why the honorverse would be full of dead planets

The E wrote:And as David Weber himself has said in this very thread, that is why most planets that have traffic control also have very strict rules about the use of impellers anywhere near them, including lethal responses if it looks like a ship intends to disobey orders to shut down its impellers.

Oh, I'm not really criticise the tech itself. I'm just feeling that any argument about the physics problems of c fractional velocity object detection and limitations is kind of silly and unnecessary given that the danger is enormous even without it.

But as for the orbital security...
Let's say you do the accelerating in question somewhere outside Jupiter orbit, at a time where earth is on the opposite side of Sun, and then hide it as part of a convoy and kill it's accel before they can be counted (or something. The books have several examples of ways gravitic sensors can be spoofed to miss strength/number of sources, so it's not impossible).
Basic orbital mechanics should enable anyone to create a collision course with a cork-screw orbital path so that it will hit from any direction you choose in 10 months or so...
How would anyone detect a dead multi-megaton freighter hulk travelling at 0.01c? It'll take it some time to reach it's target, but what is a year for a planet-killer?

In the end we must assume that:
If this technology existed, these sort of problems certainly would have been considered (you probably can't get rid of all the nerds, whatever you do) and a solution would have been found, or else there would be dead planets.

All-in-all, since the concepts of an anti-gravity civilization requires rather fundamental (to say the least) shifts in our understanding of both relativistic and quantum physics, we can probably assume that our discussions on it's limitations are rather pointless.

And the number of consequences any physics-breaking technology can have are huge, so why focus on the big ones. The smaller ones are usually much scarier, and funnier, in my experience.
How to destroy a spaceport/city/annoying commie-anarcho-capitalist-leftist-conservative?
See the fate of PNS Tepes...


There is the point where we simply have to activate our suspension of disbelief...

True enough, but it does help to get a better grasp of the quantities involved.

An extinction-level impact event, for example, releases on the order of 100,000- 1,000,000GT, not 50. 50GT is more in the range of a smallish volcanic explosion - quite uncomfortable if you happen to be standing beside it, but barely inconvenient once you're over the horizon.

Obbas wrote:

The E wrote:And as David Weber himself has said in this very thread, that is why most planets that have traffic control also have very strict rules about the use of impellers anywhere near them, including lethal responses if it looks like a ship intends to disobey orders to shut down its impellers.

Oh, I'm not really criticise the tech itself. I'm just feeling that any argument about the physics problems of c fractional velocity object detection and limitations is kind of silly and unnecessary given that the danger is enormous even without it.

But as for the orbital security...
Let's say you do the accelerating in question somewhere outside Jupiter orbit, at a time where earth is on the opposite side of Sun, and then hide it as part of a convoy and kill it's accel before they can be counted (or something. The books have several examples of ways gravitic sensors can be spoofed to miss strength/number of sources, so it's not impossible).
Basic orbital mechanics should enable anyone to create a collision course with a cork-screw orbital path so that it will hit from any direction you choose in 10 months or so...
How would anyone detect a dead multi-megaton freighter hulk travelling at 0.01c? It'll take it some time to reach it's target, but what is a year for a planet-killer?

In the end we must assume that:
If this technology existed, these sort of problems certainly would have been considered (you probably can't get rid of all the nerds, whatever you do) and a solution would have been found, or else there would be dead planets.

All-in-all, since the concepts of an anti-gravity civilization requires rather fundamental (to say the least) shifts in our understanding of both relativistic and quantum physics, we can probably assume that our discussions on it's limitations are rather pointless.

And the number of consequences any physics-breaking technology can have are huge, so why focus on the big ones. The smaller ones are usually much scarier, and funnier, in my experience.
How to destroy a spaceport/city/annoying commie-anarcho-capitalist-leftist-conservative?
See the fate of PNS Tepes...


There is the point where we simply have to activate our suspension of disbelief...

Louis R wrote:True enough, but it does help to get a better grasp of the quantities involved.

An extinction-level impact event, for example, releases on the order of 100,000- 1,000,000GT, not 50. 50GT is more in the range of a smallish volcanic explosion - quite uncomfortable if you happen to be standing beside it, but barely inconvenient once you're over the horizon.

