A bit of analysis: Posleen War

[Ahriman238]

What would be really nice is if they knew enough about posleen tech to target the onboard antimatter with their initial shot.

Thanks to all the ships captured in Diess, they have complete schematics for Lampreys and C-Decs, which are part of SheVa training. Antimatter storage/production is a very difficult target, however. Bun-Bun is the only SheVa to start consistently hitting them on purpose, more generally its a lucky shot.

[Mr Bean]

To note to the naked and computer aided eye a C-Dec or Lamprey is identical from the outside about the only thing you know is that the side without any weapons is the landing side, other than that orientation does not much matter, shooting for the anti-matter pod while it's on it's side won't do you much good and the wrong configuration.

[Ahriman238]

Halway through Hell's Faire, and I already have cloe to twenty pages of quotes and notes. So I'm going to put them up again. Starting with the ACS, which are some of the shortest. Enjoy.

ACS:

Major Michael O'Neal checked the holographic schematic he had thrown up and nodded as the Banshee banked to the right and dropped; now the fun started.

The shuttle he was riding in looked like a black scimitar scything across the cloudy Appalachian sky. The combination of human, Indowy and Himmit technology had created something that was neither the best nor the worst of the three worlds, a ship that was somewhat stealthy, somewhat armored, somewhat maneuverable and somewhat fast.

Of course, compared to anything from pure human technology, the Banshee III was a marvel beyond words.

Banshee III, the third and last model. The Banshee was originally designed as a means of airlifting ACS and supplies anywhere in the world in 3 hours or less, to give them unheard of strategic mobility, as well as the ability to quickly get quick reaction teams on top of any landing. They figured it was armored enough to take some hits from God-king weapons, and fast enough they wouldn’t get off more than a shot or two. They were wrong. All the Banshees at Diess were turned into scrap metal, but they had always expected casualties, so they’re rigged to fly on automatics or by remote.

The Banshee II incorporated Himmit stealth technology, to try and boost their survivability. No idea if it worked or not, but now we have the compromise design, less stealthy than the Banshee II, but more armored, faster and more agile than any human aircraft. We also have the first description of the shuttles appearance, a black scimitar shape.

Each Banshee is expensive as an ACS suit.

O'Neal nodded again as another turn was faintly sensed. The shuttles used just a touch of inertial compensation to reduce the impact of their course corrections. Too much and they stood out like light bulbs to the Posleen. Too little and they smashed their passengers into jelly. Mike switched to an external view and by the light of the waxing moon he could see the mountains flashing by overhead; the ships were down in a valley, following its wandering path and only the occasional shudder passed through to the humans.

Delicate balance of inertial dampening versus stealth. I guess the Posleen can detect too much gravity manipulation.

The shuttles were small, designed to carry thirty-six troopers and two "leaders" in no particular comfort. Each "suit segment" was rigid, with clamps to hold the suits in place against the worst possible maneuvering and designed to swivel and fire the troopers out into a hostile environment. This did not make for the most comfortable of seating.

In short, the suits are locked into place against the wall with metal clamps, and at the push of a button the wall segment they’re on will flip over, leaving them on the outside of the shuttle, upside-down. Then they are fired at the ground. Fun. Shuttles carry 38 men apiece.

The oolt'ondai was armed with three-millimeter railguns, plasma guns and hypervelocity missiles. The shuttle crested the south shoulder of Oakey Mountain and headed down Stillhouse Branch, accelerating past Mach Four and preparing for a hot inertial drop along Black Creek. It turned out to be hotter than anticipated.

Most of the fire went behind or to either side, but the targeting systems of the God King's weapons were still good enough to lead the craft, and a hurricane of railgun and plasma rounds hammered the shuttle as it rocketed down the stream. In a blink of an eye it started to come apart, scattering its highly volatile cargo into the fire.

Class Five Antimatter Reactors, the system installed on shuttles, were designed for combat and to withstand the occasional misdirected round. They were not, however, designed to be hit by a storm of plasma fire. In less than a millisecond the containment was pierced and all hell broke loose.

Shuttles have ‘class 5’ reactors (more on that later) God-kings can still hit targets traveling at Mach 4 at treetop level, which is what the shuttles are doing.

"I'll have to bring that up with the manufacturing clan," O'Neal said seriously. "A little thing like a two-hundred-kiloton explosion shouldn't have damaged them!"

Lance (anti-ship missile) is launched by the nearby shuttle detonation. Apparently this should not be so. 200 KT detonation of shuttle’s class 5 reactor.

Tommy felt the slam of ejection over his inertial compensators and bent his knees as the ground came at him at nearly a thousand miles per hour. His on-board compensators and the disposable inertial pack that he was wearing combined to slow his speed to just below the speed of sound before he entered ground effect where a Terran bounce pack included in the inertial set slowed him even more.

The ejection was noticeable but hitting the ground hurt. He was still going at over two hundred miles per hour and felt the shock through his whole body as the suit automatically tucked and rolled backwards.

He went through two more rolls, mainly due to the slope, before the suit was able to establish control and throw him to his feet and a screaming halt.

Suit fired at the ground from a shuttle doing Mach 4. The suit, with an add-on inertia pack, is able to slow him to the point where he hits the ground at only 200 mph (322 kph) and is fine. Suit automatically rolls to disperse impact energy.

There was no vision possible; virtually every single sensor was off-line from the chaos around him. His external temperature sensors showed an incredible two thousand degrees Celsius and he had to wonder what in the hell was keeping him alive until he saw the power gauge on his suit visibly dropping. The suits were able to keep a person alive in conditions that many considered flatly impossible, but it was at the cost of using nearly as much power as was being thrown at them.

Suit survival of the shuttle’s destruction, said to be a 200 kt blast. At the very least, we have the above temperature of 2000 C. Suit power expenditure almost equal to the power repelled.

"The bad news is that we're out half our power," Duncan noted, shifting over a battalion power graph. "And we just used up a day's worth in that one event."

1 “day” or 30% of the suit’s available power supply expended just surviving the shuttle-nuke.

The Grim Reapers were the heavy weapons suits of the ACS. They were designed for long-range indirect fire or heavy-duty close-in support and generally carried four weapons (versus the standard one rifle of the Marauders). These might range from anti-ship heavy grav-cannons to long-range auto-mortars to flechette cannons capable of spewing millions of rounds per minute.

