Teleros wrote:Universe - p7...the space-black and silver perfection of the dress uniform of the Patrol... glittering golden meteors upon their collars or the resplendently polished ray-pistols and other equipment at their belts.
Dress uniform of the GP.
Possibly just for the Cadet Corps, but there's nothing to indicate that the rest of the Patrol doesn't use the same colours.
The meteor would be an obvious throwback to the old Triplanetary Patrol; one wonders what some of the less humanoid members of the Patrol wear...?
Technology - p8The sergeant-major touched a stud at his belt and all vast Wentworth Hall fairly trembled under the impact of an all-pervading, lilting, throbbing melody as the world's finest military band crashed into "Our Patrol"."Squads left - March!" Although no possible human voice could have been heard in that gale of soul-stirring sound and although Kinnison's lips scarcely moved, his command was carried to the very bones of those for whom it was intended - and to no one else - by the tight-beam ultra-communicators strapped to their chests.
The communications gadget is I'd guess worn under the dress uniform, rather like one of Conway Costigan's "Service Specials" in Triplanetary, and I'd assume that they've earpieces & mics too if they're to have a chance of hearing whatever's said, but it's not said either way. The "ultra" prefix for the communicators may indicate that the devices use ultrawaves. I'm not sure what special significance the "Our Patrol" music has, but at a guess I'd say it's the anthem or what-have-you of the Patrol.
That it is, and is confirmed to be in
Second Stage Lensman. Me, I always imagine it sounding a bit like "The Caissons Go Rolling Along," but I'm a Yank, so that doesn't prove much.
Technology - p8 & 9
The first evidence of Lensverse inertialess technology - and the training required to march off into the shaft, because that's a hell of a drop even if you know on an intellectual level that it's perfectly safe. Essentially, the cadets went from zero to terminal velocity practically instantly whilst travelling down the shaft, and back to zero once they landed on the floor at the bottom. Given how easy it'd be to mess up the formation without any inertia there may be other, unmentioned, technologies at work - perhaps forcefields to prevent turbulence for example.
Likely. This is the logical descendant (so to speak) of the inertialess shafts we saw in Patrol HQ back in Samms' day, apparently improved on.
Technology - p9
Lt-Marshal Fritz von Hohendorff, the Commandant of Cadets at Wentworth Hall, has had major cybernetic work done following injuries. Also better than what we have today if it can mimic the look of a limb so well. Nothing like stem cells or regenerative medical procedures yet exist in the setting, although the "Philips treatment" is developed later in the series.
True, although I'm not sure exactly how advanced the cybernetics really are. We're up to the point where we can
almost produce reasonably convincing prosthetics of that sort, certainly ones that would be amazing by the standards of the 1930s. Also, I'm betting that by "artificial eye," Smith means a
glass eye, not a prosthetic- because there's no discussion of functioning prosthetic eyes in
Gray Lensman.
Technology - p10
A device on Hohendorff's desk that attaches the Lens to the bracelet and then fixes that around the person's arm (or whatever). Given how Kinnison is later taking the thing on and off I guess there's a release mechanism hidden in it somewhere that isn't mentioned here - it's that or he has to literally cut it off (assuming it's not so loose it can be slid off over the hand).
Sounds reasonable. Also, remember that no one else can touch a man's Lens when he isn't wearing it: if you're going to have the cadet ceremonially stretch out their arm to receive the Lens, it has to be done by a machine.
Universe - p11...every year one million eighteen-year-old boys of Earth are chosen as cadets by competitive examinations. You know that during the first year, before any of them see Wentworth Hall, that number shrinks to less that fifty thousand. You know that by Graduation Day there are only approximately one hundred left in the class.
Of the million original cadets, only one in ten thousand will become a Lensman. Women aren't allowed to become Lensmen by Arisian edict - see the Triplanetary analysis for more on that. At any rate though, there are a hell of a lot more Lensmen than you get in most similar groups such as the Jedi or Green Lantern Corps. Spoken by Hohendorff.
Oh, absolutely. Though the Lensmen are more selective than any real group, they're a lot less selective than the "one superhero per planet" organizations they inspired in later 20th century fiction.
Universe - p12Every man who can be made to reveal any real weakness is dropped. Most of these are dismissed from the Patrol. There are many splendid men, however, who, for some reason not involving moral turpitude, are not quite what a Lensman must be. These men make up our organisation, from grease-monkeys up to the highest commissioned officers below the rank of Lensman.
