Information I'd love to know

Theemile wrote:I would have said the same about multiple stations as well, but David corrected me during discussions about Oyster Bay. All production in Manticore happened on those 3 stations. There are forts, yes. Habitats in Manticore B space for 350 million folks, but none of them manufacture anything or are in Gryphon orbit. No space stations, or anything that could be repurposed for manufacturing in planetary orbit for any of the 3 planets. Every module in orbit was part of one big station. No other warehouses other than those at the junction. No manufacturing stations near the orbital smelters (which are near the asteroid belts). Nada. Nothing...

In the aftermath of the Yawata Strike and orbital explosions at Beowulf, it seems reasonable to me that the orbital stations should be separated into purely civilian and purely military installations, with all primary freight handling and storage segregated to prevent a hidden bomb from creating major casualties. The military installations could be better defended and able to raise sidewalls or evacuate in a possible emergency, without causing civilian disruptions. The civilian installations will still need the ability to raise sidewalls, but only to defend against damage by debris (if the attack is honorable).

There are going to be at least two major stations around each of the habitable planets. My guess is that they will get the same levels of protections because doing any less would invite strikes at the less well defended ones anyway. Certainly the Alignment wouldn't care about hitting the "civilian" station since that is also going to have some level of manufacturing even if it isn't cranking out military specific hardware.

The 1st problem is the shift in weapons and ship tech which has let the Alignment hit the stations and anything else with no warning. The Manticore stations and probably a lot of other system infrastructuer had good defenses but since they never say anything comming- not even a ship comming out of hyper- there was no warning to bring up ANY of the defences or implimenet evacuation plans.

So now they are spreading the assets and are going with 24/7/365 (or whatever the Manticorian expression should be) with shields plus probably sequencing through hot CM and energy weapons. Expensive is so much better than everybody on board dead and all that infrastructure blown to bits again.

Well, not exactly true. The dozens of missiles lighting their wedges was a pretty clear attack indicator...

Brigade XO wrote:There are going to be at least two major stations around each of the habitable planets. My guess is that they will get the same levels of protections because doing any less would invite strikes at the less well defended ones anyway. Certainly the Alignment wouldn't care about hitting the "civilian" station since that is also going to have some level of manufacturing even if it isn't cranking out military specific hardware.

The 1st problem is the shift in weapons and ship tech which has let the Alignment hit the stations and anything else with no warning. The Manticore stations and probably a lot of other system infrastructuer had good defenses but since they never say anything comming- not even a ship comming out of hyper- there was no warning to bring up ANY of the defences or implimenet evacuation plans.

So now they are spreading the assets and are going with 24/7/365 (or whatever the Manticorian expression should be) with shields plus probably sequencing through hot CM and energy weapons. Expensive is so much better than everybody on board dead and all that infrastructure blown to bits again.

We do not really know what would have happened during the Yawata Strike, if the stations have been separated into military and civilian. Since missile production, for example, would be in the military installation; it is possible that the civilian platforms would have been ignored. The civilians were targeted at Beowulf, but that is because the Mesan Alignment hates them. The problem with putting active defenses on a civilian orbital, not just sidewalls, is that the station takes on more of a military character. The main reason for proposing the separation, particularly of the major freight handling nodes is the problem demonstrated at Beowulf.

kzt wrote:Well, not exactly true. The dozens of missiles lighting their wedges was a pretty clear attack indicator.

Even if the process can be triggered automatically when a missile lights its wedge, what is the spin-up time for the spherical sidewall generators? However in Oyster Bay, my recollection is that the missiles fired off after the graser torpedoes had already done their work. The military orbitals may have to have their sidewalls up all the time, if it is possible to open a big enough portal for authorized transits.

kzt wrote:Well, not exactly true. The dozens of missiles lighting their wedges was a pretty clear attack indicator...

But one with likely less than 225 seconds of warning.
(And if sequenced slightly behind the graser torps then the first indication of attack would still have be grasers firing from "nowhere" into vulnerable targets). That's very little warning.



Though Sphinx orbit is theoretically less than 180 seconds by MDM from the hyper limit[1]. So this minimal warning risk has existed since the MDM was developed. (Manticore, thankfully, has a somewhat more reasonable minimum warning of almost 22 minutes against MDM attacks from the hyper limit).


That's not that much less warning than Sphinx would have had in the SDM era. (For a BC on a flyby course I get about 32 minutes from the hyper limit to SDM range plus 3 more for the missile's flight). So the Manticore system should have had defense plans for decades that were built around the potential threat of only around 30 minutes from first warning to first weapons impact. (Though Manticore itself would have far more warning time, being much further inside the hyper limit)

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[1] It's just close enough, at .8 lightminutes (14.39 million km), that you can use full power settings (14.6 million km range) on the MDMs. If you restricted yourself to the normal half-power setting you'd reach it in 252 seconds using just 2 drives.

