Eridani Edict Violation of the most Dismissive Kind...

SoV wrote:“He can’t be serious.” Francine Venelli stared at the face on her com display. “That would…that would—”

“That would kill a hell of a lot of people,” Frinkelo Osborne filled in for her. “Unfortunately, it’s not our call.”

“Not our call?” Venelli glanced across her desk at Commander Bryson Neng, Hoplite’s executive officer. Then she looked back at Osborne. “Forgive me for pointing this out,” she said more than a little caustically, “but whether or not it’s our call, it’ll damned well be our KEWs!”

“I realize that, Captain.” Osborne closed his eyes for a moment, then shrugged, his expression unhappy. “Unfortunately, Frontier Security signed a standard assistance agreement with the MacMinns over thirty T-years ago. And under its terms, the President is entitled to ask for—and the League is obligated to provide—‘all required military assistance’ when the local government determines that it’s necessary.”

“Excuse me, Mister Frinkelo,” Neng put in, “but this is exactly what the Eridani Edict is intended to prevent, and the Constitution obligates the League to enforce the Eridani Edict, not violate it!”

“I’d love to tell the locals that,” Osborne said bitterly. “But Attorney General MacGwyer’s already pointed out to me that the Eridani Edict specifically exempts planetary governments dealing with insurrection and civil war. And Secretary of War Boyle’s assured me that he’s prepared to sign off on the target list as constituting actual military objectives, not simply terror strikes.” He raised one palm-up hand into his com’s field of view in a gesture of helplessness. “So the bottom line is that they really can ‘request’ this.”

“They’ve got orbital infrastructure of their own,” Neng pointed out. “If they want kinetic strikes, let them carry them out themselves!”

“No, Byron,” Venelli said, her voice heavy. He looked at her, but she continued before he could protest. “They’ve got orbital infrastructure, but none of it’s weaponized. Do you really want a bunch of civilians de-orbiting cobbled up KEWs? God only knows what kind of effective yields they’d wind up with! For that matter, they’d be lucky to hit the right town! And at least three of the targets on this list are coastal. If they dump an outsized hunk of orbital debris into an ocean, Lord only knows how much of a tsunami they could churn up!” She shook her head, her expression grim. “No, if this is going to be done, it needs to be done by somebody who can at least hit the right target and not kill anybody else.”

snip

“Targeting queue uploaded and locked, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Sharon Tanner told Captain Venelli. Her tone and expression made it clear what she thought of that targeting queue, Venelli thought. “Atmospheric penetrators deployed and ready. Prepared to execute on your command.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Venelli said, speaking to her tactical officer much more formally than usual.

She glanced at the com displays showing Captain Alec Sárközy of the Yenta MacIlvenna and Commanders Gwang and Myrvold of the Abatis and Lunette. None of them had been assigned any of the targets on Boyle’s list. Hoplite had more than enough launch capability to handle all of them, and Venelli refused to spread the guilt around if she could help it.

Their expressions told her all she needed to know about how they felt about their orders, and their eyes looked back at her grimly. She forced herself not to wilt under the anger in those eyes—anger she knew wasn’t directed at her—and drew a deep breath.

“Very well, Commander Tanner,” she said. “Execute.”

“Executing, aye,” Tanner replied harshly and punched a button.

Eighty-seven seconds later, nine regional administrative centers which had gone over to the LLP ceased to exist. As did eight smaller towns, seven staging areas, and four major ex-UPS district bases…along with just over 3.3 million citizens of the Republic of Loomis.

Weird Harold wrote:

WeirdlyWired wrote:Sorry, just too lazy to try to find the book and page. but aren't the MAN stealth systems able to disguise all but a bit of the waste heat signature, which it is able to vent way from sensors. which would be defeated if it passed between two enemy ships? That sounds at least marginally better than Manty stealth.

That quote is a few posts back in this thread.

MAlign stealth is undoubtedly different than RMN stealth. That is NOT the same thing as better than RMN Stealth.

The "bit of waste heat" you remember is a veritable beacon of IR energy in one aspect. Waste Heat is not a big problem for anyone else, because it gets dumped into the Wedge. RMN (and virtually every other Navy) doesn't have to worry about being surrounded and unable to find a "safe" vector for that waste heat.

The difference reminds me of the old Jack London story, The Shadow and the Flash. The MAlign has gone for Transparency and everyone else has gone for Absolute Black. Both have betraying features.

