A bit of analysis: Posleen War

[CaptainChewbacca]

Hunh. Either that picture can't possibly be right, or the stats are way off. Assuming the unit is set up the way that picture shows--even two treads side by side leave only 85 feet of 385 between them for drive units and the like. Four 150ft side by side treads on a 385 ft wide unit...he's got 215 feet of tread sticking beyond his "total vehicle width" even before you fit anything to drive them. For that matter, the total length of the vehicle is only 3 tread widths.

The picture is fan art and not considered canon (pardon the pun).

[Connor MacLeod]

I'm juts going to drop the last discussions because they deal mostly with SHeVa and that's what will be discussing currently. Except for one little bit:

Yes, that might well work- although since everything about Casaba Howitzer is so classified that we can't even be sure it works properly, I don't know whether it would pan out. But it's certainly an idea for how to go about this.
Side note: Casaba Howitzer charge shaping might not work at all for antimatter- it exploits specific properties of fission.

Could be. But if they got SheVa and all the other crazy shit that shows up in the novels to work, I can't seee why they couldn't rig something up for the Howitzer. Hell they should have been able to make some workable advances in fourth generation nukes (much of which should, as I understand it, predate Ringo's Posleen novels, but I only recently started digging into it in connection with my 40K stuff so he might have missed it.) the 4th generation stuff has some pretty fascinating and relevant possibilities I'll have to dig some of what I was looking at up. I also want to touch on the idea of fusion a bit later as well when I discuss SheVa.

The 16" Smoothbore SheVa round is stated to have the power of six 16" shells; so that's 1,738.8 megajoule

Actually Hell's Faire said 6x the recoil, which isn't quite the same as 6x the KE (6x the momentum, yes.) because that would be more like 4-5 GJ - higher velocities affect KE more than higher mass does. Although as I said I don't think KE is quite what matters when it comes to the round.

He sighed and pulled up a graph that he knew he looked at too much. It was his own AID's estimate, based upon all available information, of . . . relative combat strength in the United States. It took into account that the casualty ratio of humans to Posleen tended to be about one thousand to one, but it also took into account the dwindling supplies of soldiers and Posleen birthrates. What it said was that sometime in the next twelve months, when the current crop of Posleen nestlings reached maturity and were given their weapons, there would be enough Posleen to swamp every major pass in the Appalachians. And it wouldn't even take smart Posleen.

You know I can't stop myself from rolling my eyes when I read this and see the ACS have such absurdly high kill ratios compared to everything else. I mean I could kinda accept infantry, but outdoing artillery and other shit? No way in hell. It's one of those little things that really just jerks me around when it comes to these novels. I could accept the idea that ACS suits are supposed to be like Gundam in concept.. if Ringo were consistent about it.
Anyhow the other obvious thing is that Posleen for all intents and purposes have similarities to Orks and Tyranids in certain respects - once on planet they are insanely hard to eradicate without literally sterilizing the planet, it would seem.

One quarter-kilo of antimatter.

Bigger than I recall. So I went and looked in Gust Front and when Mike and those Officers are talking about the C-dec destruction on Diess and poor Buckley, Mike mentions it was only like a 4 kiloton nuke going off. So I'm guessing despite having all that antimatter it didn't all go off at once, or the reaction that did happen blew it all in wild directions or something.
TL;Dr the blast was really inefficient, or maybe Ringo just had another case of revisionism or fucked up math in Hymn again. Who the hell knows.

Since round speed is a function of energy imparted versus round weight and barrel drag, the round left the barrel at speeds normally obtainable only by spacecraft.
The plastic "shoe" fell off within half a mile and what was left was an eight-inch-thick, six-foot-long, pointed uranium bar with tungsten "fins" on the back. The fins stabilized its flight. And fly it did crossing the twenty kilometers to the target, trailing a line of silver fire, in just under two seconds. However, such speed and power do not come without some minor secondary effects.

I should note that your mass figures are probably approximate. going by the recoil bit in HEll's Faire and shep's figures I got a mass of around 1700 kg, so its not too far off. I will note though that Hell's Faire goes with 2500 m/s velocities rather than 10 km/s,. Again either Ringo fucked up math (once again) or the 10 km/s round are an example of a "specialty" round - considering they have 100 kt shells in the HF I imagine they might have some super-ultra hyper velocity shell too for whatever reason.
I'm really wondering why all SheVa rounds have to have an antimatter core. Why not just have some specific KEP only rounds for landers, and save the explosive ones for the C-decs?

Now the propellant is 'plasma enhanced' where earlier it was the same as a BB gun.

I suspect Ringo is alluding to Electrothermal-chemical technology, which has been proposed as a modern means of upping the performance of tank gun propellant without anything dramatic as a railgun (basically you convert the propellant to plasma, which can be more easilly controlled to allow for more efficient acceleration of the projectile.) an ETC could probably provide the sort of performance they want for SHEVA, although I suspect pure Electorthermal would work better (and they could probably do it if they can do ETC)
IIRC pure ETC tech can provide a 25-30% increase in velocity over standard propellant. coupled with the use of a saboted round (which should about double velocity) and the longer barrels that would reasonably provide the 2.5 km/s velocity.
I also suspect that they were alluding to Gerald Bull's Project Babylon. Sounds alot like it anyhow. But nothing actually stated above is inconsistent, or at least its a minor inconsistency I could forgive. SheVa's design shows Ringo tried putting some thought into it and itnernal consistency, which I will give him credit for, even if the SheVa gun comes out being needlessly bizarre or overpowered.

The magazine for the SheVa guns was the heaviest armored container ever designed. The inner layer was simple steel, four layers of hardened case steel coated with "supersteel," a recent development that increased the surface hardness of steel almost fourfold. Outside that were two layers of "honeycomb" armor made of tungsten and synthetic sapphire. The outermost section was multiple layers of ablative explosive plates. These had been found to disrupt Posleen plasma guns, to an extent.

Isn't this some of the similar stuff they stick on the upgraded Abrams Doombarrage tanks later on? I can't believe they wouldnt have already been doing this by book 3 or something. They apparently have it. Then again I saw mention of the Abrams so maybe they did, they just didn't decide it was a good idea to cram as many machine guns onto it until book 4 (EG when things REALLY got insane.)

[Connor MacLeod]

Now three things really bug me about SheVa in particular:

1.) The sheer size and mass of the projectile involved, which necessitates all that hefty and confusing setup. Liek I said, given some of their galtech stuff I find it hard to believe this was the minimum needed for Anti-Posleen killing. For one thing, why is 2500 m/s needed? Why not 1800 m/s or 2000 m/s?

Secondly I'm wondering why they stuck with conventional propellant rather than exploring options. Given galtech they should have been able to rig up some means to pull of pure-electrothermal (which is actually better performance-wise than ETC as I understand it, although Pure Electrothermal gun technology is hardt o find data on nowadays), or some sort of liquid-propellant gun (that was another comeptitor for future guns alongside EM guns and ET/ETC as I remember. If you combine ETC/ET guns with liquid propellant I bet you could get similar performance without being nearly so unwieldy.)

2.) SheVa's gun, as it stands, is basically just a really-large, scaled up APFSDS round, as such what it depends on is both the velocity AND the sectional density/diameter of the round to ensure maximum penetration. Now, there are certain limts to the Length to diameter ratio (modern rounds go for like 20:1 L:D ratio) but the smaller the diameter the better it will gneerally be at penetrating. Sheva probably has certain limits having to pack in an explosive payload in some rounds, so I'm willing to forgive its L/D ratio (which I estimate as 9:1, or less than half what it could be.) But it does occur to me that a smaller round could still PROBABLY penetrate if you can keep the scaling between the momentum of the projectile and the diameter relatively consistent (so that the pressure is basically the same for the smaller round as the bigger) Even if the loss in KE/momentum makes the round incapable of killing a lander by itself, you could just incorporate a smaller explosive charge to destroy the lander, like they do with the C-dec. You would just have different kinds of ammo for kiling different targets, or something.

I'd also have to wonder about some other alterantive - like a tandem-charge round (some sort of uber-tech shaped charge to penetrate, and then the second charge to detonate inside.) rather than this scaled up KEP. AGain Posleen don't seem to have a good record against projectiles so.. *shrugs*

3.) The constant use of antimatter. Given how rare and limited antimatter is, you have to wonder why they haven't figured out some way to devise a fourth generation nuke or "pure fusion" device. I mean with all that antimatter they should be able to at least pull of antimatter-catalyzed fusion, if not some sort of ICF fusion with their uber-tech lasers and shit. A pure fusion device probably could be kilotons (or less) and fill in quite a bit of roles while also making the antimatter supply stretch. I suppose they might hve hydrogen acquisition problems, but I dont think it would be TOO impossible to acquire it on Earth either...

4.) I can kinda understand their desire to want to do "one shot-one kill" but I'm not sure that really justifies something as huge and unwieldy as SheVa. I mean smaller tanks might be less effective, but they can't coordinate or hunt in "packs?" Multiple such tanks are going to be easier to hide, more mobile, and easier to replace it you lose one (greater redundancy.) I'd also imagine that smaller rounds could fire faster (maybe even make it a multi-gun turret. Imean if you're going to emulate a battleship gun, why not just mount several of them at once?)