The 3 major stations were taken out by the graser torpedoes and then all the rest of the strike arrived in ballistic mode and went active....so missles (I think individualy, don't recall any pods being included) and possibly just kenetic weapons targeting all sorts of things which were in regular orbits around the three planets of the Binary System. Same thing with Grayson at Blackbird EXCEPT that at Grayson it appears to have been only around Blackbird. Nothing was hit at Grayson itself (the Alignment didn't have enough weapons/deliver systems to include that).

Not hitting what was around Grayson- including the orbital farms and factories etc- wasn't from any desire to spare civilian lives, it was just lack of ways to deliver the weapons on targets and they would have had to put more ships like the Ghosts and Sharks on the planet Grayson, ships they didn't have to do both the survaleince and carry & deploy the ordenence. The majority of the Grayson orbital heavy industry & it's workforce was out at and around in the astroid belts by Blackbird- which is what they hit.

My opinion is that even if the civilian manufacturing, civilian shipyards, and other infrastructure was already on compleatly seperate orbital facilities, the Alignment would have still hit them as well. Why? Because the entire operation was designed to eliminate Manticore's ability to produce, expand, supply and maintain it the RMN against Haven. Just hitting pure Military targets wouldn't do that since Manticore also had a significant civilian shipbuilding and repair industry and the light, medium and heavy industry to support that. Same with the nominally consumer/commerical industrial capasity. All those people who were trained in the various industries and support sectors. Manticore has all the designs ect backed up.
Every one of those "civilian" industrial platforms and the civilian spacecraft industry could be converted- and the employees retrained to produce ships, weapons, spare parts etc for the RMN.
Look at what happed in the US in WW II (and in WW I as well but II is easier to see). Although the US was hurt by Pearl Harbor and the loss of the US forces and bases in the Philippines and no shipyards were hit anwhere else in the country, war production was signifcantly intialy based on existing maufacturing companies who where making other things.
Ok, auto manufactures then made military vehicles, but along with the expansion of existing companies to build military gear and all the logsistics support to feed, etc the military, much was an awful lot of what was needed was made by converting factories and their work forces to make military gear.
One of those examples that doesn't usualy get noted was Smith-Corona, the typewriter company. While they also has to push up production of typewrites (logistics, reports and communications) they changed part of their operations to manufacture bolt action .30-06 rifles. For most people, the only way to tell the difference between the S-C produced guns and the ones by the Springfield Armory is the manufacture's name on the barrel.

The Alignment had to take out ALL the capasity to support the RMN in the war with Haven. That they left the resource recovery and new materials smelting operations alone was also because they didn't have the ships to target and set up the weapons deliver at those places.
If there had been seperate "civilian" stations with similar types of industries, they would have been hit was well some of the smaller/less important (from the Alignement's point of view) military locations would not have been targeted.

David’s assumption that people will live in an overpriced highly monitored sardine can to save 15-30 minutes of commuting to where they could have 5x as much space for 1/2 the price and without the orwellian surveillance seems questionable.

Why would anyone want to live there in a culture where you could be anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes? It’s like deciding to live in the oil refinery you work at (paying inflated rates for the one bedroom trailer) because you think that’s a great place to raise your kids.

kzt wrote:David’s assumption that people will live in an overpriced highly monitored sardine can to save 15-30 minutes of commuting to where they could have 5x as much space for 1/2 the price and without the orwellian surveillance seems questionable.

Why would anyone want to live there in a culture where you could be anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes? It’s like deciding to live in the oil refinery you work at (paying inflated rates for the one bedroom trailer) because you think that’s a great place to raise your kids.

Is it possible that vast areas of the planet either belong to the gentry or the Crown, so the only affordable places for workers are in city towers or space orbitals?

tlb wrote:

kzt wrote:David’s assumption that people will live in an overpriced highly monitored sardine can to save 15-30 minutes of commuting to where they could have 5x as much space for 1/2 the price and without the orwellian surveillance seems questionable.

Why would anyone want to live there in a culture where you could be anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes? It’s like deciding to live in the oil refinery you work at (paying inflated rates for the one bedroom trailer) because you think that’s a great place to raise your kids.

Is it possible that vast areas of the planet either belong to the gentry or the Crown, so the only affordable places for workers are in city towers or space orbitals?

Space orbitals are NOT affordable.