Some info on the Patrol's organisation and the quality of the personnel. This is unlikely to be the only source of recruits, given the massive expansion the Patrol undergoes by the end of "Grey Lensman", otherwise I suspect that there would be too few people to do everything. Anyway, the Lensman rank is quite interesting: all the members of the class, from the sergeant-major up to Captain Kinnison, are Lensmen (or are once they all get their Lenses), yet sergeant-majors aren't normally considered commissioned officers. Possibly there is some higher rank to which only Lensmen may be promoted. Spoken by Hohendorff.
There may be internal ranks
among the corps of Lensmen, with any Lensman outranking any un-Lensed personnel. Thus, the sergeant-major of a class of Lensmen, on graduation, can now order around senior naval officers... who happen not to be Lensmen.
As for personnel, I agree. It seems fairly likely that they enacted a program of, if not conscription, at least greatly lowered recruitment standards to fill out the fleet for the mobilization in
Gray Lensman.
Universe - p12 & 13No man who can be cracked has ever worn, or ever will wear, the Lens...
Therefore it would be manifestly unfair to stigmatise the rest of them because they were not born with that extra something, that ultimate quality of fibre which does, and of necessity must, characterise the wearer of the Lens. For that reason not even the man himself knows why he was dismissed, and no one save those who wear the Lens knows why they were selected - and a Lensman does not talk.
More on those who don't become Lensmen. Of course, as in the previous quote they
do discriminate against non-Lensmen, because there seems to be a glass ceiling on promotions for non-Lensmen, the ruling Galactic Council consists solely of Lensmen, and so on. Not telling someone why they were dismissed I'm also unsure about, as that could backfire if people become too obsessed with finding out why they didn't make the grade. Spoken by Hohendorff.
Well, no one said the Patrol was perfect. Except possibly the Patrol themselves... and if they did, well, that just goes to prove they can't be right all the time.
But jet back to the 1930s mindset, so to speak: "stigmatize" did not mean then what "discriminate" does now. To stigmatize someone who flunked the Lensman qualification (like, say, van Buskirk) would be to say "He- gasp!-
failed the Lensman qualification! You know what they say about people who don't rate a Lens..."
And they don't do that. Van Buskirk is respected as a leader, promoted to what are probably the limits of his ability (he's a fighter, not a strategist). He's a damn
hero, and is presented as such. But he will never wear the Lens, and it may be just as well, because can you imagine him being promoted to the level of responsibility that someone like Haynes or von Hohendorff holds? Or to take another example, no one thought about giving Sir Austin Cardynge a Lens- and yet he's one of the smartest men alive, and tough-minded and honorable by any reasonable standard.
So yes, there's a limit on how far any non-Lensman can hope to be promoted in the Patrol. The converse of that is: knowing that you've managed to select for the individuals fit to wear a Lens, and knowing that they
will do a better job... why would you want the system
not to promote Lensmen preferentially?
Universe - p14
Hohendorff describing the power of the Lensmen within the confines of Civilisation. Interestingly, solar systems at least occasionally seem to develop their own Lensmen before joining Civilisation, and some may not have any representation at all if they want to join yet haven't developed their own Lensmen. More, the Galactic Council must be huge - if every solar system is sending just a single representative, then we're talking tens of billions of representatives by the end of the series. IMHO, this makes the idea of unrepresented systems more plausible, unless a Lensman from another system / species is willing to represent them on the Council.
Incidentally, it's never mentioned how one becomes a Council member - in Samms' time he simply told them they were (as in Rigel or Petrino), but since then it's never mentioned. Unless the Councillors are chosen by some sort of voting system in most systems, Civilisation would appear to be some sort of idealised meritocratic aristocracy (ie, rule of the best men) or oligarchy.
Yup. As for planets with their own Lensmen who are not formally adherent to Civilization, the most obvious example would be Palain VII. The Palainians probably neither know nor care about the day to day affairs of Civilization, and I very much doubt that any of them feel much interest in joining its government. The only exceptions would be Palainian Lensmen, and even they cannot claim to speak for their planet as a whole, because they are
deviants by the standards of Palain.
Technical Note - p18In the "big teardrops" - cruisers and battleships - the driving force is always directed upwards, along the geometrical axis of the ship, and the artificial gravity is always downwards along that same line. Thus, throughout any possible manoeuvring, free or inert, "down" and "up" have the same significance as within any Earthly structure.