[TimothyC]

I am really skeptical of launching a HIBEX from a Humvee. That thing must have one hellacious exhaust backblast, and it's a bit heavy.

Of course, you still come out ahead over a SheVa no matter how big the launch platform is.

Well those were Shep's mini-HIBEXes off of HUMVEEs.

If you let yourself have two full on HIBEXes, then you get into the category of needing an M270:



Or if you really have to have heavy protection:



which could probably take three full size HIBEXes

[CaptainChewbacca]

I think the 2500 m/s was needed so that they could have LoS insta-kills because Landers were maneuverable enough to dodge slower fire.

[Simon_Jester]

Could be. But if they got SheVa and all the other crazy shit that shows up in the novels to work, I can't seee why they couldn't rig something up for the Howitzer. Hell they should have been able to make some workable advances in fourth generation nukes (much of which should, as I understand it, predate Ringo's Posleen novels, but I only recently started digging into it in connection with my 40K stuff so he might have missed it.)

From what I know, "work" might predate the novels, but most of the ideas involved aren't practical without GalTech elf magic- sure, you could probably boost a fission charge with antimatter, but where are you going to get the antimatter? At which point... well, we're back to GalTech elf magic.

You know I can't stop myself from rolling my eyes when I read this and see the ACS have such absurdly high kill ratios compared to everything else. I mean I could kinda accept infantry, but outdoing artillery and other shit? No way in hell. It's one of those little things that really just jerks me around when it comes to these novels. I could accept the idea that ACS suits are supposed to be like Gundam in concept.. if Ringo were consistent about it.

Well, that casualty ratio of 1000:1 seems to be for all branches, including infantry and artillery. Also, ACS would frequently be fighting in positions where they themselves can call on artillery support to destroy what their guns can't reach, or where they're engaged in an offensive of limited scope such that they never run into more Posleen than they can handle.

Anyhow the other obvious thing is that Posleen for all intents and purposes have similarities to Orks and Tyranids in certain respects - once on planet they are insanely hard to eradicate without literally sterilizing the planet, it would seem.

Yep. Fortunately, they're less dangerous even than feral orks, because they can't instinctively make powerful weapons out of rocks and mud. Once you've destroyed Posleen organization and killed off the God Kings, the normals go feral in the woods and don't manage any weapons more dangerous than a fire-hardened spear.

I should note that your mass figures are probably approximate. going by the recoil bit in HEll's Faire and shep's figures I got a mass of around 1700 kg, so its not too far off. I will note though that Hell's Faire goes with 2500 m/s velocities rather than 10 km/s,. Again either Ringo fucked up math (once again) or the 10 km/s round are an example of a "specialty" round - considering they have 100 kt shells in the HF I imagine they might have some super-ultra hyper velocity shell too for whatever reason.
I'm really wondering why all SheVa rounds have to have an antimatter core. Why not just have some specific KEP only rounds for landers, and save the explosive ones for the C-decs?

It takes ten minutes to reload the gun. Do you really want to wait ten minutes while the alien starship with plasma cannons shoots up your lines because the SheVa had to unload the kinetic penetrator and load a nuclear/antimatter round?

Isn't this some of the similar stuff they stick on the upgraded Abrams Doombarrage tanks later on? I can't believe they wouldnt have already been doing this by book 3 or something. They apparently have it. Then again I saw mention of the Abrams so maybe they did, they just didn't decide it was a good idea to cram as many machine guns onto it until book 4 (EG when things REALLY got insane.)

The events of books three and four occur back to back, pretty much; it's the same weapons loadout on the vehicles in each case aside from a handful of field modifications.

2.) SheVa's gun, as it stands, is basically just a really-large, scaled up APFSDS round, as such what it depends on is both the velocity AND the sectional density/diameter of the round to ensure maximum penetration. Now, there are certain limts to the Length to diameter ratio (modern rounds go for like 20:1 L:D ratio) but the smaller the diameter the better it will gneerally be at penetrating. Sheva probably has certain limits having to pack in an explosive payload in some rounds, so I'm willing to forgive its L/D ratio (which I estimate as 9:1, or less than half what it could be.)

Antimatter is more... flexible than a shaped charge or nuclear warhead. You might very well distribute the antimatter as a narrow cylinder all along the length of the round and still have it work, which would be impossible with a fission bomb.

But it does occur to me that a smaller round could still PROBABLY penetrate if you can keep the scaling between the momentum of the projectile and the diameter relatively consistent (so that the pressure is basically the same for the smaller round as the bigger) Even if the loss in KE/momentum makes the round incapable of killing a lander by itself, you could just incorporate a smaller explosive charge to destroy the lander, like they do with the C-dec. You would just have different kinds of ammo for kiling different targets, or something.

There's going to be a feasible limit on how far you can scale this down- to reduce the diameter of the round by half while doubling the length (about as much as you can hope for, if you say fire this thing from a scaled-up Abrams sabot)... keeping the momentum constant requires upping the muzzle velocity by a factor of four, and praying that air resistance isn't a bigger problem at 8 km/s than it was at two.

At which point your propellant becomes much more exotic, the guns get expensive, and... oh god. Oh god NO.

This is what they did for the Tiger III tanks in the Kratman book.

Ow you made me have a flashback. Ow ow ow...

Heh.

I'd also have to wonder about some other alterantive - like a tandem-charge round (some sort of uber-tech shaped charge to penetrate, and then the second charge to detonate inside.) rather than this scaled up KEP. AGain Posleen don't seem to have a good record against projectiles so.. *shrugs*

3.) The constant use of antimatter. Given how rare and limited antimatter is, you have to wonder why they haven't figured out some way to devise a fourth generation nuke or "pure fusion" device. I mean with all that antimatter they should be able to at least pull of antimatter-catalyzed fusion, if not some sort of ICF fusion with their uber-tech lasers and shit. A pure fusion device probably could be kilotons (or less) and fill in quite a bit of roles while also making the antimatter supply stretch. I suppose they might hve hydrogen acquisition problems, but I dont think it would be TOO impossible to acquire it on Earth either...

Yeah, shouldn't be too big a problem. On the other hand, use of any kind of nuclear fusion or fission device imposes specific constraints on the geometry and minimum size of the weapon, whereas antimatter can be used in nearly arbitrary amounts and still work. Antimatter is a relatively common GalTech substance in that they use huge amounts of it and so can keep providing a trickle to Earth, too.

Sure, the ACS start running out of antimatter for their rifles. That may just be because President Shep figured out that the antimatter they were using in their rifle cartridges was a waste and would be more profitably used in NUKEY NUKEY...

Also, it is revealed later in the novel that Earth has limited native antimatter manufacturing, which changes the dynamic- if we can make our own at even a limited rate, it starts making a lot more sense in roles that could conceivably be filled by tactical nukes.

4.) I can kinda understand their desire to want to do "one shot-one kill" but I'm not sure that really justifies something as huge and unwieldy as SheVa. I mean smaller tanks might be less effective, but they can't coordinate or hunt in "packs?" Multiple such tanks are going to be easier to hide, more mobile, and easier to replace it you lose one (greater redundancy.) I'd also imagine that smaller rounds could fire faster (maybe even make it a multi-gun turret. Imean if you're going to emulate a battleship gun, why not just mount several of them at once?)

The problem is that ships are apt to shoot back if not one-shotted. At some point, you're choosing whether to have one antilander gun and bank everything on its ability to one-shot an enemy starship that comes into range... or to have a battery of six guns and predictably lose one every time because it takes too long to beat the lander to death.

My impression is that like real-life tanks, it's pretty easy to kill a Posleen lander/C-Dec if you can penetrate the outer defense at all. So the constraints of what it takes to kill them are set by what it takes to penetrate the hull armor, and this 'just happens' to be 100%+ overkill for actually destroying the target given that the armor is breached. A weapon scaled down in size until it's 'just enough' to kill the target might well not be able to penetrate the armor except under favorable conditions (close range, impact perpendicular to target surface, etc.).

[Vejut]

I think that 10 minute figure is for reloading a 4 round bundle. Or at least, I hope it is, given that even bagged charge 16" guns only need 30-45 seconds to reload, and much of that, as I recall, is moving the gun into and out of reloading position. That plus Posleen numbers may explain why they thought they needed rapid fire--even 30-45 seconds may be too long to wait for second shot capability if there's more than one lander per SheVa.

Speaking of, I notice that drawing of HIBEX shows a payload. Any idea how much that weighs, and could a small nuke, say, a davy crocket or SADM type device be fitted to that? That'd pretty much take care of low-altitude anti-lander, even if you did need more than the raw KE to take them down.