The Reapers' suits were bulkier and slower than the standard Marauder suits, looking a bit more fat bellied than the "muscle" look of the Marauders, but given that most of their weapons had much higher ammunition bulk than the Marauders, that was all to the good. The flip side was that their armor was lighter, so getting into direct fights with the Posleen was usually a losing proposition.

Description of Reaper suit. I see the ‘warrior’ basic infantry armor is now called ‘marauder.’ Will someone please tell Mr. RIngo what a writer’s bible is? Reaper armor is thinner and more vulnerable than the basic suits, whatever their designation is.

The long-barreled M-283 grav-cannons had additional acceleration ability over standard systems. In addition, the rounds contained an antimatter driven inertial accelerator and an antimatter "rocket" system similar to that used in the antimatter lances and Space Falcon fighters.

Thus the 75-millimeter round was accelerated to over a thousand kilometers per second by the time it struck the wall of the ship.

To survive the flight to the ship the round needed to be made of sturdy stuff and it was, a composite of gadolinium and monomolecular iron with a carbon ablative coating. But when one struck the armor of the Lamprey, it turned into an expanding hemisphere of boiling white plasma; even the enormous energy of one of the penetrator rounds was no match for Posleen armor.

Of one round.

But there were twelve Reapers firing at the Lamprey, pounding five rounds per second into a contact patch the size of a human hand.

In addition, the aiming system on the penetrators was far more effective. It designated a particular point on the side of the lander, chosen from a database of lander weaknesses, and directed all the weapons in the area to fire on that point.

Thus, when the twelve Reapers paused and opened fire, twelve hundred rounds hit a single weapons pod on the side of the Lamprey, boring a hole into the interior and detonating the feed mechanism of the plasma gun. The rest began flailing around the interior.

Hah! Reaper anti-lander weapon, called a grav cannon which is annoying since I was already referring to the PDF guns that way. 75mm, blurs the line a bit between grav-weapons and HVMs. By itself, on single-shot, insufficient to penetrate Posleen ship armor which is why they have a fairly high (but not insane) rate of fire. Even then, and even with careful aiming, it’s not anywhere close to the one-shot capabilities of SheVa or PDF grav-cannon, and they actually need support to finish a single Lamprey.

And with this final major weapon system, the list for Reapers goes; 60mm automortars, 75 mm grav cannon, flechette cannon, super shotgun, and unnamed third close support weapon. Possibly a plasma gun, as there was a throwaway line in Gust Front about ACS using those. Possibly other weapons we haven’t heard of. Finally, retired weapons 75mm automortar, terawatt laser.

Despite having four hardpoints, each Reaper only uses a single type of weapon at a time. I attribute this to inability to carry ammo for multiple weapons systems. However, they can swap out their weapons in just a minute or two, and nothing says they can’t give a different weapon type to every squad member, so as long as they have supplies its rarely a big deal.

The Reapers, if they had any ammunition, could engage with a variety of heavy weapons. They had 75mm automortars for indirect fire and heavy flechette cannons for close-in work, both of these besides their anti-lander systems.

Or maybe the 75mm mortars got unretired. I don’t know.

"Sergeant Major." Jake's artificial intelligence device still had the toneless tenor that was the "factory" default. He had never bothered to personalize it. The AID was a Galactic introduction, a small, black, formable piece of what looked like plastic but that was, in fact, a continuous computing unit. The devices were fully AI and linked together in a seamless web of data that stretched across an entire planet. In this case the AID had picked up a piece of information from the net and after a nanosecond's consideration determined that, yes, this was something that its human needed to know.

Description of AID, since I didn’t provide one at the beginning.

If Mosovich was unsettled by the change in style of warfare, it wasn't showing. "AID, radiation patterns."

"Given the placement of the rounds, there should be no persistent radiologicals in the area of the O'Neal farm. All of the rounds were air-burst and any incidental fallout from irradiated casing or ground material should drift with the prevailing winds to the east. However, I have a secondary ability to sense harmful radiation and will warn you if we begin to experience any radiation high enough to be harmful to humans."

AID can detect radiation levels.

"Battalion, fire!" Mike called and watched the flight of the grenades to their targets. The suits mounted dual launchers and carried 138 of the 20mm balls in onboard storage. Each of the balls had a range of just over three thousand meters and an effective kill radius of thirty-five meters. So the battalion fire mission dropped across the oncoming oolt'ondar like the wrath of God, the grenades detonating at one meter above ground height and flailing the air with shrapnel.

Huh, the suits didn’t use to have two grenade launchers, was their rate of fire not good enough? I see the range has more than doubled, and the ammo capacity less than halved. The area of effect is comfortingly constant.

The three hundred rifles of the battalion, when added to the Reapers, had the desired effect. As the continually rotating point passed over one of the weapons positions the armored hard point first vaporized under the fire of the Reapers then belched outward as the grav-guns penetrated into its magazines.

So the grav rifles CAN damage landers if something breaches their exterior armor first.

The M-300 grav-rifle was attached to the suit by a sinuous organic-looking extender over the right shoulder. The extender included a feed tube that was supplied from the ammunition lockers within the suit. In battle the firing suit could crouch within a hole, or around a corner, and extend the rifle out to engage oncoming targets; the rifle had its own sighting system that led back to the suit control systems.

There had been suggestion that the suits have two rifles attached, but the limit of the guns was not firepower but ammunition availability. The suits had six separate ammunition storage lockers, each with their own blow-out panel, but even so, and despite the fact that the actual "bullets" were nought more than uranium teardrops the size of the end of a pinkie, they could run through their entire on-board store of ammunition in three hours. Especially in what was called "a target-rich environment." And that description certainly met the current conditions.

Finally, an admission that the grav-rifles are physically attached to the suits. ‘Extensors’ allow the guns to be fired from around corners and below breastworks/foxholes, since the guns have a camera feed into the suits. The idea of two rifles was brought up, and laughed down. Three hours of battle to expend suit ammo, where before it was thirty minutes of continuous fire. That actually sounds about right for a fierce battle.