These vessels are ordinarily landed only in special docks, but in emergencies can be landed almost anywhere, sharp stern down, as their immense weight drives them deep enough into even the hardest ground to keep them upright. They sink in water, but are readily manoeuvrable, even under water.
E.E.S.
[Emphasis added- S.J.]
A note by Doc Smith on the design of the mid-sized warships of the Patrol, including their ready use as submarines...
Note that this supports my theory that Patrol ships are denser than water; assuming their internal metal is about as dense as steel on average, with minimal use of super-dense materials like uranium and tungsten, this requires that they be more than 10% metal by volume.
Universe - p20
This is why they want to use the heptadetonite propellant, rather than say use a railgun (assuming they have them) - the idea is that the inert gases released, by being contained within the Q-type helix / gun barrel, give the shell the extra oomph needed to punch through the wall-shield.
Meanwhile, the type formula of the Q-type helix appears to be referring to the "Q47SM9", and a 40 million degree fireball is consistent with what you'd expect from a nuclear explosion, despite being from what appears to be a conventional explosive in all other respects.
Duodec is interesting and tricky stuff; Smith gives it nuclear weapon energy density in what is nominally a chemical substance, as you say. Frankly, if he'd written the stories five years later he'd probably have substituted atomic bombs for duodec everywhere...
Haynes and Kinnison on the Britannia. The part I really want to look at is the section focusing on the speed it can reach:...
[math]
Hmm. I'd like to come back to this, but frankly I'm a bit burned out on doing calculations for this reason today.
Universe - p23...Lieutenant Kinnison...
Although he graduated Captain of his class, Kinnison's rank was only that of a Lieutenant in the Patrol proper.
This contradicts my earlier speculation to the effect that Lensmen might automatically outrank normal Patrol officers... though Kinnison certainly gives orders to officers on his ship, and they are followed vigorously.
Technology - p24"Right in our laps!" he exulted. "Scarcely ten light-years away! Start scrambling the ether!" and as the vengeful cruiser darted towards the scene of depredation all space became filled with blast after blast of static interference...
The
Britannia jams the pirate ship's communications as it closes from 10LY away. Not sure what this says about the ship's sensors, because its mission required it to respond to pirate attacks, not to seek them out, as it may have simply been waiting near several important trade routes for something to happen, without using active sensors to give away its position (whilst its passive ones were presumably not good enough).
In addition, the Lensman universe, like the Skylark one, appears to use something similar to the luminiferous aether - that is, a medium that permeates space and through which light is propagated (similar to how sound waves are propagated through air).
In this era, "ether" was a synonym for "space" for poetic purposes ("blown out of the ether"), or for the underlying structure of space. It does not, strictly speaking, require that the
Lensman setting have an ether-based cosmology, though I suppose it might.
The fact that the pirate is spotted "
scarcely" ten light-years away, to my mind, suggests that the maximum detection range is longer than that in principle...
Henderson puts a "CRX tracer" on the pilot - apparently some kind of FTL sensor that automatically tracks its target and may also set the ship to follow the target, given the way Henderson relaxes once it's on the pirate vessel.
Assuming that ultrawave detection (which I assume is being used) works like radio and radar (which was probably Smith's mental model for all this), I can imagine even fairly crude hookups that would allow a ship to automatically chase an acquired target, and for an active sensor to detect a target and keep a lock on it despite its attempts to evade. Indeed, both those things were possible in the context of radar as early as the late 1940s or the 1950s.
It should be pretty clear by this that the only forces acting on an inertialess ship with regards to its velocity are friction and its drives. Given the problems the inertialess drive is already giving me, any ideas on how to have a inertialess ship travelling at only 90 parsecs an hour yet have an inert acceleration of 10g would be most welcome.
I'll work on it. Eventually...
Technology - p26
First, possible evidence that the weapons distort space in some manner due to the violence - it depends really on what you believe the "ether" in the books to be.
From a history-of-physics standpoint, "ether" is the medium of propagation for various... call them 'intangible' waves, in this case electromagnetic ones. Given the energy levels being slung around here, gravitational distortion simply isn't in the cards, so my guess would be that what's seen here is sidescatter from the interaction between the pirate beams and
Dauntless's shields intense enough to cause visible EM phenomena in the surrounding space. I can't suggest a mechanism off the top of my head, but it
has to be electromagnetic, I'd think.