[Ahriman238]

I think that 10 minute figure is for reloading a 4 round bundle. Or at least, I hope it is, given that even bagged charge 16" guns only need 30-45 seconds to reload, and much of that, as I recall, is moving the gun into and out of reloading position. That plus Posleen numbers may explain why they thought they needed rapid fire--even 30-45 seconds may be too long to wait for second shot capability if there's more than one lander per SheVa.

Yeah, I believe the 10 minutes is for refilling the magazine from the trucks carrying spare ammo and specialty rounds. Which, by the way, include 'area-effect' antimatter rounds for sweeping away vast groups of Posleen on the ground.

At the same time, even the largest 16" rounds in real life are- what? 1200 lbs, 8 feet long? The SheVa rounds are apparently 16 tons, 14 feet from tip to base, and more than half again the thickness of the barrel. I'm not sure if that last is just the effect of the cartridge which never gets fired down the barrel, or another math goof.

Now three things really bug me about SheVa in particular:

1.) The sheer size and mass of the projectile involved, which necessitates all that hefty and confusing setup. Liek I said, given some of their galtech stuff I find it hard to believe this was the minimum needed for Anti-Posleen killing. For one thing, why is 2500 m/s needed? Why not 1800 m/s or 2000 m/s?

Secondly I'm wondering why they stuck with conventional propellant rather than exploring options. Given galtech they should have been able to rig up some means to pull of pure-electrothermal (which is actually better performance-wise than ETC as I understand it, although Pure Electrothermal gun technology is hardt o find data on nowadays), or some sort of liquid-propellant gun (that was another comeptitor for future guns alongside EM guns and ET/ETC as I remember. If you combine ETC/ET guns with liquid propellant I bet you could get similar performance without being nearly so unwieldy.)

2.) SheVa's gun, as it stands, is basically just a really-large, scaled up APFSDS round, as such what it depends on is both the velocity AND the sectional density/diameter of the round to ensure maximum penetration. Now, there are certain limts to the Length to diameter ratio (modern rounds go for like 20:1 L:D ratio) but the smaller the diameter the better it will gneerally be at penetrating. Sheva probably has certain limits having to pack in an explosive payload in some rounds, so I'm willing to forgive its L/D ratio (which I estimate as 9:1, or less than half what it could be.) But it does occur to me that a smaller round could still PROBABLY penetrate if you can keep the scaling between the momentum of the projectile and the diameter relatively consistent (so that the pressure is basically the same for the smaller round as the bigger) Even if the loss in KE/momentum makes the round incapable of killing a lander by itself, you could just incorporate a smaller explosive charge to destroy the lander, like they do with the C-dec. You would just have different kinds of ammo for kiling different targets, or something.

I'd also have to wonder about some other alterantive - like a tandem-charge round (some sort of uber-tech shaped charge to penetrate, and then the second charge to detonate inside.) rather than this scaled up KEP. AGain Posleen don't seem to have a good record against projectiles so.. *shrugs*

3.) The constant use of antimatter. Given how rare and limited antimatter is, you have to wonder why they haven't figured out some way to devise a fourth generation nuke or "pure fusion" device. I mean with all that antimatter they should be able to at least pull of antimatter-catalyzed fusion, if not some sort of ICF fusion with their uber-tech lasers and shit. A pure fusion device probably could be kilotons (or less) and fill in quite a bit of roles while also making the antimatter supply stretch. I suppose they might hve hydrogen acquisition problems, but I dont think it would be TOO impossible to acquire it on Earth either...

4.) I can kinda understand their desire to want to do "one shot-one kill" but I'm not sure that really justifies something as huge and unwieldy as SheVa. I mean smaller tanks might be less effective, but they can't coordinate or hunt in "packs?" Multiple such tanks are going to be easier to hide, more mobile, and easier to replace it you lose one (greater redundancy.) I'd also imagine that smaller rounds could fire faster (maybe even make it a multi-gun turret. Imean if you're going to emulate a battleship gun, why not just mount several of them at once?)

By Dance/Faire they have reverse-engineered fusion from the Galactics, though fusion tech is a lot bigger and less efficient than the Galactic version.

I can understand, by this point in my reading I think the Casabla Howitzers are one of the few improbable fanboyish weapons not used in this series. When you consider they reactivated the Battleships, built a giant tank with a 16" gun, generally upgraded most everything to a larger caliber gun, have Land Warrior tech and freaking Black Rhinos it gets a little wierd seeing this one tech that would be incredibly useful and isn't used.

Anyway, here's my personal theory on how the whole SheVa design process went down.
1.) Grav-cannon kill accidentally attributed to 16" Battleship gun. Much rejoicing over having an effective anti-lander weapon.
2.) Much money and effort is invested in designing and building a land-based platform for a 16" gun.
3.) In testing or, more likely, battle it turns out that 16" guns actually can't kill landers after all. Oops.
4.) Having invested so much time and money into the SheVa project, the design team/company scramble to make the thing work somehow before their impotence and thus squandered resources is discovered, their contract is lost, or more people die. Depending on how public the failures of the first few SheVa are, and how moral the design team.
5.) Unwilling or unable to start from scratch after the first X many SheVa were built, the design team decides to bank everything on their ability to create new munitions that will get the job done. After all, the existing design does everything it was supposed to, except kill landers.

Finally, we arrive at the point we are in the books, a supermassive tank that fires over-engineered overkill rounds that half seem like they were designed for a different weapon altogether.

This at least, is my theory.

[Simon_Jester]

I think that 10 minute figure is for reloading a 4 round bundle. Or at least, I hope it is, given that even bagged charge 16" guns only need 30-45 seconds to reload, and much of that, as I recall, is moving the gun into and out of reloading position. That plus Posleen numbers may explain why they thought they needed rapid fire--even 30-45 seconds may be too long to wait for second shot capability if there's more than one lander per SheVa.

Yeah, I believe the 10 minutes is for refilling the magazine from the trucks carrying spare ammo and specialty rounds. Which, by the way, include 'area-effect' antimatter rounds for sweeping away vast groups of Posleen on the ground.

At the same time, even the largest 16" rounds in real life are- what? 1200 lbs, 8 feet long? The SheVa rounds are apparently 16 tons, 14 feet from tip to base, and more than half again the thickness of the barrel. I'm not sure if that last is just the effect of the cartridge which never gets fired down the barrel, or another math goof.

Preeety sure that's the cartridge- although the cartridge is also described as being something like the size of an ICBM, which is a lot longer than that.

[Ahriman238]

Preeety sure that's the cartridge- although the cartridge is also described as being something like the size of an ICBM, which is a lot longer than that.

It's counting the cartridge as a part of total weight. It's also why I didn't say it was definitly a goof that the whole thing is so much wider than the barrel.

Though, why they'd build a mobile 16" gun and not use it every once in a while to fire old-fashioned 16" shells is another mystery. I offer the size and weight of the SheVa ammo as one probable reason they don't carry more, it's so much damn bigger than any battleship shell.

[TimothyC]

I think that 10 minute figure is for reloading a 4 round bundle. Or at least, I hope it is, given that even bagged charge 16" guns only need 30-45 seconds to reload, and much of that, as I recall, is moving the gun into and out of reloading position. That plus Posleen numbers may explain why they thought they needed rapid fire--even 30-45 seconds may be too long to wait for second shot capability if there's more than one lander per SheVa.

Speaking of, I notice that drawing of HIBEX shows a payload. Any idea how much that weighs, and could a small nuke, say, a davy crocket or SADM type device be fitted to that? That'd pretty much take care of low-altitude anti-lander, even if you did need more than the raw KE to take them down.

Payload dimensions are marginal for a preexisting nuclear device, but within the realm of possibility.

In the real World HIBEX grew and became SPRINT.

[Simon_Jester]

Preeety sure that's the cartridge- although the cartridge is also described as being something like the size of an ICBM, which is a lot longer than that.

It's counting the cartridge as a part of total weight. It's also why I didn't say it was definitly a goof that the whole thing is so much wider than the barrel.

Though, why they'd build a mobile 16" gun and not use it every once in a while to fire old-fashioned 16" shells is another mystery. I offer the size and weight of the SheVa ammo as one probable reason they don't carry more, it's so much damn bigger than any battleship shell.

Old style battleship shells require bagged powder charges and large gun crews- they're harder to handle automatically, and you wind up with the gun crew of a battleship to handle turret operations. This is probably not a good idea from the point of view of the SheVa's designers.

[Ahriman238]

Old style battleship shells require bagged powder charges and large gun crews- they're harder to handle automatically, and you wind up with the gun crew of a battleship to handle turret operations. This is probably not a good idea from the point of view of the SheVa's designers.

Ah. I knew that, but I didn't really think of it.

You know I can't stop myself from rolling my eyes when I read this and see the ACS have such absurdly high kill ratios compared to everything else. I mean I could kinda accept infantry, but outdoing artillery and other shit? No way in hell. It's one of those little things that really just jerks me around when it comes to these novels. I could accept the idea that ACS suits are supposed to be like Gundam in concept.. if Ringo were consistent about it.
Anyhow the other obvious thing is that Posleen for all intents and purposes have similarities to Orks and Tyranids in certain respects - once on planet they are insanely hard to eradicate without literally sterilizing the planet, it would seem.

