Keith_w wrote:I was not aware that what applies in one universe does not apply in another until you explained it to me, having never met a single science fiction author with multiple universes before so I was kinda expecting an ageless vampire to show up, defeat the CoGA and then the Ghaba.
Now would you also kindly explain to me why what occurred to military planners in the honorverse, as well as those in the real world, that is, kinetic energy weapons are much more energetic when they have additional boost applied might not have occurred to military planners in the Safeholdian universe?
See Compact Kinetic Energy Missile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Kinetic_Energy_Missile
SPOILERS... I hope!
I've noticed that there are clear differences in propulsion between the Honorverse and Safehold, but I've never thought there was a great difference between the KEWs used in each.
The KEWs used in "Cauldron of Ghosts" seem quite similar to those used by the OBS system, if on a smaller scale. I
always thought the OBS
fired projectiles more or less straight downward at the planet's surface below it. I never considered it to be like Mike from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," which was a computer that helped the rebels launch rocks at Earth using a magnetic rail system. Those rocks in metal containers got their impact energy from their initial launch speed, aided by the Earth's gravity well.
The KEWs in both the Honorverse and on Safehold are actively fired at the surface from a much closer orbit, not dropped. The damage at Armageddon Reef is simply too great to be accounted for by a rock kicked into a degrading orbit and accelerated merely by gravity. Langhorne was intensely paranoid and might have worried that the techies had installed an anti-bombardment system, so the speed of the OBS' warheads would be crucial if they had. He would have elected to build an OBS that
fired KEWs, not one that dropped them. That would also make the OBS more accurate, because each KEW would spend less time penetrating the atmosphere.
It's also notable that the OBS can vary the amount of damage it does, presumably by altering the amount of mass fired at the planet, or by altering the speed of the KEW, just like the KEWs used in the Honorverse. The destruction of the Abbey of Saint Kohdy was far too surgical to have been done by one of the "warheads" of the size and speed that were used to destroy the Alexandria enclave at Armageddon Reef, which left craters miles wide across the surface and obliterated an area nearly the size of the Duchy of Silkiah. If the warhead used on the Abbey had been as powerful as the ones used on Alexandria, there would be a sizable crater in the Temple Lands, and the Church would have had to admit that the Rakurai had destroyed the abbey rather than conveniently omitting that fact from its official records.
I'm not saying that the OBS system uses impellers on whatever type of KEW that it fires, but the evidence that its KEWs hit with much more momentum than mere gravity could impart is overwhelming. Why else would Merlin be nervous about flying the skimmer at high speeds? No rock that was merely "dropped" from the OBS would ever hit the skimmer flying at Mach 4, but a KEW fired at a sufficient velocity might.