Secondly, evidence that the shields can experience localised failures without going down - 4 of the Britannia's 58 stations (tractor beams, repellors, projector one and the Q-gun were listed as being four of the stations before the battle commenced) are out of action and / or destroyed.
We've already seen this in
Triplanetary and
First Lensman, but since this was written earlier it has a special canon status independent of chronological order.
Technology - p27
The Q-type helix is projected from the Q-gun's barrel. It seems to act both as a weapon and a gun barrel in its own right, given the way it breaks through the shields.
Presumably, the helix can be, heck (is) used the same way that the "polycyclic drill" was used by Rodebush and Cleveland to breach Roger's shields (you didn't reference that bit of
Triplanetary, with Roger's survivors going up against the Patrol supership, but I'm sure you remember what I mean). One can in principle use them to drill the shield then fire something through the hole thus created.
Also, it takes only a few dynes to hold the two ships still enough for the above battle to take place, but obviously a lot more for the Q-gun to work properly.
Hmm. Doing some purely in-brain speculation (no equations jotted), but assuming that ultrawaves work
essentially like EM waves and are simply manipulated by different mechanisms, then given their extreme speed of propagation I'd expect them to carry virtually no momentum. The ultrawave equivalent of radiation pressure would be incredibly feeble for a given amount of energy transfer. Therefore, the tractors don't have to exert much force to keep the ships together even when they're dueling with megaton/second range ultrawave beam weapons.
Technology - p27For to those space-hardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl; and here was a thing that would require four or five whole seconds to cover a mere ten kilometres of distance!
2km/s velocity for the shell. Assuming it weighs exactly 20 tonnes - ie just the duodec, without any casing etc - that's 4e10J of kinetic energy and 4e7kg·m/s of momentum.
Which, of course, is a joke compared to the beam energies at work here. It's not the impact of the slug that matters here; it's the bursting charge.
Technology - p27 & 28
The Patrol ship uses its weapons to protect the Q-helix and the tractor beams somehow - perhaps simply keeping up the pressure and preventing any diversion of power to the weapons? It's not clear unfortunately how else they could protect either, unless offensive beams somehow interfere with one another, which may be possible given the nature of the ether.
The former explanation seems likely. Tell the truth, so does the latter: by concentrating offensive fire on the area around the helix, one might well generate interference patterns that make the helix harder to cut. Or they could just be shooting at the projectors nearest the helix, making it impractical for them to open up fully. Dunno.
Technology - p29 & 30
Semi-portable weapons, and possibly personal beam weapons as well, can be powered by remote from the Britannia. In addition we see them boiling if not vaporising the bulkheads, although we've no idea how long it took or how the bulkheads were constructed, so I won't try any calculations for this.
Well, melting a few dozen tonnes of metal out of the way is a job for high gigajoule-range energies, and this probably only took a few seconds; I'd feel cautiously confident about rating semi-portables in the GW range. But I should sit down and give that some careful thought tonight.
"Vibratory destruction" again sounds like what you'd get with beams that travel through the ether, whilst we get a glimpse of the non-beam weapons still used in the universe.
Well, it's strongly implied that ultra
waves are simply an exotic analogue of EM radiation, one that propagates faster but behaves in (and can be used in) many of the same waves, to the point where in some contexts "ether" is used to refer to the propagation of these "sub-ethereal" waves, as in "clear ether!" and "murky ether" on the subject of enemy jamming attacking ultrawave communication.
I think it likely that these beam weapons are simply "ultrawave lasers," though they aren't necessarily coherent.
Technology - p30But when the beamers pressed their switches nothing happened. The pirates had managed to jury-rig a screen generator, and with it had cut the power-beams behind the invading forces.
A shield generator can cut the wireless power supply to the semi-portables. The effect on the personal weapons is not known, but at any rate the Patrol's space marines switch immediately to using an explosive paste, so either they were disabled too or they were of insufficient power to bring down the screen.
The latter seems more likely. We know that personal shields can block Delameter fire; it stands to reason that portable shield generators (implied to be heavy enough to be only somewhat man-portable) can too.
Technology - p30
The only time that ferral paste is used in the series. It seems to be a fairly conventional explosive used to breach bulkheads and the like. If it has a downside, it's that it seems to require a hell of a lot, given the "trowelled it on" description.
