Suspension of Disbelief.

saber964 wrote:When hiding people in plain sight it best if you hide the forest in an even bigger forest. What I mean all of the left behind MAlign personnel could have been concentrated in a few of Mendels towers and most of them may have been killed during Houdini. E.g. if you look at where personnel and families of the various U.S. intelligence agencies live in the D.C. area the tend to live in the same housing areas or town's. In a couple of areas of Williamsburg VA upwards of 70% of the households have at least one member working for or retired from the CIA's training facility(The Farm). It is the same for Quantico VA and Ft Meade MD. Another example is there is an area of Staten Island NY that in which nearly 80% of the population is a member of the NYPD or NYFD.

It was pretty explicit that they weren't going to do that. The instructions for Operation Houdini emphasized that loose lips would cause family that was left behind to be killed, otherwise not.

The other problem is that those residential towers are tough puppies. You can damage one with a nuke or with a KEW, but to completely eliminate one requires something big enough to create lots of collateral damage - see the KEW used to take out Hancock Tower. The "ballroom" nukes were nowhere big enough and weren't deployed against the towers anyway. The Green Pines nuke did a lot of damage, but Colin Detweiller survived because he was behind a structural wall.

JohnRoth wrote:The other problem is that those residential towers are tough puppies. You can damage one with a nuke or with a KEW, but to completely eliminate one requires something big enough to create lots of collateral damage - see the KEW used to take out Hancock Tower. The "ballroom" nukes were nowhere big enough and weren't deployed against the towers anyway. The Green Pines nuke did a lot of damage, but Colin Detweiller survived because he was behind a structural wall.

And his window was basically facing the blast. Apartments more than 90 degrees around the periphery of the building would likely receive minimal damage because the building itself shields their windows from direct blast damage.

And that's for rooms with exterior windows - interior rooms more than a wall or two inside, even facing the blast, seem likely to have withstood its effect reasonable well. So there's probably at least 80% of the tower's volume were you'd have been uninjured from a nuke set off in the park out front. Those towers are ridiculously strong.

Jonathan_S wrote: Those towers are ridiculously strong.

David seems to think that everyone is trying to design a hardened fortress with everything he's done. The ships being two to three+ orders of magnitude stronger than they need to be, the towers able to stand up to midrange nuclear contact bursts.

Extra material costs money, reduces usable volume and increases build time. There is a reason why people don't design aircraft to survive being flown through skyscrapers or bridges to handle someone parking an aircraft carrier on it.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: Those towers are ridiculously strong.

David seems to think that everyone is trying to design a hardened fortress with everything he's done. The ships being two to three+ orders of magnitude stronger than they need to be, the towers able to stand up to midrange nuclear contact bursts.

Extra material costs money, reduces usable volume and increases build time. There is a reason why people don't design aircraft to survive being flown through skyscrapers or bridges to handle someone parking an aircraft carrier on it.

the Cerama-crete or whatever he's using in place of the concrete of today, David has just made ridiculously strong, tensile, and other engineering crap to make it the next best thing to indestructible (excluding KEWs, and specially designed pocket nukes in the basement designed to blow directly up)


Look at the towers in Haven, not only have those survived the nuking of the Octagon by Saint-Just, they also survived military pinnaces when McQueen blew the snot out of the Leveller Insurrection, and the McQueen rebellion shooting StateSec's shuttles down. Lastly they survived when Tom staged HIS rebellion and ended up assassinating OSJ... and those were direct attacks on at least one (probably others as well) tower.

Somtaaw wrote:the Cerama-crete or whatever he's using in place of the concrete of today, David has just made ridiculously strong, tensile, and other engineering crap to make it the next best thing to indestructible (excluding KEWs, and specially designed pocket nukes in the basement designed to blow directly up)

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open. You might have noticed that people don't make the steel columns holding up a high rise the same size as the brick column you would need if you were to use bricks?

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:the Cerama-crete or whatever he's using in place of the concrete of today, David has just made ridiculously strong, tensile, and other engineering crap to make it the next best thing to indestructible (excluding KEWs, and specially designed pocket nukes in the basement designed to blow directly up)

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open. You might have noticed that people don't make the steel columns holding up a high rise the same size as the brick column you would need if you were to use bricks?

Yes I'm aware, I work construction (ugh rebar installation day today). But the Honorverse Cerama-crete is used in minimum pours of about a foot thick I think for external walls.

