why the honorverse would be full of dead planets

It really doesn't matter. A million or four tons of iron ore or ingots, 4 million tons of grain, it all works the same.

I should mention that Austalia exports sand to Saudi Arabia. Along with camels.

Hell, I honestly expet that there are freighters in the honorverse carting air as cargo.

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L. E. Modesitt actually did this in The Ecolitan Enigma.Took a large freighter, filled it with asteroidal iron and drove into a moon at relativistic speed, destroying it utterly. Escaped in an attached scout ship and got away clean. Not saying it could or could not be done in the Honorverse, that's the author's option. But it has been done elsewhere.

zuluwiz wrote:L. E. Modesitt actually did this in The Ecolitan Enigma.Took a large freighter, filled it with asteroidal iron and drove into a moon at relativistic speed, destroying it utterly. Escaped in an attached scout ship and got away clean. Not saying it could or could not be done in the Honorverse, that's the author's option. But it has been done elsewhere.

the "sand caster" offensive action also features prominently features in the Ian Douglas Star Carrier books. This specific tactic of using a sandblast launched via freighter was also very prominent in Star Marines (also an Ian Douglas series) to blow the hell out of a Xuul monitoring planetoid.

There's dozens of this variant, it's a well-used strategy in various sci-fi's that aren't fairly well thought out and have some form of super-civilization that says "do this, and we will end you." And sometimes it's actually the super-civilization that does the exterminating (like over in the Excalibur Alternative series).

And then there's always the Heinlein maneuver of dropping rocks from the moon, and uhh starting to blank on the various sci-fi tropes there's so many it's a brain lockup.

This thread reminds me of the suits in the aftermath of 9/11.

Who could have for seen anything like this?
Our reports stated known terrorist groups don't have the resources to pull off an attack like this.
Something like this requires some very special skill sets and applicants are screened and monitored.
And on and on and on.

9/11, not surprised at attack method or one of the targets. They had been there and done that at the trade center. And those suits all need to be fired as they must be illiterate or only read PC garbage. All I got to say about method of attack is two words, Tom Clancy.

As for the "in the future humans don't think like that". PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE............

There are only a few forums I regularly check. This is one of them and it is because you guy's and gal's have your heads screwed on straight for the most part. Enough said.

svenhauke wrote:imagine your democratic verge planet gets fucked by the OFS, a dictator put in a core Transstelare raping it, your wife raped and murdered your daughter raped and murdered your son murdered, and you had a 2 million ton freighter.

id load 1 million tons of water or sand, go to 1 light week from earth and accelerate and when my 1 million tons of water or sand are aimed at earth id let them go and hyper out

thats enough energy to melt the crust of earth kill all those bastards who murdered my family all those bastards who don t care shit that my family is murdered

and nobody is even going to know i killed earth

i ll hyper out 6 light days away from earth, my load of sand isn t going to hit for 8 days at 70% lightspeed

a planet can t move

1 million tons of sand moving at 70% lightspeed
nobody knows who throwed it
thats a sandblast

and earth really deserves it

repeat for every transtealars who rapes planets homeworld

Ok, finally ran some numbers. At 6 light days from Earth you'll definitely be within their grav sensor range - after all Manticore's sensor have ranges measured in lightmonths.

So roughly 2 hours 20 minutes after you drop out of hyper the FTL trace of your hyper emergence, and then the continuing FTL tracking of your wedge hit Earth's sensors.

Assuming you worked up to the max speed of 0.5c in the alpha bands you'd be down to 0.04c (11991.68 kps) when you hit n-space. From that point a 380g freigher would take roughly 14 3/4 hours to work up to your specified 0.7c, then another 15 hours to slow back down to the 0.3c safe speed to enter hyper - so over a day all told; while you cover almost 11 lighthours (and shave about 12 minutes off your FTL tracking lag)

The continual hard accel towards Earth will, as I said before, be suspicious enough - worthy of dispatching a boat to investigate why you aren't making a short jump through hyper if you landed that badly short. But once you turn over and start slowing back down lots of red flags should be going off. Of course by then you've dumped your load as a relativistic projectile - but a ship coming out to investigate you should easily be able to see that - giving Earth even more time to react that I'd predicted from the light speed signature of the sandblast's passage.