The bullets were accelerated to a small percentage of the speed of light before they left the barrel of the rifles. This gave them a tremendous, really an overkill, punch at the end, which explained why a three-millimeter-wide, four-millimeter-long teardrop was causing explosions the size of artillery shells.

But that took power, lots of it. The bullets were fired in a stream, much faster than any conventional machine gun, with multiple rounds in the barrel at any one time. And power was power. To cause the effect of a hundred kilos of TNT required that much power be put into pushing them down the barrel.

The power was supposed to come from the rounds themselves. "Standard" rounds had a droplet of antimatter at the base, sufficient to power the round and even bleed a little over to the suits. But the humans didn't have the technology to create the ultra-miniature containment system necessary. So since the blockade of Earth had shut off the flow of Galactic Technology, and as "standard" rounds become few and far between, the suits had fallen back on "emergency" procedures, using the power in their suits to drive their guns.

The ‘firing from suit power’ again. Where the grav-gun rounds where 3x2 mm in hymn, they are 3x4 mm here. That could be from being locally produced rounds, or the addition of the carbon coating, or just another contradictory figure. I love how he actually admits some of to the problems of having a super-machinegun firing artillery-level rounds, and even admits to it being overkill, but never really the obvious ones. So yes, both ammunition and power are serious issues for the ACS.

To reduce the problem, they had sent the scout suits—which used a lower velocity projectile that was nearly undetectable in a battle—up the slopes on either side to target the leaders in the horde.

A nice callback to Hymn where scout suits carry M-209 sniper-variant grav-rifles (as opposed to the M-300 standard, what’s with the numbering convention there?) which are single-shot and have ‘no more energy signature than a high-power rifle’ and thanks to extensive computer support and wind direction/resistance being negligible at the kind of velocities of grav guns they can casually hit even fast evading targets several klicks away. Which makes it an awesome sniper weapon.

Though, as they found out on Diess, even the reduced power signature is perfectly detectable to God-kings, unless there’s mass firing or artillery in the vicinity.

"Yes, sir," the specialist said, grabbing the bulbous plastic sack. He heaved it over his left shoulder and clamped it on then stumbled slightly as it threw off even the suit's massive gyros. "Gonna be hell to move with."

Weight that can stagger a Reaper suit. Haven’t gotten to the point where they reveal what’s in the sack that got Sunday all excited, but hopefully it’ll be something with at least a ballpark weight.

"I blame it on Gunny Thompson," Mike said lightly.

It took Jack a moment to remember who Mike was talking about. Gunny Thompson had been on the design team for the ACS weapons system, along with a recently recalled web designer named Michael O'Neal and General Jack Horner.

"Why Gunny Thompson, who the last time I heard was on Barwhon?"

"Well," Mike said with a sigh. "He wanted a ray gun and the best I could do with the technology that was offered was a grav-gun that shot fast enough it looked like a ray gun. The problem of course being that that meant it was a power-hog."

"Your guns are being used that much?" Jack asked. Even in the hottest battles the Posleen could only take an hour or so of being turned into offal; then they retreated.

"No artillery to slow them down, Jack," Mike responded. "They're just piling themselves up, literally. And they're not really going forward, just piling. It's . . . it's insane, even for the Posleen."

The line that upset Connor, about the grav-gun being pushed because it looked like a raygun, and was thus cool. Yeah, it’s not quite as horrible as Connor made it sound, but it’s still fairly stupid and… more or less exactly what I’d expect to happen if they got a bunch of sci-fi writers to design their gear with a free ticket to fuck the regular testing and procurement processes. Please, please tell me that the ACS design team consisted of more than these two fatty nerds with Horner babysitting. Though… even the bit about a highly paranoid team wouldn’t really exclude that possibility, Mad Mike, his pop and daughter are all about two long steps from tinfoil hats.

Posleen usually break after an hour or so of getting butchered and not really seeing any gains.

First priority were the three antimatter power packs. Each was rated to resupply one company of ACS for four full days of use in standard terrain. Excepting the power to drive the guns, they should last the remaining suits about six days in the current conditions.

Second priority was standard rifle ammunition. This was "the good stuff," Indowy manufacture complete with their own antimatter power system on each round, which meant the suits wouldn't have to draw power to run the guns.

Last priority was Reaper ammunition. The Reapers were flat out but, like the MetalStorms, they ran through enormous quantities of material in firing.

Antimatter power packs good to completely recharge a single company of ACS. Even though they long since ran out of regular rounds and have been powering them by the suits, the untouched caches still have the priceless old ammo. Go figure that they never broke into these, it’s not like the supply caches are there to be used in the event of resupply difficulties or something.

At the warning O'Neal just shrugged as well as he could inside his armor. He had been tossed around by . . . Jesus, he'd lost count. At least five nukes in his time. Not to mention being buried in a building by a near-nuclear class explosion, run over by a SheVa gun—twice on that one—and had various and sundry other unpleasant items occur while he was in a suit. Then there was that poor bastard Buckley who had had a space cruiser fall on him.

Frankly, being buried five meters in the ground at the ground zero of a two megaton nuclear explosion wasn't anywhere near the bottom of his experiences. It was sort of comforting in a way.

"Gotcha," he said, flipping frequencies to internal. "Battalion, splash over."
There was a brief rumble, high frequency ground shocks, that preceded the impact, but in less than a second after the first shudder the ground began to spasm around his suit. The shocks went on for about five seconds, about as bad driving a jeep across rough ground, and then it was done.

"That's it?" someone queried on the general frequency.

Mad Mike has been in several more nuclear detonations since the last time. The ACS have to dig in to survive the 100 Mt super-bomb, though the local bomblet will "only" be 2 Mt. But they can dig themselves 5 meters underground in about thirty seconds and at that depth no one is so much as injured.

He shook his head and checked his radiation monitors, blanching as he did. The suits were more than capable of handling four hundred rems per hour, but it would kill any human stone dead. Or, hell, most cockroaches.

Some of the suits NBC capability. Rems are units for measuring one’s risk of illness and injury form radiation, accounting for absolute radiation levels (rads) multiplied by a quality rating referring to the specific radiation type and its efficiency in causing damage. The average person absorbs ~300 millirems a year.

