new/old dead horse, futher beating requested

We know they can detect missile drives at least out to about 10 LM, and the typical ship pretty much can't help but notice a hyper transition at 2 LH.

It's very vague past that, and I doubt that this is an accident.

Cheopis wrote:Remember Honor's reaction to Blackbird Station? She was stopped. Remember her reaction to when Tankersley was killed? She wasn't stopped. Sure she was much younger then, but many navies have lots of young commanders. You do something heinous to civilians and you risk that world's professional military becoming professional killers who are willing to set aside the "gentleman's" rules of war.

There is a world of difference, literally. At Blackbird, Honor went after, specifically, the Masadan commander who had ordered the abuse of the RMN prisoners, not the entire population of Masada. After Paul died, she went after, specifically, the people who ordered and carried out his killing, not the entire population of Manticore.

Dafmeister wrote:

Cheopis wrote:Remember Honor's reaction to Blackbird Station? She was stopped. Remember her reaction to when Tankersley was killed? She wasn't stopped. Sure she was much younger then, but many navies have lots of young commanders. You do something heinous to civilians and you risk that world's professional military becoming professional killers who are willing to set aside the "gentleman's" rules of war.

There is a world of difference, literally. At Blackbird, Honor went after, specifically, the Masadan commander who had ordered the abuse of the RMN prisoners, not the entire population of Masada. After Paul died, she went after, specifically, the people who ordered and carried out his killing, not the entire population of Manticore.

There is not a world of difference. In the first case she lost control. In the second case she lost interest in anything but killing the one that hurt her, and the one who ordered it.

If you are hurt badly enough, and can still act, the animal will emerge. Instincts will take over, and if you are a trained soldier, those instincts will be to attack. This is something people have known for centuries. It's not changing for as long as we can identify as being human. It's part of us. We try to control it to some extent, normally, but everyone has a breaking point.

Cheopis wrote:
There is not a world of difference. In the first case she lost control. In the second case she lost interest in anything but killing the one that hurt her, and the one who ordered it.

If you are hurt badly enough, and can still act, the animal will emerge. Instincts will take over, and if you are a trained soldier, those instincts will be to attack. This is something people have known for centuries. It's not changing for as long as we can identify as being human. It's part of us. We try to control it to some extent, normally, but everyone has a breaking point.

At which point her XO or medical officer relieves her of duty as mentally unfit to command, in much the way that Scotty Tremaine stopped her from doing anything stupid at Blackbird.

And, FYI, when I said there was a world of difference, I chose the word carefully. As in, the world full of other people you're going to vapourise along with the people you actually want to kill, if you launch an Eridani attack. It takes a special kind of mental break to do that, and in any remotely well-functioning military, one of your subordinates will stop you.

There is nobody more dangerous or difficult to stop than someone who has nothing left to lose.

Dafmeister wrote:

Cheopis wrote:
There is not a world of difference. In the first case she lost control. In the second case she lost interest in anything but killing the one that hurt her, and the one who ordered it.

If you are hurt badly enough, and can still act, the animal will emerge. Instincts will take over, and if you are a trained soldier, those instincts will be to attack. This is something people have known for centuries. It's not changing for as long as we can identify as being human. It's part of us. We try to control it to some extent, normally, but everyone has a breaking point.

At which point her XO or medical officer relieves her of duty as mentally unfit to command, in much the way that Scotty Tremaine stopped her from doing anything stupid at Blackbird.

And, FYI, when I said there was a world of difference, I chose the word carefully. As in, the world full of other people you're going to vapourise along with the people you actually want to kill, if you launch an Eridani attack. It takes a special kind of mental break to do that, and in any remotely well-functioning military, one of your subordinates will stop you.

You are correct that in a WELL-FUNCTIONING modern military, such a thing would not happen. We aren't talking about that scenario though, we're talking about a scenario where the military is no longer well-functioning because someone has just pushed the button that erased everyone that military cared about.

Military discipline, combat discipline, rules of war... All of these things are constructs we use to prevent atrocities. They are constructs we try to build with as much redundancy and effectiveness as possible, but they can be broken. When they are broken, we get things like the German treatment of Jews, Gypsys, and gays in WW2, or the Japanese treatment of Chinese and other occupied asian states in WW2. The US had some breakdown moments in Vietnam as well, and the Vietnamese were pretty bad about how they treated a lot of POWs. As recently as the US in Iraq there were breakdowns when the wrong combination of events occurred. Faluja.

Humans are capable of some truly terrible things if they are pushed hard enough.

There were a lot of awful things that were done in WW2 by Allied troops to enemy troops. They just were not usually mentioned.

To take one example: My dad knew a guy who was a ranger who roamed about 25 miles in front of the US front with his team. They would capture prisoners and after interrogation the same guy would always be ordered to "take them back to HQ". He was always back in 10 minutes. Exactly what happened he didn't know, but...

The ranger my dad knew wasn't terribly upset about how the Army tried to get all the Rangers (including him) killed in combat at the end for the war, as his opinion was that they were generally not really not very nice people.