Mesa occupation

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:That being said, still will not create the long term radiation you are talking about. Nitrogen/Xrays are fine. Same goes for Oxygen. So.... What am I missing here?

You pour enough x-rays into the atmosphere via an x-ray laser you will get some at the surface. It will be a lot less than what you started with and won't be coherent or well focused, but you will get, given the power level of honorverse weapons, quite a bit of energy in the form of x-rays over a wide area. And I've read that having full body irradiation by high powered x-ray sources is generally considered not conducive to your continued health or longevity.

So, NO, you agree with me, that there will not be long term residual radiation from a laser and in fact you misspoke.

Xrays verses light molecules, deflection scatter? Hardly. Instead of frying a 5m diameter circle from 300km overhead, it might be 5.5m... Ooooo scary...

I said they would die of radiation poisoning over the next few weeks. That's what happens to people who absorb a lethal but not insanely absurd amount of radiation. Here's handy chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning

How you managed to come up with "And the land becomes radioactive" I don't know, because neither said that or implied it.

kzt wrote:I said they would die of radiation poisoning over the next few weeks. That's what happens to people who absorb a lethal but not insanely absurd amount of radiation. Here's handy chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning

How you managed to come up with "And the land becomes radioactive" I don't know, because neither said that or implied it.

Uh, no, they will not die of radiation poisoning a week later. How you came up with baloney is anyone's guess.

Death occurs due to explosive expansion when the 95% of their body containing water turns into a gas. And anyone else nearby will be obliterated by flying debris.

kzt wrote:

hanuman wrote:Don't think for a moment that the story of Helen's rescue of Berry and her brother hasn't been widely distributed among the oppressed peoples of the galaxy by now. That is a powerful thing.

Who is the most heroic fighter in the overthrow of the genocidal government of Rwanda? How come that doesn't ring a bell with you? How about the most effective Croatian general in the war with the Serbs?

There are lots of great stories out there and that is on one planet. With 2000 or so in the SL?

As a matter of fact, the reason Museveni is the President of Rwanda is precisely because he was the general leading the Tutsi insurrection against the Hutu government.

I do get your point, though. On the other hand, we are talking about a very specific dynamic here. And there are plenty of examples where a formerly oppressed people do remember and even venerate the guy who led them to liberation, even centuries later. Washington, anyone?

I tend to doubt The Mesa Broadcasting System shows many films portraying how heroic the ballroom is. Have you ever talked to or read stuff written by people who lived in communist states where they only had access to the approved storyline and then they came to the west and found a somewhat different view of the matter?

Relax wrote:Death occurs due to explosive expansion when the 95% of their body containing water turns into a gas. And anyone else nearby will be obliterated by flying debris.

Dude, what forms a fireball when a nuke goes off? It's the X-rays in air being absorbed in several feet and producing a plasma that strongly absorbs X-rays, and then heating that. That is what is going on for 20 miles of air. There is no coherent beam by the time you get to the ground. You have this inverted triangle of plasma sticking down into the atmosphere. It's not a tiny bit wider, it's hugely wider until the power density drops to the point where it no longer produces plasma in air. At that point you are "just" getting hard X-rays being emitted.

So no, X-Ray lasers are NOT what you want to use for precisely controlled delivery of force on the surface of Mesa.

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:Death occurs due to explosive expansion when the 95% of their body containing water turns into a gas. And anyone else nearby will be obliterated by flying debris.

Dude, what forms a fireball when a nuke goes off? It's the X-rays in air being absorbed in several feet and producing a plasma that strongly absorbs X-rays, and then heating that. That is what is going on for 20 miles of air. There is no coherent beam by the time you get to the ground. You have this inverted triangle of plasma sticking down into the atmosphere. It's not a tiny bit wider, it's hugely wider until the power density drops to the point where it no longer produces plasma in air. At that point you are "just" getting hard X-rays being emitted.

So no, X-Ray lasers are NOT what you want to use for precisely controlled delivery of force on the surface of Mesa.

Dude: Did you miss geometry class? A nuke makes a fireball because it is omnidirectional when it explodes. You do not get to change an XRays, VECTOR at will. Something has to reflect it. The only "something" that very marginally reflects XRAYS are materials like gold or tungsten carbide, or Niobium. I do not see Wolter telescopes covering the sky to get grazing reflectivity out of XRAY's. Of course that only works for low energy state XRAY's. XRAY's useless for destroying anything.

When high energy state XRAY hits an atom it strips it of its electrons turning it into a plasma and keeps going in the same direction it started in. Its amplitude drops. Plasma then reemmits an XRAY at right angles generally is my understanding from spin direction which then is absorbed into an atmospheric atoms. The distance required to absorb this energetic XRAY is the same no matter the height at which the initial atom was stripped. Follow on Xrays are still going straight. Plasma is transparent to high energy waves short wavelength waves letting the Xrays through in a line. (Are we going to assume in phase or out of phase X-rays and therefore much higher density? Personally I would assume in phase. We are pretty much there today.)

