RTH Official Snippet #2

brnicholas wrote:If you were replying to me, as far as the Sharonans know, they can just fly over the Atlantic Ocean.

Nicholas

pushmar wrote:True, I guess the Sharonians wouldn't know that dragons have only a 1000 mile range or so.

That's not to say that they won't ever figure that out.

phillies wrote:Blow up dragon corpse.

Hopefully they were more fortunate than the iirc Oregon Public Works Department that had a dead whale on the beach.

Boys and their toys meant a perfect excuse to use...

HIGH EXPLOSIVES!

After all, if you blow something up, it isn't there any more, is it? And perhaps this was just to turn the whale to fragments.

In any event, since there is little civil engineering experience in blowing up whales, they used a healthy amount of high explosives. And they apparently invited the public to watch. It was, well, sort of like watching The Great Train Wreck.

Fortunately, this time no one was killed or injured. The car parked well back from everything, well, 'resistance to being crushed by a half ton of dead whale falling from a great height and also having sideways velocity' is apparently not in the car's design specifications. There are, however, videos someplace.

Returning to the railroad, the folks advancing by rail are in the position of Sherman trying to reach Atlanta or the fascists in the Ukraine. To defend a railroad, you have to defend all of it, every inch. The fascists had the advantage that the other side did not have total air superiority and the ability to infiltrate assault forces by air to the point of interest. Sherman dumped his supply lines, but he was not going very far, there was a supply base at the far end, and he was advancing through terrain that could be thoroughly plundered. Also, he had heard of 'plunder, before you burn'. The Sharonans have none of these advantages, and are going to have a challenging time of things. Steam overland freight haulers over flat terrain may work better. Advancing by water rather than rail may work better, though translocating the Cape Fear Dreadnaught works may be a chore.

How tall is one of these holes in the universes?

brnicholas wrote:I wanted to make a couple of comments on these numbers.

First we know that there are seven more brigades behind these two. How far behind is an open question but the fact that the first two arrived about a week apart implies to me the rest probably aren't too far behind.

Second, the Arcanans ought to start having significant rear area security problems in the next few weeks. We know the Sharonian civilian settlers were pulling out from the universes close to Hell's Gate but I can't imagine that applied to the survey crews. I expect they were rushing toward Hell's Gate. Chalgyn's teams had claimed only a few mile wide direct route between the portals, everything else is still open to be claimed and with contact made with another civilization the expected value of such resources will be very high. I'm sure the Portal Authority closed Hell's Gate to survey teams and they may have also closed New Uromath but they surely left the other worlds open. Those survey teams are all men who chose a high risk high reward occupation, all have small arms, are about half military veterans, are all in voice contact with the Portal Authority voices. They will have figured out by now that something is wrong back at the portals and at least some of their Voices probably got messages a lot like the one Syrial got. I expect them to walk back to the forts and to attack when they find them under Arcanan control. Does anyone doubt several survey crews working together can take a fort away from an Arcanan force commanded by someone of Hundred Thalmayr's ability? I don't. Especially since the Arcanans don't even appear to realize they are there! That is likely to pull a lot of Arcanan forces away from the front in the next six months are so.

Nicholas

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:
We were told at the end of HG that the AEF started
with c11,000 men. Figure Harshu gave Carthos 2,500
and took 8,500 with him. If he lost 1,500 at Ft.
Salby (probably lost fewer), he still has 7,000 men,
with Battle Dragons arriving any time,
against chan Geraith's expected 6,000.
But one brigade of 3DD, without extras, has 3,000
to go against maybe 2,500. And the brigade brings
heavy weapons, which Carthos-force lacks.

Of course, the Kelsyr Route is a long way to the front!
Many Portals to garrison.

HTM

Mil-tech bard wrote:

{big snip - htm}

the journey between Vankaiyar, the Ricathian city closest to the portal linking Traisum and Salym, and New Ternath included a water gap of over six thousand miles — practically the entire length of the Mbisi and the width of the Vandor —

{big snip}

runsforcelery wrote:

______________________________________________



Fort Salby

Yanohan Bay on the west coast of the green and misty island from which the Ternathian Empire took its name.

3rd Dragoon Division’s
winters at Fort Emperor Erthain in Karmalia,

Kingdom of Shurkhal;

Arpathia,

Division-Captain Arlos chan Geraith

the Arcanan attack on Fort Salby,
flying creatures which could only be described as dragons

The Trans-Temporal Express’s work crews
steam shovels and bulldozers to bury them,

the “eagle-lions”, the enormous horses

Company-Captain Lisar chan Korthal, his staff Voice,
Regiment-Captain Braykhan chan Sayro, staff artillerist. Regiment-Captain Therahk chan Kymo, his staff quartermaster (with a) Delkrathian accent

3rd Dragoons were at the far end of a thirty thousand-mile supply chain.
(NOTE: I Thought it was forty-thousand miles - htm)

Brigade-Captain Shodan chan Khartan commanded the 3rd Dragoons’ 2nd Brigade,


An infantry brigade was almost twice "that size",
{"that size" = the 3000 men of a cavalry brigade - htm}
but an infantry division had only two brigades,
whereas a dragoon division had three,
for a nominal total of just over ten thousand men,
not counting the inevitable attachments.