Whats-his-face, the Detweiller son/clone that survived Green Parks, was behind at best a 1-foot thick wall, and the transparant aluniminum (whatever David calls it transparisteel, whatever) glass wall. Nuke goes off, he only suffered some light thermal burning, enough he was hospitalized. But not enough physical damage he wasn't up and moving less than two weeks later. And the Noveau Paris towers are more of the same, relatively thin walls, built out of the cerama-crete, multiple nukes gone off and they haven't had to tear them down and rebuild.


With how tough all these towers are, they could be built between 3 and 6 inches thick, and still do everything they do now (until you start blowing nukes up, or throwing KEW's through them from directly above)

Somtaaw wrote:

kzt wrote:You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open. You might have noticed that people don't make the steel columns holding up a high rise the same size as the brick column you would need if you were to use bricks?

Yes I'm aware, I work construction (ugh rebar installation day today). But the Honorverse Cerama-crete is used in minimum pours of about a foot thick I think for external walls.

Whats-his-face, the Detweiller son/clone that survived Green Parks, was behind at best a 1-foot thick wall, and the transparant aluniminum (whatever David calls it transparisteel, whatever) glass wall. Nuke goes off, he only suffered some light thermal burning, enough he was hospitalized. But not enough physical damage he wasn't up and moving less than two weeks later. And the Noveau Paris towers are more of the same, relatively thin walls, built out of the cerama-crete, multiple nukes gone off and they haven't had to tear them down and rebuild.


With how tough all these towers are, they could be built between 3 and 6 inches thick, and still do everything they do now (until you start blowing nukes up, or throwing KEW's through them from directly above)

The materials are dirt-cheap. If the savings in materials, labor, equipment availability, equipment wear, etc., would be trivial between "good enough" and "bring on Ragnarok", it's plausible that they over-build just because they haven't enough reason not to.

JeffEngel wrote:The materials are dirt-cheap. If the savings in materials, labor, equipment availability, equipment wear, etc., would be trivial between "good enough" and "bring on Ragnarok", it's plausible that they over-build just because they haven't enough reason not to.

Have you ever met an architect?

kzt wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:the Cerama-crete or whatever he's using in place of the concrete of today, David has just made ridiculously strong, tensile, and other engineering crap to make it the next best thing to indestructible (excluding KEWs, and specially designed pocket nukes in the basement designed to blow directly up)

You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open. You might have noticed that people don't make the steel columns holding up a high rise the same size as the brick column you would need if you were to use bricks?

Case in point, Skydomes.

Very strong materials are also used in the design of cutting edge architecture. Such as the many gravity defying designs you may have seen, as specialized in by this company...

http://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/sear ... hosted_003

Somtaaw wrote:

kzt wrote:You know what architects and structural engineers do with ridiculously strong materials? They make things much thinner and more open. You might have noticed that people don't make the steel columns holding up a high rise the same size as the brick column you would need if you were to use bricks?

Yes I'm aware, I work construction (ugh rebar installation day today). But the Honorverse Cerama-crete is used in minimum pours of about a foot thick I think for external walls.

Whats-his-face, the Detweiller son/clone that survived Green Parks, was behind at best a 1-foot thick wall, and the transparant aluniminum (whatever David calls it transparisteel, whatever) glass wall. Nuke goes off, he only suffered some light thermal burning, enough he was hospitalized. But not enough physical damage he wasn't up and moving less than two weeks later. And the Noveau Paris towers are more of the same, relatively thin walls, built out of the cerama-crete, multiple nukes gone off and they haven't had to tear them down and rebuild.


With how tough all these towers are, they could be built between 3 and 6 inches thick, and still do everything they do now (until you start blowing nukes up, or throwing KEW's through them from directly above)

JeffEngel wrote:The materials are dirt-cheap. If the savings in materials, labor, equipment availability, equipment wear, etc., would be trivial between "good enough" and "bring on Ragnarok", it's plausible that they over-build just because they haven't enough reason not to.

Cutting edge, very strong materials are NOT cheap. Hence, cutting edge. Many slipshod companies wish they were, then they wouldn't be forced into the dangerous, rampant practice of underbidding then cutting corners and costs by undermining the safety of the project in substituting non-standard design materials which either ends up costing the project possible years in delays, busts budgets and worst case, claims lives.