Where (or whether) to put criticism on Uncompromising Honor?

Frank777 wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The orbial habitats are not military installations. They are CITIES inhabited by civilians. They have been built over centuries. Safety systems are designed to deal with plausible natural events such as meteor impacts, not military attack. They are no more difficult to evacuate than American cities which were potentially vulnerable to nuclear attack for decades.

Military personnal is trained to a much higher degree than civilians would ever be. So I expect the safety regard for places where civilians live, much higher than for military personnel. At least for hazards, like meteors, which can destroy whole living hubs.

The responses you folks give so far ont he 45 minute evacuation-logic seem to assume that living hubs in space are built up just the same as old cities on earth: hap-snap additions and lean-to's, not much plan other than adding more needed space and services. I highly doubt this would ever be the case, space seems to unforgiving to me and most sf books I read show a healthy respect for those hazards.

Cities on earth are vulnerable because you can only get out asap when you live at the edge. And that is because we generally only have '2D' transportation (via roads). Actually, if the White House was threatened, the president would be removed very fast, using helicopters, because a) he is considered important and b) helicopters work 3D. But you cant evacuate the whole of Washington due to numbers; there are not enough helicopters, there is not enough air space, to do the same to the whole population. This is actually a nice analogy to my original gripe.

There are valid points on both sides. Remember that non-military orbiting platforms were really off-limits as targets. What the Sollies planned for Hypatia was without a doubt an atrocity. Had they been able to carry it out, when the war was over and the League lost, there would have been gigantic damages paid and almost certainly Navy people in prison.

Second, the orbiting platforms had been around so long that multiple safety systems were certainly built in. Yes, there would be accidents but no one ever expected a navy to come in and simply destroy them.

In a way, though, it is a bit like New Orleans. No one believed a Force Five hurricane would hit. There's a TV commercial now from Allstate Insurance that say that 26 "500 year disasters"...things supposed to happen only once in 500 years, in the past decade. So, yes, Hypatia was unprepared and I get the same would have been said for similar platforms everywhere.

As for getting around defense systems, people work on that all the time. Even in the movies, there always seems to be a flaw...note the Death Star in Star Wars.

As for tracking the spider drive, once the Alliance knew what to look for, it could create software and even hardware to do some tracking. And I would bet Dr. Simoes could give more than a few hints. He might not have been working on THAT project (he worked on the streak drive) but I would guess he would know what other physicists were doing... after all, being able to combine the spider and streak drives would be really neat.

ldwechsler wrote:And I would bet Dr. Simoes could give more than a few hints. He might not have been working on THAT project (he worked on the streak drive) but I would guess he would know what other physicists were doing... after all, being able to combine the spider and streak drives would be really neat.

No reason to believe they aren't already combined, since the streak drive is a brute-force power level increase on the hyper generator rather than anything to do with the impeller drive nodes. It's probably just an upgrade to existing capabilities the same way you can put a military grade hyperdrive into a ship with civilian grade nodes to get higher hyperspace performance without changing the basic acceleration rate of the ship.

Right, as long as a given ship with the spider drive can go into hyperspace, it can use the streak drive to enter into the higher bands (iota and kappa).

I wonder if the improvements to the streak drive Simoes was working on were to allow a ship equipped with it to enter into even higher bands of hyperspace (lambda, mu, etc.)?

ldwechsler wrote:In a way, though, it is a bit like New Orleans. No one believed a Force Five hurricane would hit. There's a TV commercial now from Allstate Insurance that say that 26 "500 year disasters"...things supposed to happen only once in 500 years, in the past decade. So, yes, Hypatia was unprepared and I get the same would have been said for similar platforms everywhere.

A year or so before the Hurricane hit NOLA.com published a report and map called “going under” iirc which showed the likely effect of various hurricanes. Luckily the Hurricane was an F3 or less when it hit, because at worst case f5 the river edge of the French quarter is the only part above water.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The orbial habitats are not military installations. They are CITIES inhabited by civilians. They have been built over centuries. Safety systems are designed to deal with plausible natural events such as meteor impacts, not military attack. They are no more difficult to evacuate than American cities which were potentially vulnerable to nuclear attack for decades.

