Taking Out the Rakurai...

Question:

Why can't Merlin use the orbital lift capability he has to loft rocks/sand/pebbles into a retrograde orbit. With closing velocities of 10's of km per second and the relative immunity of rocks to lasers, the Rakurai SATs should be shredded with just a few attacks....

Merlin's not going to mess with the Rakurai until he can neutralize what's under the Temple. He can't know what kinds of protocols would be triggered if the Rakurai goes offline. It's entirely possible, even probable, that the Temple, no longer sensing the Rakurai, would activate some kind of failsafe. At the moment, the Rakurai has no impact on the war that is being waged, so he doesn't want to tempt fate until he's good and ready.

CRC wrote:Question:

Why can't Merlin use the orbital lift capability he has to loft rocks/sand/pebbles into a retrograde orbit. With closing velocities of 10's of km per second and the relative immunity of rocks to lasers, the Rakurai SATs should be shredded with just a few attacks....

Welcome to the forums, and enjoy a virtual beverage of your choice! You'll find we're a friendly bunch, although your topic has been address in numerous other threads which may well answer your question - not to mention that Himself as weighed in on it once or twice... (That's RFC or David Weber if you haven't read the Bahzell books yet.)

Your question leaves me a bit confused. What orbital lift capacity does Merlin have available? As far as I know, he has has only two skimmers and an assault shuttle - which may not have orbital capacity. Of course Nimue's cave contains whatever RFC needs it to contain, so you may well be right - but since there's so much tech that Charis is avoiding because of the OBS, I'd bet that Merlin doesn't have much heavy lift capacity.

If Merlin wants to take out the OBS by lobbing rocks at it, he'd set up a fabber in the asteroid belt (if Safehold has one) and fire some rocks at the Rakurai that way. That's a favorite of the "Let's throw rocks at it" crowd, and as far as I can tell, it would work, as long as it didn't miss and hit the planet. (Major oops!)

This discussion has been held before in great depth, so simply searching for "Destroy Rakurai" here in the forums will probably give you half a dozen threads with some pretty good ideas - some of which include throwing rocks, which given that "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is one of my favorite books of all time, occurred to me immediately. Unfortunately, orbital lift wasn't one of the things with which Shan-Wei was able to equip Nimue's cave - that we know of, since at this point the cave could hold just about anything, since we haven't been told much even after all these books. (Notice that we didn't learn anything in the HFQ snippets either? That wasn't a spoiler was it?)

So yes, Merlin may destroy the OBS by throwing rocks at it sometime in the future, although the current bet, based on RFC's book "Heirs of Empire" is that the controls are in the Temple basement, so capturing the Temple will become just a wee bit more important in the next few years, before any interfering archangels make their return and decide that Charis is absolutely ruining Langhorne's great plan...

Until then, Merlin has more than enough on his plate, with a major war in Siddarmark to win (Never start a land war in Asia!) and the Temple to capture, not to mention getting revenge on Gorath for the murder of a thousand Charisian POWs! So there ought to be quite a lot of excitement in HFQ, even before the Mighty Host of God and its 1.6 million locusts/Harchongese show up, most of them to act as cannon fodder. But where are they going to show up, and will they be split into separate groups? I vote for a northern and southern force, which would cause Hanth and DE all sorts of problems, since it takes a long time to kill off a million men acting as cannon fodder, while 600,000 have muzzle loading rifles and even some of the new breech loaders and are shooting back at you.

Best to cut off their logistics and starve them to death. TLs, lock up your wives, daughters, and livestock!

Why can't Merlin use the orbital lift capability he has to loft rocks/sand/pebbles into a retrograde orbit. With closing velocities of 10's of km per second and the relative immunity of rocks to lasers, the Rakurai SATs should be shredded with just a few attacks....

Because it's quite possible that the system have some sort of dust shielding, that would just make her immune to this kind of attacks.

Think about it. The Rakurai system was designed by the peoples, who have good reasons to assume such attacks are pretty possible. After all, Fallen's could took control over some skimmers, or even shuttles, or simply have some SNARC's avaliable. And the dust attack is the simplest that they could start. So, the Archangel's clearly took some precaution to make system invunerable to any weapon, that Fallen's may be able to field.