I'm pretty sure that's the figures for all the thousands of men holding the Wall and other major fortifications.

That's more or less what Crenaus said about Irmansul, unless you're willing to glass the place there's always going to be some feral Posleen. I think they may actually stand somewhere between the Orks and 'Nids as far as being 'the amazing multiplying menace.' Tens of millions of Posleen die in every campaign, to take China, the Mid. East, South America etc. And for each that falls a dozen rise to take its place.

I should note that your mass figures are probably approximate. going by the recoil bit in HEll's Faire and shep's figures I got a mass of around 1700 kg, so its not too far off. I will note though that Hell's Faire goes with 2500 m/s velocities rather than 10 km/s,. Again either Ringo fucked up math (once again) or the 10 km/s round are an example of a "specialty" round - considering they have 100 kt shells in the HF I imagine they might have some super-ultra hyper velocity shell too for whatever reason.
I'm really wondering why all SheVa rounds have to have an antimatter core. Why not just have some specific KEP only rounds for landers, and save the explosive ones for the C-decs?

I doubt we're going to get any closer than a ballpark estimate here anyways. It hadn't occured to me there might be multiple types of rounds to explain the speed difference.

I suspect Ringo is alluding to Electrothermal-chemical technology, which has been proposed as a modern means of upping the performance of tank gun propellant without anything dramatic as a railgun (basically you convert the propellant to plasma, which can be more easilly controlled to allow for more efficient acceleration of the projectile.) an ETC could probably provide the sort of performance they want for SHEVA, although I suspect pure Electorthermal would work better (and they could probably do it if they can do ETC)
IIRC pure ETC tech can provide a 25-30% increase in velocity over standard propellant. coupled with the use of a saboted round (which should about double velocity) and the longer barrels that would reasonably provide the 2.5 km/s velocity.
I also suspect that they were alluding to Gerald Bull's Project Babylon. Sounds alot like it anyhow. But nothing actually stated above is inconsistent, or at least its a minor inconsistency I could forgive. SheVa's design shows Ringo tried putting some thought into it and itnernal consistency, which I will give him credit for, even if the SheVa gun comes out being needlessly bizarre or overpowered.

Ah. Cool.

[Forgothrax]

What's preventing Earth from hanging on to captured Posleen landers and C-Decks and using them for anti-lander purposes? Other than Ringo handing his characters the idiot ball to allow the ACS to take center stage.

[Ahriman238]

What's preventing Earth from hanging on to captured Posleen landers and C-Decks and using them for anti-lander purposes? Other than Ringo handing his characters the idiot ball to allow the ACS to take center stage.

Nothing. Except that they sold off all the captured ships from Diess since the Galactics are hurting for warships. Definitly a banghead move, but in their defense I believe they were expecting their own ship designs to be far superior to the Posleen.

[Simon_Jester]

They were far superior, at least the actual built-from-keel-up warships. Their supermonitors easily crack entire Posleen globes, while their Fleet units brush aside any lander/C-Dec/B-Dec presence in Earth orbit at the end of Hell's Faire.

The problem wasn't the quality of the warship designs, it was the available quantity, which humans as of A Hymn Before Battle were likely overestimating, just as they were overestimating the availability of things like GalTech nuke-proof bunkers for their planetary defense centers.

[Forgothrax]

Still... *shakes head* They were expecting, at least as far as I recall, to still have to fight the Posleen on their own soil. Even Lampreys, not to mention C-decs, would have come in handy post-landing. Terra would not have been able to launch enough of them to actually contest battle globes, mind, but having them available for airmobile operations and using them like AC-130s might have dealt a severe blow to the Posleen.

[Tasoth]

From what I can remember about the books, they do mention that they lost one of the Supermonitors once it came off the line because it got into a scrap with too many of the Posleen vessels without support and went down to weight of fire. I believe the characters talking about it even thought it was a dumb move on Fleet's part.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Each supermonitor was lost multiple times and then salvaged/rebuilt from a hulk. Supermonitors were designed to be able to one-shot Battle Globes, or at least blow them apart and then have to deal with the 'swarm' of smaller ships that survived. Supermonitors like the Lexington and Indra each took out several dozen globes, but due to Darhael meddling they never had enough ships on hand during a wave to completely stop it from hitting earth.

[Ahriman238]

Finally done Dance with the Devil. Will take a little bit to get my notes organized, but for now, here's the ACS. Complete with carbon-coated grav gun rounds that don't have antimatter. Normally you'd think that was a good thing. In this case, think bullets without cordite.


ACS:

The inside of a suit of GalTech armor was filled with a semibiotic shock gel. The silvery gel was the medium that supported the billions of nannites that fed and cared for an ACS trooper, but it also served to prevent high speed impact injuries. Since these affected the head as much as, or more than, any other part of the body, the helmet was cushioned on all sides by the gel, leaving only a small portion open for the eyes, mouth and ears. The exterior of the helmet was opaque; what the "Protoplasmic Intelligence System" inside the armor saw was a fully conformable construction of the external view. This "construction" was, in turn, conveyed to the eye by small optics that were extruded from the helmet. A similar audio system threaded out of the wall of the suit and into the ear canal for hearing while air was pumped to the opening around the mouth.

The railguns and plasma cannons of the enemy turned troops in the open into hamburger and the God Kings opened up main battle tanks like tin cans. It was why the ACS, the Galactic supplied Armored Combat Suits, were always used for assaults. But that meant that the ACS had been whittled away in attack after attack, especially on the Great Plains and here in the Ontario Salient. And with Earth interdicted and the only factories for making suits off-planet that had meant "ten little suits, nine little suits." Until there were none.

Review. ACS 101.

The armor also permitted degrees of control that were both a blessing and a nightmare. A superior could control every aspect of the battle down to the smallest action of a subordinate. Which was the nightmare. However, it also permitted a commander to lay out a very detailed and graphic plan, then monitor events and intervene if necessary when, not if, the plan went awry.

Now, though, it permitted the major to cover last-minute changes with his company commanders and battle staff while standing on the bottom of the Genesee River.

The downside of ACS command and control, it can lead to extensive micro-management. Suits can walk along river bottom.

The battalion had reached the Conrail line, and he ordered a short stop to get everything set. The Reapers, who had been responding to calls for fire all along, yanked charging tubes out of the huge ammo baskets welded on their backs while the regular ACS troopers checked ammunition levels and shifted as necessary. The standard suits carried hundreds of thousands of the depleted uranium teardrops but the grav-guns fired nearly five hundred a second. This meant that the suit troopers occasionally had to worry about running out of ammunition, a situation that would have been considered impossible before the war.

Ammo situation. Why would running out of ammo be considered impossible, especially the way ACS uses it?

The armor was a private gift to then-Captain O'Neal from the Indowy manufacturer and included all the "special" functions that he had requested when he was a member of the design group. Besides the additional firing ports on wrist and elbows for close range combat, it was powered by antimatter. This eliminated the worst handicap of powered armor, its relatively short combat range. Technically, standard armor was designed for three hundred miles of range or seventy-two hours of static combat. In practice it had turned out to be about half that. Several suit units had been caught when they simply "ran out of gas" and were destroyed by the Posleen.

The drain on suit power had just gotten worse with the ammunition shortage. Because it was impossible for any terrestrial factory to produce the standard ammunition, which had a dollop of antimatter at the base to power the gun, it had been necessary to substitute simple depleted-uranium teardrops. Thus the grav-gun, which should have been powering itself, was forced to "suck" power from the suits. Since the rounds were still accelerated to a fraction of lightspeed, and since that required enormous power, the "life" of the suit batteries had been cut to nearly nothing. It was getting close to a choice of shoot or move for most of the standard suits, the exception being O'Neal's, which had almost unlimited power.

The flip side, of course, was that if anything ever penetrated to the antimatter reservoir, Major O'Neal and a sizable percentage of the landscape for a mile around would be vapor.

But all of those things were invisible. It was the "surface" that attracted attention; the suit gave the appearance of some sort of green and black alien demon, the mouth a fang-filled maw and the hands talons for ripping flesh. It was startling and barbaric and in some ways, for those who knew O'Neal, very on cue.

Mike’s super-suit and the power issue. In theory, ACS powers should last for 3 days static combat, or 300 miles of running firefights. In practice, it’s half that, if they’re lucky, as seen on Diess where they were desperate for power before lunchtime.

To make matters worse, they can’t build new grav-gun rounds with the antimatter charges. We’ve established that there IS native production of limited quantities of antimatter, and they can, and do, produce fresh suit grenades and SheVa rounds. Therefore, I believe this is an engineering problem. It’s not that they can’t create antimatter propellant, it’s that they can’t do it on anything as small as a grav-gun round. In absentia, they just make the same-shaped rounds out of DU and the grav gun draws on the suit’s own power supply to fire, which really exacerbates the power problem.

