Quote:Ah. Yeah, stet, that works.
For that matter, will the reverse-engineered ship-scale ganerators even work the same way, or do they need to be laid in differently than the (uniformly damaged to a greater or lesser degree) original alien models?
Quote:*explodes in frothing fit*
As for two ships per arm... nah. If nothing else, flight operations would be even more of a bitch with two sets of bridge structures to avoid.
...
*goes away, comes back calm*
Okay, right. The reason flight ops on a carrier look the way they do (wires, catapults, runways, etc.) is that the aircraft it services have to stay at or above a certain minimum speed for their wings to generate the lift needed for flight.
In space, not only is there no atmosphere, but any two objects that close together are either falling in the same direction at the same speed anyway, or in a whole fucking lot of trouble.
Depending on the degree of control the EDTO's scientists were able to establish over the ship's artificial gravity system, they might or might not be able to extend artificial gravity outside of the original main hull (my vote is 'not'). Either way, though, they're certainly not going to have it on a point outside the ship where it would be more convenient not to.
Besides, the way it's looking is that they only got one carrier anyway, so who says it (or the other ships, for that matter) can't just be put at the most convenient angle?
Actually, I was thinking rather more than two - one arm, as I've doodled it out, has a battleship for the 'upper arm' and a bundle of four destroyers or cruisers that's been wrapped in several layers of makeshift armor for a 'lower'. And had a grappling claw built to scale grafted onto it. The other side has our catamaran carrier rotated ninety degrees relative to the core ship's gravity plane. Since the 'elbow' is between the two hulls, the assorted smaller hulls that got used to fill the gap to the upper arm assembly fit neatly inside also, meaning that the arm can be fully straightened.
Hmm. Actually, the VLS launch bays might have been put along the underside of the ship, so that the flight deck could be armored to a fair-thee-well... although that probably wouldn't have been considered as a factor until after the Saturn incident.
Oh, and a sudden, horrible, inevitable, perfect thought I had while I was sketching these 'arms' out - not all of the ships at Tinian that day were military. Do you really think that a cruise line would miss the chance to sell tickets to watch an event like the Macross's launch?
I have bits and pieces of an action sequence playing out in my head, and actually I think it comes out much more impressively if the Macross's arms are relatively flexible.
Ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."