My God! My God, the seccies have guns!

Dafmeister wrote:

kzt wrote:Oh, but there is a 120 meter deep tunnel a meter wide that the missile is being fired down. Which will easily accommodate the AT or AA missile body. It won't accommodate the wedge. So the missile screams down the tunnel until it hits the end at mach 6+, while the wedge around it turns the structural ceramacrete into very fine dust. I suspect the tensile strength of a cloud of sub-micron sized dust is pretty low.

The same trick works with a window or door too, after you blow it with a grenade or satchel charge. The door or window is suddenly a lot larger opening and anyone around it is dead.

Given that the structure of a residential tower can withstand a multi-kiloton nuclear weapon going off inside it without signigicant structural damage, I doubt that an anti-tank missile hitting it at mach 6 is going to do more than make an interesting scorch pattern on the surface.

Difference between a blow torch and a bullet against a popcan. Same principle.

Gigantic difference between a thermal bloom in its basement, compared to a DENSE projectile moving at Several Mach. Why nuclear weapons used against ships, concrete strucutres etc is a useless weapon unless it goes off underwater where its THERMAL energy evaporizes the water and flips said ship onto its back for instance. An instantaneous thermal bloom on a substance with a high thermal heat of vaporization effectively negates said weapon. At best it vaporizes the surface a certain distance.

True, the people in the structure will all be dead as they turned into crispy fried critters, but the structure itself will still be fairly in tact. Conversely against a penetrating projectile the structure has a bad day, but the people inside may survive if slightly protected.

kzt wrote:Oh, but there is a 120 meter deep tunnel a meter wide that the missile is being fired down. Which will easily accommodate the AT or AA missile body. It won't accommodate the wedge. So the missile screams down the tunnel until it hits the end at mach 6+, while the wedge around it turns the structural ceramacrete into very fine dust. I suspect the tensile strength of a cloud of sub-micron sized dust is pretty low.

The same trick works with a window or door too, after you blow it with a grenade or satchel charge. The door or window is suddenly a lot larger opening and anyone around it is dead.

You're assuming that the plasma guns can make that tunnel. It was established as far back as OBS that plasma weapons don't penetrate natural rock very well, let alone ceramacrete. Based on textev, so far as I can remember, I'm not sure plasma weapons would make any impression at all.

Relax wrote:Difference between a blow torch and a bullet against a popcan. Same principle.

Gigantic difference between a thermal bloom in its basement, compared to a DENSE projectile moving at Several Mach. Why nuclear weapons used against ships, concrete strucutres etc is a useless weapon unless it goes off underwater where its THERMAL energy evaporizes the water and flips said ship onto its back for instance. An instantaneous thermal bloom on a substance with a high thermal heat of vaporization effectively negates said weapon. At best it vaporizes the surface a certain distance.

True, the people in the structure will all be dead as they turned into crispy fried critters, but the structure itself will still be fairly in tact. Conversely against a penetrating projectile the structure has a bad day, but the people inside may survive if slightly protected.

Firstly, a ceramacrete tower isn't a case of bullet v pop can, it's more like bullet v battleship's belt armour.

Secondly, nuclear weapons don't just produce thermal effects. There's a hell of a lot of kinetic energy as well, just like with a projectile.

Dafmeister wrote:You're assuming that the plasma guns can make that tunnel. It was established as far back as OBS that plasma weapons don't penetrate natural rock very well, let alone ceramacrete. Based on textev, so far as I can remember, I'm not sure plasma weapons would make any impression at all.

They found they couldn't use handheld plasma guns inside the facility due to the amount of structural damage they inflicted on the ceramacrete. So that suggests that it will in fact leave quite a mark.

I found this thread searching for something else and just have to necro it...

Little background about myself I was an Army Infantry Sgt with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and I love MOUT

1. The Peaceforce, while organized as an army IS NOT an army. They have no doctrine for attacking a similarly armed and motivated force

2. Defensive forces always have a significant advantage generally minimum 3-1 in a fortified setting. Hancock is more representative of "normal" conditions, still a extremely bloody affair but a relatively quick victory. Neue Rostock has a much better disciplined and organized force before Thandi Palane comes in.

3. There is a reason we call MOUT training facilities murder houses. A single untrained fighter, who knows your coming, can inflict serious losses on even the best trained forces inside of buildings.

A decently trained team can clear a normal house in 30 seconds to a minute. Going into these towers is basically suicide they are a rats nest of passageways in 3 dimensions. These towers are like Hundreds of Sadr Cities or Fallujah's stacked upon each other. To make matters worse the attacking force has no maps and no support. Effectively every squad is on their own. During the Second Battle of Fallujah we sent in 13 Infantry battalions, 2 tank Battalions and 10 Companies of Infantry plus artillery and air support. It took 2 months to clear what would be the equivalent of 1 level of a residential tower, and that was with having all the maps and surveillance abilities available to the attacking force. Pulsers are way more lethal then bullets and you only have to hit someone to make them combat ineffective, and Peaceforce has very few suits of battle armor and even those will go down to a tribarrel or good IED.

The few actual battle scenes seemed pretty accurate to me. In short of just dropping a KEW on the tower attacking those towers would be exactly like he described it, a very nasty maze of death.

As far as using impeller drive missiles, hitting a mass the size of a load bearing strut is way different then a tank. if im not mistaken that much mass would overpower any hand held missiles wedge.

Using plasma weapons also would not be much use, again a load bearing strut of a 3-400 story tower is a lot different then some hidden hut on Medusa.

