munroburton wrote:JeffEngel wrote:One other bit that may not have shown up yet in the speculation - The political dimension will mean that smacking League forces as soon as they cross the hyperlimit may not be possible. So there may well be SD's that get damaged or debris from them that will be flying toward Beowulf out of control. Some chunk of that the leaks through close in defenses could have a Yawata Strike like effect on Beowulf to account for 10 million casualties, or what remains to make up 10 million after the BF casualties themselves (if the 10m figure doesn't exclude those).
It would take a peculiar bit of maneuvering to get debris from units still decelerating for a zero-zero intercept to do that, but an alternative may be (eeek!) that result from destruction of BF units already near Beowulf and with zero or trivial relative velocity to it.
Debris clearance isn't tricky. Look how Tenth Fleet handled it in Spindle, even forced to press destroyers into SAR work, they were able to stop damaged units from crashing into anything.
Debris clearance isn't
always tricky. If the SLN units at Spindle had been closer to it, if they'd been maneuvering in different directions, if they'd been shot up more, if 10th Fleet had fewer units to respond, it could've been a lot worse. The battle at Beowulf can certainly have some of those conditions satisfied, for all we yet know.
Since an atrocity is on the table here, I'm thinking of a recent event where one was expected and the defending commander had to deploy some of his units as a planetary screen: Second Battle of Congo. The threat there was a deliberate bombardment.
My current guess is something similar to what happened with William Daniels, Filareta's ops officer. Except instead of launching a fleetful of pods at an opposing fleet, they'll flush everything at Beowulf. Even Grand Fleet couldn't stop every missile fired at it during Second Manticore. If only the BSDF is in position to intercept that kind of dick move, the planet's going to take hits.
If they're targeted on the planet itself, and you really want to kill people, any leaker would do far more than 10m in deaths just by slamming into it as a projectile.
I suppose if you are less concerned about deaths and more concerned about making it look like some sort of deliberate move on some SLN officer's part, the missiles would be fired with normal parameters - get near and fire off laserheads - and nominally at stations, bases and fortresses near Beowulf. That could account for 10m casualties and not far more - there are almost certainly going to be some laserheads that discharge into the atmosphere or surface without those being the actual target. (And the debris from the orbital targets will still be going places, sometimes down.) The BSDF may not be in the best position to stop those missiles either, if it is going out to meet the hundreds of SLN "observer" wallers, leaving just close-in defenses to fend off a surprise attack.
That kind of attack could look like "just" an attack on Beowulf's orbital infrastructure and bases/fortresses, the sort of thing that's not an EE violation but too close for comfort for responsible navies. It could smear the SLN's reputation (even with itself; they're not monsters) without sending up red flags about nanotech mind control for everyone.
It would take someone with a known, prepared simple combination of movements to execute, like Daniels and the use-or-lose missile pod flush. I wouldn't think that an ops or tactical officer would be ready with such a combination for an attack on Beowulf or the orbital targets though. It would more likely take creative reprogramming on the missile or tactical computer end, possibly triggered by some human input that may itself have some nanotech influence.