It really would be nice in these circumstances, if they could dial back the speed of the rounds, say two or three times the speed of a high-velocity bullet? You’d lose almost all of the stopping power, but you still have an insane rate of fire, so it evens out.

I actually consider this something of a testament to the grav-gun’s engineering, the level of redundancy. How many guns have you ever seen that can still fire if you feed it bullets without any form of propellant? This also brings up another issue I’ve been thinking on, what makes a grav-gun a grav gun? The firing mechanism has been described towards the end of Hymn, and gravity manipulation has nothing to do with it, a ‘field’ ruptures the other field that keeps the antimatter from contacting matter, then the energy is directed to fire the shot. Then I remembered Connor saying that Mike’s suits inertial dampening put a rather serious limit on its ability to handle recoil, and the resulting discussion of whether or not we can credit the books when they say grav-guns are recoilless.

So here’s my theory, the grav-gun has a small very high-power inertial dampening system and/or a piece of the magical energy-redirecting technology used in bounce-tubes and the static-rappel, to turn recoil into further force. This would allow the gun to be recoilless (theoretically, in reality I doubt it’d work, but its close enough for most sci-fi authors) and even account for their ability to fire without the antimatter propellant.

Bulbous bodied medic and engineer suits moved forward supplying additional ammunition to the fighters and checking on the dropped data links. Such damage usually meant that the trooper was terminal, a DRT or Dead Right There in the cold battlefield parlance of the medics, but occasionally it was just massive suit damage that the trooper had survived. In that case, nine times out of ten, the medic would leave the trooper anyway.

A few troopers had fallen back from the fight with serious injuries or damaged weapons. Usually anything that penetrated a suit was fatal, but, again, if the trooper survived the initial shock the suits would keep them alive until pickup, sealing the injury, debriding the wound, attacking infection and either putting the trooper out or shutting down the nerve endings depending on the tactical situation. And even such injuries as lost limbs were, at worst, an inconvenience as O'Neal was well aware; he came away from Diess with only one functioning limb. Regeneration and Hiberzine were perhaps the two greatest boons the Galactics had presented to humans and the suit troopers well knew it; most of the veterans had lost at least one limb at some point.

Engineers/technicians largely used as ammo-runners when their specialty is not needed. ACS medics use the engineer-pattern suits. But even if a soldier isn’t killed by whatever takes him down, there’s not much they can do in the field that the suits don’t already do automatically. Finally, most people who’ve been in the ACS for some time have lost at least one limb at some point, fortunately regeneration and Hiberzine are commonly available.

The Indowy-made grav-guns fired 3mm droplets of carbon-coated depleted uranium that were accelerated to a small fraction of the speed of light. The carbon coating was added after it was discovered the DU rounds tended to "melt" at about ten kilometers in standard air pressure, but the carbon didn't prevent them from creating their characteristic "silver lightning" of plasma discharge. In addition, because of the relativistic speed of the rounds, when they hit a solid object they converted most of their kinetic energy into a racking explosion.

Thus the wave of Posleen was met by nearly a hundred lines of actinic fire, reaching out to waves of racking explosions as the tiny "bullets" converted themselves into uranium backed fire. The first wave was shattered by the volley; any of the rounds that missed traveled on to hit succeeding aliens.

What I hope is a final bit of insanity about the grav-guns. To prevent vaporization, they coat every round with a thin layer of carbon. As Connor noted, the grav-rounds aren’t really good at penetration, they just blow shit up.

"Un-fucking-believable," Mike said. "Are you listening to yourself? I've got three hundred and twenty effectives! We couldn't carry in enough ammo for three days! And there's no way you're going to be able to get anyone to us in three days! Not in the teeth of the Posleen!"

Strength of MAD MIKE’s battalion after the battle of Rochester.

Shelly, how many AM Lances are there that can be transported here within the next, say, six hours?"

"Four," the AID reported. "They are scattered around Minneapolis for the support of Northern Plains Front. One of the shuttles that is lifting from Chicago could pick them up and bring them down. To get here in six hours would require ignoring some safety regulations, but it could be done."

Lances, Fleet missiles for destroying B-Decs, but they work just fine as SAM and..somehow, aren’t brought down by autotargeting point-defense.

"There are twenty-two Banshee Two shuttles," Shelly said. "Sixteen will be here within three hours. If we wait for the AM Lances, there will be ample time for all twenty-two to arrive."

Shuttles available to fly Mike to his last hurrah. It should only take a couple to carry all his men, but they’re supposed to hold out for several days, so he’ll want lots of power, ammo, spares, and food.

"Gotcha," the captain said with an abstracted expression. "We've only got a total of five generators and power packs, though. And if the power packs get hit . . ."

"Biiiig boom," Stewart interjected.

" 'There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom, where was the earth-shattering kaboom?' " Gunny Pappas said with a chuckle.

I’m not sure what the difference is supposed to be between the generators and power-packs then, if they're both like really, really, big batteries and they both go boom when hit. Ah well, maybe he'll explain in the last book.

[Simon_Jester]

Ammo situation. Why would running out of ammo be considered impossible, especially the way ACS uses it?

Because they carry enough ammunition for several hundred seconds' sustained maximum-rate automatic fire- compare this to the loadout for a modern infantry unit which is assumed to have ample ammunition.

Mike’s super-suit and the power issue. In theory, ACS powers should last for 3 days static combat, or 300 miles of running firefights. In practice, it’s half that, if they’re lucky, as seen on Diess where they were desperate for power before lunchtime.

I think that's partly a problem of extreme energy consumption from things like getting caught under an exploding building. But yeah, their endurance isn't stellar.

[Ahriman238]

Well, the ACS was the shortest section that needed the least consideration/proofing. I wonder if Ringo hadn't gotten a little bored of his favorite toys, since he longer unveils drastic new capabilities. Anyway, the Other/Misc and SheVa sections of my notes are so long, I may have to post them in two parts. For now, here's the Posleen part.


Posleen:

Especially with the "estanaar" of this large band. The term was both new and old, it was to be found in the net, but it had not been used in the memory of anyone in the Horde. It had connotations of "Warleader" and "Mentor" and even "King" in human terms. However, the days of the last estanaar were recorded thousands of years before.

A bit more Posleen language. Tulo, the villain for the last two books, is changing the way Posleen approach war, adopting human tactics and conventions, and also reviving ancient traditions like his new title.

"Do not speak to me of the Path," spat the older God King. He fingered the symbol dangling from one ear and snarled. "The Path is what has led us to this impasse. It is the Path which has hurled us into defeat on Aradan and Kerlan. We will use the Path when it is the way to victory, but the only Path in my encampment, the only mission," he said, using the human word, "is to defeat the humans, utterly. It goes beyond this small ball of mud, it goes to the survival of the Po'oslena'ar as a race. If we do not destroy these humans, they will destroy us. And I will destroy them, root and branch, here and on Aradan and Kerlan and anywhere else they exist. Not for the Path, but for the Race. And you will either aid me in that, without question, or you may go. But if you say you will aid me and you question me or the officers I appoint to you then you will die. Do you understand me now?"

Tulo explains his raison d’être.

"I don't know how well they would have done under normal circumstances," Horner answered, "but these Posleen aren't acting like Posleen at all. They have some sort of armored flying tank that took out the SheVa gun that was forward deployed. It apparently was parked too close to the main force of the Corps and it took out the second and third line of defense. To make things worse, they are using their landers for a straightforward airmobile operation; they used C-Decs to take out the Wall, to literally smash it flat, and look like they're getting ready for a bound forward. Then they have come in and, apparently, rebuilt the road. I'm impressed. And frightened. I don't like the idea of Posleen combat engineers. What next? Artillery?"

Actually, it’s Indowy slave-labor used to rebuild the road. I’m sure that Tulo would love to have some arty to call his own. But he does get some of his people to fight from trenches themselves, to patrol for Special Forces around their camps, and to engage in massive airmobile missions.

"Tulo'stenaloor, this defensive area is reduced and the humans are in flight," Orostan said. "The support companies have moved up and are gathering what thresh and weapons are salvageable from the pass."

This latter was another innovation. Usually individual Kessentai would have their forces scavenge as they moved. Tulo'stenaloor had put a stop to that; no matter how efficiently a unit did it, it tended to slow them down. Units moving through the Gap had to move steadily, not stop to loot. So special units under cosslain and Kenstain had been detailed to clean up the battlefield.

He even organizes the looting so his forces won’t be slowed down. What a go-getter!

"I am not a nestling," snarled Cholosta'an. "I do not have to take this from you, Kenstain!" The term was a terrible insult, the equivalent of calling someone a eunuch. Kenstain were God Kings who had been removed for all time from the Battle Rolls, either by their own choice or by the decisions of the Posleen Data-net. Some were God Kings that had chosen not to engage in battle, but most were those unlucky in battle or who were unable to garner riches through either fighting or deceit.

Kenstain were useful on a certain level, they provided the minimal "administration" that could not be provided by the Net. But since they were unrecognized by the Net, they could not engage in legitimate trade and had to survive at the whim of their luckier or more courageous brethren.

