why the honorverse would be full of dead planets

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

Just as long as we don't check that against observational numbers, be should be ok...

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

Yellowstone's last eruption was not "in recorded History." I'm not aware of any studies or theories on related extinction events.

I think we can take it as an axiom that the Honorverse has the technology to crack a planet like an egg, but probably doesn't have the technology to pop a star like an over-ripe zit. The only real question is why they don't -- and the answer is that it isn't cost effective because it destroys any chance of occupying the "conquered" planet. Only a very few fanatics and other crazies would even consider it and very few of those have the means.

Weird Harold wrote:I think we can take it as an axiom that the Honorverse has the technology to crack a planet like an egg,

Make it uninhabitable for sure, actually destroy the planet itself I doubt. A SD hitting a planet at 80% c would be on the order of 10^27 J - permanently disrupting an Earth-sized planet is on the order of 10^32 J.

EDIT:

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.

8.4 x 10^19 J is 20 gigatons, not 200 (1 ton TNT is 4.184 x 10^9 J). There seem to be different numbers for Tambora's explosive force, granted. The one I'm used to seeing is 1 GT.

cralkhi wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:I think we can take it as an axiom that the Honorverse has the technology to crack a planet like an egg,

Make it uninhabitable for sure, actually destroy the planet itself I doubt. A SD hitting a planet at 80% c would be on the order of 10^27 J - permanently disrupting an Earth-sized planet is on the order of 10^32 J.

EDIT:

8.4 x 10^19 J is 20 gigatons, not 200 (1 ton TNT is 4.184 x 10^9 J). There seem to be different numbers for Tambora's explosive force, granted. The one I'm used to seeing is 1 GT.

The math of the impact alone, yes would indicate even an SD would have trouble permanently messing with a planet. But isn't there textev, that just a wedge alone used inside the atmosphere is enough to mess with minor things like jetstreams and the like for decades?

If you pulled a Harkness, and physically cut an SD's sensors (or just any ship for that matter), they could keep their wedge up and still accelerating until actual wedge collision with the planet. Where suddenly the planet is being physically subject to a wedge, you could even program the autopilot to bring the wedge up just before hitting atmosphere

So you would do the ultra-high speed ballistic c-fractional phase merely to get the ship physically close to the planet first. But once an active wedge actually starts diving into the planetary atmosphere, let alone physically impacts the planet, it's doomed and probably about to get planet-cracked.

Somtaaw wrote:The math of the impact alone, yes would indicate even an SD would have trouble permanently messing with a planet. But isn't there textev, that just a wedge alone used inside the atmosphere is enough to mess with minor things like jetstreams and the like for decades?

If you pulled a Harkness, and physically cut an SD's sensors (or just any ship for that matter), they could keep their wedge up and still accelerating until actual wedge collision with the planet. Where suddenly the planet is being physically subject to a wedge, you could even program the autopilot to bring the wedge up just before hitting atmosphere

So you would do the ultra-high speed ballistic c-fractional phase merely to get the ship physically close to the planet first. But once an active wedge actually starts diving into the planetary atmosphere, let alone physically impacts the planet, it's doomed and probably about to get planet-cracked.

I don't recall ship's wedges being described as quite that impactfull on the atmosphere, but you might be right.

Even so I don't think they'd add all that much to a relativistic planetary impact scenario because the wedge wouldn't last long. I think a wedge would overload and blow out it's nodes if you hit it with a planet or large moon; but even if I'm wrong the wedge needs the impeller nodes to produce it and when even something as tough as a warship impacts the atmosphere at 0.8+c it's going to turn into a ball of plasma nearly instantly. Now a large enough warship, say an SD, as a wedge large enough to stretch all the way through Earth's atmosphere before the bow of the SD hits real atmosphere. The edge of space is conventionally defined at 100 km, and given the size of the SD's wedge and the SD itself, even considering it's 30° angle to the ship, the wedge extends forward about 129 km past the bow.

Punching a pair of 300 km wide, 30ish km deep slices into the planets crust 190 km apart should trigger one hell of a volcanic release, even ignoring the relativistic plasma thats about to smash down between them. But the wedge won't carry through and core the planet. Don't get me wrong, it's still destructive as hell, but I don't think it would literally crack the world.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:The math of the impact alone, yes would indicate even an SD would have trouble permanently messing with a planet. But isn't there textev, that just a wedge alone used inside the atmosphere is enough to mess with minor things like jetstreams and the like for decades?

