"What if" after HH09

ThinksMarkedly wrote:This is a situation that Grayson had lived with for over 1000 years. They hadn't collapsed before the Alliance, so whatever the cost was, it was paid.

That's also why they had domes, so people could work outside of buildings without such protective equipment. And even outside of domes, it doesn't look like it was that bad either: the contaminants appeared to be in the soil and heavy metals are heavy: they don't aerosolise and float in the air, they tend to sink to the ground. We have seen scenes of kids playing outside, though that was with masks and I suspect it was still inside a dome.

Note that even outside the domes or houses even non-Grayson visitors normally don't need to wear filtration masks. HotQ notes that Courvosier has his Embassy issues on in a case on his hip -- but that he wouldn't need it until he made a prolonged stay or the atmospheric dust count kicked up.

Grayons, with their genetic adaptation to be better at naturally rejecting airborne heavy metals, need to wear filter masks even less. But sure, during particularly bad days even they wear filters. Just like today we would wear them if there was a nearby wildfire that was kicking up atmospheric particle counts. (The difference is that dust counts can spike more quickly than wildfires tend to appear - so Grayons habitually carried emergency breath masks when out and around their cities or steading; in case an emergency came up and they needed to don it. (Not too dissimilar to people today who might still have an N95 mask in their jacket pocket; just in case)

And yes their homes are designed with better sealing and filtration that we have today on Earth, to keep out atmospheric heavy metals -- partly to keep them away from infants and the elderly, and partly to serve as a shelter when the dusk count is especially high. But they survived for centuries without quite that level of filtering -- they "just" suffered more from heavy metal accumulation; reducing their lifespan.

But it's not like even at the time of HotQ they have to daily wear fully body PPEs, or even filter masks.

Is it nicer to have a filtered and decontaminated dome over your whole town? Sure. But it's not required for survival - it just means you can enjoy "outdoor" activities even when weather kicks up the atmospheric dust count.


OTOH I'll note that there were times, in Grayson's past, where the agriculture system wasn't able to keep up. When, as IEH noted "In Grayson's grim, early days, it had also been the steadholder's harsh duty to determine which of his steaders had to die if that was what was required to balance population against the maximum strain his steading could bear" But Grayson's grim early days were nearly a thousand years before Honor's time - and I don't get the impression that even in the wars with Masada that Grayson was brought to the brink of starvation. So despite the costs they must have sufficient agricultural capacity, and emergency stockpiles of food, to ride out disruptions. (Though to some extent a Steadholder may still be able to place limits on the population growth within a Steading; in order to ensure that they don't outgrow their safety margins on food production and stockpiles)

Jonathan_S wrote:And once Haven realizes that the units it holds back to defend its systems aren't actually capable of preventing SD(P) raids from wrecking infrastructure then Saint Just (who presumably hasn't be taken out yet because the war is still on and so he hasn't tried his massive post-war purge of the navy) would quickly realize that the only effective defense is a massive offense.

Actually, I disagree that the coup wouldn't have happened.

First, OSJ would have started the purge after he received Manticore's agreement to cease fire, even if Grayson included a note saying they didn't. He needed the Navy, but with Manticore standing down, he´d have calculated it was the time to initiate the purge.

Second, because the purge wasn't necessary for the coup. Oh, don't get me wrong: it did trigger the coup, because Theisman couldn't afford to let the purge happen. But he'd inherited the plans for the coup from Esther McQueen's failed attempt a few years earlier, the one that did cause Rob S. Pierre's death but left OSJ as the sole dictator. From the Navy's point of view, the StateSec "oversight" and interference were a hindrance to the prosecution of the war, not an asset, so getting rid of them and the commissioners would improve their fighting ability. Theisman may have waited a little more for all pieces to be ready, which could have resulted in fewer warlords having the opportunity to seize any territory or ships.

Strip the home defenses far, far, lower than they ever contemplated during the war with Manticore and adopt a full on Zap Brannigan vs the killbots strategy. Throw so many ships at Yeltsin that you run the defending SD(P)s out of ammo and then crush the system - and FYI HOS says the GSN's Harringtons had only 492 of the original pods; so slightly fewer than you'd noted. (Also, how much MDM production does Grayson have domestically at this time? Were they still getting most of their missiles from Manticore? That'd limit how many pods could be deployed in an ad-hoc system defense role -- as would the limited amount of shipboard or fort fire control for them)

That may be a strategy OSJ would call for, but it would also realistically not executed. At that time, Theisman was leading the Navy and would see the Zapp Branigan plan for what it was. If he hadn't launched his coup by then, he would now.