They're trying to achieve burnthrough in a hurry. This is compared to thermite; thermite works by burning
really hot, hot enough to melt through metal. It's used in welding applications for this reason. So it's not a conventional explosive, and they probably use a lot of it to make sure they get a
hole in the bulkhead instead of just a big gouge where they wanted the edges of their door to be.
Note also that despite being used in close proximity to the space marines, there are no reports of casualties from either side as a result of the ferral paste.
Score one for GP armor. Again, this isn't an explosive, though; it's a very high temperature incendiary.
Technology - p30 & 31The semi-portables and other heavy ordnance powered from the Britannia were of course useless. Pistols were ineffective against the pirates' armour of hard alloy; hand-rays were equally impotent against its defensive shields. Now heavy hand-grenades began to rain down among the combatants, blowing Patrolmen and pirates alike to bits - for the outlaw chiefs cared nothing that they killed many of their own men if in so doing they could take toll of the Law.
The hand weapons appear to be powered by an internal power supply, whilst there's evidence that the space marines brought other heavy weapons besides the semi-portables onto the ship. Finally, whilst pistols and the like have little effect against personal armour, "heavy hand grenades" do - and are powerful enough to shred an armoured human to pieces. No idea how you could calc this though, as it does not describe vaporisation and the like and the actual armour worn is something of an unknown too.
Well, at a minimum GP armor is tough enough mechanically to shrug off pistol bullets; since it's strongly implied to be metallic we can estimate its thickness from the real performance of metallic armors. It
might be some kind of super-alloy, but there's no reason to assume so given that muscle-powered weapons can penetrate it.
Technology - p31
In addition, airtight armour, in combination with its bullet-deflecting properties, makes it sound like powered armour: I'd be surprised if a human could wear a suit of metal armour with an air supply and shield generator unaided, especially when said armour is more or less impervious to light firearms.
I think I'm convinced by now; yes, I buy that GP armor is powered.
Technology - p32Have your draughtsmen and photographers got everything down solid?"
"On the boards!" and "In the cans!" rapped out the two reports as one.
Doc Smith was probably thinking of literal cans of film when he wrote this, but it's possible that it's just slang or similar (think about turbo
lasers). Certainly given the computers, robots and the like seen elsewhere it seems odd that they'd still use such old-fashioned equipment elsewhere.
For that matter, the same goes for literal drawing boards. Having done a bit of computer-assisted design and having tried to do even vaguely decent mechanical drawings by hand, I have to say that it would be a LOT faster to sketch out a piece of hardware on a laptop (or, hell, an iPad with a stylus) using CAD software than it would be to draw the thing by hand.
Technology - p33"Space's so full of static you couldn't drive a power-beam through it, let alone a communicator.
This by the Communications Officer of the
Britannia. Possibly some hyperbole, but at any rate static noise of sufficient strength is enough to jam ship communications. Note that EM radiation should not be expected to have any effect, given the uselessness of such jamming when ultrawaves are first introduced in "Triplanetary".
Of course, there's no reason to assume that they can't jam ultrawaves too. Ultrawave jamming wasn't tried in
Triplanetary, because as a general rule the people who were in a position to do so didn't know that ultrawaves were in use.
Technology - p35...the spools of tape were sealed in their corrosion-proof containers...
On the other hand, it seems that the tapes of data may be literally tapes. Of course how much information they carry, what they're like etc isn't specified, so there's still the possibility of something more fancy (perhaps akin to the data-encoded metal wires in "Masters of Space", again by Doc Smith). That said, I'm sure that Doc Smith intended for it to mean something like a roll of film, but without saying as much we can avoid one of the more ridiculous technological disparities of the series.
Hate to break this to you, but
data-encoded metal wires are 1930s technology too. You might be able to boost the information storage density, but it still doesn't compare to magnetic disks, optical discs, or flash memory. Frankly, a picture being worth a million bytes, I rather doubt a wire recording would be worth
as much as a spool of film when it came to recording technical drawings.
Technology - p35 & 36
Kinnison talking with Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke about the information recovered. Little that can be calculated from here that's worth calculating, but the next book does give us some hard figures on power generation for the cosmic energy intake screen.
Indeed. Along with this:
-It is not credible that cosmic energy screens operate
purely by absorbing power emitted by stars, even if we include hard radiation in that total. The mechanism has to be something else; were Smith writing today he'd probably invoke 'zero point' energy.
