what is an Eradani Edict what is not?

kzt wrote:

Grashtel wrote:Actually when it comes to Honorverse Cermacrete buildings that does not appear to be the case given the amount of punishment that the various towers took in "Cauldron of Ghosts"

That attack was run by morons. I'm sure a megaton range KEW would also have done a fine job of destroying the building too, if you didn't really care about the city...

Nothing physical and stand up to the wedge, and the wedge projects ahead of the object it is driving. So the wedge strikes the roof first. Hence the wedge of the KEW destroys the structural integrity of the roof (and probably a floor or two below this), then the KEW slams into what is essentially a very, very heavy mixture of dust and solid Ceramacrete in free fall. The energy of the KEW tuning to plasma is going to add a rather large amount of velocity to the falling debris.

I'd suggest not bing in that building -especially not on the upper floors - it will be bad.

Except for the teeny tiny fact — and I mention this because your comments about morons are beginning to get just a tiny bit irritating — that no one ever said that there was an impeller wedge on the front of the KEW when it strikes, because there isn't . If you're going to use impeller wedges against targets in atmosphere (a really, really bad idea except over very short distances and with very small wedges), then you don't need the kinetic part of a KEW at all.

As for Terekhov's tactics. His intention was to completely decapitate the regime responsible for the next best thing to a half-million deaths, the vast majority of them innocent civilians. He had absolutely no way to know if someone as desperate as Yucel wouldn't have made exactly the same threat or actually begun carrying it out after inheriting command from her, so he decided to make a very . . . emphatic statement as to why that would be a Bad Idea.

As for the death toll around the tower he took out (which, by the way, was smaller than most of the towers on Mesa), those blocks had been cleared of everyone who was not a member of the political party which had begun the massacres, an employee of the transstellar corporation which had effectively created and supported that political party, or one of the Solarian thugs who had been sent in to prop up that political party. Yes, there were children among that population, and don't think for a moment that Aivars Terekhov, for all of his military pragmatism isn't aware of that or that it won't weigh upon his conscience. He was a military commander, making a military decision, however, and there was no one (aside from the aforementioned children) inside that perimeter who wasn't there by choice and because and because of his/her voluntary association with the regime responsible for those mass murderers.

And the total number involved was substantially less than the 30,000 hostages awaiting execution if you Yucel had carried out her threat.

The need for a single decapitation strike makes sense.

However, what is the effective difference between (to make up some numbers) a 15 meter wide wedge traveling 15 km from the ground to an air target at 5km up and a similar 15 meter wide wedge traveling through roughly similar atmospheric volume from space to the ground? It would seem that if A is acceptable, B should be fine too, or if B is unacceptable, why is A allowed?

And yes, I still think the tactics used were idiotic in CoG. (And the first attack was presented as run by idiots, so that is fine.) They were not trying to capture the building intact or rescue anyone, they were trying to eliminate a somewhat isolated (isolated as in it wasn't closely surrounded by sensitive sites) strongpoint and preferably with the death or capture of all the defenders. Plasma cannon and small wedges appear ideally suited to do this with a minimal loss of life on the the attackers side by causing progressive structural collapse from standoff range. I just don't see any reason stated why reducing the complex to a 50 meter high pile of fist sized debris wouldn't have been a totally acceptable outcome, and that appears to be well within the capabilities of the military force using just their organic capabilities.

Launching wave after wave of troops into a meat grinder does not seem like an ideal way to remove the strongpoint, nor does it appear to be particularly fast or cost effective. It seems like an approach that has no particular redeeming value. However it was apparently the only option considered after "nuking it from orbit" was rejected.

It was a well written part of the book, but the motivation for why they would pursue such a hugely expensive course of action after deciding it wasn't going to be easy eludes me. After all, this wasn't the only such structure on the planet (and clearly wasn't the only one that the government had recently faced aggressive resistance from and therefore there was unlikely to be the last) and the military was pretty darn small, so getting a rather large percentage of your military rendered combat ineffectual with the first operation undertaken presents certain obvious issues.

kzt wrote:However, what is the effective difference between (to make up some numbers) a 15 meter wide wedge...

Quite aside from any other consideration, a 15 meter wide wedge is far too small to destroy a Mesan Seccie tower. I don't recall the exact dimensions, but the seccie towers were something like 1KM^3.

kzt wrote:The need for a single decapitation strike makes sense.

