Build a Fleet!

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:But, given the situation postulated above, where the planet has a missile range of 30MkM, an attacker can't exactly fire targeted penetrators from orbit. The attacker can be a careful as he wants, but to engage beyond the Planet's missile range (assuming nothing can survive long inside it,) there's going to be significant civilian casualties.

If you cannot approach closer than 30 million KM you DO NOT HAVE control of the orbital space around the planet. So firing at it would be an edict violation.

Unless you are the SLN, (that is up until they lose the "non war"). They probably cant conceive of a time they could be held accountable .... even still after all that has happened. I wouldn't be surprised if DW doesn't have some violations in store for us. I expect that will be the time when it existentially finally occurs to anyone involved from whom ever pulled the trigger all the way up to whom ever gave tacit permission that, "OMG, there is a very good chance we aren't going to get away with this!"; sort of like when someone realizes that "Saturday night scrap" he just got into has left somebody dead.

kzt wrote:

SWM wrote:As an aside, an interesting thing that I remembered while reviewing David's infodump. A missile launcher or missile control station is a valid target. But the factory that builds the missile is not (unless it is a target for some other reason).

It's a perfectly valid target. You just can't use a WMD to destroy it and the town around it.

Pardon me, I did not state it clearly enough. The context was the Eridani Edict, which only concerns itself with WMDs. You are correct. I did mean that a factory is not a valid target for a WMD when you have control of near space (unless it is a legitimate military target for other reasons).

For a factory or other non-military target, you are expected to actually drop troops if you want to control it.

SWM wrote:

kzt wrote:

[snipped a quote out from SWM--limits]

It's a perfectly valid target. You just can't use a WMD to destroy it and the town around it.

Pardon me, I did not state it clearly enough. The context was the Eridani Edict, which only concerns itself with WMDs. You are correct. I did mean that a factory is not a valid target for a WMD when you have control of near space (unless it is a legitimate military target for other reasons).

For a factory or other non-military target, you are expected to actually drop troops if you want to control it.

SWM, a candy factory or an underwire bra factory does not have military significance, anything making war materiel is in fact a military target. Even a textile mill produces material that could be used for uniforms, tentage, and war materiel.

But chemical plants and cement factories and manufacturing of many sorts use chemicals that are flammable and have hazardous health effects when spewed into the atmosphere. Mostly, it is preferable to take them intact if you can.

That didn't stop the bombing in WWII. Modern chemical plants use very very hazardous chemicals, though. So unless you have specific intel that makes a particular plant a priority target, it is (and ought to be) included in the no-fire zones for artillery and/or aircraft targeting.

Cement factories were quite common in Iraq--it is one of the primary building materials. But any chemical plant can be re-purposed to make poison gas, or munitions, or IEDs. But spewing those chemicals into the atmosphere--even or especially the volatile ones--isn't something you want to do. Especially in a factory zone near a residential district in a country where you have a small number of troops, a large patrol area, several different groups of insurgents, and a local population the size of New York State. Like, for instance, on the north side of Baghdad.

Or Mosul. Or Baqubah, Kirkuk, Ramadi, or dozens of other places. We used joint patrols of US and IA for investigatng places like that, whenever we could.

After all, Iraq had already surrendered. And, of course, not many of our people spoke Iraqi Arabic, Kurdish, or Turkish (in the north), so we needed to have interpreters.

Rob

Relax wrote:

Sigs wrote:And having your well educated workforce retrained to fill the gaps…They buy the equipment from Beowulf and if you read the book, they are training workers. That is the advantage of having your workforce highly educated, they need less time to step in to other jobs…If you have relatively advanced electrical knowledge it would be a lot easier to train you than it would be to get someone who thinks electricity is magic.

Last I checked they all GOT BLOWED UP.

KABLOOOOOOOOEEEEEY

By well educated workforce I meant the 3 billion or Manticoreans not the industry specific workers…besides what about the once Haven returned? And the whole advantage of having a well educated workforce in general is to be able to make training people for some jobs easier.

Relax wrote:
Actually, no we do not need pilots anymore.... Would be safer WITHOUT pilots. Anymore almost all fatal accidents are caused by human PILOT error and the few times it is mechanical, the pilots are useless anyways as everyone is FUBAR'd.

By your logic it people would be safer without doctors… they make a lot of mistakes… that all fine and good but if we don't have the alternative that doesn't help us much, and if we have an alternative that still requires humans that kind of defeats the purpose.

Relax wrote:Mechanics? No. We need far FEWER mechanics than we used to why? The aviation industry is mature now. Engines that used to last hundreds of hours before replacement now last thousands. Hydraulic actuators that used to require complete replacement on a D check now go multiple times as long. Sensors that used to need replacing every 10,000 actuations have now been replaced by soft film capacitors with MTBF of 500,000 actuations! Number of mechanics hours has drastically dropped on airplanes cars etc etc etc. The technology has matured.

Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that aircraft and cars of today require less maintenance than vehicles of 20,30 or 40 years ago?

Sigs wrote:By well educated workforce I meant the 3 billion or Manticoreans not the industry specific workers…besides what about the once Haven returned? And the whole advantage of having a well educated workforce in general is to be able to make training people for some jobs easier.