I think this is more appropriately applied to Hypatia than Beowulf. The Hypatia evacuation could be compared to New Orleans seeing Katrina coming days in advance and attempting to evacuate the entire city using only city buses instead of personal vehicles.

Photos taken during the flooding revealed that New Orleans had parking lots full of hundreds of buses that could have been used to evacuate. Unfortunately, Mayor Nutless Nagan decreed that school buses werent goot enough for hispeople so FEMA should supply tour buses. Since they hadnt been called to duty. Most of the school bus drivers evacuated their own families, foreclosing the option.

Question?
How many people can ride on a standard railroad flatcar or in a box car?
80 feet x 12 feet = 960 square feet.
Sitting room only = 2 people per square yard or about 12 square feet per person

Capacity of a flatcar or boxcar = 80 people.
Train with 100 cars = 8,000 people.

Run trains every hour = 200,000 people per day.

Of course the emergency airlift was impressive.
Remember the fleet of National Guard helicopters coming in from Alabama, Missippi and Texas? Rember the copters plucking people from the flood and taking them to the airport? Chartered 737s leasving every 5 minutes x 250 people per plane = 3,000 people per hour.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Photos taken during the flooding revealed that New Orleans had parking lots full of hundreds of buses that could have been used to evacuate. Unfortunately, Mayor Nutless Nagan decreed that school buses werent goot enough for hispeople so FEMA should supply tour buses. Since they hadnt been called to duty. Most of the school bus drivers evacuated their own families, foreclosing the option.

Question?
How many people can ride on a standard railroad flatcar or in a box car?
80 feet x 12 feet = 960 square feet.
Sitting room only = 2 people per square yard or about 12 square feet per person

Capacity of a flatcar or boxcar = 80 people.
Train with 100 cars = 8,000 people.

Run trains every hour = 200,000 people per day.

Of course the emergency airlift was impressive.
Remember the fleet of National Guard helicopters coming in from Alabama, Missippi and Texas? Rember the copters plucking people from the flood and taking them to the airport? Chartered 737s leasving every 5 minutes x 250 people per plane = 3,000 people per hour.

Edit: forum ate my text

Sure, it could be done. It couldn't be done in 72 hours.

ldwechsler wrote:There are valid points on both sides. Remember that non-military orbiting platforms were really off-limits as targets. What the Sollies planned for Hypatia was without a doubt an atrocity. Had they been able to carry it out, when the war was over and the League lost, there would have been gigantic damages paid and almost certainly Navy people in prison.

Second, the orbiting platforms had been around so long that multiple safety systems were certainly built in. Yes, there would be accidents but no one ever expected a navy to come in and simply destroy them.

In a way, though, it is a bit like New Orleans. No one believed a Force Five hurricane would hit. There's a TV commercial now from Allstate Insurance that say that 26 "500 year disasters"...things supposed to happen only once in 500 years, in the past decade. So, yes, Hypatia was unprepared and I get the same would have been said for similar platforms everywhere.

As for getting around defense systems, people work on that all the time. Even in the movies, there always seems to be a flaw...note the Death Star in Star Wars.

As for tracking the spider drive, once the Alliance knew what to look for, it could create software and even hardware to do some tracking. And I would bet Dr. Simoes could give more than a few hints. He might not have been working on THAT project (he worked on the streak drive) but I would guess he would know what other physicists were doing... after all, being able to combine the spider and streak drives would be really neat.

For the record, I have no gripe with the Hypatia scenes, and my major gripe with the silver bullet was only in a minor way with the detection - much more about the lack of defense to it. I still dont get any rebuttal of my 'evacuation-point' using an analogy with any city of earth (here New Orleans), because all those examples strengthen my point: that a small number of people *could* have been evacuated in the few remaining minutes.