SoV Ch. 29 wrote:“Of course they wouldn’t,” Topolev agreed. “And you’re right, unlike the Sollies the Manties know their ass from their elbow. I’m just suggesting we shouldn’t get too tightly wedded to how dazzling clever we are until we’ve gotten back up to speed, deployed the pods, and pulled out again.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “To be honest, I agree with you pretty much down the line. But we’re getting this—” he gestured at the display’s tactical icons “—on tight laser links from the platforms we left behind. Everything we’ve seen suggests the Manties’ platforms are at least as good as ours, and pretty damned stealthy. I don’t think they could have deployed a sensor shell tight enough to pick up the spider without our catching them at it, but there’s not any proof of that just yet, either.”

snip

But Task Force One’s stealth was just as good as the Manties’—probably a little better, actually—so there were no electronic emissions to spot. And the gravitic signature of the spider drive was tiny, compared to any impeller wedge. Mako’s gravitic cross-section was about on a par with an extremely stealthy recon drone, and the Manty destroyers scrambled to investigate the “sensor ghost” of their very cautious, very gradual alpha translation into n-space were a couple of light-hours astern of her. With all due respect to Admiral Topolev, no way in hell were those destroyers going to see the flagship.

cthia wrote:Harold, it looks like I've been dealt a cup 'o textev in SoV regarding that "cut above"...

SoV Ch. 29 wrote:“Of course they wouldn’t,” Topolev agreed. “And you’re right, unlike the Sollies the Manties know their ass from their elbow. I’m just suggesting we shouldn’t get too tightly wedded to how dazzling clever we are until we’ve gotten back up to speed, deployed the pods, and pulled out again.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “To be honest, I agree with you pretty much down the line. But we’re getting this—” he gestured at the display’s tactical icons “—on tight laser links from the platforms we left behind. Everything we’ve seen suggests the Manties’ platforms are at least as good as ours, and pretty damned stealthy. I don’t think they could have deployed a sensor shell tight enough to pick up the spider without our catching them at it, but there’s not any proof of that just yet, either.”

snip

But Task Force One’s stealth was just as good as the Manties’—probably a little better, actually—so there were no electronic emissions to spot. And the gravitic signature of the spider drive was tiny, compared to any impeller wedge. Mako’s gravitic cross-section was about on a par with an extremely stealthy recon drone, and the Manty destroyers scrambled to investigate the “sensor ghost” of their very cautious, very gradual alpha translation into n-space were a couple of light-hours astern of her. With all due respect to Admiral Topolev, no way in hell were those destroyers going to see the flagship.

My bold.

A cut above as I was saying.

