Caoster wrote:Merlin not destroying Dreadnaught is a huge plot hole and poor storytelling. Merlin had tons of snarcs there, viewsing the battle. He WATCHED the Captain set up the FIVE fuses to blow the ship, and presumably watched it fail to blow up. We are supposed to believe is just didn't occur to ANYONE who was watching that "hey, maybe we should finish the job?"
evilauthor wrote:That still gets into the question of why Merlin needs to build primitive 500 pound bombs to do the job of that a single SNARC could have done at the end of the book. If you could answer why a bomb and not a SNARC, the same answer would apply to why SNARCs weren't used to blow Dreadnought's magazine.
Jonathan_S wrote:Quite possibly because SNARCs use more hard to replace high-tech than a primitive laser guided bomb. OWL, despite having fabbers, doesn't have access to all the feedstocks you need to endlessly reproduce Terran Federation tech. So using what you have efficiently makes sense - the guidance circuit and control servos for a LGB should take vastly less than the cutting edge recon device that is a SNARC.
Plus developing the bombs gives you the option to blow up things that don't have significant powder magazines (merchant ships; disabled ship that have put their power overboard, non-ships, etc).
You know, guys, the fact that Merlin used a bomb to destroy one galleon doesn't — as Jonathan points out above — mean that that's the
only reason to build the thing in the first place. Note that Merlin has considerably
heavier weapons that he also built "just in case." Does he want to use them? No. But if it becomes necessary for a "miraculous" intervention — of the sort that he absolutely hates the thought of but might find himself forced into in order to prevent something even worse — the bombs give him the ability to do that without using weapons which are likely to attract the attention of the bombardment system or whatever is/is not sleeping under the Temple. So, yes, he decided to use one of them to take out the galleon instead of expending a SNARC remote to detonate the magazine. He could have done it the other way, but the recon scammer was already in the vicinity — remember that it delivered the "fishing boat" the
seijins used to board the galleon in the first place — and there was no reason
not to.
And for those who are concerned about the recon skimmer's possibly being sited, please do recall its stealth capability. No one was going to see it unless Merlin
chose for them to see it, and he didn't.
As for all of the complaints about "why didn't Merlin" blow up this or demolish that, and "why wasn't Ahbaht court-martialed," I think most of that should be fairly self-evident if you think it through.
A court of inquiry — or even a court-martial — doesn't necessarily mean that the "accused" is going to be found culpable and stripped of command. In fact, it's much more likely that you'd get a result in which Ahbaht would be removed from command in
peacetime than it is that you would get the same result in
wartime. Husband Kimmel was effectively retired following Pearl Harbor as part of what amounted to a peacetime witch hunt in a military transitioning (rather abruptly and very much against its will) from peacetime to wartime but still with a peacetime mindset. Seven months later, Richmond Kelley Turner, the commander of the invasion force at Guadalcanal, could have been court-martialed and put ashore for the rest of the war following the Battle of Savo, arguably the worst blue-water defeat in the history of the United States Navy. Although he did not exercise direct tactical control over the cruisers covering the anchorage or issue specific orders for
how the approaches were to be covered, he was still ultimately responsible for those decisions, and those decisions were disastrous. However, it was recognized by his superiors that stuff happens, especially in wars, and that while an officer may be legally responsible for the bad decisions of subordinates — or even for bad consequences of decisions he himself made based on the best available information — this is an often unavoidable consequence of fighting a war.
The ultimate lesson of someone like Turner — who went on to become the most successful commander of amphibious operations in the history of the United States — is that you don't throw away the expertise and capability of an officer of superior ability
in the middle of a war over a military disaster unless there's clear evidence that the disaster in question was the result of negligence (which it was not, in this case) or of gross incompetence (which it also was not, in this case).
As for blowing up
Dreadnought,, there
was an officer sitting there ready to blow up the ship — and himself. Unfortunately, he got killed before he could. And so did all of the rest of the ship's officers, aside from one midshipman, who (I believe) was unconscious when he was captured.
If the fact that the chain of command can be fatally disrupted in the middle of a savage hand-to-hand fight after an hours-long gunnery duel using six-inch muzzle-loading cannons and black powder I invite the reader's attention to the battle between USN
Chesapeake and HMS
Shannon. The unfortunate midshipman who carried his mortally wounded captain below decks for treatment was court-martialed for quitting the deck primarily because command had devolved upon him. Think about how many levels of command authority had to be wiped out in a battle lasting — I believe — no more than 10 or 15 minutes.
Dreadnought's battle lasted for
hours, the final boarding action came about as the result of a collision between her and another ship, virtually all of her officers had already been killed before the collision occurred, and her captain was killed at the moment of the collision, crushed by falling rigging. Then the gunner, who was supposed to fire the charges in the magazine — and who was, I think, understandably somewhat distracted by the fact that he was having to make up powder charges for the guns on the fly because the battle had lasted so long that she'd used up all of her existing cartridges — was killed by a grenade before anyone could tell him what was happening on deck.
I may been guilty of "handwavium "in setting up the battle at all — frankly, I don't think I was (obviously) — but given the circumstances confronting the ship's crew, the fact that the magazines weren't blown up shouldn't seem all that inconceivable . . . or culpable.
And that is completely aside from the points I made in another thread in explaining why Merlin didn't blow the ship up
after her capture.
