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runsforcelery
First Space Lord
Posts: 2425
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2009 11:39 am
Location: South Carolina
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Okay, Guys. I haven't read the entire thread, and I'm not going to. Partly because I can answer the questions (from my own visualization of the Honorverse) without reading all of it, and partly because the reason I haven't been on the forums in the last little bit is a combination of workload and some health issues I've been having.
The workload is that the page proofs for At the Sign of Triumph and Shadow of Victory came in literally back-to-back. That was 600,000+ words that had to be turned around in less than 1 week for each book. Note that I do not blame the publishers for the time crunch. The delay from my end in delivering the books is what created the problems for everyone, including my copy editors and typesetters, who have done yeoman duty to actually hit the release windows on both books. I am awed by how well they've done, to be perfectly frank.
However, I was working 16 to 18-hour days for the space of just about 10 days, and I'd already been pushing it to get the books delivered. So exhaustion has been part of what's kept me off the boards.
The other thing that's kept me off them is doctor's orders. I'm having some vision problems, which is why the cataracts operation has been moved up by three months. At the moment, it's very difficult for me to read anything, even the outsized monitor on which I work in the office. (And I’m sure you can imagine just how much that “helped” with the page proofs!) In addition, skeletal system seems to have reached its "use by" date. The arthritis is really flaring up in my left hip, which wasn't giving me any problems at all six months ago. The long-term damage to my right hand and wrist also seems to be coming home to roost. That appears to be a new neurological problem, not the arthritis and bone spurs I already knew about. And, finally, I am experiencing vertigo. Well, dizziness. I've had recurrent vertigo for about 15 years, but it's always come in fairly short flares, and I'm familiar enough with it that I know this isn't vertigo. Whatever it is, though, it's severe enough that I am now walking with a cane and avoiding driving after about 4 p.m., because the dizziness gets progressively worse as the day goes on. I have an appointment with a neurologist, but we all know about delays in finding appointments with specialists, so I haven't been able to see him yet. In the meantime, my GP strongly suggested to me that I should stay completely away from the office for at least one week, because he thinks exhaustion is an aggravating factor. Unfortunately, Sharon knows he said that, so I've been trying very hard to stay away from stuff.
Now, about those dead planets, and bearing in mind that I have these dizziness issues which affect my normally razor-sharp intellect and may mean that I am expressing myself with a smidgen of inelegance.
Sure, there are people in the Honorverse crazy enough to want to take out planets. Actually ramming them with a freighter’s impeller wedge would be extremely difficult – as in “to the point of impossible” difficult — assuming that the planet in question has any self-defense capability — like even a handful of LACs — available. It is an ironclad rule in the Honorverse that ships may not approach planets under impeller drive. They are required by the interstellar equivalent of the Rules of the Road and Laws of Navigation to go to reactor drive well out from any planet or orbital infrastructure. I haven’t done a lot with that in the books, because it hasn’t really figured in much of anything, at least until the nanotech assassins turned up. I have referenced the fact that the "no impeller drive" zone was increased by Manticore and its allies after they learned about the existence of the programmed killers, however, and that was simply an increase of an already existing limitation/requirement. The 2-pilot rule was a new departure for Manticore, but many shipping lines already followed that policy, for a bunch of reasons. (Among them, I’m sure you don’t want to even imagine the liability award against a shipper who allowed one of his starships to be used to destroy an entire planet.)
A ship that doesn't cut its impeller drive well out and go to reaction drive at a very low approach velocity gets fired on. It usually would be given a couple of warnings, but some systems don't even go that far, and all of them have a “mandatory shootdown” point built into their system’s security forces SOP. It doesn't matter what the ship is or who it belongs to. Kalokainos Shipping or some Gypsy outfit, ore freighter or passenger liner with a couple of thousand of innocent civilians aboard. If it breaks whatever the local star system's set as the inner perimeter for impeller drive, it's dead. And the reason for that is that there have been a handful of such attacks or attempted attacks over the couple of thousand years humanity has been running around the galaxy.
