How was Haven supposed to fight the SL (Detweiler Plan)?

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:But you stated this in answer to a question about using smuggled bombs to attack Manticore's orbital stations, and in that context it is irrelevant. Hephaestus was not a good target for a smuggled bomb (or several), precisely because of its enormous size: there was no way to get close to destroying either the shipyards or the missile production lines. Yes, it would create a major disturbance, but it would not alter the dynamics of the war.

Sigs wrote:Its harder to smuggle a bomb in a station of 3 million people most of who are directly or indirectly employed for the war effort than it is to smuggle in a civilian station of 15 million people. but more importantly, the SKM most likely has their cargo transfer points in stations of their own far away from the planet and their manufacturing stations. If something is going to one of the stations it will be inspected. This adds more chances of discovery if a container has to go from the ship, to the transfer station, and from the transfer station to another SKM ship to one of the stations or the planet.

There is NO evidence for "cargo transfer points in stations of their own". Hephaestus was a mixture of everything, civilian and military. It was where the civilian ships docked bringing passengers and cargo. The paragraphs in Mission of Honor detail the movement of some of those people as the attack occurred. So there is NO justification for saying "most of who are directly or indirectly employed for the war effort". RFC has made it clear that most of the civilian manufacturing was there, not just military construction. From chapter 29:

I thought most of the infrastructure for cargo transfer was at the Junction or near the Junction.

tlb wrote:But you stated this in answer to a question about using smuggled bombs to attack Manticore's orbital stations, and in that context it is irrelevant. Hephaestus was not a good target for a smuggled bomb (or several), precisely because of its enormous size: there was no way to get close to destroying either the shipyards or the missile production lines. Yes, it would create a major disturbance, but it would not alter the dynamics of the war.

Sigs wrote:Its harder to smuggle a bomb in a station of 3 million people most of who are directly or indirectly employed for the war effort than it is to smuggle in a civilian station of 15 million people. but more importantly, the SKM most likely has their cargo transfer points in stations of their own far away from the planet and their manufacturing stations. If something is going to one of the stations it will be inspected. This adds more chances of discovery if a container has to go from the ship, to the transfer station, and from the transfer station to another SKM ship to one of the stations or the planet.

tlb wrote:There is NO evidence for "cargo transfer points in stations of their own". Hephaestus was a mixture of everything, civilian and military. It was where the civilian ships docked bringing passengers and cargo. The paragraphs in Mission of Honor detail the movement of some of those people as the attack occurred. So there is NO justification for saying "most of who are directly or indirectly employed for the war effort". RFC has made it clear that most of the civilian manufacturing was there, not just military construction.

Sigs wrote:I thought most of the infrastructure for cargo transfer was at the Junction or near the Junction.

At the Basilisk terminal only Astro control and the forts are near the junction, everything else is in orbit around the planet. Echoes of Honor chapter 36:

"Why is that, Citizen Lieutenant?" Pritchart asked in neutral tones. "My understanding was that over half the traffic passing through this system transships at least some cargo at the warehouses in Medusa orbit before continuing through the terminus."

Chapter 37:

And after they punch out Markham's task force, they'll destroy every single installation in Medusa orbit, he thought with a dull sense of horror. Will they give the orbit bases' personnel time to evacuate? Of course they will . . . unless their CO is one of the new regime's fanatics. But even if they do allow an evac, that's still sixty T-years' worth of infrastructure. My God! Who knows how many trillions of dollars of investment it represents? How in hell will we manage to replace it in the middle of a damned war?

Sigs wrote:Its harder to smuggle a bomb in a station of 3 million people most of who are directly or indirectly employed for the war effort than it is to smuggle in a civilian station of 15 million people. but more importantly, the SKM most likely has their cargo transfer points in stations of their own far away from the planet and their manufacturing stations. If something is going to one of the stations it will be inspected. This adds more chances of discovery if a container has to go from the ship, to the transfer station, and from the transfer station to another SKM ship to one of the stations or the planet.

Beowulf had (well I guess has; since they weren't affected by the bombings) their cargo transfer points well away from the residential stations. Only cargo destined for the residents or businesses on the residential station was actually shipped to the residential station.

What they didn't have was a robust enough inspection system. Nor did they have a solid method of ensuring the recipient was expecting exactly that package before the package was moved from the cargo transfer station to the residential station.

(The bombs had to be addressed to a legit recipient on each station, but the security didn't have checks to ensure the recipient was actually expecting a given shipment. So all the MAlign had to do was make sure the notifications to the listed recipients, that a delivery was ready for pickup, got waylaid)

tlb wrote:At the Basilisk terminal only Astro control and the forts are near the junction, everything else is in orbit around the planet. Echoes of Honor chapter 36:

"Why is that, Citizen Lieutenant?" Pritchart asked in neutral tones. "My understanding was that over half the traffic passing through this system transships at least some cargo at the warehouses in Medusa orbit before continuing through the terminus."

