Characters:

David Weber introduces a lot, I mean TONS of characters in his writings that are more than a simple one touch, or few paragraph elements. Most of the times, he uses these elements in a later book, but so far, the two people I have tagged as being important characters for my writings have not be re-used. In other words, he introduced them, but I'm going to play with them.

In Honor Among Enemies, he introduced a pair of enlisted engineers on their first shipboard duty. Their names were Aubrey Wanderman and Ginger Lewis. They were both exemplary in their jobs. Though on her first cruise, people had commented that Lewis would probably 'go mustang,' which meant attend Officer Candidate School (OCS) and become an officer.

I think that she did so, and Wanderman going through a few terms later.

Propulsion:

Major Honorverse ships use what is called an Impeller Wedge for normal-space propulsion. This wedge is a band of artificially generated gravity fields of unbelievable intensity both above and below the ship. These bands are so intense that they are impervious to all known weapons. Nothing can pass through them, not even light. (A ship's sensors can penetrate their own wedge, but only because the wedge's gravity shear is precisely known.) These bands are angled in such a way as to have their after aspect being narrower than the front. They are also huge, some of the larger vessels wedges can reach 100 kilometers in diameter. The sides of the bands are stitched together by much weaker gravity fields, called sidewalls, that offer protection to the ship's sides. The major drawback to the impeller wedge is that both the leading and trailing aspects of the impeller wedge must be open to allow any propulsion or maneuverability, not even a sidewall is allowed. This makes an 'up the kilt' shot, or more desirable, a 'down the throat' shot something that ships in combat will try to achieve against, and deny to, their opponent.

There is another level of protection that is designed to protect from particulate matter while traveling at high speeds, and another one to protect the crew from radiation from both nuclear warheads and cosmic radiation.

Speeds, Distances and Acceleration:

The speed of light is just under 299,837 kilometers per second. This speed is called Cee, or referenced with a lower case letter c, as in E=Mc² (remember that one?)

Distances in space are normally immense, but can be referenced by using a time-fragment of light. Since light travels at 299,837 Kps, then a light second is 299,837 kilometers. A light minute is 60 times that value, etcetera. (The Earth is approximately eight and a half light minutes from our sun.)

The rate of acceleration is in Gravities and shown with a lower case g. One g of acceleration is just about 32 feet per second squared, or fps². This however will not match the fact that everything else is going to be in metric, so a single g of acceleration will be 9.7536 meters per second squared, or mps². Ships in normal space can accelerate at a very large number of gs. For example, the HMS Tramontane, an Edward Saganami class heavy cruiser has an official maximum acceleration of 604g in normal space. This equates to just under 5,981 mps² or about 6kps². (Acceleration is sometimes referred to as delta-v.)

The Tramontane, as do all of the Honorverse military ships have a maximum speed of .8c, or 8/10^th the speed of light. This works out to about 239,918 Kps. From absolute rest, she can attain this speed in 11 hours, 2 minutes and 2 seconds. It also takes the same amount of time to decelerate from this speed.

Interplanetary Travel:

So the next question is, how do these people travel the vast distances of space without growing old? Hyperspace, or h-space. The great thing about hyperspace is, after you figure out how to get there, the physics of this level of the universe is just a tad bit off. You still cannot physically surpass the speed of light, but that speed is exponentially higher than normal.

How does one enter hyperspace? By tuning their Warshawski generators to a certain frequency. The kicker is, there is more than one level of hyperspace. Each distinct level, or band, is referenced by using the Greek alphabet.

Travel in normal hyperspace (any band) also is under impellers, but travel is, instead normally done in what is called a Grav Wave. These are the currents that were the demons of hyperspace until that self-same Doctor Warshowski developed the Warshowski Sail. With the sail, ships could survive contact with a grav wave, and indeed use their immense power to propel the ship at astounding acceleration rates. As an example, using the Tramontane again, her Hyperspace acceleration is 5,832g or just under 57.9 Kps²!

Due to the increased particulate density within h-space, military maximum speed is only (only, heh!) .6c. (Civilians are limited to .5c.

Timeframe:

This happens after the event of the latest book, War of Honor. HMS Tramontane, though not depicted in the books is one of the ships that faught at the Second Battle of Sidemore. She was damaged, and has since been repaired, and is on an extended shakedown cruise through the Star Kingdom of Manticore's new territory in what was formerly the Selisian Confederacy.

Example Ships:

HMS Nike