Basically; < 25 rems is medically undetectable. 50-200 rems will make you sick as a dog, but probably won’t kill you, there are exceptions because people are wildly variable in radiation resistance. 200+ rems, serious radiation sickness, serious chance of death. 300 rems is about the limit of what’s reliably treatable. 450 rems is fatal to 50% of people. 800+ rems= always fatal. So killing any human is somewhat of an exaggeration, unless they decided to just hang out there for a while, but it’s about eight times the point where we stop letting people out without rad-suits.

[Ahriman238]

Posleen:

The normals that made up the bulk of the Posleen assault were of subhuman intelligence, but the God King leaders made up for it. With the battalion nearly invisible in their holes, it was hard for the normals to even find a target. But whenever a God King saw the streams of silver it naturally tracked back to the starting point and targeted it. Whenever a God King engaged a target, all the normals around him, bonded and unbonded, tended to aim at the same target. And when those storms of projectiles came in, suits, or at least the extended weapons systems, died.

Even unbonded Posleen follow the God-kings’ aim.

Cholosta'an remembered the nests.
It was how every Posleen started life, dumped in a pen with nonsentient age mates, struggling to survive every moment. When food was scarce, or when one of the nestlings faltered, the nests turned on the weaker members and then there was nothing but scattered bones.
Kessentai were no different than oolt'os in the nests. No bigger, no stronger, no smarter, just another young animal, struggling to survive. And then the Change hit.
For the oolt'os it was not so great a change. Skills began to emerge in their brain, rudimentary communication developed. But they were still much the same: larger, stronger animals.
For the Kessentai it was different. Suddenly, their mind was flickering and flashing with not only new thoughts but entire new classes of thought. Skills appeared but with them came a deeper understanding of the theory behind them. Not just rudimentary language but the full, rich flower of the Posleen tongue developed in their brains like a sculpture from within the stone. Philosophy, tactics, engineering skills and star-piloting skills, often for beings who had never seen a star.
For the oolt'os it was much the same. They fought for food, they fought for survival, they fought to survive. But the poor Kessentai could find themselves having an existentialist moment in the midst of a full-up battle for survival.
It was not until they developed crests, and at about the same time began to develop their greater bulk and the various cues that to the oolt'os proclaimed that they were their lords, that the Kessentai could feel secure.

Posleen childhood and puberty. Interesting that it isn’t until adolescence that the God-kings become bigger, stronger and smarter.

I’ve been wondering for a while now whether being a God-king is directly hereditary or maybe more random. If it’s the former, they could eugenically raise the God-king population drastically just by separating their young at birth, maybe one day be an entirely sentient race again. If the latter, the feral Posleen in the hills could give birth to God-kings to unite them and build their advanced tech, sort of like Orks, making every infestation dangerous in time.

Also, the genetic memory is a lot less than I first assumed. They get some skills and technical knowledge, normals just get basic language, but they don’t have detailed knowledge of their history, which in hindsight should have been obvious, given how they’ve mythologized their origins.

There were only two types of God Kings: Kessentai and Kenstain. All debts, rewards and obligations, by ancient custom, were controlled and distributed by the Net. The Net judged the actions of each Kessentai and determined what rewards they should receive and Kessentai traded materials, information and allegiances through the Net.
Kennelai were different. Kennelai could not own anything. They were of Kessentai material but had either failed in the Path or turned away from it. Some refused to enter the path and took the way of Kenstain from the beginning. Kennelai were mainly used to run things in the absence of the Kessentai who actually owned them, but they were considered the bottom of the barrel in the Posleen hierarchy, in some ways lower than high quality oolt'os.

Castellaine again, some choose to become castellaine without ever fighting. Castellain sometimes considered of less value than a strong normal.

They had salvaged Posleen boma blades and were using them to clear the trees off the road. The monomolecular-edged blades, especially in the hands of an armored combat suit, sliced through the thickest trunks as if they were tissue paper and then the suit troopers picked up the sections of trunk and tossed them aside.
But he had to wonder, given the fact that the trees were more of a nuisance to the Posleen than to the humans, why they were doing it.

Boma blades are good for logging, as well as decapitation! Trees hinder Posleen movement somewhat more than light infantry, which makes sense since they’re so much bigger.

Cholosta'an was watching his sensors nervously. The sensors indicated that there was an electronic device somewhere on the ridge above him. That might just mean one of the randomly scattered sensors that permitted the humans to keep track of Posleen movement. And, if so, it was no bother; there weren't many humans around to react.
But it also might mean a human or humans that had active electronics, like a radio or night-vision systems.
Unfortunately, the sensors couldn't quite pin down the location; it was just beyond their sensory range. He kept glancing up the hill, though, trying to spot any target. Thus he wasn't at all surprised when his sensors screamed a warning of an incoming round just as the oolt'os to his left grunted from the impact of a round on his neck.

Portable sensor unit can detect electronics.

My model estimates twenty percent casualties for oolt passing through the zone in the first hour with about a one percent decrease per hour thereafter. Humans, of course, are relatively fragile; unprotected humans will not be able to enter the zone for at least ten days." He fluttered his crest and snapped his mouth in humor. "It's actually a very . . . what is that human term? It is a very elegant weapon in its way. The power is frightful, of course, but it also denies territory for some time. However, the ground is fully cleared in a month or two, at least sufficient for life. Elegant."

Posleen may not be immune to radiation, but they are highly resistant to it. To the point where they can wander through the fallout an hour after the blast and lose only a fifth of their forces. Or a day later, and lose none. Of course, the normals are stupid enough to wander around, roll in the dust, drink the water etc. but the God-kings are not, and the normals follow their lead.

The aliens, used to throwing themselves onto human defenses, were reacting with shock and apparent fear. It must have seemed to them that the rabbits were attacking the wolves and it was happening everywhere.

Posleen reaction to humans charging them in suicidal, human wave attacks. Which you’d think would have been the entire China campaign, except for the devious traps, artillery etc.

Tulo'stenaloor glanced at his sensors then tugged at his earring; he had better things to do than learn skills that others had.

Posleen God-kings wear jewelry. Tulo even has piercings!