Hasek wrote:Using plasma weapons also would not be much use, again a load bearing strut of a 3-400 story tower is a lot different then some hidden hut on Medusa.

Plasma weapons are essentially controlled fusion reactions. They have a LOT of energy. That's why they couldn't even use the light hand-held ones inside, the weapon effects would shatter the deck above and drop in on the shooter and their team. However, if you want to shatter the building I suspect a really big plasma gun is just the ticket.

The vehicle mounted cannons are clearly vastly bigger then the one used by unarmored infantry and presumably a lot bigger then the ones used by power armor.

So we are talking somewhere around a scale difference between a direct fire 155mm howitzers, 40mm grenade launchers and 7.62mm MGs in terms of effects on buildings.

kzt wrote:

Hasek wrote:Using plasma weapons also would not be much use, again a load bearing strut of a 3-400 story tower is a lot different then some hidden hut on Medusa.

Plasma weapons are essentially controlled fusion reactions. They have a LOT of energy. That's why they couldn't even use the light hand-held ones inside, the weapon effects would shatter the deck above and drop in on the shooter and their team. However, if you want to shatter the building I suspect a really big plasma gun is just the ticket.

The vehicle mounted cannons are clearly vastly bigger then the one used by unarmored infantry and presumably a lot bigger then the ones used by power armor.

So we are talking somewhere around a scale difference between a direct fire 155mm howitzers, 40mm grenade launchers and 7.62mm MGs in terms of effects on buildings.

HoS says that the Royal Manticoran Army's Main Battle Tank has a 120mm Plasma Cannon as its main weapon. Since it has to be capable of taking out enemy tanks that could be armored with the same nanotech meta-materials as a warship it must be pretty powerful.

A 120mm weapon on a MBT where have I seen that before?

In my NSHO there isn't nearly as much thought and development put into the ground combat stuff as there is in the space combat systems, and it shows.

kzt wrote:In my NSHO there isn't nearly as much thought and development put into the ground combat stuff as there is in the space combat systems, and it shows.

I respectfully both agree and disagree with that statement.

I would say that the authors have given a considerable amount of thought to the ground combat stuff, if not quite as much as the naval space combat systems.

But I suspect that the reason why we think the ground combat hasn't been given much thought is that the characters in the Honorverse haven't really given the thought and planning that it would require to actually mount an offensive that to take and secure an Honorverse tower that was defended, with both sides having Honorverse weaponry but (for whatever reason), the offensive forces don't have or can't use space weaponry--KEWs. NOBODY wants to really even think about it, let alone actually do it.

As Thandi Palane told Victor and explained to Dusek, it is the stuff of nightmares:

Cauldron of Ghosts, Chapter 48 wrote:In most modern societies, therefore, the laws regulating such (re)construction were strict and well-enforced. You not only needed a permit to undertake such a project, you needed to file—and maintain—your plans, diagrams and blueprints. In theory, even in the largest such building in existence, police or firefighters or medical personnel could find their way anywhere using their equipment’s computers to access the up-to-date data off the net.
Not so, however, in societies whose central authorities were weak or corrupt—or, as here on Mesa, simply didn’t care what second-class citizens did in their own districts.
That was foolish on their part, looked at from one direction—because it meant that if a major revolt did take place, the military forces trying to suppress the revolt would be forced to operate on the worst conceivable terrain. Thandi had told Victor that Solarian Marines dreaded nothing so much as having to engage in inner-city—not even that; inner-edifice—street fighting. The advantage was entirely on the side of the defenders, no matter how lightly armed—even if the attackers had access to up-to-date and accurate records of the interior layout. If they had to operate blind . . .
On most worlds, this wasn’t a huge problem. First, organized armies seldom met in pitched combat on inhabited planets because of the provisions of the Eridani Edict and the Deneb Accords. A planet was required by interstellar law to surrender when an opponent controlled orbital space around it; if it didn’t, then the attackers were allowed to use kinetic energy weapons against its planet-side defenders, and very few people were stupid enough to go up against KEWs. So armies—and Marines—were unlikely to encounter one another in that sort of urbanized terrain.
Second, very few guerrilla or terrorist organizations had the manpower to mount a coordinated defense of such a large tower. They could have all sorts of positional advantages, but if the attackers had the manpower and the technology to come at them from too many directions at once, that wouldn’t do them a great deal of use. That meant that even OFS police actions were unlikely to face that sort of challenge very often. As far as police organizations were concerned, they were usually quite good at taking down individual floors or even multifloor levels of towers, although the job got a lot harder if they didn’t know the lay of the land. On the other hand, most criminal organizations suffered from the same relatively low manpower levels as terrorists and guerrillas: it was simply very, very difficult for such organizations to match the sort of manpower and equipment a genuine government could throw at them.

Cauldron of Ghosts, Chapter 50 wrote:Fortunately, Dusek decided to drop the issue. “Fine. Evelyn it is. How much experience have you had defending—or attacking—a building like this one?”
“Not much. Hardly anyone does. That’s because the worst nightmare a ground forces officer can imagine would be to try to take a building like this by force. Usually, you try to avoid it at all costs. If you absolutely must neutralize this sort of structure and can’t take the time for a siege, you call in the navy and have them break it down with KEW penetrators dropped from orbit.”

Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.

Vince wrote:I would say that the authors have given a considerable amount of thought to the ground combat stuff, if not quite as much as the naval space combat systems.

The impression I got from Honorcon was that Bu9 really had very little to go on. For example, they had no idea why David decided that Manticore had a tank with treads and contra-grav. I came up with maybe half dozen ideas in a few minutes about how you would go about defending that seemed to be out of left field for them.