-Note the distinction between power distribution and power generation. This may have afflicted ships back in Samms' day too; the availability of enough energy to generate or block certain forces does not always translate into the
power to block them when they hit you all at once in a massive surge.
Universe - p38Senselessly she hurled herself directly towards enormous suns, once grazing one so nearly that the harrying pirates gasped at the foolhardiness of such exposure to lethal radiation. For not reason at all she shot straight backwards, almost into a cluster of pirate craft, only to dash off on another unexpected tangent before the startled outlaws could lay a beam on her.
Some of the manoeuvres performed by the
Britannia once all human control is removed. Note that whilst EM radiation would ordinarily be harmless given the inertialess drive, maintaining a course close to a star would mean resisting the pressure of the radiation on the hull that would ordinarily push the ship away from the sun at lightspeed, hence the danger involved.
Makes sense, I suppose...
Technology - p39At the touch of those beams, light and delicate as they were, the relay clicked and the torpedoes let go.
...
The Britannia, literally blown to bits, more-than-half fused and partially volatilised by the inconceivable fury of the outburst, was hurled in all directions in streamers, droplets, chunks, and masses; each component part urged away from the centre of pressure by the raginly compressed gases of detonation. Furthermore, each component was now of course inert and therefore capable of giving up its full measure of kinetic energy to any inert object with which it should come in contact.
The destruction of the
Britannia. Again no idea on how you could calculate this given the unknown size of the ship. The
Britannia would of course have been inerted when the explosion destroyed the Bergenholm.
Hmm. Another thing to look at this evening, I guess.
Technology - p39One mass of wreckage, so fiercely sped that its victim had time neither to dodge nor become inertialess, crashed full against the side of the nearer attacker. Meteorite screens flared brilliantly violet and went down. The full-driven wall-shield held; but so terrific was the concussion that what few of the crew were not killed outright would take no interest in current events for many hours to come.
No idea how fast it was travelling, but given that the fastest ships in the books are capable of handling 10G of inert acceleration, it would not have to be travelling particularly fast to give the ship such a nudge. Of course the mass of the piece of wreckage is also important, but it just shows the importance of the inertialess drive in combat - without it heavy projectile weapons and similar could probably disable ships even if they failed to penetrate the shields.
Indeed.
Technology - p47
The lifeboat is landed free on a planet. The rest is self-explanatory, but included to give an indication of what someone can do with a DeLameter.
Indeed. You wouldn't have to vaporize much rock to trigger a landslide; you wouldn't really have to vaporize at all when explosive heating would shatter the rocks for you quite nicely. But this is still a hell of a lot of power being slung around.
Universe - p48Boskonian ships, at least, appear to use registration numbers or similar rather than names, at least for official business. For the record, you can have up to 78.4 million combinations of 7 letters and numbers, and 80.6 if you include smaller combinations as well, although as we've no idea how the ships are registered it's quite possible that there aren't anywhere near 80 million Boskonian ships.
Use of serial numbers is natural for a culture that uses many different languages, as Boskone no doubt does. Names of the ships in, say, Kalonian would be meaningless to their crews, and vice versa.
Technology - p49
Unfortunately the catlats themselves are not described much beyond their shape - their size and mass is not known, although we can make a few guesstimates based on the full passage. If we assume that each catlat masses roughly 10kg (an arbitrary figure, but unfortunately we've practically nothing to go by), and that it takes ~3MJ to vaporise 1kg of water, then to vaporise 100 of them at once would require 1.5GJ as a bare minimum. I say vaporise because "vanished in vivid flares of radiance" certainly sounds like (very rapid) vaporisation. This figure does of course depend on the mass of the catlats, but I feel 10kg is a reasonable low end guesstimate for a winged, tentacled gargoyle.
On the other hand, "blasts" need not be instantaneous, especially since most
Lensman energy weapons seem to fire on continuous beam settings. I think expecting short, sub-second bursts to destroy a hundred catlats at once is a bit excessive, and for myself I'd set the upper bound on DeLameters below a gigawatt, though I'm not at all sure
how much below it.
Maybe I'm wrong there, though.
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), they also need considerable separation distances between things like busbars and main battery energy weapons and the 'grounded' hull of the ship. Air gaps are among the best insulation of all; vacuum is better, and requiring personnel to wear GP armor while doing maintenance is arguably a good thing given how hazardous shipboard operations are. So even in the machinery spaces there's going to be a fair amount of open volume.
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