The leader spoke English, haltingly and with a strange accent, and he had told her that the Posleen had brought them from another world, apparently to do engineering for the invaders. They had built some bridges and then, when the centaurs were forced to retreat, they had been added to the group of humans, he used the Posleen term "thresh," as a mobile pantry. And so it was.
For, most of the time, instead of adding refugees one of the escorting Posleen at some unseen command would reach into the group and drag people out. Then the knives would descend. The humans in the group had been offered the food from time to time but even with their stomachs pressing against their backbones, no one had taken the dripping gobbets of flesh that had until moments before been one of their group.

The Posleen don’t just eat everything they come across. On Diess, they set aside slaughtered Indowy for later. On Barwhon, they kept a bunch of Tchpth in a paddock. On Earth, they make humans march with them until they get hungry or the prisoners get rebellious.

I’m sure nothing bad will come of this. It’s not the creatures they’re fighting have a history of getting royally hacked off over perceived atrocities or something.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I’ve been wondering for a while now whether being a God-king is directly hereditary or maybe more random. If it’s the former, they could eugenically raise the God-king population drastically just by separating their young at birth, maybe one day be an entirely sentient race again. If the latter, the feral Posleen in the hills could give birth to God-kings to unite them and build their advanced tech, sort of like Orks, making every infestation dangerous in time.

In the Tuloriad, this is actually what Tulo and his Posleen do after rediscovering their homeworld. Each God-King is allowed to choose a normal for a mate, and normals are raised only for food. At any time, a God-King may elect to separate out some of his offspring to figure out which will be another god-king and then raise and educate it as its' own child. The adolescents who aren't God Kings either become 'wives' for others or are eaten. The Posleen have no social taboo against cannibalism except in the case of other god kings.

God-Kinghood is 'hereditary' in the sense that generally God Kings will produce more of the same, but it seems to be largely random.

[Simon_Jester]

I’ve been wondering for a while now whether being a God-king is directly hereditary or maybe more random. If it’s the former, they could eugenically raise the God-king population drastically just by separating their young at birth, maybe one day be an entirely sentient race again. If the latter, the feral Posleen in the hills could give birth to God-kings to unite them and build their advanced tech, sort of like Orks, making every infestation dangerous in time.

I don't think feral Posleen God-Kings would have the knack of building an industrial infrastructure from scratch. Metal weapons maybe, or at least the ability to scavenge metal used by others on the same planet and make such weapons, but not machine tools or manufacturing.

Boma blades are good for logging, as well as decapitation! Trees hinder Posleen movement somewhat more than light infantry, which makes sense since they’re so much bigger.

Also, if their legs are horse-like, because they're more vulnerable to just stepping in a hole and tripping and falling over than a human- more likely to break ankles and the like. That may make them instinctively more cautious on bad footing than they would be otherwise.

Posleen reaction to humans charging them in suicidal, human wave attacks. Which you’d think would have been the entire China campaign, except for the devious traps, artillery etc.

Honestly, the Red Army isn't stupid. They've got experience fighting on those terms, and they know that when it comes to dumping automatic weapon fire on human wave attacks, it is better to give than to receive. So yes, they'd dig in and try to make a WWI-style fight of it with machine gunners in trenches, tanks dug into berms, and whatnot.

China really shouldn't have fallen so fast, unless... well. Unless either a lot of Posleen landed on them, or unless the positioning of the landings was such that it impeded troop deployment (Posleen sitting astride the key rail and road arteries that would otherwise be used to bring armies from point A to point B when attacking other Posleen armies).

[Ahriman238]

I’ve been wondering for a while now whether being a God-king is directly hereditary or maybe more random. If it’s the former, they could eugenically raise the God-king population drastically just by separating their young at birth, maybe one day be an entirely sentient race again. If the latter, the feral Posleen in the hills could give birth to God-kings to unite them and build their advanced tech, sort of like Orks, making every infestation dangerous in time.

In the Tuloriad, this is actually what Tulo and his Posleen do after rediscovering their homeworld. Each God-King is allowed to choose a normal for a mate, and normals are raised only for food. At any time, a God-King may elect to separate out some of his offspring to figure out which will be another god-king and then raise and educate it as its' own child. The adolescents who aren't God Kings either become 'wives' for others or are eaten. The Posleen have no social taboo against cannibalism except in the case of other god kings.

God-Kinghood is 'hereditary' in the sense that generally God Kings will produce more of the same, but it seems to be largely random.

Cool.

I don't think feral Posleen God-Kings would have the knack of building an industrial infrastructure from scratch. Metal weapons maybe, or at least the ability to scavenge metal used by others on the same planet and make such weapons, but not machine tools or manufacturing.

Maybe, maybe not. God-Kings have overseen the construction of vast underground factories, and the conversion of existing industry to suit their pupposes. Their genetic memory should give them the knowledge to produce their tech, if they can only find tools, materials, infastructure etc.

At the very least, a pack of feral Posleen will be made far more dangerous by the addition of a God-king.

Also, if their legs are horse-like, because they're more vulnerable to just stepping in a hole and tripping and falling over than a human- more likely to break ankles and the like. That may make them instinctively more cautious on bad footing than they would be otherwise.

I don't think their legs are precisely horse-like, at a minimum they have an extra joint and a foot instead of a hoof. Then again, they do have trouble with steep slopes, and climbing up heaps of rubble.

[Ahriman238]

Other/Misc:

Over the past five years the Posleen had landed in waves throughout the world, overrunning virtually every defense. The few survivors of Western Europe were now huddled in the Alps, eking out a retched existence among those upland valleys. The Middle East, Africa, most of South America, were either in Posleen hands or in such a state of anarchy not even radio communications were coming out. The only survivors in Australia were in the far western territories and roaming the desert interior in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. China had been lost only after loosing nearly a thousand nuclear weapons in the long retreat up the Yangtze Valley. Others survived in the highlands of the world, holding passes against the enemy. But few of those scattered groups were a coherent defense. Everywhere, one by one, the civilizations of the world had fallen to the remorseless invaders. With one small exception.
In the United States a combination of geographic luck—the Posleen tended to land in coastal plains and the U.S. had defendable terrain features inward of all the coastal plains—and, frankly, logistic and political preparation had permitted the U.S. government to retain control, to retain a condition of "domestic harmony" in a few areas. Of these, the most vital were the Cumberland and Ohio basins due to their industrial might and breadth of agricultural resources. The vast plains of Central Canada were still safe, and would remain so as long as the Posleen were resisted at all, for the Posleen were almost incapable of fighting in snow. But those plains, and the various western areas in human control ranging from the Sierra Madre to the Canadian Rockies, could produce only a small number of crops, mostly grains. Furthermore there was little or no industrial infrastructure in comparison to the might found in the Cumberland and Ohio.