Oh, I botched, my bad.
Since I only wanted to very quickly exemplify, I based my comment on projected energy of meteor impacts, and screwed up.


An asteroid massing 10^9 tons (1 km in diameter), travelling at 17km/s would give 50 GT and leave a crater 10 km across. (All figures rounded to order only, since the scale is what matters)

I just assumed a freighter came in at about 10^7 tons and threw in a factor 10 increase in speed to compensate.

As I have understood it (but I'm no expert), the Chicxulub impact (the dinosaur killer, and probably the greatest known impact ever on this planet), was on the lower end of your measure (on near order of 200,000 GT).

In that case the asteroid itself was perhaps 10-15 km across, not the crater. Here was my fubar, since I misread it, so
I agree your figures were certainly closer to reality than mine.

But my point was really that you do not need near-light speed and cargoes full of sand, or ball bearings, or chipmunks...
The speed I gave is only 0,0004 c, so if we bump it to 0,05c we get well into your bracket for impact energy, even if we halve the mass of the ship used.


We break the law of conservation of momentum at our peril... and entertainment.

Actually, the effectiveness of a 'dinosaur killer' is somewhat exaggerated: on current evidence, as many species survived Chixulub as didn't, which is a rather paltry score compared to the really serious extinction events that seem to have taken out 70-90% of then-living taxa. None of which are related to impact events, as it happens. [nor is Chixulub the largest known impact - there are several known features that are bigger, and at least one suspected that was ~8x the energy release]

In any case, the reason for examining c-fractional attacks is that in systems with any halfway serious presence in space the kinds of event you're describing simply won't happen. Objects that large and that slow will be detected in plenty of time to get something with a wedge in place to deal with them, precisely because everybody knows it can be done and is looking for it. And systems that _don't_ have even minimal space-control probably don't need to worry about it in the first place. For what earthly - or unearthly, if you prefer - reason will people be wandering around wasting places like Refuge? You do that kind of thing to make a point, which isn't very effective if it takes a decade or so to discover that it's even happened, and another century to find out who did it.

Obbas wrote:

Louis R wrote:True enough, but it does help to get a better grasp of the quantities involved.

An extinction-level impact event, for example, releases on the order of 100,000- 1,000,000GT, not 50. 50GT is more in the range of a smallish volcanic explosion - quite uncomfortable if you happen to be standing beside it, but barely inconvenient once you're over the horizon.

Oh, I botched, my bad.
Since I only wanted to very quickly exemplify, I based my comment on projected energy of meteor impacts, and screwed up.


An asteroid massing 10^9 tons (1 km in diameter), travelling at 17km/s would give 50 GT and leave a crater 10 km across. (All figures rounded to order only, since the scale is what matters)

I just assumed a freighter came in at about 10^7 tons and threw in a factor 10 increase in speed to compensate.

As I have understood it (but I'm no expert), the Chicxulub impact (the dinosaur killer, and probably the greatest known impact ever on this planet), was on the lower end of your measure (on near order of 200,000 GT).

In that case the asteroid itself was perhaps 10-15 km across, not the crater. Here was my fubar, since I misread it, so
I agree your figures were certainly closer to reality than mine.

But my point was really that you do not need near-light speed and cargoes full of sand, or ball bearings, or chipmunks...
The speed I gave is only 0,0004 c, so if we bump it to 0,05c we get well into your bracket for impact energy, even if we halve the mass of the ship used.


We break the law of conservation of momentum at our peril... and entertainment.

Louis R wrote:Actually, the effectiveness of a 'dinosaur killer' is somewhat exaggerated

And this is utterly irrelevant to my point. Even a fraction of the power of these would make a planet a lot less than habitable for a few thousand generations...

Louis R wrote:In any case, the reason for examining c-fractional attacks is that in systems with any halfway serious presence in space the kinds of event you're describing simply won't happen.

...Oyster Bay...

Frankly, there is no indication at all that systems have the ability to notice and track every small (yes a 10 megaton freighter is the same as those pods on a stellar scale, by the law of large numbers) emissions dead objects at any significant range.
I would assume they have such tech, but then I would assume that that tech is just as good at discovering c-fracional objects until I had a reason why not.

