensate slip won’t be stiff enough to retain pressure. You might be able to cheat by exposing the whole thing to vacuum between them, but you’re still talking about building two separate hulls, connected by the mechanisms that cause the rotation.
You’re basically looking at a space station with a separate, attached drive section. Even the slightest gravity at the center of the space station component would hinder getting to the drive section because of the momentum. You might be able to jump at 0.1 g, but what is the diameter of the hub? The size of the machinery and the diameter of the hub would increase the gravity at the top (center) of the spinning section.
And all of that still runs into the nightmare scenario of having 1g to rimward of the hub, but the rotation to create that artificial gravity might potentially create gravity on the walls to trailing as a side-effect. And if it is built to have gravity to trailing, the centrifugal force will add additional gravity 90 degrees from “down”.
It would be easier to spin the whole ship to reduce the complexity. That would let you focus on the gyroscopic bits to prevent having two “downs”.
It’s a good idea, but I don’t think it would work quite as intended. Every problem you solve creates another problem to solve.
If you can find one, I would recommend examining a record player on your planet, specifically one that can run a full 12 inch platter.
The specific speed differential between the edge of the pvc - assume it to be 1G-equivalent, for the exercise - and the edge of the sticker will be helpful.
I am excited for your level of pedantry to take on this universe.
I'm fairly certain the dockmaster here is only jealous of the crushing ability that massive stompy robots have.
The output is so... inelegant, though.
@@SacredCowShipyards Fair point.
Oh neat. Honestly started thinking I was crazy if no one else seriously considered the concept. Hell, solving the problem of getting in and out of the hinged parts is equally brain dead easy; stick an L bend in the middle of it and extend the ship side opening into an arc. Could probably even get away with just using an umbilical tube hidden in the shadow of the pods. Maintenance is only going to be concerned about keeping the parts mobile and ensuring the integrity of the outer casing anyway. After that you only really have use for an airlock at the far end of the pod that engages with the central hull when fully folded back. It’s just a glorified cargo container on a door hinge after all, no matter how jank the solution is it’s going to be pretty straightforward and cheap.
Near as I can tell, the reason it doesn’t appear much is because most sci-fi designers don’t actually care. It’s not as futuristic and fancy as artificial gravity generators and spinning rings. But on the opposite end of the spectrum of design philosophy are people who think ANY complexity is too much and therefore bad and will invariably lead to guaranteed imminent doom.
But like,… it’s literally just the equivalent of one of those arctic research and exploration vehicles. It excels in finding novels ways to make even the most mundane features even more pragmatic.
The Sojourn!
The Sojourn audio drama has ships with similar systems.
7:00 an evil red cross.
I wonder if BT's Boeing is still updating B-52's.
Out in the periphery, anything's possible.
Not true, Tycho Station in The Expanse used both spin and thrust gravity. It had centrifugal hab sections, but they were gimballed so they could be spun down and reoriented so the floors pointed "down" when the station was under thrust to its next job location.
Would meke sense for the rotating pods to have atatchment points at the hinge end to.
That way the hinges must only carry the full strain when the ship switches from drive to parking.
The gravity design is kind of similar to the design of the ship in Neil Stephenson's "Anathem."
That ship is built like a massive sphere, with other spherical compartments inside. Each compartment is partially filled with water, and the crew live in floating structures within the compartments. This allows it to not only carry a massive water supply for it's crew, but also allows the contents of individual compartments to reorient depending on if the ship is under thrust, or in orbit and using spin gravity.
I believe he mentions the hydrodynamics issues with this setup and how long it takes to transition from one state (thrust gravity) to another (spin gravity), but that's not a huge deal as the ship is an inter-universe exploration vessel meant to carry people for generations, not a warship.
Talking modern releases MechWarrior is considered a spin-off series of the BattleTech wargame
One of my favourite all time ships for space exploration, the design would fit almost any sci-fi except the really hardcore hard sci-fi, where the issue of thrust to mass and enough remas would ruin it XD
Also heat dispersal.
I have seen a similar folding grav-hab design before (possibly influenced by this, I'm not sure), from an acquaintance I've since lost contact with. He got pretty fucking wild with near future designs. The first one was just a regular Orion Drive battleship. Then came the design I just mentioned, which was a nuclear saltwater rocket. And then he decided to meme on Mike Sparks by designing an ICBM-deliverable M113 Gavin-based drop pod.
A ballistic Gavin? Fucking legendary.
@@ornerylurker8296 Truly, a battletaxi meant for a helldiver.
The original BattleTech* was a tabletop tactical game and the name BattleTech is typically used for the franchise as a whole. MechWarrior was an RPG released as a companion to the tactical game (Mech pilots are also known as MechWarriors.)
For the computer games MechWarrior titles are generally cockpit sims for fighting as a MechWarrior. BatteTech titles are typically anything else, but there are exceptions.
*Actually, the first edition was release as BattleDroids. But that name hasn't been used since.
What I've been wondering is with all the advances made in the 21st century, how big would an actual organic crew actually be in the 31st? Wouldn't most of the functions be automated by that point?
The Battletech lore has a period of technological loss. Heavily automated systems would be "lostech" and would require very dedicated and knowledgeable techs to keep functioning. At least in the beginning.
The big thing with the BattleTech universe's tonnage is that huge amounts of materials are replaced with (to us) fantastical super-materials. Mechs are massive, but their tonnage is insanely low for their durability and strength due to being some kind of sci-fi magic metal, which Ferro-Fibrous armor is an upgrade to by being *even lighter* but also needing much more bulky attachment points for its protective value. Additionally, most spaceships are a mix of these super-materials and fairly normal materials, making it head-scratchingly aggravating to try puzzling out why some things are their mass they are, because you have no idea what percentage of ultralight, super-durable super-materials a given ship is made out of; we just know that the outermost layer of most dropships is the same armor used on battlemechs, with REALLY thick layers of insulation sandwiched between that and the internal plating and ducting.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this is a good or coherent way to figure out masses for these vessels, just explaining the mechanics behind WHY it's so baffling. Not even in-universe character would likely be able to tell you the exact composition (not that it's consistent between vessels anyways, because many of them are repaired in a 'whatever is available' fashion)
Then you start running into interesting inertia problems.
@@SacredCowShipyards Indeed you do! For most of the original writers and designers being Engineering students, there is a shocking amount of thought put into cool materials science... and very little into how it would work in the real world.
It's a mind-boggling mix of "oh, wow, that'd totally work if you could make that material!" and "there is no way using a material with those properties would have that result."
Like... Plasma weapons aren't just 'energy weapons', they actually require ammunition, but since plasma is easy to make from any material you can, well, plasmate, the ammunition is lightweight bricks of high density plastics, making it one of the most affordable weapons in its damage range.
But then the LAV Mechs exist and I have to hold my head in my hands at the fact that someone tried to make a VTOL Urbanmech fighter plane. W-what were these people on? And can we get enough to share with the entire class, please?
well gravity decks that reorient for spin or thrust show up in Gundam as early as Zeta Gundam's Argama class (and settings that raid Gundam for notes) and more than a few others.