No one liked Kenstain.

More about the reclusive manager-caste of God-kings. Specifically, that some choose to become castellaine, and some become such through ill fortune, rather than cowardice.

At those ranges, though, it was unlikely that they could get rounds into the power storage compartments of the tenar, which was unfortunate; when one of the .50 caliber sniper rounds hit the storage crystals the unstable matrix tended to turn into a good copy of a five-hundred-pound bomb.

Tenar explosion, roughly.

Somewhere around the hospital there was a God King or God Kings with sense and they were not only pushing "their" forces towards the humans, but pushing the undirected mass of normals who had lost God Kings ahead of them. This was just about like herding cats, since normals that were not immediately bonded after the death of their leader caste tended to get chaotic and grouchy. But in this case there was no place for the unbonded to go but straight into Bravo.

It started as the battalion moved out again. Most of the unbonded that were carrying heavy weapons had dropped them and most of the fire was from 1mm railguns and shotguns, neither of which was even noticeable by the suits. Unfortunately, buried in the mass of normals was the occasional one with a heavier 3mm railgun, that could penetrate a suit if the Posleen got lucky, or a hypervelocity missile launcher that could smash a suit like a walnut. And with all the bodies in the way it was hard for the AIDs to point them out for special attention.

There was also the problem that the company could not just ignore the huge mass to concentrate on the more dangerous companies behind it. Every one of those centauroids was carrying a monomolecular boma blade. Enough chops from one of those and the suit integrity would be gone; one of the greatest fears of any suit trooper was getting stampeded by the horses.

Most unbonded Posleen ditch the heavy weapons, possibly they aren’t competent with them without the bond? Smart God-kings employ unbounded Posleen as cannon fodder. Posleen all carry palmate or boma blades (think a quarterstaff with a blade at one end) that are mono-edge and can easily slice through any armor, hence ‘one of the greatest fears of any suit trooper is getting stampeded.’

The Posleen were learning, learning that terrain obstacles could be crossed with determination and a well led force. He watched clinically as the hypervelocity missiles and plasma cannons of the God King vehicles silenced strong points and a force of normals crossed on the makeshift bridge. The wooden contraption, simple planks lashed to dozens of boats scavenged from all over, would have been easily destroyed by the artillery fire but, as usual, the artillery concentrated on the "enemy assembly areas" and "strategic terrain." Not the Posleen force, without which the terrain would no longer be strategic.

God-kings sometimes organize themselves into aerial units to take out strong points. Inept use of artillery, even late into the war.

Now that things were a bit less chaotic it was obvious that there wasn't a lot of fire coming from the overpass. He counted maybe three missile launchers, a pair of heavy plasma guns and some, not many, railguns. There didn't seem to be any shotguns at all.

Which meant that the pass was held by one of the Posleen "heavy" companies. That meant experienced God Kings and veteran troops.

One can usually determine the quality and experience of a Posleen oolt by its armament, though there are exceptions thanks to their looting the dead of both sides.

Tensalarial ignored the jibe and turned the tenaral towards the ground, lining up the manual aiming reticle on the slowly moving treads. The groups had had little opportunity to practice firing before the assault and they were learning by trial and error that the rounds did not go where the aiming reticle was pointed. The reticle was computer generated, but the system was not an actual auto-aiming device; it was simply a heads-up-display of where Goloswin thought the target was going to be. Since all Posleen aiming was done with advanced targeting systems—which Goloswin had never bothered to reverse engineer—the tenaral were beginning to realize that there were some basic concepts missing in the aiming system. Two of the missing concepts were "parallax" and "bore-sighting"; configured as they were, the guns were the functional equivalent of plasma blunderbusses and just about as accurate.

Tenaral don’t have the auto-targeting ability, and so their accuracy sucks except at point blank.

"That means C-Decs," Duncan pointed out. "Lampreys can't get their space weapon to bear on a ground target."

Lampreys can still engage ground targets, and do still sweep for artillery, it’s just that they only have one big anti-ship weapon, and it’s on the dorsal side.

Something resembling civilization may even continue north of the 'cold line'; the Posleen can't organize a logistics line to save their lives so they're never going to take, say, Athabasca. I understand that Montreal is a very pretty city, but all the survivors in the United States can't fit in Canada, not in any sort of sheltered fashion, much less survive for any length of time.

Reasons for the ‘cold-line’ primarily that the Posleen have shitty logistics when they can’t just hunt their own food. Tulo might be able to change that though, so I doubt it’s all that safe.

"I hate humans," Orostan snarled as six icons dropped off the screen and his own vessels pitched up and down in the shockwave; Chylasarn must have been remanufacturing antimatter already. "Their behavior is bizarre, their reproductive methods are frankly disgusting and they use their weakness as a weapon. There should be a law."

Yeah! There should be a law! Who asked these dirty humans to… come here…anyways. Oh. Right. Awkward. Antimatter can be manufactured aboard C-Decs.

If he had thought there might be significant resistance he would have had the artillery fire smoke; the Posleen generally couldn't deal with obscurement rounds very well. But it had been assumed that a nuke would do the job. Bad assumption. And by the time they shifted types of fire, the assault would have succeeded or failed; when they passed the last curve and came under fire they had less than four hundred yards to go.

Posleen don’t deal well with smokescreens. In the first book, it was implied the Posleen could a generous amount into the UV part of the spectrum, camo paint appeared fluorescent purple to their eyes, now we may be seeing a downside to that. Or maybe just to the Posleen following their God-kings, shooting the way their God-king shoots etc. and they simply can’t coordinate well without seeing each other.

Posleen had good night vision, but not perfect. And they were taking fire from the ridge; their attention would be centered there.

Posleen have superior, though imperfect night vision.

"Oh crap," Wendy said, getting up from having thrown herself on the floor. "Ah, hell, Shari."
Shari was lying on her back, hands clamped over her stomach, with blood pouring through the catwalk and onto the floor below.
Wendy walked over and rolled her onto her stomach, exposing the massive exit wound of the railgun round.
"Aaaahhh," the older woman yelled in pain. "Oh, God! Wendy, I can't feel anything from my waist down."
"That's because it went right through your spine," Wendy said sadly. She put a pressure bandage in place and waved for Elgars to come over. "Put your hand on that."
"We need to leave," Elgars said, putting pressure on the bandage.
"Yep," Wendy answered. "And we will, in just a moment." She ripped open a Hiberzine injector and applied it to Shari's neck.
"What's that?"
"Hiberzine," Wendy said. "I can't move you awake like this."
"I don't want to be out," Shari panted. "The kids need me."
"Not with a great damned hole through you they don't," Elgars replied. "You're not going to be doing them any favors screaming every time we move you."
"We're nearly to the elevator," Wendy said desperately. "We can get you out; getting you up to the surface won't be that hard."
"Oh, God," Shari said, her lips turning blue and going cold. "I can't die now."
"You won't," Wendy promised. She jammed the Hiberzine injector against her neck and watched as the woman went limp. Her color improved almost immediately as the nannites directed blood to the brain. In moments her face was flushed and her tongue protruded horribly.
"Okay, let's go," Elgars said.
"Fuck that," Wendy answered. "We need to find a medical facility and a stretcher." She pulled out the medical pack and withdrew some clamps. "If I can put her together even a bit the Hiberzine will keep her from bleeding out while we move her."

Woman is shot with 1 mm railgun. With immediate application of Hiberzine and Galactic level medical attention she lives. The fact she wasn’t immediately pulped is the strongest evidence, besides the inability of 1mms to penetrate concrete Jersey barriers, that the Posleen railguns aren’t nearly as formidable as the ones the Navy experimented with.
Then again, that could be a function of projectile mass, 1mm is a whole lot smaller than the Navy’s railgun.

Eleven "facets" of the twelve sided C-Decs had weaponry on them. Unlike the Lampreys, which only had one face with an anti-ship weapon, the command dodecahedrons sported a mix of heavy and "light" weapons.

In this case, the facet that was pointed right at Bun-Bun mounted quad plasma guns.

Example of C-Dec armament. Again note that a single side of the C-Dec does not have an anti-ship weapon, I believe that’s the one it lands on.

The first plasma round entered the gun system low, punching through a road-wheel and the compartment wall of the engine room. Plasma rounds transferred enormous amounts of energy, but like bullets that shatter when they hit a wall, they didn't have a lot of "penetration." In this case, the plasma vented into the engine room, raising the temperature notably, but otherwise doing no damage. The second round did much the same, hitting slightly to the side and taking out a section of track. The SheVa was now effectively immobilized, but maneuvering hadn't been an issue anyway.

The third plasma bolt hit the upper deck of the engine system and boiled twenty feet of steel into the air. The fourth missed entirely.

Description of plasma weapons. Plasma weapons do astonishing heat damage, but have shitty penetration (contrast with “plasma weapons that could shoot through a battleship.) Could somebody else calc vaporization of 20 of steel? I don’t think I know how.