"There were no remote order terminals in Dempsey's Bar. Patrons were served by real, live waiters and waitresses—a factor, given civilian labor costs on the Navy's busiest orbital shipyard, which explained much about Dempsey's price levels. It also helped explain why Dempsey's patrons were willing to pay those prices, but it wasn't the entire story."
...
"This particular Dempsey's lay at the very hub of HMSS Hephaestus's core, yet its designers had gone to great lengths to create a ground-side environment. They couldn't avoid the legally mandated color codings for emergency life support and other disaster-related access and service points, but they'd paid through the nose for permits to build double-high compartments, then used the extra height to accommodate dropped ceilings that hid the snake nests of pipes and power conduits which covered deckheads elsewhere. Sophisticated holo projections outside the casement "windows" displayed ever-changing planetary panoramas, and it was Monday, which meant the bar was "on" Sphinx. The cold, blue skies of autumn soared over the spires of Yawata Crossing, Sphinx's second largest city, and traffic and pedestrian noises drifted in through open windows on artfully cool breezes that smelled of live greenery and sidewalk-cafe cooking. Dempsey's holos never repeated themselves, either. Unlike the constructs less discerning owners might have used, they were broadcast from or recorded at other units of the chain on Manticore, Sphinx, and Gryphon, which gave them specific locations and complete spontaneity. Diners could—and did—sit for hours watching ground-side places they often knew well, and Manticore and Sphinx were close enough to Hephaestus to allow near real-time transmission.
"Background holos, however nice, might have seemed a relatively minor element in producing the near-fanatic loyalty of Dempsey's Hephaestus-based regulars when Manticore itself was barely twenty minutes away by shuttle. But for more than a single person, that twenty-minute trip demanded coordination of duty schedules which was often difficult and frequently worse. A spur of the moment evening ground-side with a lover or a few close friends was a near impossibility . . . except at Dempsey's, where they brought ground-side to you."

kzt wrote:David’s assumption that people will live in an overpriced highly monitored sardine can to save 15-30 minutes of commuting to where they could have 5x as much space for 1/2 the price and without the orwellian surveillance seems questionable.

Why would anyone want to live there in a culture where you could be anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes? It’s like deciding to live in the oil refinery you work at (paying inflated rates for the one bedroom trailer) because you think that’s a great place to raise your kids.

tlb wrote:Is it possible that vast areas of the planet either belong to the gentry or the Crown, so the only affordable places for workers are in city towers or space orbitals?

kzt wrote:Space orbitals are NOT affordable.

"There were no remote order terminals in Dempsey's Bar. Patrons were served by real, live waiters and waitresses—a factor, given civilian labor costs on the Navy's busiest orbital shipyard, which explained much about Dempsey's price levels. It also helped explain why Dempsey's patrons were willing to pay those prices, but it wasn't the entire story."
...
"This particular Dempsey's lay at the very hub of HMSS Hephaestus's core, yet its designers had gone to great lengths to create a ground-side environment. They couldn't avoid the legally mandated color codings for emergency life support and other disaster-related access and service points, but they'd paid through the nose for permits to build double-high compartments, then used the extra height to accommodate dropped ceilings that hid the snake nests of pipes and power conduits which covered deckheads elsewhere. Sophisticated holo projections outside the casement "windows" displayed ever-changing planetary panoramas, and it was Monday, which meant the bar was "on" Sphinx. The cold, blue skies of autumn soared over the spires of Yawata Crossing, Sphinx's second largest city, and traffic and pedestrian noises drifted in through open windows on artfully cool breezes that smelled of live greenery and sidewalk-cafe cooking. Dempsey's holos never repeated themselves, either. Unlike the constructs less discerning owners might have used, they were broadcast from or recorded at other units of the chain on Manticore, Sphinx, and Gryphon, which gave them specific locations and complete spontaneity. Diners could—and did—sit for hours watching ground-side places they often knew well, and Manticore and Sphinx were close enough to Hephaestus to allow near real-time transmission.
"Background holos, however nice, might have seemed a relatively minor element in producing the near-fanatic loyalty of Dempsey's Hephaestus-based regulars when Manticore itself was barely twenty minutes away by shuttle. But for more than a single person, that twenty-minute trip demanded coordination of duty schedules which was often difficult and frequently worse. A spur of the moment evening ground-side with a lover or a few close friends was a near impossibility . . . except at Dempsey's, where they brought ground-side to you."

Why would you use an extremely expensive restaurant to support your contention? You might as well have used The Wages of Sin for comparison. At the lower end of the accommodation scale, it is possible that living in an orbital efficiency apartment is preferable for a single person; because it saves on the time and cost of a commute.