Reflecting Upon RTH -- SPOILER THREAD

Astelon wrote:The swamp around the Mahritha-Hell's Gate portal does present some unique challenges for any Sharonian advance. The swamp itself with slow them down, and it presents Arcana with chances to use their superior mobility to its fullest extant. It will be more difficult to build and maintain roads, or any other infrastructure for that matter.

Depending on the portal's exact location there may very well be things that make it easier. The portal appears to be inside the Amazon River Basin somewhere. It is possible that a railroad could be built to a suitable location along the river or one of its tributaries. This would allow Sharona to establish a functional port, without even reaching the coast. (Large ships can get up the Amazon quite a ways.)

Once a port is running things become much easier for Sharona. They can begin shipping in parts for ship construction, and then make their way to the next portal (thanks to Darcel they know its direction). This could provide us with naval battles much earlier than some seem to expect.

Is the swamp in the Hells Gate or the Mahritha universe?

Don

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The swamp is in Mahritha.

I agree with Nicholas. Sharona needs to build up their infrastructure at Mahritha and both supply routes leading to Hell's Gate. They also need to establish factories and a colony at Hell's Gate to mine the iron Jathmar discovered. Sharona's advantage is largely strategic. They can move massive amounts materiel to overwhelm Arcana's tactical speed if the distances are sufficiently short. Sharonan tech also works more efficiently both by incorporating a larger percentage of their population and by having shorter lead times for most of their mobile weapons platforms and systems.

Arcana might well have a higher peak production capacity in their animal production, but the time lag between conception and deployment means the investment to per unit is larger before they can be deployed in battle. Coupled with Sharona needing only one shell to kill any of the military animals and it becomes obvious that Arcana's production system is at a serious disadvantage compared to Sharona's.

n7axw wrote:
The real issue here is how limited of a supply of dragons and unicorns has left at this point in the story. IIRC, he only has about 20 battle dragons of all types left after Ft. Salby. If he attacks with those, to be sure, he is going to do some damage. But he will also start using them up and the Sharonians will become more experienced in dealing with them after each attack. The same holds true for the unicorns. He lost a quite a few of them in the attack on the fort, and although I don't have a figure for how many are left, for Harshu now that he is cut off, they are not a renewable resourse. And if he tries to get transports past the portals, he is going to use those up pretty fast as well.

I just don't see how he can get more than a tiny percentage of his people past the swamp portal no matter what he does.

Don

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Don,

The Sharonan points balancing those Arcanian issues are the density of anti-aircraft weapons at the portals from Ft. Salby to Hell's Gate that the AEF has to penetrate and particularly their supply.

Remeber, Harshu is not fighting to win. He is fighting to by-pass.

Low dragon flight at night shrinks the engagement range of the heavy AA guns with predictive distance viewers to almost nothing and Sharonan machine gunners are too numerous for any to be predictive distance viewers.

Note as well that the Sharonan life sign plotters can't see very far close to the ground like they can in the air.

Plus, Harshu likely has ground forces set up in any "Armed by-pass" to keep them busy.

Flying low, diagonally, at the both edges of the portal simultaneously, is going to seriously complicate predictive distance talent and plotting talent directed AA fire at dragons in that neither talent can see through a portal aspect.

The issue for Harshu is that he can surprise with this trick once, but he has three portals to move through.

That's why he is going to have to war game this out and aerial recce each portal to the far the well to have a chance of pulling this off.

This is where the Arcanian PC crystals will come in handy.

The long stand off at the Ft Salby gate likely has resulted in the development of very detailed Arcanian threat probability assessments for Sharonan anti-aircraft positions by weapon type.

There are a lot of implications in that thought..

The only way for Arcana to properly develop a threat assessment for Sharona's weaponry is to see each of them used, preferably in action. Sharona is bringing artillery that Harshu hasn't yet seen used, specifically the big guns at Salby, and maybe brought in by Bison to other portals.

The distance viewers and plotters should be able to give enough warning of attacks that manned machine guns will still take a toll on low flying dragons. High flying ones had better be above artillery range, or covered in a glamour; if not losses could easily become catastrophic.

A ground attack to distract the portal's defenders could yield some results for Harshu. The problem is each ground force involved has to be large enough to fully distract the Sharonians, or the dragons will still take considerable artillery fire. Harshu will also lose each ground force, if nothing else he leaves it behind. Any one want to vote for Carthos' last stand?

Im not sure about the glamours. I take it that that what we are referring to is that cloaking shield the Arcanans used to try to hide that cavalry attack during their second try on Ft. Salby? Do we have other textev on it?

Don

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So either Harshu's force is successful at getting some portion of his force back to arcana or he isn't. If successful, he has to manage to keeping his transport dragon alive. He is unlikely to succeed at keeping all his dragons alive and so some of his ground force will not make it back. If he fails, the Sharonans would have been successful at targeting all Harshu's dragons. In either of these scenarios a significant number of unicorns will have been either captured or trapped in the Sharonan universes leading to Hell's Gate. I suspect that some augmented horses would also have survived.

Wanna bet that Arpathians will manage to breed unicorns? I would also bet that the portal authority will subsidize colonists wanting to set up ranches near the front raising augmented horses. Those beast will be very helpful at colonizing and improving virgin universes. Both of these ventures will require some of the expertise of the Arcanan POWs. That's one reason to keep them alive after the Sharonans discover the atrocities Neshok and Carthos committed.

I hope that the Multiverse goes on for quite some number of books. The story has become quite engaging.

I can see the current story arc ending in 1-2 books with Sharona's Uromathian problem stabilized and a state of war continuing with Arcana. I further speculate that a new arc begins some time down the road with Arcana in the midst of economic transition fueled by Jathmar's and Gadriel's mutual discoveries into the application of Sharonan science with Arcanan magic. Sharona might well be going through the same sorts of changes with the captured healing magistrons of the AEF. Politics in Arcana and deep seated distrust in Sharona keeps the war rolling along.

I would love to see how the artificial intelligences of the djinn paly into the story. That can add some seriously interesting twists. That and the increasing temptation to bring out the WMDs will add some serious tension builders to the plot.

All this would be nice.
For that matter, some of this would be nice!

HTM

PeterZ wrote:I hope that the Multiverse goes on for quite some number of books. The story has become quite engaging.

I can see the current story arc ending in 1-2 books with Sharona's Uromathian problem stabilized and a state of war continuing with Arcana. I further speculate that a new arc begins some time down the road with Arcana in the midst of economic transition fueled by Jathmar's and Gadriel's mutual discoveries into the application of Sharonan science with Arcanan magic. Sharona might well be going through the same sorts of changes with the captured healing magistrons of the AEF. Politics in Arcana and deep seated distrust in Sharona keeps the war rolling along.

I would love to see how the artificial intelligences of the djinn paly into the story. That can add some seriously interesting twists. That and the increasing temptation to bring out the WMDs will add some serious tension builders to the plot.

I'll take those bets, Peter.
I'll say that unicorns and augmented horses are Magic Animals,
so breeding them requires magic that Sharonans lack.

HTM

PeterZ wrote:
Wanna bet that Arpathians will manage to breed unicorns? I would also bet that the portal authority will subsidize colonists wanting to set up ranches near the front raising augmented horses. Those beast will be very helpful at colonizing and improving virgin universes. Both of these ventures will require some of the expertise of the Arcanan POWs. That's one reason to keep them alive after the Sharonans discover the atrocities Neshok and Carthos committed.