As to the Hypatia plot, I actually find that one of the stronger points of the book. (Iirc it was both about leaving too little time to evacuate living space for no humanitarian reason, and also a possible violation of the (Eridani? forgot the name) Edict).
The first chance the sollies could take the high ground, they botch it, with seeming wide support among both politicians and military folks, and only a few people with a conscience. Brilliant... for I think this is indeed how the human mind can work.

Frank777 wrote:

kzt wrote:Since the don't have either the theory, the design or actual spider hardware it's kind of odd to expect them to have made much progress in dealing with it. It's like my coming up with a yeti detector to sell you. Is the fact that I don't detect any yetis because they are not there, or is it because my yeti detector doesn't really work? How are you going to determine which is the case?

Except that immediately after the Oyster Bay attack, they already thought they could detect the signatures, even though they don't know the mechanic that caused it.
The analogy with the Yeti goes wrong in that we dont actually know Yeti's exist; manticore did know the attack took place.

However, this aspect was actually not on my initial list of gripes. It is "less unlikely" to me than the other points I made .

After Oyster Bay they thought they could see the signals of the stealth ships exiting hyperspace - and that given enough quick response forces they'd hope to be able to so saturate that emergency area with active sensor that a grain of sand couldn't slip through.

But Manticore didn't have any idea how to detect the stealth drive itself, or a ship moving under it except by saturating the a suspected area with a crazy density of active sensor -- far more than you could ever hope to emplace over an entire star system.


Too bad the Beowulf attack didn't have that betraying hyper emergence signature because the Silver Bullets were brought in on a freights there are ostensibly legitimate business. And once deployed the spider drives of those drone were still undetectable. (So even if they have the full Manticore rapid response setup there's nothing for them to react to)


Now you can argue that someone should have thought of that risk and mobbed every ship emerging anywhere near the planet with the reaction forces and RDs they planned to use for the hyper emergency ghosts - but given the likely traffic of Beowulf you'd need many hundreds of destroyers doing nothing but swarming legit traffic to search for ultra-stealthy items they might have dropped; whether before or after you intercepted them. You rapidly run into resource limitations trying to monitor every single ship to that level.

Jonathan_S wrote:Now you can argue that someone should have thought of that risk and mobbed every ship emerging anywhere near the planet with the reaction forces and RDs they planned to use for the hyper emergency ghosts - but given the likely traffic of Beowulf you'd need many hundreds of destroyers doing nothing but swarming legit traffic to search for ultra-stealthy items they might have dropped; whether before or after you intercepted them. You rapidly run into resource limitations trying to monitor every single ship to that level.

Most of what you write is sensible, but here we disagree. The only thing needed was to put some form of defense next to the Mycroft systems. After all, Honor Harrington once shot down similar Republican systems using lasers added to their explorer drones.

Frank777 wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Now you can argue that someone should have thought of that risk and mobbed every ship emerging anywhere near the planet with the reaction forces and RDs they planned to use for the hyper emergency ghosts - but given the likely traffic of Beowulf you'd need many hundreds of destroyers doing nothing but swarming legit traffic to search for ultra-stealthy items they might have dropped; whether before or after you intercepted them. You rapidly run into resource limitations trying to monitor every single ship to that level.

Most of what you write is sensible, but here we disagree. The only thing needed was to put some form of defense next to the Mycroft systems. After all, Honor Harrington once shot down similar Republican systems using lasers added to their explorer drones.

As mentioned above, Mycroft at Beowulf was a pre-production version. In modern software terms it was probably a Alpha version. Later versions will be tweaked with lessons learned from the initial installation - like self defenses and randomized motions to stealth exact locations.

But that brings me to a side point. How did the Malign have enough Silver bullets to take out Mycroft? Or more importantly, how did they know how many would be needed? Either a fair # of the Mycroft remote Sats survived (but enough lost to destabilize the system), or there are tons of Grasertorps running around Beowulf space waiting to run out of hydrogen (also unlikely given the rush nature of the silverbullet program).

UNLESS there was a major breach of the Mycroft system and the exact # of sats was known, which doesn't seem correct given the text.