However, what is the effective difference between (to make up some numbers) a 15 meter wide wedge traveling 15 km from the ground to an air target at 5km up and a similar 15 meter wide wedge traveling through roughly similar atmospheric volume from space to the ground? It would seem that if A is acceptable, B should be fine too, or if B is unacceptable, why is A allowed?

Earth's atmosphere is about 400 kilometers deep, with about 80% of it concentrated within --- what? 16 km or so of the planetary surface? A wedge moving through atmosphere has nasty effects on the atmosphere; the atmosphere also has nasty effects on the object doing the moving. The wedges used on SAMs are very small and very short-lived. I don't know where you got your "15 meter wide" from. The strike on Honor's pinnace in FIE destroyed only about 10 meters of its nose, IIRC, which should certainly suggest to you that the wedge is smaller than 15 meters. An impeller-wedge SAM is a short ranged anti-air missile, especially in atmosphere, with about a launch range of about 4-5 km, about the same as a present day Stinger MANPAD. Even the heavier, tripod-version Usher used in SVW has a maximum ceiling of no more than about 7 km, which is one heck of a lot less than the 16 km of fairly dense atmosphere a wedge would have to penetrate for an orbit-to-surface KEW strike.

kzt wrote:And yes, I still think the tactics used were idiotic in CoG. (And the first attack was presented as run by idiots, so that is fine.) They were not trying to capture the building intact or rescue anyone, they were trying to eliminate a somewhat isolated (isolated as in it wasn't closely surrounded by sensitive sites) strongpoint and preferably with the death or capture of all the defenders. Plasma cannon and small wedges appear ideally suited to do this with a minimal loss of life on the the attackers side by causing progressive structural collapse from standoff range. I just don't see any reason stated why reducing the complex to a 50 meter high pile of fist sized debris wouldn't have been a totally acceptable outcome, and that appears to be well within the capabilities of the military force using just their organic capabilities.

Launching wave after wave of troops into a meat grinder does not seem like an ideal way to remove the strongpoint, nor does it appear to be particularly fast or cost effective. It seems like an approach that has no particular redeeming value. However it was apparently the only option considered after "nuking it from orbit" was rejected.

It was a well written part of the book, but the motivation for why they would pursue such a hugely expensive course of action after deciding it wasn't going to be easy eludes me. After all, this wasn't the only such structure on the planet (and clearly wasn't the only one that the government had recently faced aggressive resistance from and therefore there was unlikely to be the last) and the military was pretty darn small, so getting a rather large percentage of your military rendered combat ineffectual with the first operation undertaken presents certain obvious issues.

Political direction was most responsible for the conduct of the operation. The on-site commander wanted to break the building down to rubble around the defenders' ears; she was denied that option. The ability of plasma cannon to bring the entire structure to the ground is not as great as you seem to be assuming. Plasma cannon are "sized" to do certain things, and they didn't happen to have a "Destroy Tower, Mark One" version on hand. They had infantry-sized weapons, the "Stinger-equivalent" SAMs, and a few different sizes of vehicle mounted weapons, but even the heaviest of those weapons were the Honorverse equivalent of 155mm howitzers, not 16" guns, and that tower was a very hard target. You're not going to bring down the Sears Tower in Chicago with the main guns of Abrams tanks in a hurry, and this was a vastly larger and much broader target, relatively speaking (and one which might as well have been built as a military bunker the size of a small mountain from the outset). In the Honoverse, if you need a bigger nutcracker than your equivalent of a 155 mm howitzer, then you go out and get a KEW, which is the equivalent of anything from a 16" gun to a 40,000-lb bomb to a tactical nuke to a strategic nuke, and happens to be cheap and so procurable in largish numbers. Why invest in a lot of other, much more expensive hardware to do the same job from the bottom of the gravity well? Sure, in this case that would have turned out to be a good thing to have, but under normal circumstances, you're not going to need it, and Drescher got caught out by the Gods of the Procurement Branch.