Global situation again. Now there are survivors in the Australian Interior and the West Coast.

Nuclear missiles from silos throughout the Midwest had been recovered and moved to safety ahead of the Posleen hordes. Violating numerous treaties, they had been converted to mobile launchers and now were positioned throughout the northern tier of states, most of which remained in human hands, and even up into Canada. Many of them would not have the angularity to reach the target area—their "minimum range" was still too long—but a few would. In addition, while most of the nuclear ballistic missile submarines had been converted to transports, a few of them retained their missiles. All of these weapons, enough to gut any country, were available to support the ACS airmobile.

But Posleen antimissile systems were tremendously effective; practically anything that crested the horizon that was under power or maneuvered would be destroyed. So the only viable choice was to try to saturate the defenses. However, it was not just the innumerable weapons on God King saucers that could engage the missiles; as they reached apogee they were visible to the thousands of landers still scattered across North America. So out of the thousands of nuclear weapons that were fired, only a handful survived to enter ballistic trajectories and become mysteriously invisible to the Posleen targeting systems.
Those handful would be more than enough.

The salvo of reentry rounds landed in a triangle pattern, one directly in the Mountain City Gap and the other two in the passes to the north and south. Each of the explosions was one hundred kilotons, almost ten times stronger than the weapon that hit Hiroshima, and wasted a circle three thousand meters in diameter, smashing every tree and scrap of brush to the ground or incinerating them and tossing them into the column of fiery gas that reached to the heavens.

Thousands of nukes are launched, 3 hit. Again, it’s possible to saturate the anti-missile capabilities of the Posleen long enough for a few to go ballistic, just not easy or cost-effective.

I can’t help but wonder though. In the first book, a superior normal has a HVM launcher that has only six shots, I’ve previously said that I believe the God-kings mount a different HVM with more ammo, but it must still be finite, same with 3mm railguns, plasma cannon, even lasers might tap out their power supply. So what would happen if the great Posleen horde approached a town and about a thousand model rockets shot up into the air? Or a full, July 4th fireworks display?

The blimp, nearly two hundred meters in length, had a giant container attached to the bottom of it. As soon as the skids on the container touched the ground the blimp released it and bounced into the air, heading back over the mountains. One Posleen in the wrong place would take it out in a second, but the nuclear fire from the SheVa had apparently cleared out the entire valley and as long as the blimps stayed low they were out of direct line of sight.

Dirigibles used to move personnel and cargo around in secure rear areas. Just as long as they don’t float where a God-king can see them in which case- Oh! The humanity! (oh come on, give me that one.)

In time he had even stood for brigadier, again. Three times. The first two had been blackballs; one or more members of the flag officer promotion board had felt him unacceptable as a general officer. The third time, though, he had been passed. In the old days you only had one pass at flag rank, but with the war continuing and even generals occasionally becoming Posleen fodder, the rules had been loosened. Slightly.

Chances for promotion comes slightly more easily, or at least more often in times of total war.

The problem was that the Line units had become specialists at running their automated guns and had forgotten everything else. Or never been taught it.
The Corps G-3 and commander were relieved and the incoming G-3 had asked for Arkady. So he had found himself in charge of "evaluating" individual unit training.

What he'd found was even worse than anticipated. There were entire units that had never even zeroed their individual weapons or boresighted their heavy weapons. There was an armor storage site with sufficient tracks for two brigades, but none of the brigades had trained on them in three years.

Crappy line troops with virtually no training sent to man the Wall.

MetalStorm anti-lander systems were among the less successful devices tried over the years. MetalStorm was a device for firing thousands of rounds in a very short period of time. It basically consisted of a gun barrel filled with bullets. Each of the bullets was fired, in turn, by an electrical charge. The highest rate of fire available was something over a million rounds per minute.

MetalStorm anti-lander systems were a 105mm, twelve-barrel device mounted on an Abrams tank chassis. Each of the barrels was loaded with one hundred rounds. The rounds were the same type as had originally been carried by the Abrams as an anti-tank round, but with the MetalStorm system all twelve hundred rounds could be fired in under twenty seconds. Firing all the rounds in one ripple fire was extremely unpleasant for the crew; it had been described as being put in a barrel and shaken by a giant. Despite that, the system was fairly ineffective at killing landers.

See? Metal Storm has its uses, just not as a mobile platform and not on an Abrams chassis. Or anything lighter. The problem with Metal Storm is that you can’t just swap clips, you have to stuff rounds down the barrel. Unless you’re willing to fire ultrafast bursts and then make like a musketeer, you have to pull and replace the barrel after use, and reload the used one when not in combat.

Despite the firepower, however, Malefic turned out to be unsuited to its primary role. The armor on Posleen landers was thick, the ships were large and they did not, unfortunately, approach on the ground. While the MetalStorm tracks could get penetration at short ranges, say down to fifteen hundred meters or so, they seemed unable to do any significant damage at anything other than point-blank range. And at that range, attempting to kill a lander was suicidal.

Malefic is the designer’s name for the Metal Storm Abrams. Which can penetrate ship armor at ranges of 1500 meters or less, it just can’t do real damage, just penetrate the armor, maybe chew up an internal bulkhead or two.

The basic theory of the MetalStorm system was conceived shortly before First Contact. The idea was simplicity in itself, like most interesting inventions. Instead of putting bullets in a complicated feeding system, load them all into the barrel, one stacked on top of another, with the propellant packed in between. Detonated electronically the device produced an awesome amount of firepower as literally hundreds of bullets spewed out of the barrel in bare seconds; one device had shown a theoretical rate of one million rounds per minute.
It was the "theoretical" part that was the sticking point. Since the barrel was also the bullet supply, "reloading" involved replacing the entire barrel. Furthermore, the "bullet to weight" ratio of the system was just astronomical; it could never be considered a reasonable system for infantrymen who were always overloaded anyway.