Chapter 37:

And after they punch out Markham's task force, they'll destroy every single installation in Medusa orbit, he thought with a dull sense of horror. Will they give the orbit bases' personnel time to evacuate? Of course they will . . . unless their CO is one of the new regime's fanatics. But even if they do allow an evac, that's still sixty T-years' worth of infrastructure. My God! Who knows how many trillions of dollars of investment it represents? How in hell will we manage to replace it in the middle of a damned war?

The Medusa planetary infrastructure built up at the planet to take advantage of customs loopholes built around Basilisk and the loose custom enforcement created by politicians who had personal gain. In short, foreign powers were allowed to trade with the locals as long as they followed certain rules, and goods from Medusa (officially a Manticore planet) were free from customs duties if going to other Star Kingdom planets. So items were trans-shipped at the Medusa orbital Warehouses, and made it into the Star Kingdom customs free.

So the Basilisk planetary warehousing was not an official SKM policy, but something that organically built up to support the trade there.

tlb wrote:Hephaestus was not a good target for a smuggled bomb (or several), precisely because of its enormous size: there was no way to get close to destroying either the shipyards or the missile production lines. Yes, it would create a major disturbance, but it would not alter the dynamics of the war.

A good fusion bomb design will yield about 6kt per kilo. Or 6MT per ton. So a multi-hundred ton cargo container will go boom with 1-2 gigatons.

So you get the prompt xray emissions, which turns everything around it into super heated plasma, producing a shock front that vaporizes everything it touches as it accelerates them to many km/sec. When it stops being able to do this you have a debris cloud moving at hypersonic speed in an expanding sphere. It's very unclear when this will be the case, but in the atmosphere the fireball would be 7-9km in diameter.

So basically everything within say 32 km is directly destroyed by the thermal pulse, the xray radiation, the melted remnants of a bulkhead moving at mach 6 or being smashed by a 500 ton shuttle moving at mach 2.

Equal and opposite reaction means the entire remaining platform is going to move away from the bomb. The entire structure of the platform will also transmit this shock, which will be, once it stops having enough energy to remain supersonic, at about 6km sec. So the entire remainig structure will essentially get a very high energy earthquake as I'll bet the structural materiel is not going to absorb very much.

The part past say 35-40km out probably won't be directly destroyed or crushed flat, just badly twisted and bent. Which is unfortunate as that lets the air leak out as the now slowly spinning fragments move away from the huge hole in the middle of the structure.

This assumes that secondary explosions of running fusion reactors, which David has shown are exa-scale explosions and would produce a fireball larger then the entire platform, don't occur.

So, no, it would actually be sufficiently destructive for most people's purposes.

tlb wrote:Hephaestus was not a good target for a smuggled bomb (or several), precisely because of its enormous size: there was no way to get close to destroying either the shipyards or the missile production lines. Yes, it would create a major disturbance, but it would not alter the dynamics of the war.

kzt wrote:A good fusion bomb design will yield about 6kt per kilo. Or 6MT per ton. So a multi-hundred ton cargo container will go boom with 1-2 gigatons.

So you get the prompt xray emissions, which turns everything around it into super heated plasma, producing a shock front that vaporizes everything it touches as it accelerates them to many km/sec. When it stops being able to do this you have a debris cloud moving at hypersonic speed in an expanding sphere. It's very unclear when this will be the case, but in the atmosphere the fireball would be 7-9km in diameter.

So basically everything within say 32 km is directly destroyed by the thermal pulse, the xray radiation, the melted remnants of a bulkhead moving at mach 6 or being smashed by a 500 ton shuttle moving at mach 2.

Equal and opposite reaction means the entire remaining platform is going to move away from the bomb. The entire structure of the platform will also transmit this shock, which will be, once it stops having enough energy to remain supersonic, at about 6km sec. So the entire remainig structure will essentially get a very high energy earthquake as I'll bet the structural materiel is not going to absorb very much.

The part past say 35-40km out probably won't be directly destroyed or crushed flat, just badly twisted and bent. Which is unfortunate as that lets the air leak out as the now slowly spinning fragments move away from the huge hole in the middle of the structure.

This assumes that secondary explosions of running fusion reactors, which David has shown are exa-scale explosions and would produce a fireball larger then the entire platform, don't occur.

So, no, it would actually be sufficiently destructive for most people's purposes.

How does this hypothetical bomb compare to the yield of one of those used at Beowulf? The book only says that was the size and weight of a laser pumped fusion reactor for a shuttle. The Beowulf orbital was roughly spherical, so the pressure wave (etc) impacted structure in every direction as it expanded; that would not true with Hephaestus.

But if you wish, a large enough bomb can demolish even such a structure,

kzt wrote:A good fusion bomb design will yield about 6kt per kilo. Or 6MT per ton. So a multi-hundred ton cargo container will go boom with 1-2 gigatons.