Regular space debris detection and diversion would be a major part of any orbital space administration, but the books have already established that they DO NOT WORK WELL on deliberate insertions.

And on the other end of the problem scale, if you go c frac, why bother with large objects? anything over a few tonnes would do the trick.


My points, however, still are
1. real world physics is actually irrelevant, since they exclude all our scenarios. So lets just assume there are reasons this things do happen/get detected, regardless of velocity.
2. there is no point in destroying the planet. The important part is the planets habitable biosphere. Bash that and you have a dead planet, a poisoned ball of rock.

Obbas wrote:

Louis R wrote:In any case, the reason for examining c-fractional attacks is that in systems with any halfway serious presence in space the kinds of event you're describing simply won't happen.

...Oyster Bay...

Frankly, there is no indication at all that systems have the ability to notice and track every small (yes a 10 megaton freighter is the same as those pods on a stellar scale, by the law of large numbers) emissions dead objects at any significant range.

Yes but Oyster Bay was launched with specifically low-detectable graser torps and missile pods.

Anything of a possible extinction level event would involve asteroids, or hell just a ship that's accelerated upto speed and shut down. But unless it's a warship, it's still going to be detectable far enough out to Do Something; whether it's getting a big enough ship of your own out there to tractor it to a halt, or hell just rolling sideways and letting the asteroid/ship ram into your wedge and rip itself to pieces.


And if you're using missiles, or the original question involving sand, or ball bearings, it's a specific attack rather than some huge cosmic 'accident'. Two systems in a similar situation to Grayson and Masada could in theory have remnants from prior wars still coasting between each other's systems, unmanned and totally ballistic. But again, unless they're warships, they won't have all the military goodies like RADAR absorption or scattering, and other junk that even unpowered and uncovered by EW makes a warship considerably harder to spot than a standard civilian ship.

Even without wedges, and hell without actually knowing there's someone or something out in space out to get us here on Earth, we're watching out for things that might potentially impact Earth. But given we have virtually zero space presence, even if we spot something, there's virtually nothing we can do about it. Unless you count that awful Micheal Bay Armageddon movie as how Earth would react; in which case we go from possibly doomed to almost certainly.

Duckk wrote:Finally, for the life of me I cannot figure out everyone's fascination with regularly killing planets in the Honorverse. People's minds don't work that way in the future.

I think it's because planets in the Honorverse seem roughly analogous to cities or small regions in Earth history, given the scale of many multiplanet star nations. And since cities have been razed/burned/etc plenty of times in Earth's military history, people expect destruction of planetary civilizations to be about as common in the Honorverse.

Louis R wrote:True enough, but it does help to get a better grasp of the quantities involved.

An extinction-level impact event, for example, releases on the order of 100,000- 1,000,000GT, not 50. 50GT is more in the range of a smallish volcanic explosion - quite uncomfortable if you happen to be standing beside it, but barely inconvenient once you're over the horizon.

No, 50 gigatons is supervolcano scale for sure.

Tambora, the biggest volcano in recorded history (the "Year Without a Summer" one in 1815) was ~1 GT. Krakatoa 1883 was 200 megatons, and that's still an exceptionally huge volcano.

cralkhi wrote:Tambora, the biggest volcano in recorded history (the "Year Without a Summer" one in 1815) was ~1 GT. Krakatoa 1883 was 200 megatons, and that's still an exceptionally huge volcano.

Tamboura was a 200 gigaton equivalent. (8.4x10^19j) It blew 36 cubic kilometers of rock into the atmosphere when the mountain exploded, and another 100 some cubic kilometers of ash over the next few days. And it was all over in a few days.

The Yellowstone supervolcano is estimated in Wiki at 875GT, although I admit I'd prefer to check that against the original papers.

kzt wrote:

cralkhi wrote:Tambora, the biggest volcano in recorded history (the "Year Without a Summer" one in 1815) was ~1 GT. Krakatoa 1883 was 200 megatons, and that's still an exceptionally huge volcano.

Tamboura was a 200 gigaton equivalent. (8.4x10^19j) It blew 36 cubic kilometers of rock into the atmosphere when the mountain exploded, and another 100 some cubic kilometers of ash over the next few days. And it was all over in a few days.