[Ahriman238]

Other/Misc

The Ten Thousand—or the Spartans as they were sometimes called—was an outgrowth of a smaller group called the Six Hundred. When the first Posleen landing occurred, early, by surprise and in overwhelming force, the green units sent into Northern Virginia to stop them were shattered in the first encounter. Many of them, especially rear echelons, escaped across the Potomac. A large number of these gathered in Washington so when the Posleen forced a crossing of the river, right on the Washington Mall, thousands of these soldiers who had been in the rout were directly in their path. All but a tiny handful fled. This tiny handful, six hundred and fifty-three to be exact, had decided that there were some things that were worth dying for in a pointless gesture. So they gathered on the mound of the Washington Monument for the purposes of a stupidly suicidal last stand.

As it turned out it was not, quite, a suicide. Their resistance, and the confusion among the Posleen crossing the bridge, slowed the enemy just enough for the armored combat suits to arrive. Between the ACS and artillery fire the Posleen pocket in Washington was first reduced, then eliminated.

A special medal was struck for those six hundred and fifty-three truck drivers and cooks, infantrymen and artillery, linemen and laundrymen, who had stood their ground and prepared to go to their God like soldiers. After a brief ceremony, they were to be spread throughout the Army with nothing to remember the encounter but the medal. The leader of the resistance, however, successfully argued that there should be a better use than dissemination. Thus the Ten Thousand was born. Most of the Six Hundred were given promotions and used as a nucleus of the force which was then armed from captured and converted Posleen weapons. Once completed, the Ground Forces commander had at his fingertips a fast, heavy and very elite unit.

But it did not assault swarming Posleen; only the ACS could survive that.

The Ten Thousand, frequently it seems the only non-ACS infantry worth a damn in-universe. This is probably a perspective/author-bias thing; the 10K most often operates with the support of, or in support of Mike’s ACS battalion. Still annoying though.

The 10K comes from an incident in the second book, where several hundred idiots decide after a full day’s desperate flight from the enemy that they are not going to retreat any further than D.C. The group was then ‘stiffened’ by the presence of every single living Medal of Honor recipient (except MAD MIKE) and actually managed to hold their ground long enough for the ACS to come and save the day.

Everybody gets decorated, everyone jumps at least one grade, everyone who didn’t already have one is offered a commission, though some decline. Then they go on to form the core/cadre for the new 10K. Consider for a moment that this one division contains every single living Medal of Honor Recipient, thanks to the wonders of rejuv, at its core. Fanboyish, much?

Oh, and the 10K is based out of Fort Knox, Kentucky. Yes, the gold is still there. I’m not even going to go there.

Buckley rocked forward and back as the Bradley screamed to a stop then rolled to the rear as the troop door dropped open filling the interior with streaming red light from the setting sun.

"Come on, you apes! You wanna live forever?!"

He jumped out of the troop door and stumbled to his knees as he tripped on the end. When he stood up and turned around he could see the rest of the squad frozen on the inside.
"Okay!" he yelled. "You're in the biggest fucking target around!"

Just for kicks. I'm kind of suprised more pople don't have that reaction to that particular battlecry.

"The nanochamber will repair the subject," the AID answered. "The choices are repair, repair and rejuv or full upgrade."

Wendy slowly lowered Shari onto the altar and shivered uncomfortably. "Computer, what is the nature of 'full upgrade'?" she asked.

"The patient will be given nano-enhanced musculature, fast-heal and bone-structure," the AID answered emotionlessly. "Along with implanted combat skills."

"Oh, shit," Elgars said. "Computer, what is the nature of my access to this facility? Is it because I'm a military officer?"

"No, Captain," the AID answered. "You are an ongoing patient."

"Oh, Jesus Christ," Wendy said bitterly. "How long does repair take, computer?"

"Repair will take approximately ten minutes for the damage that is detected. Full upgrade will take approximately fifteen."

Galactic medical tech, full human upgrade. Ten minutes to deal with a fatal torso wound, fifteen to create the Bionic Woman.

Michelle had been evacuated off-planet, along with over four million other Fleet dependents from a variety of countries. The ostensible reason for this was to free up the Fleet personnel from worrying about the security of their children. However, since only one child was taken per Fleet "family," the recognized reality was to create a pool of humans in case Earth was lost. When Mike was feeling really cynical he wondered if they were also hostages to ensure the good behavior of the Fleet. Practically everyone in the service had at least one child being raised by Indowy; it would be easy enough for the Darhel to arrange "accidents" if necessary.

But the Darhel always seemed so trustworthy! Roughly 4 million humans moved offworld, that should do for a breeding population don’t you think?

"The fourth and final item this individual has to report is acceptance to level two sohon training. Sohon is, as you should be aware, the Indowy field of technical metaphysics. You are, of course, trained for suit fitting which is a specialized form of level two sohon. However, as far as can be determined, this individual is the first human to be accepted for unlimited level two sohon. It is believed that a level of four or even five sohon may eventually be attained. It is to be hoped that positive acclaim may be accrued to the Clan of O'Neal by this and future accomplishments.

-snip-

One of the problems with GalTech was that everything had to be produced by Indowy technicians on an individual, custom, basis. Humans, even humans like O'Neal who had had some training in the technique, generally referred to it as "praying," but that wasn't really what was happening. Because the Indowy had been working with atomic level micro-manufacturing for, literally, thousands of years, their method of manufacture involved using swarms of nannites to build products atom by atom in vats. This gave them the capacity to build materials that violated many "known facts" of materials science; the nannites could make atoms do things that occurred only as low probabilities in any other method.

However, the process defied control by even the most advanced computers. The nannites were best controlled through a sort of direct neural interface. An individual Indowy, or, more commonly, groups, would take seats by the tank and . . . manipulate the nannites. It was not a direct thought process; it involved giving the nannites general directions and then . . . letting them use the individual's brain as a remote processor. For a suit fitting, it mostly involved staying very still and sort of meditating while concentrating on the suit "adjusting" to the person it was being shaped on; the nannites and the suit personality handled the rest.

However, as he understood it, the problem with most forms of class two and higher was that the person or team had to hold a perfect image of the item to be produced, down to an understanding of the molecular alignments for all of the individual components. A suit, for example, was a six-month process of construction involving one level six, a grand master of sohon, and dozens of lower level Indowy, all meditating in meta-concert on a perfect image, down to the last atom; that was why a suit cost almost as much as a frigate.

Sohon creation process and training. Suit fitting is level 2 sohon, there are 6 levels. At least one level six, with substantial support, must invest a month’s effort into the creation of a single suit. Suit costs half a billion credits, which gives us a little insight into just how valuable a Lv. 6 is.

He always sent his replies as text, typing them into an old word processor program and letting the AID convert them to a suitable format and send them on the military network. A laser transmitter would add them to the queue and squirt them at a deep space satellite. From there they would be transferred to Titan Base, then sit in a Jovian communications buoy until a ship was headed out-system. Every ship carried the mail in and out of the system, dropping it at other buoys until eventually, in about six to ten weeks, faster than any but the fastest military courier, it reached Michelle's planet, Daswan. Given that a transport ship would take over a year to make the journey, that wasn't too shabby.

Interstellar mail.

And then there was the whole bloodthirsty edge she had developed. He had noted it in Tommy Sunday as well. The generation that was being raised in the war was a generation soaked in blood; they were desensitized to a degree that he found unhealthy.

Maybe it was a valid reaction to the conditions, but a generation so . . . disinterested in the value of life—it seemed to extend to humans as well as Posleen—was not going to be reconstructing a positive, growing, functional society after the war.

MAD MIKE is concerned for the future. Kids these days are so brutal. I joke, but it is a point worth considering, it’s been a decade since the initial warning, a whole generation has grown up knowing only the war, they are largely uninterested in art, history, or science, just practical fighting and survival. In short, humanity is on the brink of becoming the race of janissaries the Darhel always wanted, without their interference. Rebuilding will be a pain if everyone is the stereotypical burned-out ‘Nam vets with no clue how to meaningfully exist in the absence of violence.

In the rush to enact legislation at the beginning of the crisis, one of the big debates was over formation of militias. Finally the Congress had passed laws that effectively repealed most of the anti-weapons regulations that had grown up, substituting a series of laws to "regulate the several militias." One of the laws had to do with militia boundaries, in that no member of a militia "formed in one territorial area should pass for militia purposes into another territorial area without the clear wishes of the government of the second territorial area." What they meant was that if a group of, say, Virginia militiamen were practicing, they shouldn't go into Maryland.

Unfortunately, the bureaucrats of the Bureau of Indian Affairs correctly interpreted that to mean that there would have to be a "Reservation" militia and the militia of the rest of North Carolina. And, technically, the only area that one Thomas Redman, sergeant in good standing of the North Carolina Cherokee Tribal Milita, could make war on the Posleen in was reservation territory. And he was just about to clear the reservation line.

A few of the political and legal changes wrought by the Posleen invasion. And a final bit of idiocy in giving each militia an area of jurisdiction they can’t leave without permission, plus segregated militias, in the form of having a separate militia for the reservations. Ah, now that’s the government we know and love.

