why the honorverse would be full of dead planets

cthia wrote:But that's the rub. Their plan went awry, off the tracks, derailed, out of order, interrupted. It even caused them to prematurely launch Houdini as I understand.

Sure, but I don't think they're capable of changing their Grand Plan as much as they need to.

The smart thing would be to just leave. Not just to Darius, but to far, far beyond explored space. Go 10,000 light years out or something, build up a whole new civilization along their own ideal lines. If they still care about what happens in "explored space" 300 years later, then they can come back with a mega-navy and take everything over.

So, why don't they just go ahead and launch a preemptive strike, before the victims can fully recover, develop counter weapons and/or similar weapons of their own?

To destroy the scales before they are rebalanced. Deal the finishing blow. Under the heading of the premise of this thread, that is.

It's certainly a possibility -- it might actually work, depending on how many ships they have available and how hard Darius really would be to find if every navy devoted all their efforts to looking for it.


And one kind of megalomaniac fanatic would do it under those conditions. The Detweilers strike me as a subtly different type, though.

Theemile wrote:The answer to that is simple- they don't have the tools to do it. The OB strike used every MA resource to accomplish 1/2 the goals of the original plan, using training and eval units to accomplish what should have been done with capital ships. As the MA leadership pointed out, the mission's success was due to intense prep, a completely unaware enemy, and a decently sized dallop of luck. A repeat of a mission of that scale will invite failure, and any use of the current assets may cause them to be captured and analyzed, letting the cat out of the bag well before the fleet if Detweilers is completed.

I agree the story's not going to go that way, but I'm not sure that's why.

At worst that would delay it only until the Detweilers are completed, not prevent them from doing it at all (unless they get destroyed before that time, that is).

Anyway, they have the (fairly significant, IIRC) RF navies to work with. If they just went around throwing ridiculous numbers of c-fractional missile strikes at every planet, avoiding actually engaging fleets, it might actually work.

cralkhi wrote:

Theemile wrote:The answer to that is simple- they don't have the tools to do it. The OB strike used every MA resource to accomplish 1/2 the goals of the original plan, using training and eval units to accomplish what should have been done with capital ships. As the MA leadership pointed out, the mission's success was due to intense prep, a completely unaware enemy, and a decently sized dallop of luck. A repeat of a mission of that scale will invite failure, and any use of the current assets may cause them to be captured and analyzed, letting the cat out of the bag well before the fleet if Detweilers is completed.

I agree the story's not going to go that way, but I'm not sure that's why.

At worst that would delay it only until the Detweilers are completed, not prevent them from doing it at all (unless they get destroyed before that time, that is).

Anyway, they have the (fairly significant, IIRC) RF navies to work with. If they just went around throwing ridiculous numbers of c-fractional missile strikes at every planet, avoiding actually engaging fleets, it might actually work.

Oh, I agree, the aim of the MAlign is to break society apart then rebuild it in it's image. Repetitive attacks of the most heinous kind - Eridini type attacks - will polarize the universe against it, which is the last thing it wants.

I was just answering why the MAlign hasn't done any other attacks to date. Capability is independent of will; when you don't have it, it really doesn't matter what you want to do.

The MAlign doesn't just leave because how will known space, and especially Beowolf know that the Dertwilers were right if they're 10k ly away?

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Hi MaxxQ,

The major textev for the "Lenny Det's" implies they are going to be huge, ie up around 20 million tons, or more than double the latest GA's SDP's, and given the 3-2 building rate, they should take at least 7 years to complete, assuming everything works the way its intended the first time, which I tend to doubt from our own current experience.

The MAlign is going to survive for the next story arc, of course; but I wouldn't be surprised if either not that many "Lenny Det's" will be available, or rather more likely, the GA's SDP's or whatever follows are so much better by then [~20 years?] that the L-D's are relatively obsolete from having frozen the design too soon, for another big "Oops!"

L

MaxxQ wrote:

cthia wrote:Something just occurred to me. Could it be that RFC's decision not to advance the timeline in SOV as much as we'd like had a little to do with the fact that the Lenny Dets aren't completed yet? IOW, his hands were tied? Because how long should it reasonably take to complete them?

IIRC*, The MA's build times for larger similar class ships are about a year or so longer than Manticore's, because they haven't got quite the building efficency of either Manticore or Haven (which has build times somewhere between Manticore and what I recall of the MA). Smaller class ships take months longer than for the GA.

*And I'm not sure where I read that, so take it with a grain of salt.

cralkhi wrote:

cthia wrote:But that's the rub. Their plan went awry, off the tracks, derailed, out of order, interrupted. It even caused them to prematurely launch Houdini as I understand.

Sure, but I don't think they're capable of changing their Grand Plan as much as they need to.

The smart thing would be to just leave. Not just to Darius, but to far, far beyond explored space. Go 10,000 light years out or something, build up a whole new civilization along their own ideal lines. If they still care about what happens in "explored space" 300 years later, then they can come back with a mega-navy and take everything over.

So, why don't they just go ahead and launch a preemptive strike, before the victims can fully recover, develop counter weapons and/or similar weapons of their own?

To destroy the scales before they are rebalanced. Deal the finishing blow. Under the heading of the premise of this thread, that is.

It's certainly a possibility -- it might actually work, depending on how many ships they have available and how hard Darius really would be to find if every navy devoted all their efforts to looking for it.