Well Merlin did risk a foray into the OBS with a stealthed SNARC, that was promptly killed by a laser defense system. The temple did not respond to that and you'd think that would be a pretty big red flag to any AI controller.

I brought the simple concept of rocks/sand/pebbles up because I'm a big fan of Ian Douglas' work in his 3 trilogies. I like his use of KISS to equalize the advantages between us technological inferior space travelers and an all powerful galactic spanning civilization. (If you're not familiar with the series, highly recommended. Ship loads of sand accelerated to a significant portion of c is a heck of a weapon.)

Rocks themselves are pretty immune to lasers and while you do have the blow-off impulse effect deflecting the rock, you also have the cone of shrapnel effect.

At a retrograde closing velocity of 6km/sec, each gram of protective would have about 8 grams of TNT explosive equivalent. Lofting a kg would be like 8 kg of TNT. Nothing to fool around with and very difficult to shield against.

We know Merlin has at least sub-orbital capability in his recon skimmers. And his SNARC was able to get co-orbital with the OBS at one time.

At least something for him to consider when the temple activates itself in the next couple of books - we certainly aren't going to wait until the 1000 year visit to see that happen are we?

OBTW, I still think the Hamilcar is somewhere close by...

It doesn't have to be an AI running the OBS. IIRC, Merlin's pretty sure it's all automated, so it would have ignored something that could have been mistaken for cosmic detritus. But it's incredibly trivial for there to be a periodic handshake between the OBS and the groundside control station (presumably the Temple) to make sure everything is OK. Heck, it could simply be a telescope pointed at the thing to make sure it's still there. If the Temple tries to ping the OBS and gets nothing back, that's a much more relevant red flag than shooting down some ostensible space junk. That kind of emergency would be worth activating whatever contingency plan the Archangel's had.

Well Merlin did risk a foray into the OBS with a stealthed SNARC, that was promptly killed by a laser defense system. The temple did not respond to that and you'd think that would be a pretty big red flag to any AI controller.

Only if it understood what happened. And it may not. For example, if sensors catched the small radar signature of stealthed SNARK moving on the ballistic trajectory, system could just misidentify it as a really small stone.

I brought the simple concept of rocks/sand/pebbles up because I'm a big fan of Ian Douglas' work in his 3 trilogies.

The sandshots work in Douglas universe, but, for example, they would not work in Honorverse; the dust shields on even the smallest ships could deal with a few kilos on the relativistic speed.

. (If you're not familiar with the series, highly recommended. Ship loads of sand accelerated to a significant portion of c is a heck of a weapon.)

Yes, against the enemy on position, that wouldn't just move out of trajectory. And only on a really large speed.

At a retrograde closing velocity of 6km/sec, each gram of protective would have about 8 grams of TNT explosive equivalent. Lofting a kg would be like 8 kg of TNT. Nothing to fool around with and very difficult to shield against.

And very simply to just vaporise it with a laser shot. Come on, the OBS have sensors that could detect a stealthed SNARK - which is definitely very good cloaked. The space debree, that could be dangerous for the OBS dust screen would be detected and vaporised/diverted long before it would came close.

Wasn't there a scene once where Merlin took the skimmer into orbit just for his own peace of mind?

Expert snuggler wrote:Wasn't there a scene once where Merlin took the skimmer into orbit just for his own peace of mind?

Yep.

Okay, let's list the possible defenses that the OBS might have:

Point Defense Lasers - Verified by the vaped SNARC. Hell, the OBS is noted too be surrounded by defense in depth of satellites.

Tractor Beams - Merlin used a hand held one on Eric Dynnis. There's likely bigger versions for space work, and having satelites with tractors to deflect rocks off course would be likely.

Drones - Not just for maintenance. Drones could be sent out to grab rocks and divert them. They might even use tractor beams.

Armor - Federation armor is some pretty tough stuff. The Temple needs a city destroying nuke to guarantee getting what's in the basement. The OBS might well be armored well enough laugh off a retrograde sand/rock attack.

Throwing rocks from the asteroids could be done safely unless he threw so many that an AI decided it was enemy action. Misses that hit the planet don't matter--simply don't throw a rock that will do damage through the atmosphere. Remember, Chelyabinsk was hit by a half a megaton and it didn't do more than break windows. Throw smaller stuff and it's not an issue, yet it's quite lethal to space-based hardware.

However, it's not an option because the satellites have defenses.