But it had certain benefits. After the coming of the Posleen, MetalStorm was used widely as an "area denial" system, laying down masses of bullets that could best be described as a "rain of lead." When stopping Posleen wave assaults, more was always better when it came to firepower. And there wasn't much "more" than MetalStorm.

Like I said, you have to swap the barrels. Also like I said, as turrets on fixed fortifications, it works fine. Plus you can fire off all sorts of cool 105mm ammo if not using the anti-lander sabot. Start with HEAT, then canister, turns out there’s a grenade launching variation…

He turned to the driver of the Bradley he was currently occupying and gestured. "Son, if you don't catch that SheVa before it's halfway across the valley I'll have you shot."
"Yes, sir!" the driver said, kicking the armored fighting vehicle into gear. "Not a problem," he added with a feral grin as the track commander cycled his guns. The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.

‘Scout’ Bradley with a lot more firepower than most Bradleys I’ve heard of.

It moved with the smooth oiliness that was the hallmark of the Abrams series and it seemed that nothing could stop it. Of course, one plasma gun that hit just right would do just fine. There had been improvements in the armor of the Abrams series over the course of the war, but they could still be taken out with plasma or HVM fire. If it hit right.

Advancements in tank armor. After a decade-long brutal and all out war we have gone from “3mm railguns that can go through an Abrams the long way” and “even an Abrams can’t stand up to the Posleen for long.” To “armored enough to take all but their heaviest weapons, the ones that spatter ACS to. And we might get lucky even with those.”

Mike noted another checkpoint and looked off to the left. Somewhere out there was Asheville, awaiting the dawn of a new day, a city still inhabited by over a million civilians and six divisions of infantry. Behind it were two Sub-Urbs with a combined total of five million souls. And all of it was in the vise of a nutcracker.

2.5 million people per Sub-Urb?

When the news of the Posleen invasion had come, he thought he was going to be going back into a blue suit; the conditions of space-board battle were similar enough to subs that submariners were at a premium in the Fleet. Instead, he had stayed at the University and Oak Ridge because it was there he could make the greater contribution. Because the "theoretical" research he had been involved in at Oak Ridge was the manufacture, capture and management of antimatter.

Submariners prized in Fleet.

As it turned out, the Indowy technique for making antimatter was trivial; it was one of the few things that human theory could comprehend about the new technologies. And they could contain it. The latter was important. Antimatter that contacted "regular" matter converted all of its mass to energy. It was that energy release that made it so alluring. Best of all, it could be contained in very small amounts. That way if some of the encapsulation failed, there wouldn't be a massive nuclear fireball. Microencapsulating it, though, or even containing it, turned out to be tricky. The Indowy knew how, but nobody else did.

Galactic antimatter production process is simple enough to be grasped by modern scientists and built here on earth. Containing antimatter is somewhat more troublesome.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. After studying Indowy techniques (to the extent that they would allow) for nearly a year, he came away a frustrated man. The Indowy defied the laws of probability and that was just not fair.

All quantum mechanics, all chemistry, all metallurgy, comes down to probabilities. When two chemicals are mixed, there are several ways that they can recombine. But only one way is "probable." Therefore, almost all of the molecules combine in that way, with a scattered handful combining in others.

Often the "alternate" combinations are more useful. But they are also hysterically unlikely. The Indowy got the alternate combinations every single time. It was like hitting Lotto not once, but Every. Single. Time. What a rip.

It was the answer to all the problems. Not just microencapsulation but their armor, their drives, their energy and gravity technologies. All of them depended on hitting the Lotto, consistently and dependably. He didn't understand how they did it and they couldn't, apparently, explain it in terms that made sense. They just "prayed" and it happened.

Why sohon is the basis of all Galactic science and manufacturing. That’s a very interesting capability, and I can’t help but notice that contrary to statements in the first book, it isn’t really invalidated by assembly line production. The two could actually complement each other nicely.

There was one theory of microencapsulation that might work. There was a material called "fullerene," after Buckminster Fuller the inventor of the geodesic dome, which was a spherical molecule of carbon. Since each of the carbon atoms generated a "repulsion zone," any molecule or atom trapped in the center was automatically held away from contact not only with the carbon atoms but with the rest of the universe.

After exhausting every other theory, Mickey threw himself into the chemistry and physics of bucky balls. There was an existing knowledge base of how to produce them, and even how to wrap them around another atom. But wrapping them around anti-hydrogen, without it coming into contact with them, was a whole nother ball of fullerene.

It took time. And the process was not without its failures. But if Tennessee had anything it had miners (to dig holes in mountains to build the remote-controlled experimental facilities) and mountains. And it had only taken three mountains to find a way to perform microencapsulation safely. (Well, relatively safely. They weren't going to move it out of mountain four and into the middle of a city any time soon.) In the process he even got a minimal understanding of how the Indowy were warping physics to their own ends.

Unfortunately what he got was useless for his purposes.

Fullerene was tough stuff. To get the energy out of the encapsulated hydrogen required "breaking" the fullerene first. And breaking it took nearly as much energy as was recovered from the explosion. It worked better setting up a chain reaction, putting a quantity of the "hyperfullerene" into a vessel and forcing the destruction of a small amount (usually by injecting anti-protons) which then broke up the rest.

Fullerene. The first 3 antimatter research/production facilities went boom.

[Ahriman238]

SheVa:

SheVas were the sort of bastard weapon that only occur in the midst of really terrible wars. Early on in the battles against the Posleen one of humanity's greatest weaknesses was the inability to destroy the Posleen ships when they were used for close support of the alien infantry. The event was fortunately rare—the Posleen were not good at combined arms—but when it occurred it was devastating. Many weapons systems were created to try to destroy the Posleen landers, but with the exception of the Galactic-crafted heavy weapons, which were in short supply, only one system had proven effective. And it was monstrous in every meaning of the word.

SheVa purpose, again it’s said that the Posleen were very effective at air support at the beginning of the invasion, when they actually used it, and made great gains. Perhaps this explains China?

The answer was to create a new class of guns, superficially similar to the battleship guns. They were sixteen inches in diameter but at that point the resemblance stopped. Like modern tank guns, they were smoothbore and very high velocity. The guns used an electroplasma propellant, extended barrels and secondary firing chambers to accelerate a depleted uranium dart as thick as a treetrunk to twenty-five-hundred meters per second. Firing a single penetrator round, the weapon designed to destroy a Posleen lander, was the recoil equivalent of firing six standard battleship cannons.