If you pulled a Harkness, and physically cut an SD's sensors (or just any ship for that matter), they could keep their wedge up and still accelerating until actual wedge collision with the planet. Where suddenly the planet is being physically subject to a wedge, you could even program the autopilot to bring the wedge up just before hitting atmosphere

So you would do the ultra-high speed ballistic c-fractional phase merely to get the ship physically close to the planet first. But once an active wedge actually starts diving into the planetary atmosphere, let alone physically impacts the planet, it's doomed and probably about to get planet-cracked.

I don't recall ship's wedges being described as quite that impactfull on the atmosphere, but you might be right.

Even so I don't think they'd add all that much to a relativistic planetary impact scenario because the wedge wouldn't last long. I think a wedge would overload and blow out it's nodes if you hit it with a planet or large moon; but even if I'm wrong the wedge needs the impeller nodes to produce it and when even something as tough as a warship impacts the atmosphere at 0.8+c it's going to turn into a ball of plasma nearly instantly. Now a large enough warship, say an SD, as a wedge large enough to stretch all the way through Earth's atmosphere before the bow of the SD hits real atmosphere. The edge of space is conventionally defined at 100 km, and given the size of the SD's wedge and the SD itself, even considering it's 30° angle to the ship, the wedge extends forward about 129 km past the bow.

Punching a pair of 300 km wide, 30ish km deep slices into the planets crust 190 km apart should trigger one hell of a volcanic release, even ignoring the relativistic plasma thats about to smash down between them. But the wedge won't carry through and core the planet. Don't get me wrong, it's still destructive as hell, but I don't think it would literally crack the world.

Once they are going .8c they could just turn the ship so they are pointing perpendicular to their motion, and it is going wedge first. This would allow the wedge to push the atmosphere (and crust) out of the way until stress on the wedge caused the nodes to fail.

I believe the wedge effectively demolecularises any matter it comes into contact with. In open space, where the relative mass of any object(e.g. space station debris) impacting the wedge is tiny, there's plenty of volume for the former object to expand into as a cloud of gas or plasma and disperse rapidly.

I have no idea whether a wedge in close contact to an enormous mass could end up saturating the dispersion capability of the wedge's inner plane or what the effects upon the ship would be if that happened.

We do know that two roughly equivalent wedges colliding results in both ships blowing up, although it isn't clear whether a SD could survive a wedge-on-wedge collision with a DD, for example. I think there's mentions of countermissile wedges being overpowered specifically in order to match the stronger wedges of larger missiles. Certainly, missiles running into a warship's wedge have no effect, so there's a threshold somewhere.

My best guess is, a wedge face-on collision with a planet will blow the ship up, whether it's from the wedge being overloaded or the atomised, superheated matter the wedge's inner side spits out.

crewdude48 wrote:
Once they are going .8c they could just turn the ship so they are pointing perpendicular to their motion, and it is going wedge first. This would allow the wedge to push the atmosphere (and crust) out of the way until stress on the wedge caused the nodes to fail.

Interesting thought. That should protect the ship's hull longer so it's really a question of how long the nodes can stand the stresses of feedback from a relativistic collision of the wedge with a planet (or it's atmosphere). On the one hand you get a wider footprint as you could angle so the whole 300 x 300 km SD wedge was exactly parallel to the surface, but on the other if it overloads quickly it probably won't penetrate as deeply as the, nose on, twin-blade impact...

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.

Mmmm... what future are you referring to? The "Faithful" certainly wouldn't have had a problem killing Grayson if they couldn't conquer it. It says so right in THOTQ.

The Mesan Alignment had no problem doing severe damage to the Maticoran system. While they didn't directly attack the planets themselves, they certainly didn't care about damage done by large pieces of debris arbitrarily falling on them. A tsunami caused by a significant chunk of a de-orbiting space habitat can be just as devastating as a deliberate planetary strike.

Realistically, the *ONLY* thing keeping planets from being killed off wholesale is the Eridani Edict. And the fact that most folks involved in making decisions for attacks aren't complete fanatics that don't care what happens to them later as long as they get "the other guy" first. But there still are, apparently, *some* of those. Luckily none that, so far, have had time to take advantage of such an opportunity before being stopped.

OrlandoNative wrote:Realistically, the *ONLY* thing keeping planets from being killed off wholesale is the Eridani Edict. And the fact that most folks involved in making decisions for attacks aren't complete fanatics that don't care what happens to them later as long as they get "the other guy" first. But there still are, apparently, *some* of those. Luckily none that, so far, have had time to take advantage of such an opportunity before being stopped.

The Edict plus the fact that a worthwhile strike on a target worth blasting is a non-trivial task. Getting a large enough mass going fast enough while not attracting attention isn't as easy as some people are making it sound. At least, not in any system where cold, dark objects are looked for on a regular basis.

The people involved need to be a certain kind of mass-murdering crazy, have a general disregard for their own life, and the capability to do it. The first two are probably negatively correlated with the third.