The workers that Haven captured at Grendlesbane specifically had the least specialized knowledge - the 10,000 "knowledge experts" with the most experience and specialized knowledge were saved by Higgens as he left. It was the generalists, apprentices and the laborers that got left behind. So while useful, they actually are not the optimal group needed to lead the education of the next high-tech workforce.

Relax wrote:

Sigs wrote:I don't know, maybe they were "producing other extremely sensitive high end technology in LARGE quantities" before hand and they have the ability to do it there hence why they are doing it in Beowulf rather than Bolthole? Or did that go over your head too?

Yea, Beowulf was producing FTL nodes...

Oh wait, no they were not.

Yea, Beowulf was producing FTL transceivers.

Oh wait, no they were not.

Yea, Beowulf was producing micro fusion bottles...

Oh wait, no they were not.

Yea, Beowulf was producing grav pinch technology inside the micro fusion bottles and on the grav lensing on the warheads of missiles.

Oh wait, no they were not.

Come again?

Because the Author has repeatedly stated that there was nothing wrong with Solarian League civilian technology, they can build all the things that Manticore can they just have not researched in those technologies…

Sigs wrote:

Relax wrote:
Actually, no we do not need pilots anymore.... Would be safer WITHOUT pilots. Anymore almost all fatal accidents are caused by human PILOT error and the few times it is mechanical, the pilots are useless anyways as everyone is FUBAR'd.

By your logic it people would be safer without doctors… they make a lot of mistakes… that all fine and good but if we don't have the alternative that doesn't help us much, and if we have an alternative that still requires humans that kind of defeats the purpose.

Relax wrote:Mechanics? No. We need far FEWER mechanics than we used to why? The aviation industry is mature now. Engines that used to last hundreds of hours before replacement now last thousands. Hydraulic actuators that used to require complete replacement on a D check now go multiple times as long. Sensors that used to need replacing every 10,000 actuations have now been replaced by soft film capacitors with MTBF of 500,000 actuations! Number of mechanics hours has drastically dropped on airplanes cars etc etc etc. The technology has matured.

Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that aircraft and cars of today require less maintenance than vehicles of 20,30 or 40 years ago?

The average airplane engine in WWII was designed to be completely overhauled/replaced in less than 500 hours of use. The jet engines in the Me-262 were replaced in less than 100 hours. Modern Jet engines get multiple thousands of hours between engine overhauls. The Average Car sold today doesn't need it's spark plugs replaced (and a major engine service) for 80-100 thousand miles - where a car from the 80's usually required a replacement every 25,000 miles or so.

Sigs wrote:Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that aircraft and cars of today require less maintenance than vehicles of 20,30 or 40 years ago?

Such numbers are all over the internet; usually tagged as "man-hour/Flying hour" or something similar. One example I'm familiar with is the F-4G vs F-16C aircraft -- I don't recall exact numbers, but the F-16 required about half as much maintenance as the F-4G. The was 25 years ago when I retired (in 1989.)

Weird Harold wrote:

Sigs wrote:Nations dont generally do things out of the goodness of their hearts, they do things to promote their national interests and protect their citizens, sending untold millions or billions of their citizens to fight and die just because it is the right thing to do just doesn't happen. The war with the MA will end and as all democracies go, the government that won the war will have to adopt to peacetime or it will be replaced.

Just for reference as to why I believe Manticore -- and presumably the entire GA -- will stay in the "space patrol" business indefinitely:

Storm From the Shadows
Chapter Forty-four
Honor Harrington speaking: wrote:"So if we get into an all-out war with the League, our strategy is going to have to have a very definite political element. We'll have to make it clear that the war wasn't our idea. We'll have to drive home the notion that we're not after any sort of punitive peace, that we're not trying to annex any additional territory, that we have no desire to conduct reprisals against people who don't want to fight us. We need to tell them, every step of the way, that what we really want is a negotiated settlement . . . and at the same time, we have to hit the League as a whole so hard that the fracture lines already there under the surface open right up. We have to split the League into separate sectors, into successor states, none of which have the sheer size and concentrated industrial power and manpower of the present league. Successor states that are our own size, or smaller. And we have to negotiate bilateral peace treaties with each of those successor states as they declare their willingness to opt out of the general conflict to get us to stop beating on their heads. And once we have those peace treaties, we have to not only honor them, but step beyond them. We need to use trade incentives, mutual defense pacts, educational assistance, every single thing we can think of to show them that we are—and to really be, not just pretend to be—the sort of neighbor and ally they'll want around. In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."

Manticore doesn't have to do everything by themselves, but they are explicitly planning for long-term involvement in Trade and Military assistance.

And Trade and Military assistance means what? Because that is assuming that there would be many successor states which would mean that they would not require any patrolling. What I got from that is that they would want to do the exact opposite of "space patrol"

Storm From the Shadows
Chapter Forty-four
Honor Harrington speaking: wrote:[/b] In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."

How do you do that by forcing your down everyone throat? for those nations that come out of the League, Manticore will make treaties with it doesn't say anything about peacekeeping and pacification. I am not denying that there would be involvement in some systems by Manticore or the GA where they act as Peacekeepers and do anti-piracy patrols, for example any systems/nations that the MA forces on Manticore such as the Mobius System where manticore was committed, or other systems where they do a lot of business in or through.