message 0148

• On Riders: Advantages, uses, origin
• On dartships

>Date: Mon, 24 May 93 11:52:59 +0200
>From: mst@vexpert.dbai.tuwien.ac.at (Markus Stumptner)
>Subject: Cherryhlist

>If this is correct, why are there riderships at all? I allways 
>assumed riders would have advantages in realspace combat because
>they saved the mass of the FTL-drive. We know there are small
>combat jumpships (dartships?). These craft should be capable
>of all ridership maneuvers, and with the possibilities of
>"boosting up" and independent missions they would be much
>more powerfull.
>Do I miss some advantage of the ridrships?

Even if both types of ships use the same type of drive, this does
not mean that all drives are powerful enough for FTL capability.
The dfrives in the riders could still be much smaller and more
efficient at sublight speeds if they are designed not to got to
FTL.  Given that we know next to nothing about how the FTL drives 
are supposed to work, this is as valid a reason as any. Do riders 
have vanes, btw?   

Finally, since riders do not have to consider long-term crew accommodation,
they could still be built lighter and smaller even if their armament is
equivalent to a carrier's (e.g., no permanent crew quarters, no rotating 
crew cylinder).

A related argument is price.  If the riders have the same capabilities,
but cost a lot less (due to the savings above), then you may get five
ships (all indirectly FTL-capable because of the carrier) for the price
of one.

What book are the dartships mentioned in?  I don't recall them (I haven't
read Hellburner yet).

>One more ridership question: Why are there so many of them?
>in _HB_, someone said "96% retrievability"

They could conceivably have improved on that.  (Of course, it could
be a continuity slip, pure and simple.)

>If the Fleet
>did any missions at all, they should have lost some of the
>riders, and riderships should be impossible to replace once
>the regular supply was cut off.

I agree it's fairly improbable.  If you want a possible reason, here's
my hypothesis.

Every time a carrier is destroyed, there would be four riders
looking for a carrier to attach to.  A possible counterargument to
this would be that the riders would defend a carrier at all costs,
to the point of being destroyed before it, so this would not happen 
very often, but the same effect would be achieved if the Fleet ever 
decommissioned a carrier to use it for replacement parts (AFAIK, a
very common practice in comparable situations).  However, since I would 
assume that a carrier would not usually run and leave its riders behind, 
loss of the riders may imply loss of the carrier if it's to late to run.

Thus, the fewer carriers the fleet has, the more probable is it that
a carrier loss without rider loss will make it possible to fill the
gaps in the complement of the remaining carriers.

	Markus