And if he did take military power (under civilian leadership), he would use proper strategies, not Zapp Branigan's.

kzt wrote:That's not how it works.
"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. "

That's one (or three) stations, and military ones at that. Generalisations may not apply from them. They were also industrial platforms, not habitats, very much unlike Beowulf Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. They had the technology and if we are told that 300 million people lived in the Belt, then I don't see why they couldn't be allowed to live in comfort.

Besides, comfort is relative. What they think is a good quality of life may not be what planet-dwellers do. Why did people move to the MBS in the first place in the 15th and 16th centuries? The financial incentives may have been good, but the same would apply to the Belt. And why did they stay in the MBS after the Junction was opened, when a fully-civilised, peaceful and prosperous system was just a few hours' travel away?

Except David says they don't. The entire, I mean ENTIRE, industrial base of the entire system was contained on the three platforms. Along with the technical experts who ran it, the engineers who designed it, and the entire infrastructure that built not only the industrial base but all space construction. An probably the entire training infrastructure for this.

And it was all somewhat less than a million people who produced everything the SEM made, from children's toys to SD(P)s.

Well, we have agreed that that portion of the economy doesn't make sense. And since it doesn't, it's not a surprise it doesn't fit with the rest either, but it's not a reason to discard everything.

I tend to interpret the industry in the space stations not as the agglomeration of most of the system industry, but as the bottleneck and final portion of the processes related to ship-building and other military components. That means the lower-value resource extraction industries wouldn't have been compromised. I know I am contradicting what RFC said in the forum, but AFAIR not with what he wrote in the books.

And besides, that doesn't change what all the other economic activities the Belt may have had. Who says that the Balt didn't have a large datacenter industry, because cooling requirements would be that much easier off-planet and away from the stars.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And besides, that doesn't change what all the other economic activities the Belt may have had. Who says that the Balt didn't have a large datacenter industry, because cooling requirements would be that much easier off-planet and away from the stars.

That thirty+ minute latency to anywhere that people live might be a tiny little problem.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And once Haven realizes that the units it holds back to defend its systems aren't actually capable of preventing SD(P) raids from wrecking infrastructure then Saint Just (who presumably hasn't be taken out yet because the war is still on and so he hasn't tried his massive post-war purge of the navy) would quickly realize that the only effective defense is a massive offense.

Actually, I disagree that the coup wouldn't have happened.

First, OSJ would have started the purge after he received Manticore's agreement to cease fire, even if Grayson included a note saying they didn't. He needed the Navy, but with Manticore standing down, he´d have calculated it was the time to initiate the purge.

Second, because the purge wasn't necessary for the coup. Oh, don't get me wrong: it did trigger the coup, because Theisman couldn't afford to let the purge happen. But he'd inherited the plans for the coup from Esther McQueen's failed attempt a few years earlier, the one that did cause Rob S. Pierre's death but left OSJ as the sole dictator. From the Navy's point of view, the StateSec "oversight" and interference were a hindrance to the prosecution of the war, not an asset, so getting rid of them and the commissioners would improve their fighting ability. Theisman may have waited a little more for all pieces to be ready, which could have resulted in fewer warlords having the opportunity to seize any territory or ships.

Strip the home defenses far, far, lower than they ever contemplated during the war with Manticore and adopt a full on Zap Brannigan vs the killbots strategy. Throw so many ships at Yeltsin that you run the defending SD(P)s out of ammo and then crush the system - and FYI HOS says the GSN's Harringtons had only 492 of the original pods; so slightly fewer than you'd noted. (Also, how much MDM production does Grayson have domestically at this time? Were they still getting most of their missiles from Manticore? That'd limit how many pods could be deployed in an ad-hoc system defense role -- as would the limited amount of shipboard or fort fire control for them)

That may be a strategy OSJ would call for, but it would also realistically not executed. At that time, Theisman was leading the Navy and would see the Zapp Branigan plan for what it was. If he hadn't launched his coup by then, he would now.

And if he did take military power (under civilian leadership), he would use proper strategies, not Zapp Branigan's.

You might be right. However two corrections:
1) Theisman wasn't in charge of the navy, he was just in charge of the Navy's Capital Fleet. Picked by Saint Just and approved by Rob s. Pierre to be a counterbalance to Secretary of War McQueen.
2) McQueen's failed coup wasn't years earlier, it was months earlier at most -- when Theisman and LePic departed Barnett to Haven under orders to report to Rob S. Pierre (where they'd be told they were taking over Capital Fleet) news of the coup hadn't reached them - it was a complete surprise when they arrived at Haven and were told by the still very twitchy StateSec ships there that Pierre was dead in a coup. So the coup had happened more recently than the round trip travel time between Barnett and Haven. And Saint Just had already ordered the assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth and Protector Mayhew; and once he got word of its success had sent his request for a ceasefire and negotiation. That whole sequence didn't take years; even with the weeks, to low months, travel time within the Haven Sector.