So, no, you most certainly do not get a triangular cone, you most certainly do get a column of plasma.

You could argue that there are better solutions, KEW, which one can vary for total destructive power, but most certainly a PDLC would work. Has to be able to blow away a missile moving at 0.8c at 200,000km. Somehow a target at most 1000km away moving VERY slowly is not going to pose a problem.

JohnRoth wrote:

saber964 wrote:Why would the MOF need to wait for Jeremy X to show up they already have the CinC TMF GEN Thandi Palane and a loud shout away the de facto Crown Princess of Torch Helen Zilwiki at Mobius.

JohnRoth wrote:General Paline is the head of Torch's armed forces. She is not a genetic slave, she is not a Ballroom member and, while she can (and undoubtedly will) give Admiral Gold Peak her advice as the senior Torch official present, she is not the government of Torch.

Helen Zilwiki has nothing to do with Torch. Her position with respect to the Torch monarchy is undefined, to say the least.

Jeremy X, on the other hand, is a native of Mesa, is a genetic slave (an entertainer line, to be specific), was the head of the Audubon Ballroom, and is known by reputation to just about everyone. He represents the rebellion among the slaves.

saber964 wrote:Thandi is the most senior government official present, she is right at or just below policy level in the government. Her advice and recommendations will very heavily influence the MOW. Whether she is or isn't a slave or ballroom member is mostly immaterial, she represents the government of Torch and any of the slave that know that will give her a certain amount of respect and a large amount of influence with the slaves. Plus she was on planet and leading the resistance and commanding the defense of Sakarov tower which will give her more of the same.

As the military leader of the defense of Neue Rostock tower, she has a lot of credibility with the seccies. That probably doesn't transfer to credibility with the slaves.

saber964 wrote:Also hears something to consider the Ballroom may already have infiltrators on Mesa like the Felicia III these hypothetical people may give the MOF a leg up with various problems as they crop up.

Did you actually read CoG? The ballroom has very few assets on Mesa. This was a major plot point.

saber964 wrote:As for Helen Zilwicki, she is under the constitution provisional or otherwise is the de facto Crown Princess of Torch. She may not be able to do much but being the elder sister of the Queen of Torch will also buy a certain amount of influence and respect with the slaves. Plus with Helen being an officer in the RMN will also buy some influence and respect , because the RMN has been enforcing the Charwell Convention very rigorously for centuries.

Torch does not have a constitution yet, provisional or otherwise. Whatever credibility the RMN has among the slaves is vested in Admiral Gold Peak.

By the way, what is the MOW? All I can make out is that it's how you cut grass.

To answer your last two questions. I was balancing the contradictions between SoSag and CoG in which states that Torch does (SoSag) and doesn't (CoG) have a constitution. I was also speaking of the perception involved.

I kinda thought it was obvious MOW is short for Ministry/er of War i.e. Jeremy X. Sort of like DOD is Department of Defense.

saber964 wrote:
To answer your last two questions. I was balancing the contradictions between SoSag and CoG in which states that Torch does (SoSag) and doesn't (CoG) have a constitution. I was also speaking of the perception involved.

I hadn't caught that. I suspect the issue is that RFC didn't catch the discrepancy during the final edits on CoG - it was very late, and he and Eric were doing a lot of heavy-duty editing during Honorcon that year. RFC is going to have to resolve that discrepancy.

saber964 wrote:I kinda thought it was obvious MOW is short for Ministry/er of War i.e. Jeremy X. Sort of like DOD is Department of Defense.

I'm afraid my tolerance for unfamiliar acronyms got exceeded when I had to figure out what someone was doing yammering on about the FLOTUS.

kzt wrote:I tend to doubt The Mesa Broadcasting System shows many films portraying how heroic the ballroom is. Have you ever talked to or read stuff written by people who lived in communist states where they only had access to the approved storyline and then they came to the west and found a somewhat different view of the matter?

I have indeed. On the other hand, ever heard of the Underground Railroad.

There is a difference between the communist states pre1990s and, for instance, South Africa. The former did not, by and large, practice an institutionalized caste-based political system. South Africa and our fictional Mesa did/does practice such a system, in which members of the lower caste were methodically persecuted, oppressed and reduced to servitude on the basis of readily-recognizable physical features. In such a system it is very easy for an underground network of information sharing, at the very least, to develop. In the communist states the oppressors were of the same ethnicity and culture as the oppressed. In South Africa and on Mesa that is not the case.