My God! My God, the seccies have guns!

kzt wrote:

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.

Well, there goes that idea.

Maybe the authors are covering up their not thinking through the ground combat stuff by having the characters in the Honorverse not wanting to think about it--either because it is the stuff of nightmares, or because of a certain amount of laziness in thinking--call in the Navy and have them deal with it (rain KEWs on the target[s]). Or maybe both.

As for the attack against and the defense of Neue Rostock as written in Cauldron of Ghosts, a very rough, primitive analogy might possibly be the attack by United States forces on Iwo Jima against the Japanese forces holding it in World War II.

yes. but unlike the U.S. marine in WW2, mesa had heavily armored VTOL shuttles available to do things like clear from the top down, which is pretty much always the preferred option. Unlike the U.S. marines, Mesa appears to have not used any sort of supporting fires at all. No bombing from shuttles, no use of the plasma cannon, no use of wedge based AT missiles to rip up hard sites, just slow methodical advances into what they knew was a meat grinder.

Hell you know the secies have access to nukes, you could simply blow the tower up with a mining nuke at a critical point and claim it was a bomb being prepared for another green pines style attack.

When they took out Hancock Tower with the megaton-range KEW, it flattened and destroyed the industrial spokes on either side of the Hancock District and severely damaged the nearest towers beyond those spokes. The was also damage to the subsurface infrastructure serving the entire city (author's emphasis). Over 8k citizens were killed who were flying or in subways when the KEW hit and another 4-6k were missing and *might* be dead as well instead of lost in the confusion. So a big KEW didn't work when the civilian leadership tried it, which is why in the book they held off on the little KEWs.

There were hordes of independent newsies on the way, so patiently blasting the building into rubble would take too long. They were not using plasma cannons due to the likely non-structural damage that would fill up the hallways and make it that much harder to attack the tower.

I think that the argument is that to take Neu Rostok, the Mesan forces didn't use optimum strategies, and could have taken the tower(s) much more quickly if they had. Gee, that makes sense in the HonorVerse where "Smart People Ain't Perfect except on the 6th Tuesday in a 5 week month" if you get my drift.

Well isn't that a duh. Group one is the goon squad that's been "thuggering" the secces for generations unopposed. Picture them as a bunch of prison security guards from a third world country trying to act as an assault force in unknown territory. Group two is the "we can wipe up your neighborhood" with meh! competent leadership and better weapons and small unit tactics, but they run up against a well armed contingent, let's say they're as effective an out of town police force going up against "Russian top mafia" set of shooters, etc. Then the big bozo takes charge and marches everyone into a football stadium and gets the roof dropped on all of them. So the politicos go nuts and nuke the place (albeit with a monster KEW strike) that takes out part of their elites, then run scared from their own
stupidity because the newsies are on the way.

So at that the Mesan leadership you call in "the varsity", aka the National Guard, weekend warriors who are really quite well trained, but who haven't really been doing a whole lot of tactical invasion type stuff in urban environments, and gee whiz, the superior officer is being managed by the same chickens--t politicos. They might be full time, what they are NOT is SLN marines who know how to assault a well defended urban location from long experience doing so, blah blah blah.

Can't simply blow up the tower --> ceramcrete plus mistake #1 KEW style. And if you knock down the Neu Rostok tower, (say with a plasma shell tank plus KEW's or impeller missiles that they don't have anyway -- at least they never make an appearance in the Verge systems including Mesa) the opp force probably also takes out the electrical for the whole or most of the city. OOPS. Now the tactical grid is kaput, and the tower's is still up, courtesy of the fusion reactor in the basement. You're blind; the defenders are not.

Up against... An embedded enemy who has nothing to gain and everything to lose if they don't go balls to the wall, death to the last defender, and they've had more than enough time to look at the "home turf" design a whole lot of dead ends, traps, kill zones based on available weapons to maximize opp force casualties and minimize defensive manpower losses -- using the knowledge of a superior talented and trained Marine to defend against HER OWN level of expertise, let alone amateur hour.

I'm not even military but give me 75% as good of weaponry sans air cover as the local totalitarian police might have, and home "urban turf" with stuff as solid as Ceramcrete, including tanks, and I'd wager that with 4-5 better trained pro(s), led by a Marine Captain to help us set our traps and zones, plus another 30-50 men like me, we'd take out at least a regiment and maybe a battalion before we went down. Which is about that the secces were doing.

Meaning that I find the Cauldron of Ghosts urban assault "defense in depth" scenes to be well done, by "human" choices along the way not the dang Borg collective.

kzt wrote:yes. but unlike the U.S. marine in WW2, mesa had heavily armored VTOL shuttles available to do things like clear from the top down, which is pretty much always the preferred option. Unlike the U.S. marines, Mesa appears to have not used any sort of supporting fires at all. No bombing from shuttles, no use of the plasma cannon, no use of wedge based AT missiles to rip up hard sites, just slow methodical advances into what they knew was a meat grinder.