(The wiki's timeline claims McQueen's failed coup was Dec '14, and Theisman arrived May '15; but AoV doesn't include dates so I don't necessarily trust that; but 6 months does sound about right)

But if Grayson insists on continuing the war with ships that can outrun any Peep SD force, out-range anything in Haven's arsenal, and kill multiple SD's with each SD(P) before withdrawing for more ammo -- well you've got the same kind of force imbalance that historically did cause Theisman (when he later was in charge of the restored Republic's Navy) to advocate for an all or nothing attack on the Manticore Binary System -- accepting the huge necessary losses to force a strategic win before the small, but growing, number of ships they have no other response to can win the war for the other side.

Sure the Zap Brannigan bit was a comedic exaggeration -- but if you can't defend against the Graysons, and don't look to be able to build the tech you need to do so for years, then your only real choices are surrender or take whatever losses are necessary to overwhelm their tech advantage with sheer numbers and force them to surrender. So I don't agree that Theisman, to the extent he'd have the option to refuse orders, would refuse or resist orders for all all stakes attack on Yeltsin in a bid to end a war they can't otherwise fight.

kzt wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And besides, that doesn't change what all the other economic activities the Belt may have had. Who says that the Balt didn't have a large datacenter industry, because cooling requirements would be that much easier off-planet and away from the stars.

That thirty+ minute latency to anywhere that people live might be a tiny little problem.

Not for long-term storage needs. AWS S3 Deep Glacier has an SLA on retrieval of 12 hours. We're experiencing this right now, on the millisecond latency range. Some applications require this to be in the single to double-digit millisecond latency at most, which is something that can't be reliably offered on regular datacentres within one continent, let alone across oceans or to space. LEO is crowded not just because it's cheaper to put satellites there, but also because of light lag. A satellite orbiting at the ISS altitude of 420 km experiences a 2.8 ms round-trip delay because of light alone, and that's actually much closer than most DCs -- if you account for the speed of light inside an optical fibre, that distance drops to 300 km. That's further than metropolitan areas like NY and LA to their closest AWS DCs.

So once we become interplanetary, we'll need to cope with this. I don't think we'll duplicate every bit of data over every planet. Instead, I think we'll learn to accept some data and some tasks will take a significant amount of time to get results for. Not "cup of coffee" time, but "full pot of coffee." Only what's critical will get processed or stored locally, even if that is an orbital cloud (a cloud outside the atmosphere!). And this in spite of the cost of storage and processing going down, because there's a good chance the volume of which will outpace the rate at which it goes down. There's no need to keep copies of that video of the Numa Numa Guy over every planet (or on ground storage) if it's only accessed once a year or less, but cached copies of Rick Astley's famous video will likely exist.

Yes, I fully expect people will still be getting rickrolled in the 20th century PD. It's not the same experience if you have to wait 2 hours to see the video after clicking the unsuspecting link.

Note that a cheap and high-bandwidth FTL solution only makes the business case for off-world DCs even more compelling.

Jonathan_S wrote:You might be right. However two corrections:
1) Theisman wasn't in charge of the navy, he was just in charge of the Navy's Capital Fleet. Picked by Saint Just and approved by Rob s. Pierre to be a counterbalance to Secretary of War McQueen.
2) McQueen's failed coup wasn't years earlier, it was months earlier at most -- when Theisman and LePic departed Barnett to Haven under orders to report to Rob S. Pierre (where they'd be told they were taking over Capital Fleet) news of the coup hadn't reached them - it was a complete surprise when they arrived at Haven and were told by the still very twitchy StateSec ships there that Pierre was dead in a coup. So the coup had happened more recently than the round trip travel time between Barnett and Haven. And Saint Just had already ordered the assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth and Protector Mayhew; and once he got word of its success had sent his request for a ceasefire and negotiation. That whole sequence didn't take years; even with the weeks, to low months, travel time within the Haven Sector.