Small craft are actually a bigger threat for this sort of attack, because they are normally carried inside the bays of their motherships and can be deployed as weapons once a ship is already in orbit. The maximum acceleration they can attain in that short a distance and the smaller size of their wedges means that they don't represent potentially world-killing weapons. They can/could do incredible amounts of damage, especially if they attacked in a “cluster,” but they can’t literally kill a planet. Well, they could, but it would be really, really hard for most Honorverse ships to carry enough of them to provide sufficient kamikazes to effectively take out a planet. Major urban centers like, oh, Old Chicago or Landing would be another matter, of course. On the other hand, remember those “innocuous weather domes” on the Mount Royal Palace grounds. The weapons they protect from weather don’t need human instructions to take out any vessel that enters atmosphere with an active wedge. You’ve never seen an example of a small craft using its wedge in atmosphere, for several reasons, some of which have to do with the physics involved. But also because the mere passage of a wedge — even a relatively small one — can do huge damage to local atmospheric and ecological systems. And because it’s sort of inconvenient to be automatically shot out of the sky by the Landing defenses because you absentmindedly entered their kill perimeter with an active wedge. Most planetary capitals and really big megalopolises have similar defenses.
I’m sure that someone is going to suggest sending in a cloud of ball bearings or some other suitable micro-projectiles to fry a planet’s atmosphere. (Just as a by the way sort of comment, I always wondered how the western hemisphere didn’t get flash-fried at the end of the original Independence Day movie when the debris from a ship a quarter the size of our own moon began hitting atmosphere. But I digress.)
The problem with that sort of attack is that the cloud of projectiles (or gravel or sand or whatever) would be pretty damned noticeable as it made its way towards the planet. I’m sure there’d be all sorts of micro collisions switch at relativistic speeds would be pretty obvious. It would also represent a fairly easy to see radar target, so it would almost certainly be detected well short of its target unless its target is so strapped for any sort of space infrastructure that there wouldn’t be any reason to use such a “launch and leave” weapon against it in the first place. And once it’s spotted, a planet with any impeller drive starships — or even purely intrasystem craft — could easily use those vessels’ impeller wedges to “sweep up” the attack cloud.
I’m not saying that it would be impossible to destroy a planet in the Honorverse. With Honorverse-level tech, the physical ability to flash fry an inhabited planet obviously exists, and, as I say, my basic assumptions include a couple of tragedies just like that as part of what inspired the Eridani Edict and as examples of why planetary governments that clandestinely sponsored such attacks have been . . . dealt with sternly, shall we say, under the Edict’s umbrella. I’m simply saying that it would be extremely difficult and that the planets most likely to attract that sort of attack — like Mesa, Old Terra, the local Tyrant from Hell’s hangout, etc. — are also the ones it would be most difficult to attack successfully.
Attacks with smaller kinetic projectiles which are simply de-orbited by a seemingly innocuous ship which has been allowed to enter parking orbit are much more likely to succeed and, in fact, they have succeeded on a couple of occasions, largely because “iron bombs” don’t have active impeller wedges. It usually hasn’t worked out well for the sponsors of such attacks, however, for the very reason that nuclear weapons are so seldom used by terrorists in the Honorverse despite their greater availability. Carrying out that kind of attack normally requires a nihilist, suicidal mindset which actively embraces the concept of death as part of carrying out the attacker’s glorious mission. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of exactly that kind of mentality in our own recent experience as a planet. However, any group which sponsored
such an attack would soon discover that in the Honorverse there wouldn’t be a whole lot of discussion for the perpetrators were bombed back into the Stone Age and people like the Solarian League would have troops on the ground in a skinny interstellar minute, probably with even OFS’ most virulent critics cheering them on the entire way. That is, in fact, the entire reason for the situation at the end of Shadow of Victory in the eyes of anyone who believes that Manticore is responsible for what’s happened on Mesa pretty much anything the League does to bring such a mad dog regime to its knees will be acceptable. The Mandarins may or may not believe that Manticore actually carried out the attacks but in their current situation, they really won’t care whether or not it was Manticore. What they are likely to see is simply that they’ve just been given the biggest moral club imaginable in the Honorverse’s accepted rules of human behavior. If they can pin it on Manticore, all sorts of things about the League’s citizenry’s eroding support for the confrontation with the SEM are possible.
Not that I’m suggesting for a minute that I deliberately handed the Manties’ enemies such a weapon.
Oh, my, no!
"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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attack and successors, yeah... I remember you once commented that the problem with denying it was that the Mesa claims were in fact pretty much accurate in large measure.