And one kind of megalomaniac fanatic would do it under those conditions. The Detweilers strike me as a subtly different type, though.

Don't forget that the MA is not just Darius. It is also all the other planets where the leadership has been subverted by the Detwielers, so that should the Darius team move 10,000 light years away, they will lose contact, or at least reduce it majorly with those members of the alignment.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:How to destroy a planet:

[snip]

Our rockpile is of course an x-ray source in the sky--but note that it's behind the star--the planet can't see it.

The trajectory I have picked will cause the rocks to miss the star by about 1 solar diameter, in the last 3.6 hours of flight (remember, lightspeed sensors) the planet will see an x-ray source slowly emerging from behind the star--that is, if they can make it out at all as a separate entity from the star. And who points telescopes at the local star, anyway??

Once it clears the star the planet has less than 3 minutes to detect it and intercept. There is no way to match orbits, thus the only defense is to interpose a wedge. From the response to Oyster Bay we can see that this would be hopelessly inadequate in stopping a pile of rocks that are spread across the planet. They'll get some, most will get through.

So you are targetting a planet that's got enough reaction capability that you need to try to hide the relativistic attack, yet so minimal a space presence that they didn't deploy the basic solar orbit system sensors to avoid people sneaking up on them from behind the sun?
Nobody with even a basic space navy is going to rely exclusively on planetary, or planetary orbital, sensor to try and monitor the whole system. (Yes the other sensors will have a lightspeed lag to inform the planet of what they see, but even a relayed warning of a moving x-ray source 14 light hours away (20 hours from impact) should still give you a couple hours warning.

But ok, given a target that's blind to what's happening behind their own sun I guess that this attack would work - but it seems overkill to use relativistic boulders to attack such a weak system.

Come from above or below the ecliptic. For some reason, while most of the systems are known to look "out", they don't seem to look up or down much. Probably because any planets, moons, and asteroid belts all tend to be in the same plane; and ship orbits reflect that.

Duckk wrote:http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/272/1

Suicidal lunatics.
These are the sorts of threats that careful screening of starship pilots, multi-man crew requirements in critical duty slots, carefully crafted traffic requirements, etc., are designed to at least make difficult. Such precautions really aren't designed to stop mass attacks on planetary surfaces, but rather to intercept/prevent attacks by single suicide-run ships and the like.

...

The ultimate defense against a major naval attack launched directly against the planet -- that is, an Eridani Edict violation -- is not really to stop the attack at all, because the likelihood of being able to do that is… debatable. The ultimate defense is precisely that which the Eridani Edict stipulates, and what back in the Bad Old Days when everyone was stuck on Old Earth was referred to as "mutually assured destruction." What this means is that super elaborate defenses designed to stop deliberate, sophisticated attacks on the planets themselves are ultimately regarded as both unreliable and not cost effective. One attempts to defend the space around the planet, not the planet itself, against deliberate attack. One attempts to defend the planet itself against "lone-maniac" attacks… for which relatively light defenses will be effective (assuming the [lone]-maniac in question is [detected] in time) and heavy defenses are unnecessary.

I would also point out that typical Verge planets don't have freighters to their name to begin with.

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.

Yeah, no offense, but that's BS. Peoples minds WOULD think that way, 1-2K years aren't going to change deep seated thinking patterns in mankind.

*sigh*

The point isn't that no one is trying to kill planets. The fact that the Edict has been applied (if I recall correctly) 7 times since its inception still means that some loonies will crop up from time to time to try it.

The point is that people in the Honoverse don't think it's a good idea to do this with any sort of regularity, or, to address the topic title "be full of dead planets". People may spend an hour or two wistfully thinking what they might do to an enemy, but no one thinks it's acceptable for India to actually lob nukes at Pakistan, so to speak. Actions still have consequences in the Honorverse, and killing a planet is as high consequence as possible. People aren't regularly nuking each other here on Earth because great pains were taken to prevent that. Likewise, people in the Honoverse aren't regularly killing inhabited planets.

Well Duckk, lets play that scenario. An India-Pakistan exchange.

The Pakistani's have just gotten over the limit in the last few years to the point where the Indians believe they can successfully kill most Pak nukes on the ground with airstrikes. hence the Indian "Cold Start" doctrine that decrees in the event of a war, forward positioned ground forces need to be able to cross into Pakistan fast enough that the Pakistani's would be nuking their own soil if they went tactical. India of course retains enough strategic nukes to counter-value target most major Pakistani cities in the Pakistani's go counter-value in their own right.

So, lets say that happens. Something fires off the "Cold Start." India flows in. The Pakistanis go "use it or lose it" and turn the border into ground zero even though that isn't the rational game-theory answer.

Now what? Will the US stop sending logistics through Pakistan to keep their Afghan experiment alive? We all know that the strat air package would be barely enough to keep the USF on essentials in there, and honestly that assumes several other nations don't take the opportunity to ratchet up the impact.

While the US completely cut itself off from India, who they see as the primary bulwark against China expanding west?

Will the US or Europe strike? Invade? Impose sanctions as more than a wrist slap?

None of them end well...

So...it really isn't "no one thinking it is acceptable" that keeps them at bay. It's strategic calculus. People can get rather self-centered in thinking "well, I wouldn't like it, so there" when assessing what other people will do.

You may recall, for example, the hoards of talking heads that said Assad could never survive since "the international community" dissapproved of him. Whoops.