(The wiki's timeline claims McQueen's failed coup was Dec '14, and Theisman arrived May '15; but AoV doesn't include dates so I don't necessarily trust that; but 6 months does sound about right)

But if Grayson insists on continuing the war with ships that can outrun any Peep SD force, out-range anything in Haven's arsenal, and kill multiple SD's with each SD(P) before withdrawing for more ammo -- well you've got the same kind of force imbalance that historically did cause Theisman (when he later was in charge of the restored Republic's Navy) to advocate for an all or nothing attack on the Manticore Binary System -- accepting the huge necessary losses to force a strategic win before the small, but growing, number of ships they have no other response to can win the war for the other side.

Thanks for the timeline correction. That actually makes more sense. I'd begun writing about the Leveller Uprising, but that also sounded wrong.

If Theisman wasn't the Minister of War at the time, who was? McQueen was dead. And he did launch the coup like she did try, so there wasn't anybody above him in the military who could stop him.

Either way, I don't think it changes any of the conclusions.

Sure the Zap Brannigan bit was a comedic exaggeration -- but if you can't defend against the Graysons, and don't look to be able to build the tech you need to do so for years, then your only real choices are surrender or take whatever losses are necessary to overwhelm their tech advantage with sheer numbers and force them to surrender. So I don't agree that Theisman, to the extent he'd have the option to refuse orders, would refuse or resist orders for all all stakes attack on Yeltsin in a bid to end a war they can't otherwise fight.

I don't think that would have been a decision he'd have to make in the first place. Theisman was patently in a position to launch the coup, so if OSJ suddenly started depleting the Capital Fleet and sending sailors to the meat grinder, he'd have launched it anyway.

Which could have actually been for the better. Pritchart and Theisman were ready to surrender and the only reason they didn't was because High Ridge was stalling. So if Grayson had continued the war and then agreed to have surrender & peace talks, they'd have happened. It did happen with Erewhon after all. They'd likely have imposed tougher conditions than Erewhon did, but I suspect that a deal would happen.

How this would affect the rest of the timeline, I'm not sure. High Ridge would continue to be arrogant and not negotiate, but I do think the Alliance would have fallen apart, with a great deal of the rest of the systems following Grayson's lead and signing for peace. I don't know if the conquered systems could be returned at this point: what's their legal status, if the Alliance effectively no longer exists? Are they now Manticore possessions?

If Grayson and Haven are talking, then Honor is being kept in the loop and she would be on the floor of the Lords decrying the High Ridge intransigence. Giancola would likely not have been able to alter all correspondences with Grayson to keep up his shenanigans -- imagine there's a face-to-face meeting with Pritchart like Honor had in 1922. So High Ridge may have been forced to sit at the table.

I don't think Thunderbolt would have happened, at least not when it did. And if the hostilities don't restart in 1919, then the MAlign doesn't launch Oyster Bay either.

Meanwhile, the Lynx Terminus would get discovered and the escalation of tensions with the League would still happen. Without Oyster Bay the space stations are still intact, but they're idling because there's no war footing. And because Grayson would have pulled out of the Alliance, the ships it did buy would have instead been scrapped. So the RMN would be a weaker position when Filareta would come calling.

Because there wouldn't have been an Oyster Bay and no big alteration of diplomatic dispatches, the discovery of the Alignment (which would still happen, because of Torch) wouldn't lead Pritchart to travel herself to Manticore and strike an alliance. It's possible the High Ridge government would have fallen by this time (it wasn't very stable in the first place), but it might not either.

The RMN would have been able to deal with Filareta and his fleet without breaking a sweat. Even if they didn't have Apollo yet (not rushed because of the war), they'd have sufficient number of MDMs and platforms. But it would have actually been a battle, because Filareta wouldn't back down against 50 SD(P)s or so that a non-GA Home Fleet would have got plus 15 from a non-GA Third Fleet, instead of the 500 that Honor and Theisman showed him. Plus, it wouldn't have been Honor in command either.

This sets up to the worst of all the possible confrontations: High Ridge and Janacek on one side, against the Mandarins and Rajampet on the other. And if you don't think that's bad enough, remember the Alignment had not one but two moles in/links to the High Ridge Government.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Note that a cheap and high-bandwidth FTL solution only makes the business case for off-world DCs even more compelling.

BTW, if you had that, the best place to put a DC might not be in the belt. The best place would be on a tidally locked planet close to the star. That way, you can use the day side to generate power from solar and the night side to radiate your excess heat away.

Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun (it's at a 3:2 resonance). We don't know if Salamander is tidally locked to Manticore-A or Erinye to Manticore-B. The two are less than half the distance from Mercury to the Sun, and Manticore-A is more massive than our Sun, so chances are they are tidally locked. Even if they aren't, they'd be in resonance like Mercury is and that's not a deal-breaker for Mercury either.