[Edit I made a type of the freighter's top speed in hyper; 0.6c rather than the correct 0.5c. However I'd done the math with 0.5c]

Tim wrote:As for the "in the future humans don't think like that". PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE............

Pretty much

Jonathan_S wrote:Ok, finally ran some numbers. At 6 light days from Earth you'll definitely be within their grav sensor range - after all Manticore's sensor have ranges measured in lightmonths.

So roughly 2 hours 20 minutes after you drop out of hyper the FTL trace of your hyper emergence, and then the continuing FTL tracking of your wedge hit Earth's sensors.

Just drop in a lightmonth out and nobody will detect you. Or dont run the wedge at full power.
FTL gravitic tracking has its limits and nobody except Mantiocore keeps an eye on whats happening so far out system.

The continual hard accel towards Earth will, as I said before, be suspicious enough - worthy of dispatching a boat to investigate why you aren't making a short jump through hyper if you landed that badly short.

Uhm no, not really. Nobody will bother. They wont look for you, let alone dispatch someone to look after you. This isnt Manticore, this is Earth, they dont care.
They'll assume you have some engine trouble and decide to make the trip in nspace.
Or they just think that you are too incompetent to try a short hyperjump after you screwed up your inital jump.
In any case you would call them anyway if you are in real trouble. So why bother.

But once you turn over and start slowing back down lots of red flags should be going off.

Nothing will go off, if anyone notices it will be lost in the usual chatter before anyone notices.
We are dealing with Solarian Level bureaucracy here.
There is no way in hell some odd behaviour detected by the Gravitic Array agency will result in the deployment of a hypercapable vessel within a couple of hours.

And even if they'll manage that, the vessel must first clear the hyper limit to make the jump.
Even ignoring acceleration this would take about six hours from Mars Orbit at moderate speeds.

So even assuming they'll start the alert process at turnover, chances are you are gone before the vessel makes the jump.

Of course by then you've dumped your load as a relativistic projectile - but a ship coming out to investigate you should easily be able to see that - giving Earth even more time to react that I'd predicted from the light speed signature of the sandblast's passage.

Uhm no. They wont detect it since they wont be looking for it.
No wedges, no detection.

And what could they do if they detect the cloud of sand coming in at .7c? This is not Manticore, they dont have vessel on sandby to guard the planets with their wedges.

1) Minor point, planets do move if only in a fairly predictable fashion.
2) Come in from either polar N or S. Kind of hard to trace that vector back to anything meaningful.

I'm kind of a dumb Lib Arts grad, so I have no idea how far past earth's orbit a light month is but I'm guessing it's a bit farther than Pluto's orbit by a factor of at least 100 (probably closer to 10,000). That's quite a lot of sensor reach, even for passives. Not sure how much "faster" faster than light even is. Except that Manty ghost rider FTL is not instantaneous.

So basically you're saying a ship would have to start out about half way from Alpha Centauri and accelerate flat out, translate down to N-space kill the wedge and coast in?

WeirdlyWired wrote:1) Minor point, planets do move if only in a fairly predictable fashion.
2) Come in from either polar N or S. Kind of hard to trace that vector back to anything meaningful.

I'm kind of a dumb Lib Arts grad, so I have no idea how far past earth's orbit a light month is but I'm guessing it's a bit farther than Pluto's orbit by a factor of at least 100 (probably closer to 10,000). That's quite a lot of sensor reach, even for passives. Not sure how much "faster" faster than light even is. Except that Manty ghost rider FTL is not instantaneous.

So basically you're saying a ship would have to start out about half way from Alpha Centauri and accelerate flat out, translate down to N-space kill the wedge and coast in?

FYI: Light leaving the sun can reach the orbit of Pluto in 5 hours.

Vince wrote:FYI: Light leaving the sun can reach the orbit of Pluto in 5 hours.

Do a light month is way beyond the effective boundaries of the solar system. Thanx for the heads up. nice to have high friends in all sorts of places.