As to why she then continued to launch attacks into the "meat grinder" (as you so aptly put it), she was under orders from the same political leaders who'd denied her the requested KEW strikes to get in and shut down the opposition ASAP. She thought the orders were stupid and tried her damnedest to get them changed, but her political masters refused. So if you want to call the attacks idiotic or moronic in that respect, I have no disagreement with you. If you want to call her tactics within the constraints artificially imposed upon her stupid or moronic, we have a problem, Houston,

runsforcellery wrote:
[SNIP]

As to why she then continued to launch attacks into the "meat grinder" (as you so aptly put it), she was under orders from the same political leaders who'd denied her the requested KEW strikes to get in and shut down the opposition ASAP. She thought the orders were stupid and tried her damnedest to get them changed, but her political masters refused. So if you want to call the attacks idiotic or moronic in that respect, I have no disagreement with you. If you want to call her tactics within the constraints artificially imposed upon her stupid or moronic, we have a problem, Houston,

At this point in 'HOO-DEANY' the powers that be were as screwed by the 'Onion,' who wanted the most chaos possible after taking out the most damning records, as the poor ground pounders

Poker

runsforcelery wrote:As for Terekhov's tactics. His intention was to completely decapitate the regime responsible for the next best thing to a half-million deaths, the vast majority of them innocent civilians. He had absolutely no way to know if someone as desperate as Yucel wouldn't have made exactly the same threat or actually begun carrying it out after inheriting command from her, so he decided to make a very . . . emphatic statement as to why that would be a Bad Idea.

As for the death toll around the tower he took out (which, by the way, was smaller than most of the towers on Mesa), those blocks had been cleared of everyone who was not a member of the political party which had begun the massacres, an employee of the transstellar corporation which had effectively created and supported that political party, or one of the Solarian thugs who had been sent in to prop up that political party. Yes, there were children among that population, and don't think for a moment that Aivars Terekhov, for all of his military pragmatism isn't aware of that or that it won't weigh upon his conscience. He was a military commander, making a military decision, however, and there was no one (aside from the aforementioned children) inside that perimeter who wasn't there by choice and because and because of his/her voluntary association with the regime responsible for those mass murderers.

And the total number involved was substantially less than the 30,000 hostages awaiting execution if you Yucel had carried out her threat.

Thank you. It was mostly the lack of this expanded explanation that I found jarring when reading SftS.

RFC, I appreciate your answers to kzt, because I had had some of the same questions in my head regarding the assault on Neuw Rostock. Your answers cleared up the points just fine.....except for one niggling detail....

Since the 'smaller' KEWs were released to Dreschler and she had employed them to take down the upper levels of the tower, why not keep using them until, to borrow from kzt, you had pretty much a pile of rubble left? It shouldn't have taken any longer than the armed assault on the building and would have had the same effect of wiping out the building without eating up your troops. (albeit the sub-floors and underground systems would still have to have been taken hand to hand).

Now, to undermine my own position, it may have been that the accumalation of the destroyed portions of the building on top of the still viable floors might have required larger and larger KEWs that the Mesan Government would not allow, lest damage to the 'citizens' homes and businesses occured.

But if you have the chance, I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Hutch wrote:RFC, I appreciate your answers to kzt, because I had had some of the same questions in my head regarding the assault on Neuw Rostock. Your answers cleared up the points just fine.....except for one niggling detail....

Since the 'smaller' KEWs were released to Dreschler and she had employed them to take down the upper levels of the tower, why not keep using them until, to borrow from kzt, you had pretty much a pile of rubble left? It shouldn't have taken any longer than the armed assault on the building and would have had the same effect of wiping out the building without eating up your troops. (albeit the sub-floors and underground systems would still have to have been taken hand to hand).

Now, to undermine my own position, it may have been that the accumalation of the destroyed portions of the building on top of the still viable floors might have required larger and larger KEWs that the Mesan Government would not allow, lest damage to the 'citizens' homes and businesses occured.

But if you have the chance, I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Combination of three factors:

(1) The rubble pile was deep enough that without the really big KEWs ("really big" in this case being defined in terms of the yields the civilian government was prepared to allow her to use), it would have taken a lot of hits to actually level it. And even after you did that, how could you be sure you'd really leveled it (and gotten all the ringleaders) without sending someone to check?

(2) The political pressure was still on her to "get in and finish it" with the sort of "victorious assault" which would demonstrate to the Seccies and the slaves that (a) they couldn't hope to defeat the army and security forces in the long term and (b) that the army and the security forces would come for them (and their families) regardless of the cost. Of course, the fact that the government was being run by drooling idiots who had gotten their own egos invested in finishing the battle on their terms didn't help things, either.

(3) Demolishing the tower the rest of the way with KEWs would have taken quite a while, and the repeated strikes required would have done even more "environmental" damage to the capital in general. More to the point, while it was holding out, the army and security forces were pinned down there rather than being free to deal with the other potential "Neue Rostocks" springing up all around them. They needed to finish the operation quickly so that they could redeploy forces in order to (hopefully) dissuade anyone else from following Neue Rostock's example, on the one hand, or to hit them hard and fast if they did try to emulate Thandi and the others.

