A Nasty Surprise

Just in case I missed it, did it ever occur to anyone after the blowups at Beowulf to send out a reminder to all cargo handing facilities everywhere to physically check every container aboard? A lot of work yes, but a nice sigh of relief if nothing is found. Imagine the panic if one of those bombs is found in an otherwise neutral station. And how else would you know if you might be on a list somewhere for no reason that you can think of.

zuluwiz wrote:Just in case I missed it, did it ever occur to anyone after the blowups at Beowulf to send out a reminder to all cargo handing facilities everywhere to physically check every container aboard? A lot of work yes, but a nice sigh of relief if nothing is found. Imagine the panic if one of those bombs is found in an otherwise neutral station. And how else would you know if you might be on a list somewhere for no reason that you can think of.

A grav implosion bomb looks like a bunch of electronics on a scanner. Which means you bury it inside a container of electronics. You've got 4000 cubic meters of electronics to search, which amounts to like 2000 pallets of electronics with say 100,000 boxes.

I've got 10,000 of those containers going to customers via your station, which I'm going to unload at say 10 per minute, so in 18 hours I'm empty and moving on.

How long do you estimate it will take to inspect by hand several BILLION boxes of consumer electronics?

kzt wrote:A grav implosion bomb looks like a bunch of electronics on a scanner. Which means you bury it inside a container of electronics. You've got 4000 cubic meters of electronics to search, which amounts to like 2000 pallets of electronics with say 100,000 boxes.

I've got 10,000 of those containers going to customers via your station, which I'm going to unload at say 10 per minute, so in 18 hours I'm empty and moving on.

How long do you estimate it will take to inspect by hand several BILLION boxes of consumer electronics?

Silly question maybe. You're getting 4,000 cu mtr from the pair of Rhino heavy lift containers?

In universe do they know enough to figure out the physical size of the bomb used?

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kzt wrote:

zuluwiz wrote:Just in case I missed it, did it ever occur to anyone after the blowups at Beowulf to send out a reminder to all cargo handing facilities everywhere to physically check every container aboard? A lot of work yes, but a nice sigh of relief if nothing is found. Imagine the panic if one of those bombs is found in an otherwise neutral station. And how else would you know if you might be on a list somewhere for no reason that you can think of.

A grav implosion bomb looks like a bunch of electronics on a scanner. Which means you bury it inside a container of electronics. You've got 4000 cubic meters of electronics to search, which amounts to like 2000 pallets of electronics with say 100,000 boxes.

I've got 10,000 of those containers going to customers via your station, which I'm going to unload at say 10 per minute, so in 18 hours I'm empty and moving on.

How long do you estimate it will take to inspect by hand several BILLION boxes of consumer electronics?

It's not quite that bad. Not quite.

The Honorverse uses shipping containers --- they've been referenced several time --- and containers can be offloaded and placed in designated orbital holding areas until they are inspected. Indeed, we may see a shift to a system in which transshipped goods --- as opposed to final destination goods --- are stored only on dedicated platforms with minimal human crews, which would mean that any bomb which did get through might kill hundreds, even a few thousand, but would not inflict megadeaths.

It'd be inconvenient, but it can be done. And as the scale of the Beowulf incident sinks in --- there have been terrorist attacks on habitats before, but never anything on this scale --- the Honorverse in general is likely to rethink its shipping practices. Not just at the warehousing end, either.

Who this is going to be hardest on are individually owned ships who work the "tramp" role --- the ones who have irregular routes and look for consignments anywhere they can get them, rather than working as cogs in a major shipping line's fleet. The major lines will quickly realize they don't want to go anywhere near the potential liability of another Beowulf Incident and will institute their own internal procedures to protect themselves. They are big enough and well enough established that they can't just fade into the woodwork after delivering a bomb. The major freight handling platforms will be installing additional sensors and monitoring equipment, as well. It may not be able to readily detect suitably disguised nukes, but it should be sufficient to make a pretty good stab at figuring out where a device detonated, which will sort of define the pool of shippers who might have delivered it, which would in turn establish the liability chain and put even more pressure on the big shippers. But on the flip side, that means freight managers will tend to feel much safer about handling their goods and probably fast track at least some of their practices. The little guy, who isn't well known, is going to be the guy TSA spends the most time wanding, and that's going to hurt his bottom line (which is probably more fragile to begin with) more than the big guys are going to get pinched.

There have always been some safeguards against something like this in place, but, frankly, no one ever encountered a terrorist group or individual terrorist prepared to kill 40-50,000,000 people just to make a point. Or not one who succeeded in the attempt, anyway.

Now that someone has, I think you can assume the possibility of future repetitions would be taken very seriously.

kzt wrote:

zuluwiz wrote:Just in case I missed it, did it ever occur to anyone after the blowups at Beowulf to send out a reminder to all cargo handing facilities everywhere to physically check every container aboard? A lot of work yes, but a nice sigh of relief if nothing is found. Imagine the panic if one of those bombs is found in an otherwise neutral station. And how else would you know if you might be on a list somewhere for no reason that you can think of.

A grav implosion bomb looks like a bunch of electronics on a scanner. Which means you bury it inside a container of electronics. You've got 4000 cubic meters of electronics to search, which amounts to like 2000 pallets of electronics with say 100,000 boxes.

I've got 10,000 of those containers going to customers via your station, which I'm going to unload at say 10 per minute, so in 18 hours I'm empty and moving on.

How long do you estimate it will take to inspect by hand several BILLION boxes of consumer electronics?

Even if the detonator is a grav pinch generator rather than a fission bom , that scanner should be able to spot a couple kilograms or even tons of Lithium-6-Deuteride that is the fusion fuel.

All this is fine, until someone decides to give a habitat the Tepes Treatment. Even if that wasn't classified after Honor's return from Hades, it's absurdly unlikely every small craft everywhere has been retrofitted around that little design flaw.

Or any number of other ways an orbital habitat can come to grief.

My question is pointed more to the area of bombs that are already in the warehouses. If you were to examine all the cargo boxes in your warehouses and actually found a bomb, what would you think?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Even if the detonator is a grav pinch generator rather than a fission bom , that scanner should be able to spot a couple kilograms or even tons of Lithium-6-Deuteride that is the fusion fuel.

Say it's only 50KT. I really don't want to be anywhere on an orbital platform that has a 50KT bomb go off inside. Everyone within say 5 kilometers is just dead. The shockwave propagated by the structural members at the speed of sound in steel is going to do nothing good for the integrity of the rest of the compartments, then the hurricane of fragments of pulverized station components rams into the rest of the station at speeds ranging from KM/sec to hundreds of meters/sec.

This assumes it doesn't destroy one of the those cool Honerverse reactors that releases petatons worth of energy as it fails, at which point half the biosphere of the planet it orbits catches fire.

zuluwiz wrote:My question is pointed more to the area of bombs that are already in the warehouses. If you were to examine all the cargo boxes in your warehouses and actually found a bomb, what would you think?

That I need to leave right now. And so does everyone else.

kzt wrote:

zuluwiz wrote:My question is pointed more to the area of bombs that are already in the warehouses. If you were to examine all the cargo boxes in your warehouses and actually found a bomb, what would you think?

That I need to leave right now. And so does everyone else.

Depending on where in the warehouse, and how likely I thought the bomb was to detonate if moved, I would eject it from the warehouse with a nav beacon on it. Call traffic control let them know about the hazard I just launched and have them decide if EOD should look at it or just send it on a decaying orbit into the nearest star.