Shadow of Victory, Chapter 29 wrote:“They never got a sniff of the spider, Sir,” Commander Theresa Coleman said, studying the tactical imagery in the depths of the main tactical display on MANS Mako. “That’s a standard picket formation. If they had a clue where we really are, they’d be headed our way.”
“It looks that way to me too, Theresa.” Admiral Frederick Topolev nodded. “But let’s not get too confident,” he went on, waving an admonishing forefinger in his chief of staff’s direction. “For one thing, they may have seen us just fine and decided not to tell us about it by coming after us. Don’t you think their Home Fleet might like the opportunity to micro-jump a couple of squadrons of their damned podnoughts right on top of us before we could hyper out again?”
“Well, of course, Sir.” Coleman seemed a little taken aback, but she rallied gamely. “They might think that way, but that’d be more like something a batch of Sollies might try. If they really wanted to keep us from hypering out, they’d have to wait until we were inside the hyper limit, and there’s no way Manties would be stupid enough to risk losing track of us in the month or so it’s going to take us to get that far inside.”
“Of course they wouldn’t,” Topolev agreed. “And you’re right, unlike the Sollies the Manties know their ass from their elbow. I’m just suggesting we shouldn’t get too tightly wedded to how dazzlingly clever we are until we’ve gotten back up to speed, deployed the pods, and pulled out again.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “To be honest, I agree with you pretty much down the line. But we’re getting this”—he gestured at the display’s tactical icons—“on tight laser links from the platforms we left behind. Everything we’ve seen suggests the Manties’ platforms are at least as good as ours, and pretty damned stealthy. I don’t think they could have deployed a sensor shell tight enough to pick up the spider without our catching them at it, but there’s not any proof of that just yet, either.”
Coleman nodded soberly, because the admiral had a point. The Mesan Alignment Navy was one of the youngest fleets in the galaxy. In fact, it was in the process of carrying out its first combat operation…and using what had been supposed to be training ships, prototype test-beds for the actual battle fleet still under construction, to do it. The Royal Manticoran Navy, on the other hand, was hundreds of T-years old, with a peerless tradition of victory, and more than two decades of brutal warfare against the People’s Republic of Haven under its belt.
Probably pretty damned hard to overestimate the bastards, she thought. But if you’ve got to make a mistake, it’s better to do that than to underestimate them. On the other hand, they’re not really ten meters tall and covered with hair. And they can’t have a clue about the spider. We have a hard time tracking it, and we know exactly what we’re looking for. Be a bit hard for them to pick up something they don’t even know exists!
In many ways, the spider drive was the crown jewel of the Alignment’s war-fighting technology, the product of many decades and billions of credits of research, and the deciding factor in making Operation Oyster Bay possible. The primary sensor used by every navy to detect and track hostile vessels under power was the Warshawski, a highly refined version of Adrienne Warshawski’s original gravitic detector. The enormous gravitic footprint of a starship’s impeller wedge, even at relatively low power, was glaringly obvious at enormous ranges, whereas active sensors had strictly limited reach against targets as small (relatively speaking) as a warship. Even with the best stealth fields in existence, the passive detection range against a starship wedge was at least six or seven times the range any active system was going to manage against that starship’s hull. So it made far more sense to use those passive systems to look for impeller signatures and search for electronic emissions.
But Task Force One’s stealth was just as good as the Manties’—probably a little better, actually—so there were no electronic emissions to spot. And the gravitic signature of the spider drive was tiny, compared to any impeller wedge. Mako’s gravitic cross-section was about on a par with an extremely stealthy recon drone, and the Manty destroyers scrambled to investigate the “sensor ghost” of their very cautious, very gradual alpha translation into n-space were a couple of light-hours astern of her. With all due respect to Admiral Topolev, no way in hell were those destroyers going to see the flagship.
And neither is anyone else, she thought grimly. I don’t know that Oyster Bay’s going to work as well as everyone hopes. One thing I do know is that no plan ever works as perfectly as it sounds like it should. But those people behind us don’t have a clue, and the first thing anybody ahead of us should know about it is going to be a cloud of graser torpedoes coming in out of absolutely frigging nowhere.
Which, when she came right down to it, would work just fine for her.

cthia wrote:I don't think so Vince. The jury isn't out, they were killed in Oyster Bay!

cthia wrote:I don't think so Vince. The jury isn't out, they were killed in Oyster Bay!

cthia wrote:Harold, it looks like I've been dealt a cup 'o textev in SoV regarding that "cut above"...

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:Harold, it looks like I've been dealt a cup 'o textev in SoV regarding that "cut above"...

Have you read the Shadow and the Flash?

The opinion of a possibly "unreliable narrator" does not negate my point that there are substantially different approaches to stealth very similar to the Shadow and the Flash: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stori ... aFla.shtml

~Ch. 38 wrote:Even if they hadn’t been designed to be the stealthiest attack platforms yet built by human hands the graser torpedoes which had slashed past Bernike were far too distant and far too tiny to appear in any optical display.

cthia wrote:I haven't read that, sorry. And haven't the time now. Sorry.

But I still feel that you are standing on the wrong side of the fence of this argument because of the MAlign's approach to stealth.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:I haven't read that, sorry. And haven't the time now. Sorry.

But I still feel that you are standing on the wrong side of the fence of this argument because of the MAlign's approach to stealth.

The Shadow and the Flash is a short story about two inventors who compete to invent "perfect invisibility." One chooses to pursue the "perfect black" where all light is absorbed but leaves a shadow. The other chooses to pursue "perfect transparency" where all light is passed through, but is betrayed by a prismatic flash at certain angles.

Both achieve invisibility, but each method has has a betraying drawback.

The MAlign and Manticore both achieve near impenetrable stealth, but they do it by different means. An example is the waste heat beam from a spider drive ship because it doesn't have a wedge to shunt the heat into. MAlign stealth is very good, but it is oranges to Manticore's very stealthy apples