[Ahriman238]

He flipped through the codes that he had, but he didn't have an AA unit listed for Whiskey Three Five. Since the landers could only be engaged, for all practical purposes, by SheVa guns, there weren't many AA units of any stripe left; most AA personnel had been swallowed by the regular forces.

It’s a difference from the modern Army, so it gets included.

She was assigned to one of the first Screaming Meemie units, a system officially referred to as the M-179 "Rosser" Medium Anti-Lander System, and, when it became apparent that the system was suicidal and useless against landers, there she had been left. There was no definable utility for the Meemies, but it was too much trouble to reconvert the Abrams tanks that they had been designed around back to direct fire systems and although the Meemies were very effective there were other systems that were just about as good. So for the last five years she had been shuttled around from one corps to another, shoring up a defense here and there, but generally shuttled back out of the way; nobody knew quite what to do with Meemies and few cared to learn.

Screaming Meemie. No, it has nothing to do with the WWII Nebelwerfer chemical war platform/mortar. It’s an Abrams converted to a Metal Storm anti-lander platform, a failed experiment. But just what the doctor ordered for tenaral, and conveniently right there when needed.

"The computer's balking," Specialist Glenn said. The gunner was a female, like her commander, and had fine, light brown hair that constantly escaped from under her crewman's helmet. She brushed it out of the way and looked up. "It refuses to lock them up. The radar sees them, but the computer won't aim the gun."

Chan sighed and slipped down into the turret. She was fairly sure she knew what was happening. The computer software had been pulled from the long defunct Sergeant York program. That system had been a nightmare from the word go, but it was the closest analogue to the Screaming Meemies, so the software had been assumed to be similar.

"Assumed" had so many connotations. In this case some bug in the software probably was telling the computer that these were not valid targets. She hated the software. If she ever found the idiots who had written it, she was going to line them up against a wall and shoot them.

With the commander's machine gun; the ro-ro would probably miss.

She rolled her shoulders and shrugged. "Okay, Glenn, switch control up here."
"Yes, ma'am," the gunner said. "What are you gonna do?"

The M247 ‘SGT YORK’ was a conversion for the M48 Patton tank to keep it current with the new Bradleys and Abrams by giving it a new role. Basically, they ripped off the turret and replaced it with one that had twin AA-guns, radar-directed. The project went through a very long development hell, with new problems popping up at every trial, but the Army soldiered on until the project’s ultimate cancellation in 1985.

If they’re still using software from a 70s-80s AA platform, I’m not really surprised that it doesn’t work. Not to disparage the programmers of the time, but you really can’t just enter thirty-year-old code into a completely different weapons system and call it a day.

The Screaming Meemie was so named due to its passing resemblance to the WWII German mortar system of the same name. The "gun" was mounted on top of the tank on a very heavy-duty rotating pintle that replaced the turret; the tank commander and a gunner were shoehorned into what had been the bottom of the turret with the driver at the traditional position at the front. The gun itself was more or less circular in appearance with six distinct bulges or lobes on the side. The difference between the systems being that the German weapon, properly called the Neubelwerfer, was a multi-barreled mortar system. The modern Screaming Meemie was a MetalStorm 105 twelve-pack.

MetalStorm's name said it all; each pack could throw up to twelve hundred 105mm discarding sabot rounds into the air in less than a minute. The rounds were packed "nose to tail" into twelve tubes that were both barrel and breach. The system was electrical and could fire either one round or a series at very high rates of fire. Once clear of the "barrel" the rounds, accelerated at slightly different velocities due to the nature of the system, dropped their plastic "shoes" and a sixty-millimeter dart of tungsten headed downrange at tank-killing speeds. With a hundred rounds packed into each tube, and the rounds going off at an electronically controlled sequence, the air quickly became saturated with tungsten and steel.

The amount of energy involved in firing the system led to an enormous number of compromises. One of these was that the system could only shoot "forward" unless it deployed its firing spades or "jacks" as they were called. Otherwise the sheer energy involved in twelve hundred rounds of discarding penetrator heading down-range would flip the massive tank over on its side.

While this had been found to be insignificant against landers, six of the tanks firing into the space the tenaral were passing through was another story.

Metal Storm, more fanboyism. 12 barrels each shooting 1200 rpm give us 14,400 rpm which, hilariously, is still less than half the rate of fire of a grav-rifle. Probably has less recoil to. Of course, each of these is a 4” AT gun, firing 2” sabot rounds, admittedly at far slower velocities than the grav-guns, but it serves. It serves.

…

We should get Thanas back here, and see what he has to say about re-using the famous nickname for the Nebelwerfer.

The target recognition system for the Meemies was sometimes a bit messed up and the radar integration system often malfunctioned. But the manual firing system was mostly taken from a standard M-1 Abrams design and worked rather well.

In this case a laser swept the sky until it got a return, estimated the range, found it to be functionally close to the one that Captain Chan had keyed in manually and began a series of calculations. It checked wind-speed, air temperature, humidity and whether the StormPack had been previously fired. Then it ran a rapid series of calculations and adjusted the aiming point appropriately. And the unknown programmer who had originally designed the system had heard of parallax.

For Captain Chan it was simplicity in itself. She pointed the red circles at the descending tenaral and waited until they flashed green. This took approximately half a second. Then she flipped the thumb selector from "safe" to "full," closed her eyes, clamped down on the firing lever and held on for dear life.

Well, this part works anyway. She also slaved the other five tanks to hers.

The Abrams was never designed to mount the MetalStorm 105. The original Abrams tank was designed to fire a single 105mm cannon that was similar in energy. Until the coming of the Posleen and such monstrosities as the SheVa gun, the concept of a mobile MetalStorm 105 would have been ludicrous. The energy imparted by the gun was sufficient to loft a 747, briefly. Lighter systems were considered possible for mounting on medium armor, but a 105mm, high-velocity penetrator was a different matter. It made the 72-ton tank shake like a mouse in the grip of a terrier and rattled the commander and crew like peas.

What? Is that a consequence from deploying a jury-rigged and improvised weapon? Wow, keep giving actions consequences, Ringo, and you may just convince us you’re a writer. Recoil energy is enough to lift a 747 off the ground, if only for a moment, and even with jacks, the crew lives in dread of getting flipped over when they fire.

"General Horner, the Chinese fired over two thousand nuclear weapons and poisoned the valley of the Yangtze for the next ten thousand years. You propose to do much the same to the Tennessee Valley, you understand that? And they still lost. That is the greatest part of the problem, the very real political and more importantly morale problem. Nukes, now, are considered to be the last desperate weapon of someone who is losing. Who, in effect, has already lost. That is the real reason that I have prevented their use; the image of them being the desperation weapon. Is it worth the . . . social damage that will occur? Is it worth the physical damage; the Tennessee drains into the Mississippi. For that matter, it is the water source for the entire lower defense line and it will be poisoned by dropping nukes into that valley."

Few details about what happened in China, specifically how many nukes were used, and the reasons for the US squeamishness about nukes. This is probably a much better explanation for the lack of Casaba Howitzers, SADM, Anzio Annie and other such means of nuclear delivery than just assuming they weren’t thought of.

"I don't know," Horner answered. "The remaining silos are all well north of the Posleen lines and there's a strong storm across the Midwest. The combination should permit most of the missiles to fly. They're most vulnerable in boost-phase, of course, but they're going to loft very fast. The Posleen lose some of their efficiency when the targets get into orbital phase. We'll just have to see if they make it."

Both inclement weather and leaving the atmosphere provide some protection from auto-targeting God-king weapons. That doesn’t mean you’re safe, just that it takes a bit longer for them to get a lock, or that they’re less accurate or powerful.

[Vejut]

You probably can't really use that 20 feet of steel comment, I'd think. It doesn't say much about what shape or which way the feet were taken off, so it'd be pretty much a WAG. I mean, we could probably estimate it based on a 20 foot by 20 foot square of 3/4" STS (if I remember right, battleship decking/wall circa WWII, at least for the US), but it could just as easily be a foot wide scorch mark 20 feet long in thin engine grill plates, or given how logic defying the SheVas are every other way, a arbitrarily sized hole in 20 feet of RHA. First one is probably the most reasonable though. Plus there's the whole "maybe it was just blasted off, not actually vaporized" issue.

doing first one, but subbing mild steel, as I can't find STS specifically:
240 inchesx240 inchesx .75 inches= 43,200 in3
This site says density of .284 lbs/in3
12,268 lbs. call it 12,000.
same site, 2570F to melt, .122 BTU/lb/degree F specific heat, assume we start from room temperature, 3.6 million BTU
another 1.4 million BTU for the heat of fusion (From engineer's toolbox for iron)
Engineer's toolbox says the boiling point is 5198 degrees F, so another 2628 degrees, for another 3.8 million BTU
and then 2923.32 BTU/lb for heat of vaporization, adding a full 35 million BTU
So our total is 43.8 million BTU, or about 46.2 GJ. Odd we dump this much energy in, yet only see the adjacent room heat up a bit.