I might also point out that by the time they got ready to launch the final assault, the defenses (and the defenders) had been so hammered that resistance, however desperate and determined, was going to be far less effective than it had previously been. In other words, while Drescher would have preferred not to have made an assault at all, she was now in a position to finish things with one last push that would secure and clear and unambiguous (although costly) victory.

runsforcelery wrote:

Hutch wrote:RFC, I appreciate your answers to kzt, because I had had some of the same questions in my head regarding the assault on Neuw Rostock. Your answers cleared up the points just fine.....except for one niggling detail....

Since the 'smaller' KEWs were released to Dreschler and she had employed them to take down the upper levels of the tower, why not keep using them until, to borrow from kzt, you had pretty much a pile of rubble left? It shouldn't have taken any longer than the armed assault on the building and would have had the same effect of wiping out the building without eating up your troops. (albeit the sub-floors and underground systems would still have to have been taken hand to hand).

Now, to undermine my own position, it may have been that the accumalation of the destroyed portions of the building on top of the still viable floors might have required larger and larger KEWs that the Mesan Government would not allow, lest damage to the 'citizens' homes and businesses occured.

But if you have the chance, I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Combination of three factors:

(1) The rubble pile was deep enough that without the really big KEWs ("really big" in this case being defined in terms of the yields the civilian government was prepared to allow her to use), it would have taken a lot of hits to actually level it. And even after you did that, how could you be sure you'd really leveled it (and gotten all the ringleaders) without sending someone to check?

(2) The political pressure was still on her to "get in and finish it" with the sort of "victorious assault" which would demonstrate to the Seccies and the slaves that (a) they couldn't hope to defeat the army and security forces in the long term and (b) that the army and the security forces would come for them (and their families) regardless of the cost. Of course, the fact that the government was being run by drooling idiots who had gotten their own egos invested in finishing the battle on their terms didn't help things, either.

(3) Demolishing the tower the rest of the way with KEWs would have taken quite a while, and the repeated strikes required would have done even more "environmental" damage to the capital in general. More to the point, while it was holding out, the army and security forces were pinned down there rather than being free to deal with the other potential "Neue Rostocks" springing up all around them. They needed to finish the operation quickly so that they could redeploy forces in order to (hopefully) dissuade anyone else from following Neue Rostock's example, on the one hand, or to hit them hard and fast if they did try to emulate Thandi and the others.

I might also point out that by the time they got ready to launch the final assault, the defenses (and the defenders) had been so hammered that resistance, however desperate and determined, was going to be far less effective than it had previously been. In other words, while Drescher would have preferred not to have made an assault at all, she was now in a position to finish things with one last push that would secure and clear and unambiguous (although costly) victory.

Much and many thanks. I had already considered #1, and #2 is not unfamiliar to anyone who knows a little bit of history ("Forward to Richmond!"). I'm still a bit skeptical on #3, but it's your universe and #1 and #2 are more than enough justification.

Thanks again.

Weird Harold wrote:

kzt wrote:However, what is the effective difference between (to make up some numbers) a 15 meter wide wedge...

Quite aside from any other consideration, a 15 meter wide wedge is far too small to destroy a Mesan Seccie tower. I don't recall the exact dimensions, but the seccie towers were something like 1KM^3.

The wedge is just the carrier, the actual damage would be done by the energy of the object being carried by the wedge. In this particular case, if the wedge was running, which David says it is not, the wedge would serve to disrupt the structural integrity of the object you are hitting. Essentially the spinning wedge rips a deep circular gash in the object around the point that the KEW will hit. When the KEW actually hits the surface it is more or less instantly destroyed and the wedge fails then.

In this case, if there was a working wedge, the wedge would likely cut a multimeter wide hole in the armored roof of the building, then the KEW hits the now unsupported very heavy rigid mass and converts some to plasma and accelerates the rest into the building at a rather high speed, along with the plasma shock front. A bad day is had by all.

The wedge doesn't protect the KEW from hitting something, because the front of the wedge is open. So you can, in theory, shoot down a wedge propelled AT or AA missile. Something like the defensive system known as trophy would kill the wedge, then you have to just deal with the hypersonic debris. Not easy, but easier.