Hell you know the secies have access to nukes, you could simply blow the tower up with a mining nuke at a critical point and claim it was a bomb being prepared for another green pines style attack.

One point of similarity between Iwo Jima and Neue Rostock is that both of the attackers did not use their maximum weaponry (at least not until later for Neue Rostock) available to them.

SharkHunter wrote:So at that the Mesan leadership you call in "the varsity", aka the National Guard, weekend warriors who are really quite well trained, but who haven't really been doing a whole lot of tactical invasion type stuff in urban environments, and gee whiz, the superior officer is being managed by the same chickens--t politicos. They might be full time, what they are NOT is SLN marines who know how to assault a well defended urban location from long experience doing so, blah blah blah.

And SLN marines themselves don't have long experience doing so - they've just got enough experience, consideration, and institutional memory of how hellish it is to avoid it at just about all costs. If they had to do it, they'd've probably started with a better job of isolating the tower followed by light KEWs - or approximately the same plan the Mesan professionals would have adopted had they been allowed to by circumstances and civilian leadership. And it still would have been the stuff of nightmares and slow.

It's a nightmare scenario all around and not something anyone does much. Where the SLN Marines would shine would be only in the second place better knowledge of how to do it. Mostly they'd excel in knowing enough to demand the authorization to avoid it or do it the right way from the start. And having more pull with their superiors about doing it their way than Peaceforce had on Mesa.

Shark Hunter, good analysis, and I would add another point....General Dreschler's actions were controlled by the politicians....Clauewitz's old formula (often misquoted) still holds true.

Those folks didn't just want Neuw Rostock bombarded and destroyed; they wanted the seccies massacred and decimated, with bodies laid out in rows, so that no other tower could or would ever think of offering resistance. They were also shocked by the damaage done by the KEW used against Hancock, and like politicans everywhere, really didn't understand modern warfare or what Dreschler wanted to do.

Add to that they had a natural, almost ingrained, bias against the 'seccies' in that they would scuttle off and refuse to fight, as they had done so many times before. They simply couldn't concieve (as the SLN couldn't) that something was different this time.

And by the time they realized it, they were too far into the building, had too much political and military...prestige I guess is the best word I have...tied up in this effort and they felt they had to carry it though to the end.

So I'll leave the tech parts (could a 120mm plasma cannon and missiles do the job) to others more skilled, and simply say again that youo cannot leave out the political side of the equation.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

Kizarvexis wrote:They were not using plasma cannons due to the likely non-structural damage that would fill up the hallways and make it that much harder to attack the tower.

When the building falls over, which it will eventually when you scoop out a couple of dozen cubic meters of structure every minute, it really doesn't matter how much rubble is inside it. Rocks fall, everyone dies.

The whole objective is to end the rebellion. Taking the building room by room and floor by floor is a possible way of doing this, but a highly suboptimal way. If for no other reason than you have a very small force that can't absorb the scale of losses you will incur. Assuming that they don't just desert, which isn't a safe assumption if you are feeding them into a meat grinder.

Turning the building into a 50 meter high pile of rubble is another way of solving the problem, and was certainly doable.

kzt wrote:Turning the building into a 50 meter high pile of rubble is another way of solving the problem, and was certainly doable.

Actually, I don't think that particular result was "doable."

The description of the way Neu Rostock was built and the materials it was built with, reducing the tower to a pile of rubble would require collapsing each floor as the remaining tower settled upright and intact atop the rubble. The way it is described, there is no way it is going to do a WTC Collapse if you start destroying it at the foundations.

--snipping--

kzt wrote:The whole objective is to end the rebellion. Taking the building room by room and floor by floor is a possible way of doing this, but a highly suboptimal way. If for no other reason than you have a very small force that can't absorb the scale of losses you will incur. Assuming that they don't just desert, which isn't a safe assumption if you are feeding them into a meat grinder.

Turning the building into a 50 meter high pile of rubble is another way of solving the problem, and was certainly doable.

We're agreeing. General Drescher definitely agrees, but they used a TOO big hammer the first time when they blew away the Hancock tower. Then the civilian authorities won't let the MPP use ANY hammers at all, and finally they get around to saying "use hammers but don't blow away the stuff under the tower", likely because someone pointed out "your KEW's (or tower collapse?) dig a crater too deep, a significant chunk of our city will be without power. These towers are supposed to dwarf the WTC, requiring countergrav to build, after all.

The political calculus was why Thandi was sure that they could hold out for a decent amount of time, until the KEW's started falling. Before it happened though, both Duesek and Drescher realized that the spark in Neu Rostok had ignited an unstoppable war: the powers that be had committed 1/4 of the entire planet's MPP to take out ONE tower in ONE secce district near ONE city.

AKA it's a good thing that an invasion fleet captured the high orbitals before things REALLY got out of hand. In fact, I'd think that the good General probably wiped her brow in relief that "the Calvary" arrived and ended her part of the fight.