Out of order snippet? WHAT out of order snippet?

Theemile wrote:Those Manties are doing all sorts of things that aren't possible. FLTL comms, FTL firecontrol, multi-drive missiles,. ships accelerating 50% faster than they should, etc. who is to say they don't have transporters or super stealthed insertion methods.

Cauldron had nobody notice a megaton scale KE entering the atmosphere. Apparently Mesan's are just not very good at noticing things. I mean, it's pretty subtle effect, so I guess you can see how they missed it.

"Someone gasped as a solid bar of white light stretched down from heaven; air riven to ionized gas, and fragments of ablative shielding. The bar touched earth, and a pattern of shocked-white fury reached out from that point. The shock wave moved after it, and buildings rippled and blew away like straw around it."

Loren Pechtel wrote: However, what's left behind still is enough to tell them there's something more out there. Also, the blowing up of the people and evidence again clearly shows that someone is covering their tracks.

While a bunch of nukes makes it obvious something is going on, most people won't make the leap from nukes to cover-up. Most people will conclude the goal was just mass murder. Furthermore the nukes do a good job of breaking the trail. It does a good job of destroying any evidence that could be used to figure out where everyone ran off too.

MaxxQ wrote:Meh... doesn't matter. There is such a thing as "dial-a-yield". I should know - I've dealt with them. Now whether the manty warheads have that capability or not, I don't know, but to find out, someone independent - with knowledge of weapons design - would need to inspect the warheads. Think the manties are going to let anyone outside the RMN have that close of a look at their tech?

I couldn't find a quick reference (I though the nuclear demolition device stolen on Mesa had variable yield, but a quick keyword search didn't find anything that actually said that)

But at least for warheads they use grav compression of hydrogen fuel to trigger the fusion explosion without a fission primary. So it should be trivial to have variable yield by, for example, allowing some of the hydrogen to be vented off prior to triggering the nuke.

But just because it would be trivial to support doesn't mean anybody bothers to add that minor complexity to the normal warheads of anti-ship missiles. (Construction demolition charges would almost certainly have to be variable yield, less trouble that producing a wide variety of fixed yields, even through Torch of Freedom doesn't actually mention that. There are certainly demolition tasks that would call for lesser nuclear booms )

Jonathan_S wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:Meh... doesn't matter. There is such a thing as "dial-a-yield". I should know - I've dealt with them. Now whether the manty warheads have that capability or not, I don't know, but to find out, someone independent - with knowledge of weapons design - would need to inspect the warheads. Think the manties are going to let anyone outside the RMN have that close of a look at their tech?

I couldn't find a quick reference (I though the nuclear demolition device stolen on Mesa had variable yield, but a quick keyword search didn't find anything that actually said that)

But at least for warheads they use grav compression of hydrogen fuel to trigger the fusion explosion without a fission primary. So it should be trivial to have variable yield by, for example, allowing some of the hydrogen to be vented off prior to triggering the nuke.

But just because it would be trivial to support doesn't mean anybody bothers to add that minor complexity to the normal warheads of anti-ship missiles. (Construction demolition charges would almost certainly have to be variable yield, less trouble that producing a wide variety of fixed yields, even through Torch of Freedom doesn't actually mention that. There are certainly demolition tasks that would call for lesser nuclear booms )

I agree. What I wrote was from the viewpoint of someone saying the manties did it.

kzt wrote:

n7axw wrote:I don't know what RFC is referring to when he talks about persuasive evidence that 10th Fleet wasn't involved.

But it does seem to me that the most obvious way of clearing 10th Fleet would be to do a forensic examination of the blast sites. Take a team composed of all interested parties which would include the Mesans themselves and establish whether the residue of the explosions was local to Mesa or if it had originated off planet. If it is local to Mesa, 10th Fleet would be off the hook.

Don

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Luckily we know the answer to that. It isn’t local to Mesa.

Hi kzt,

Where is this coming from? The booms in question happen at the very end of SOV. We get the reaction from the bridge of Mike Henke's flag when they go off. Then comes O'Hanrahan's response and then book ends... So where is the forensic investigation?

Don

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quite possibly a cat wrote:It hadn't really occurred to me, but this is probably going to be how the bad guys snatch defeat from the jaws of victory isn't it? They've basically won. The League will disintegrate and Manticore/GA is gonna look like the ones responsible for the nukes. That reporter should have no trouble spinning a story that makes Manticore/GA the only one who could fit.

While the GA could be spun as responsible for the atrocities on Mesa the GA knows better--they know the alignment is still out there and pulled out of Mesa in a very bloody way. And at this point the GA is the 1000# gorilla.

n7axw wrote:

kzt wrote:Luckily we know the answer to that. It isn’t local to Mesa.

Hi kzt,

Where is this coming from? The booms in question happen at the very end of SOV. We get the reaction from the bridge of Mike Henke's flag when they go off. Then comes O'Hanrahan's response and then book ends... So where is the forensic investigation?

Don

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David said recently they were built by the MA on Darius.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:Those Manties are doing all sorts of things that aren't possible. FLTL comms, FTL firecontrol, multi-drive missiles,. ships accelerating 50% faster than they should, etc. who is to say they don't have transporters or super stealthed insertion methods.

Cauldron had nobody notice a megaton scale KE entering the atmosphere. Apparently Mesan's are just not very good at noticing things. I mean, it's pretty subtle effect, so I guess you can see how they missed it.

"Someone gasped as a solid bar of white light stretched down from heaven; air riven to ionized gas, and fragments of ablative shielding. The bar touched earth, and a pattern of shocked-white fury reached out from that point. The shock wave moved after it, and buildings rippled and blew away like straw around it."

Yeah. If you were talking about today, an event like that would be recorded by literally dozens of sensors, ranging from phone cameras all the way up. However, proving a negative isn't all that easy; the fact that nobody recorded something expected is a lot harder to track down and document.

quite possibly a cat wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote: However, what's left behind still is enough to tell them there's something more out there. Also, the blowing up of the people and evidence again clearly shows that someone is covering their tracks.

While a bunch of nukes makes it obvious something is going on, most people won't make the leap from nukes to cover-up. Most people will conclude the goal was just mass murder. Furthermore the nukes do a good job of breaking the trail. It does a good job of destroying any evidence that could be used to figure out where everyone ran off too.

As I think someone else pointed out, the actual targeting does not seem to be very consistant with that... why the nature reserve for example??

JohnRoth wrote:Yeah. If you were talking about today, an event like that would be recorded by literally dozens of sensors, ranging from phone cameras all the way up.

Hmm... Henke could try and generate evidence for Manticore's innocence by bringing media in with them as Manticore secures sensor data. Then Manticore wouldn't have time to tamper with it.

Although, its entirely possible there are recordings of Manty stealth missiles coming down!

isaac_newton wrote:
As I think someone else pointed out, the actual targeting does not seem to be very consistant with that... why the nature reserve for example??

Mass murderers are crazy. Plus, it lets the mass murderer point to blowing up a nature reserve and say "see it was some spooky nature hating conspiracy."