If you don't have instantaneous FTL comms like an ansible, then the innermost planet has an extra, non-obvious benefit: it's the planetary body that is closest to all the other planets, most of the time. That is, the average distance between any one planet and the innermost one is smaller than with any other two planets. Earth is never further than 11.2 light-minutes from Mercury, but is 14, 24 and 51 light-minutes from Venus, Mars and Jupiter, respectively, once a year.

Though if you're starting small, you'd start with geostationary orbit over your planet with beamed power, then transition to one of the Lagrange points with your natural satellite (if you have one) so you can then use direct solar power, then transition to the L1 with the star. That last one is a good long-term solution if you don't need a massive installation, because it's always in the sunlight, usually not in a freight route, and at a constant distance from your planet. Even if you do have the need for massive DCs, that would be a good place to put a local cache, since it's much closer by (5 light-seconds in our case, versus the minimum of over 60x that with Mercury).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:You might be right. However two corrections:
1) Theisman wasn't in charge of the navy, he was just in charge of the Navy's Capital Fleet. Picked by Saint Just and approved by Rob s. Pierre to be a counterbalance to Secretary of War McQueen.
2) McQueen's failed coup wasn't years earlier, it was months earlier at most -- when Theisman and LePic departed Barnett to Haven under orders to report to Rob S. Pierre (where they'd be told they were taking over Capital Fleet) news of the coup hadn't reached them - it was a complete surprise when they arrived at Haven and were told by the still very twitchy StateSec ships there that Pierre was dead in a coup. So the coup had happened more recently than the round trip travel time between Barnett and Haven. And Saint Just had already ordered the assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth and Protector Mayhew; and once he got word of its success had sent his request for a ceasefire and negotiation. That whole sequence didn't take years; even with the weeks, to low months, travel time within the Haven Sector.

(The wiki's timeline claims McQueen's failed coup was Dec '14, and Theisman arrived May '15; but AoV doesn't include dates so I don't necessarily trust that; but 6 months does sound about right)

Thanks for the timeline correction. That actually makes more sense. I'd begun writing about the Leveller Uprising, but that also sounded wrong.

If Theisman wasn't the Minister of War at the time, who was? McQueen was dead. And he did launch the coup like she did try, so there wasn't anybody above him in the military who could stop him.

I don't know for sure - but I suspect that Saint Just had, at lead de facto, assumed that authority just like he assumed the control of the Committee with Pierre's death. And since he'd ended McQueen's coup by setting off the hidden nuclear charge inside the Octagon pretty much the entire upper military command structure was gone. He might have tapped someone from StateSec's naval forces to help him command the military -- but I've no doubt he held on to the actual control.

(And of course he didn't end up having to really try to run the war -- basically the forces that McQueen had deployed defensively were left in place to try (and fail) to defend against Buttercup for the brief time until Hassan occurred and he got his ceasefire. At which point he tried to purge the navy and remove that threat to his one-man rule of Haven; but Foraker and Theisman, in their different ways, put paid to most of those attempts)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:]

Not for long-term storage needs. AWS S3 Deep Glacier has an SLA on retrieval of 12 hours. We're experiencing this right now, on the millisecond latency range. Some applications require this to be in the single to double-digit millisecond latency at most, which is something that can't be reliably offered on regular datacentres within one continent, let alone across oceans or to space. LEO is crowded not just because it's cheaper to put satellites there, but also because of light lag. A satellite orbiting at the ISS altitude of 420 km experiences a 2.8 ms round-trip delay because of light alone, and that's actually much closer than most DCs -- if you account for the speed of light inside an optical fibre, that distance drops to 300 km. That's further than metropolitan areas like NY and LA to their closest AWS DCs.

So once we become interplanetary, we'll need to cope with this. I don't think we'll duplicate every bit of data over every planet. Instead, I think we'll learn to accept some data and some tasks will take a significant amount of time to get results for. Not "cup of coffee" time, but "full pot of coffee." Only what's critical will get processed or stored locally, even if that is an orbital cloud (a cloud outside the atmosphere!). And this in spite of the cost of storage and processing going down, because there's a good chance the volume of which will outpace the rate at which it goes down. There's no need to keep copies of that video of the Numa Numa Guy over every planet (or on ground storage) if it's only accessed once a year or less, but cached copies of Rick Astley's famous video will likely exist.

Yes, I fully expect people will still be getting rickrolled in the 20th century PD. It's not the same experience if you have to wait 2 hours to see the video after clicking the unsuspecting link.

Note that a cheap and high-bandwidth FTL solution only makes the business case for off-world DCs even more compelling.

Interesting thought.