abrax894 wrote:evilauthor wrote:One more thing!
The idea of trying to love tap your way past the Temple's armor seems to be based entirely on the assumption that the Temple WON'T REACT to an attack that threatens its integrity (ie, "the Tank won't shoot back if I shoot it"). However, Merlin's entire decision making process about the Temple assumes the Temple WILL react if it detects anything that could be considered a threat. Threats like SNARCs and Merlin's mere presence would be far below the threat level of even a love tap bombardment.
If Merlin starts assuming the Temple WON'T react to a love tap bombardment, then what's stopping him from walking in through the Temple's front door and killing whoever he pleases? If the Temple isn't going to react to an attack, there's no need to try to punch through its armor at all.
I'll respond to the last 2 posts. First, the rifle comment. Umm, I'm not talking about using a an ar15 firing a 5.56 round at an MBT, I'm talking about using .50 cal plus anti-materials rifle with specially designed rounds to penetrate the armor. The KEW's would be designed, probably from battle steal, to PENETRATE, like the difference between between a rapier vs broadsword or claymore. A nuke is very similar to the broadsword. You are depending on the shock wave and heat to do you destructive damage and it would take something very big to do the kind of damage you would need to destroy a hardened bunker. But you're not depending on the shock wave to do you damage, you using the direct kinetic energy transfer onto the outer shell to do your damage. A number of smaller, consecutive hit on the same area in quick succession.
As for the Temple defending itself, go back and read my previous comments on that topic. I'm actually assuming that the temple HAS point defense, which is why, once again, it will be made of a material that will be resistant to that damage and traveling at a speed that will minimize it's engagement window.
This post has become most repetitive and has gone far afield of where I wanted it to go.
The main problem with the proposals to take out the Temple is that you can't "erode" the armor. The amount of kinetic energy required to do appreciable damage to the armorplast protecting it is a . . . nontrivial number. Even assuming that Merlin possessed sufficient space going capability to loft the number of penetrators you seem to be proposing, he'd have to be able to guarantee hitting exactly the same spot repeatedly to "chip away" at the armor, and each impact — assuming he was going to be able to get through at all — would be the equivalent of a ground burst kiloton-range explosion. The consequences of that for the citizens of Zion would be significant and result in very high civilian death tolls, unless it was possible for her to somehow warn the citizens of the city to evacuate.
Further, however, you need to look at Nimue's description of the Temple from Off Armageddon Reef Reef.
nimue alban on page 68 wrote:
It was ridiculous. She'd seen planetary-defense command bunkers which had been flimsier than the Temple, and she wondered which brilliant lunatic had decided to plate that silver dome in armorplast? It looked as if the plating was at least seven or eight centimeters thick, which meant it would have been sufficient to stop an old, pre-space forty-centimeter armor-piercing shell without a scratch. It seemed just a little excessive as a way to keep the dome and that ludicrous statue of Langhorne bright and shiny.
She isn't saying that the armorplast is what makes it less flimsy than "planetary-defense command bunkers" which she'd seen. Planetary defense bunkers are designed to sneer at mere 16" (well, 15.8") armor-piercing shells. They are designed to stand up to high megaton-range bunker busters. The Temple as a whole is built to that standard of toughness; the armorplast coating of the dome (as Nimue's own reflection make clear, I thought) is to permanently and miraculously preserve the brilliant polish of the Temple's dome and Langhorne's statute. Even assuming that she could take down the dome without totally flattening Zion (which, to be fair, she probably could do, although she'd still inflict significant collateral damage), all she'd manage to do would be to piss off whatever might be hiding under the dome in the basement of that "planetary-defense command bunker" she's talking about.
Now, even if all she needed to do was to knock down the dome, and even if she was able to accomplish that with "only" the equivalent of a Hiroshima or Nagasaki-level explosion at an altitude of less than 200 feet, she would kill a whole big bunch of Zionites. If you'll go back and look at her reflections on this very matter, she knows that she could take out the aboveground portions of the Temple anytime she wanted to, although it might require a suicide run on someone's part to get the nuke onto the Temple's grounds. Unfortunately, unless she could get her device into the Temple/bunker's basement, she couldn't take out the entire facility. And even if she managed that, she and the "good guys" would have to explain to the survivors why they detonated a megaton-range device in the middle of the largest city on Safehold. The death toll would be horrendous, and the initial assumption of virtually all Safeholdians would be that Shan-wei had finally managed to escape hell and destroy the Temple. Surely only the Queen of Hell would be willing to murder tens of thousands of people to destroy the structure! So when Charis announced that it had destroyed the Temple — "We had to destroy the village to save it" — who do you think the Temple Loyalists would decide Charis had been serving all along?
And, of course, there's also the question of what the bombardment system would do. Best case scenario, it would do nothing . . . which would mean that Merlin and his friends would still have no way of knowing what its on board instructions might be. Worst-case scenario, it would take the explosion of a nuclear device on the planetary surface as an indication that someone had managed to build a very high level of technological capability without its sensors detecting them, in which case its instruction hierarchy might call for the systematic destruction of every major population center in order to get whoever had so thoroughly violated the Proscriptions. There are all sorts of other Really Bad possible outcomes between those two extremes, and Merlin and the inner circle have absolutely no way to guess which Really Bad Thing might happen.
You have to remember that the Temple may be the central command and control node for the bombardment system. It may not be, however, and even if it is, the system could well contain a Doomsday Protocol or some sort of deadman's switch.
In short, there is no way — from either the bloodbath quotient perspective or the "we don't know what would happen" perspective — that Merlin/Nimue would even contemplate some sort of frontal assault on/bombardment of the Temple unless there was literally no other conceivable alternative.
)which would mean that godrod/titanium phone pole/flying crowbar penetrator type weapon not withstanding that energy would have to go somewhere, probably vaporizing Zion with a huge amount of civilian casualties.