So you get the prompt xray emissions, which turns everything around it into super heated plasma, producing a shock front that vaporizes everything it touches as it accelerates them to many km/sec. When it stops being able to do this you have a debris cloud moving at hypersonic speed in an expanding sphere. It's very unclear when this will be the case, but in the atmosphere the fireball would be 7-9km in diameter.

So the entire remainig structure will essentially get a very high energy earthquake as I'll bet the structural materiel is not going to absorb very much.

Hrmm, how the Hell would a singular several hundred ton cargo container get inside a civilian infrastructure? Industrial? Sure, but civilian? Sorry, no dice. Of course, maybe I am wrong, and their standard cargo containers are several hundred tons to the platforms would this even make sense? Food containers from the planet etc for bulk goods of grains seems right. But everything else? No. OF course we are talking 20Million people, so maybe as we are talking a population density that dwarfs anything on earth. This brings up a very telling problem... WHO would put up with that population density for very long?

NO ONE would put up with that insane pop density other than dedicated people under MILITARY law/order. This is supposed to be a civilian infrastructure, so need for parks, windows for everyone, space to NOT listen to the neighbors arguments or farts or dog barking is paramount to any society that does not want to be ruled by authoritarian dictators. Who today lives without a window even in the DENSEST apartment complexes in even the lowest of rat infested warrens in the 3rd world? NO ONE.

As for the earthquake shockwave: Yes/No. If a super rigid structure then; yes, but nothing like on earth as there is not enough physical strucutre to transmit POWER. If a bunch of modules connected then for internal safety bulkheads, ease of manufacture, and economics of expanding gradually and logically; no. The connections would never be rigid enough to transmit that shockwave traveling at ~mach 20(air STP) or so.

Just some thoughts.

Remember how Honorverse ships hold like 7 million tons of cargo? A standard ISO cargo container can weight up to 30 tons. So you'd have at least 233,000 of those to load and unload. This might take 'some time'.

A Honorcon 1, before they become cosplay cons for other people's IPs, David talked about this issue. I forget the exact details, (They were posted here, but the terrible platform used here erases old postings) but it was something like 25 meters long, 12.5 meters wide and 12.5 meters high and massing up to 500 tons. Basically 16 x forty foot cargo containers.

So now you have 14,000 cargo containers. Which is well within the scale of a modern container ship, which has a capacity of up to 21,413 twenty foot containers (TEU).

Which also explains a lot of the whole smuggling issue. Consider trying to search 21,413 containers to see if they have something like say ten stamped PKM machine guns receivers somewhere in the load of 60,000 stamped auto parts in one container. Consider doing that for a million assorted unfamiliar to you machine parts. Consider where do even do this, in terms of the floor space you need?

Relax wrote:This brings up a very telling problem... WHO would put up with that population density for very long?

NO ONE would put up with that insane pop density other than dedicated people under MILITARY law/order.

Conclusion: the population density on a civilian habitat must be much lower, so those stations must be huge.

The population density of Manhattan is 25000/km². If this station were an O'Neill cylinder where everyone lived on the inner surface, the inner surface would need to be 800 km². If Hephaestus can be 110 km long, let's say Beowulf Alpha is 40 km long, which gives us a radius of 3.2 km.

This assumes the station has a hollow interior and is probably spinning for simulated gravity. If it is organised like a ship, with multiple decks (whether concentric like a 16th century PD ship or stacked like modern ones), the interior volume can be more efficiently utilised without increasing the surface density.

Relax wrote:This brings up a very telling problem... WHO would put up with that population density for very long?

NO ONE would put up with that insane pop density other than dedicated people under MILITARY law/order.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Conclusion: the population density on a civilian habitat must be much lower, so those stations must be huge.

The population density of Manhattan is 25000/km². If this station were an O'Neill cylinder where everyone lived on the inner surface, the inner surface would need to be 800 km². If Hephaestus can be 110 km long, let's say Beowulf Alpha is 40 km long, which gives us a radius of 3.2 km.

This assumes the station has a hollow interior and is probably spinning for simulated gravity. If it is organised like a ship, with multiple decks (whether concentric like a 16th century PD ship or stacked like modern ones), the interior volume can be more efficiently utilised without increasing the surface density.

Calculate a figure for cubic meters per person by multiplying the area for a person to live and work by a height sufficient for that person and the associated environmental support structure (say an area of 100 square meters times another 10 meters for 1000 cubic meters). Then multiply that by the maximum number of people and see what size sphere would hold that volume. One million people could be housed in a sphere with a diameter of about 1241 meters (if I haven't messed up). So 25 million would fit into a sphere with a diameter of about 3.6 kilometers.

I am guessing at the amount of space to devote to each person, but you can play with the idea to get something that you might prefer better.

PS. artificial gravity will be used, not spinning.