True, no unit was ever fully up to the numbers in
its official table of organization.
That was certainly true in the Third Dragoons’
case, at least!

Salbyton, the town spreading out beyond the fort {Salby},

Gahlreen Taymish, TTE’s First Director,
had sent his senior engineer, Olvyr Banchu, forward

Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik’s men
during their successful defense of the fort.

Regiment-Captain Merkan chan Isail, chief of staff,
...chan Isail had been with chan Geraith a long time
-----------------------------------
the Kelsayr Chain

list of Worlds Outgoing from Sharona,
and of their Portals, when given, is at
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1673

Traisum was one of the half-dozen or so “triples”
the Portal Authority had explored — universes which
possessed three portals rather than the customary two.

The Chernoth portal, linking Traisum and Kelsayr,
and the Salbyton Portal, linking Traisum and Karys,
had been discovered within a year of each other.

Chernoth lay in the heart of New Ternath
on the far side of the Vandor Ocean,

the Salbyton portal
(only there hadn’t been a Salbyton then, of course)
had been one of the most inaccessible ones ever
discovered, lying as it did in the heart of
the Narshathan Mountains.

Vankaiyar, the Ricathian city closest to
the portal linking Traisum and Salym,

a water gap of over six thousand miles — practically the entire length of the Mbisi and the width of the Vandor

TTE had built a shipyard from the ground up
at Renaiyrton, on the same site as the
Ricathian Mbisian seaport of Nymara.
The yard — established simultaneously with
the enormous railhead at Salbyton —

Once that was accomplished, {snip}
the portal from {Kelsayr} to Lashai had been
discovered within another several months.


the Chalgyn Consortium’s push forward through
the newly opened Failcham had reordered everything.
Chalgyn had surveyed portals in Failcham, Thermyn
(yet another triple), New Uromathia, and Nairsom
before they hit Hell’s Gate, and the Portal Authority
had been astounded to discover that Nairsom connected
directly to Resym in the Kelsayr Chain.

It was the first time any {Sharonan} had ever encountered
two universe chains which intersected one another.
No one had expected it, {snip} and Kelsayr and Karys
had been considered completely separate chains.
No one was certain exactly how to designate
them now — chan Geraith suspected one of them would
end up being dubbed a “loop” or something of
the sort — but the unique configuration {snip}

If the TTE had expected the two chains would merge, it might well have simply abandoned the hugely expensive Traisum Cut entirely. The route from Fort Salby to Hell’s Gate, the original point of contact with the Arcanans, along the Kelsayr Chain was better than four times as long as the one along the Karys Chain, but over ten thousand miles of it lay in Traisum,
{snip - htm}
Kelsayr and Lashai were both more heavily inhabited
and had better road and rail development than
anything down-chain from Traisum in the Karys Chain.

The route from Lashai to Thermyn, on the other hand,
was almost totally unimproved. There were trails,
and the future route of the TTE’s roadbed had been
surveyed almost all the way to Nairsom, but there
was nothing remotely like an adequate road net
to support the advance of thousands of men with
all of their weapons and supplies beyond Lashai.

Mil-tech bard wrote:That there are other voices behind Arcanian lines besides the one the Arcanians assassinated in the Portal forts -- and the child-voice whose father died to protect him -- means a great deal in terms of a WW2 Coast watcher type communication's/observation network on the Arcanian military.

This is a completely outside the Arcanian frame of reference threat. Once the Sharonan's punch through any portal's Arcanian ground defenses. The Sharonans will have intelligence on Arcanian operational patterns from behind the lines survey teams that will let them surprise the hell out of the Arcanian military.

Consider for a moment that the Arcanians don't have optical instruments like binoculars that the Sharonan's use.

They instead use things like mage images of dragon vision.

Can you say a lot of unexpected Transport Dragon causalities?

A Sharonan with a high power rifle and a 8-to-10 power optical scope is going to make Arcanian garrison life pure hell on earth.

And with survey team voices to organize it, this threat won't surface until after the Shronan's punch through a gate.

This will be how the Sharonan's will make rapid progress up to Hell's Gate.

And it will also make for a great deal of pure hate when Arcanian reprisals and atrocities against Sharonan civilians are feed live to Sharona's talented population/elites.

Keeping Sharonan's from committing uncontrolled reprisal atrocities is going to be very, very, difficult.

Astelon wrote:Voices have ranges and sensitivity that varies by person. The passage in HHNF is about a single Voice mentioned as young, and not very sensitive. He had to enter an upper level trance to be able to hear a message at more than a limited distance (don't remember if the distance was mentioned, but the way it was discussed made it seem short).