The attack on Alexandria

I believe Dilandu overestimates the needed number of nuclear weapons, depending on what "devastates" means.

The quoted yield, though, is like a Krakatoa or somewhat larger explosion. The weather will be a bit cooler, and the sunsets somewhat gaudier.

phillies wrote:I believe Dilandu overestimates the needed number of nuclear weapons, depending on what "devastates" means.

I calculate the number of 100-megaton weapons needed to cover this area with at least SOME effect (generally some burns). The actual area of total devastation would be several times less.

phillies wrote:The quoted yield, though, is like a Krakatoa or somewhat larger explosion. The weather will be a bit cooler, and the sunsets somewhat gaudier.

We are talking not only about ammount of material thrown into the atmosphere, but also about dropped into the oceans. About ocean chemistry.

phillies wrote:I believe Dilandu overestimates the needed number of nuclear weapons, depending on what "devastates" means.

The quoted yield, though, is like a Krakatoa or somewhat larger explosion. The weather will be a bit cooler, and the sunsets somewhat gaudier.

It's not just the yield, but the energy density of the bang and what it hits that really matters.

Hiroshima-level bombs will not cause a nuclear winter because the mushroom cloud tops out in the troposphere. Any crud kicked up soon rains down. Even with a lot of crud you don't get a big effect--witness Saddam's burning the oil wells.

The big booms are much worse because the mushroom cloud tops out in the stratosphere--above the rain. Anything thrown up comes back down only by gravity, it won't rain out--and fine dust will take a long time to come down. However, to date there's been many such booms with no nuclear winter effects--because of the target. The bomb goes boom, the mushroom cloud shoves a whole bunch of air up but there's not a lot of crud in it, the effect is minimal.

What's really devastating is when you use a big boom on a city. The bomb opens a channel to the straosphere and the soot from the burning city goes up that channel. Now you have a bunch of soot that won't rain out, the effects are much bigger.

I imagine there had to be some environmental effects of the bombardment. I just don't think we are talking the entire area of the Armageddon reef. End of the day it was a fairly small agrarian enclave with a tiny "city" as a capital. How much square footage are we actually talking about here? Doesn't seem worth the effort to level an uninhabited jungle.

That being said the details of the event are... Vague many secondhand. I am questioning some of the actual order of events and suspect Chiro may have been the real arsehole behind most of the problems we see today. I am not saying Langhorne was a swell guy or anything, but the
More first hand accounts we hear of the time frame the more it sounds like Schueler was an OK dude. The whole journal of senjin Khody threw everyone's preconceptions on the ear.

Direwolf18 wrote:I imagine there had to be some environmental effects of the bombardment. I just don't think we are talking the entire area of the Armageddon reef. End of the day it was a fairly small agrarian enclave with a tiny "city" as a capital. How much square footage are we actually talking about here? Doesn't seem worth the effort to level an uninhabited jungle.

From the big-file map, it appears that the bombarded area is about 12.25 Million Km^2. That's not a trivial area, but not a significant percentage of Safehold's surface. It's not even a majority of the southern continent.

The northwest corner of that southern continent is "Armageddon Reef" and looks like the target of multiple shots from a 12Ga shotgun. We know that there were three waves from the Rakuri, so using the 12 Ga target comparison, I would guess that each wave was composed of a dozen or more iron asteroids with only minimal shaping, if any. The result would be three dozen, or more, craters similar to Meteor Crater in Arizona.

The map doesn't show a lot of large overlapping circular formations so there was probably a lot of smaller asteroids or a lot of the original broke up before impact.

There are also three large bays shown on the map; Demon Sound, Heartbreak Bay, and Rakurai Bay. Those may well correspond to the center of each of the three waves.

The amount of dust and debris lofted into the atmosphere or orbit would be tremendous, but probably not up to "dinosaur killer" levels. Perhaps double or triple the effect of a super-volcano like Yellowstone, Krakatoa, or Mt Tambora. The latter caused "The Year Without A Summer" in northern latitudes, but the effect only lasted a year or two.

Wasn't Armageddon "Reef" created by the resulting craters of the bombardment flooding with sea water and that much of the "Reef" are in fact the parts of the lips of the craters poking above sea level?

That's kinda what I read what happened from Merlin's OAR description.

Edit: Also, it wouldn't be surprising if most or all of Alexandria's settlements were coastal. Humans love coastal real estate after all. Which means the resulting craters wouldn't have to be all that big or deep to flood with seawater.

Direwolf18 wrote:I imagine there had to be some environmental effects of the bombardment. I just don't think we are talking the entire area of the Armageddon reef. End of the day it was a fairly small agrarian enclave with a tiny "city" as a capital. How much square footage are we actually talking about here? Doesn't seem worth the effort to level an uninhabited jungle.

That being said the details of the event are... Vague many secondhand. I am questioning some of the actual order of events and suspect Chiro may have been the real arsehole behind most of the problems we see today. I am not saying Langhorne was a swell guy or anything, but the
More first hand accounts we hear of the time frame the more it sounds like Schueler was an OK dude. The whole journal of senjin Khody threw everyone's preconceptions on the ear.

Merlin in OAR seemed to think the devastation was pretty widespread. I don't think the bombardment was trying for subtle, or 'just sufficient'.

We have precisely two 'first hand' accounts. One is from Schueler and one is from Scheuler's great admirer Kohdy, who was only a random Adam at the time of the Armageddon reef strike. Is it surprising those two present a 'nice' picture of Schueler? As far as we have yet seen neither discusses the strike in any detail. It does not seem to me we have anything like evidence that Schueler was an 'OK dude'

Even if you take the Key presentation at face value, he is only taking another approach to preserving the lie he has deserted his solemn duty in order to foster on Safehold thereby doing all he can to ensure short, backbreaking, disease-ridden ignorant lives for the whole population for as long as possible and ideally for ever. That is not being an OK Dude.

Direwolf18 wrote:I imagine there had to be some environmental effects of the bombardment. I just don't think we are talking the entire area of the Armageddon reef. End of the day it was a fairly small agrarian enclave with a tiny "city" as a capital. How much square footage are we actually talking about here? Doesn't seem worth the effort to level an uninhabited jungle.

That being said the details of the event are... Vague many secondhand. SNIP.

Indeed - I think this is much more likely, especially as the livable areas on this continent would be more toward the north. Afterall they had two aims in mind:
- smash the actual Alexandria enclave to smithereens
- finish off all human life on the continent EXCEPT for 1 village, whome they would scare to death
Their aim was not to cause a global winter and destroy all life.
So - a few heavy duty rocks to pound Alex, and lots of light ones sufficient for general village killing. Maybe with a 'clean up' afterwards by 'angels' to eliminate any survivors - except the chosen village

evilauthor wrote:Wasn't Armageddon "Reef" created by the resulting craters of the bombardment flooding with sea water and that much of the "Reef" are in fact the parts of the lips of the craters poking above sea level?

True.

The point I was making was that the three large bays and numerous small ones aren't circular as you'd expect from three large singular strikes. They look like patterns of bird-shot from a shotgun instead of the big hole a shotgun slug would make.