SheVa gun, cookie to Connor for suggesting the electroplasma earlier. Since the 2.5 km/s is 1. Less insane, and 2. The only number to get repeated, I figure I’ll run with that.
Where does Ringo come from, that ‘thick as a tree-trunk’ means 8”?

The gun was a two-hundred-foot-long, multi-chambered "Bull" gun. The basic propellant was an electro-plasma system that used an electrical charge to excite material and provide propulsion far beyond that available with any normal chemical propellant. However, due to power drop-off over distance, the barrel had secondary firing chambers down its side that added their own propulsion to the gigantic projectile. The combination permitted penetrator rounds, discarding sabot rounds with an outer disposable-plastic "sabot" and an inner uranium penetrator, to reach a velocity of nearly twenty-five-hundred meters per second, an unheard of speed prior to the SheVa gun.

Secondary firing chambers, repeat electro-plasma, and 2.5 km/s again.

Because of the enormous energies involved, a tremendous recoil system had to be designed including shock absorbers the size of small submarines. While it was, relatively, easy to install in the few fixed fortifications that received the guns, the real necessity was for a mobile gun platform.

Shock absorbers the size of submarines again. What really interests me, however, is the confirmation of fixed SheVa guns. I mean, besides the one at Tenn. U.

SheVas were four-hundred feet long and three hundred wide, with huge tracks surmounted by a "turret" that looked like a metal factory building. At the rear, concealed in the turret, was a heavily armored magazine for its eight main gun rounds, each of which looked like a cross between a rifle cartridge and an ICBM. The cantilevered gun, massive against any other backdrop, stuck out of the turret like a giant telescope and was so small in comparison it looked like an accidental add-on.

The gun consisted of three main portions, the gun itself and its supporting structures, the monstrous "weather shield" turret that created the gun room, and the drive system.

SheVa appearance.

To protect all of this machinery, some of which was not particularly weatherproof, the gun was encased in a gigantic "turret," actually a simple weather shield, that was a major engineering feat in itself. The shield was a hundred-foot-wide cube that mounted to the turret ring at the base of the gun so that it rotated at the same time as the weapon. The exterior of the shield was six-inch steel plate, not for any armoring reasons but simply because any lesser material buckled whenever the gun fired. The interior, on the other hand, was mostly empty, a vast space of soaring girders and curved braces that held the shield in place.

SheVa turret mostly hollow. Also a hundred feet across, which means the scale on the pic I first put up must be way off. I still like it better than the cover art for Hell’s Faire though.

Admittedly there were . . . issues with the reactors. Despite careful use of Galactic heat regeneration techniques, the drive room was hot as the hinges of hell. And if the reactor took a direct hit, as had happened from time to time, the tiny "pebbles" became one heck of a radioactive nuisance. But the power that the reactors provided more than made up for those little shortcomings. And reactor breaches were what clean-up crews lived for.

The drive system for the tank was just as revolutionary, using induction motors on all the drive wheels to provide direct power. Thus the SheVa could lose one or more drive wheels and still continue moving.

Not sure what induction motor means, I'm afraid. GalTech heat dispersal tech used in SheVa reactors.

SheVas, by and large, did not do a lot of communicating. They mostly stayed in place or were moved by careful coordination of the local force commanders, who "owned" the SheVas as attachments. Operations orders, movement orders and communications were laid out days in advance. Otherwise they tended to run over such unimportant obstacles as front-lines, headquarters or, in one particularly unpleasant accident, the entire logistics "tail" of divisions. There was a reason that SheVa crewmen referred to everything other than SheVas, including "lesser" armor, as "crunchies."

Reason for lack of a dedicated communications specialist on SheVas.

In addition to the earth movers, specialty heavy equipment had flowed in at a tremendous rate. One device, apparently made from a giant steam shovel, was an automated plasma cutter. The massive tracked system had driven directly from the container to the SheVa and begun cutting huge holes in the wall of the drive system. There were also three specialty track breakers which moved from damaged track to damaged track, removing the man-sized bolts that connected the tracks, pulling them off and replacing them with new. Some of the damaged tracks were on the underside; it would be interesting to see what the repair techs did about that.

As Pruitt watched, a massive forklift rolled out of one of the containers carrying a complete reactor pack.

CONTAC team gear. I find it amusing that they went to so much trouble to design a mega-tank that can be run by just 3 men, and several hundred support staff if anything ever goes wrong.

"No, but we can assault them," Kilzer interrupted.

"Oh, yeah, now there's a good idea!"

"No, seriously. That was the point of the upgrade. You have more frontal armor, now, than an M-1A4; from the front you're practically invulnerable to plasma cannon fire and will even shrug off most HVM hits . . ."

" 'Practically'?" Indy interrupted. " 'Most'?"

"In addition there's the squirt-gun," the designer continued. "That should give you at least ten percent more likelihood of survival . . ."

" 'Practically'?" Pruitt said, goggle-eyed.

"Oh, quit being a baby," Paul said. "You're the most heavily armored thing on earth; act that way!"

Bun-Bun (SheVa 9) gets upgraded. More than twice the frontal armor, mounting the Metal Storm turrets from those Abrams, adding two extra reactors, a couple claymores and, oh yeah, the squirt gun. All this inside 12 hours, so it can charge to the rescue of Mike’s ACS battalion.

"Negative visual, negative radar, negative lidar," Pruitt sang out. "What in the hell just happened."

"Darn," Kilzer said. "Let me check my notes . . ."

"Mr. Kilzer!" the colonel shouted across the compartment. "Is this your doing?"

"Well, yeah," the tech rep replied. "It's an experimental anti-plasma defense. We mounted a fifty-thousand-gallon water tank in the front of the turret and . . ."

The squirt gun. Basically it hoses the front of the SheVa with water, and the fills the hundred feet or so of air immediately before the SheVa with several hundred gallons of water a second. Supposedly this gives them an extra 10% chance of shrugging off plasma fire.

"Kilzer! Water curtain, Now!"
"Uh . . ." Paul looked over and shrugged. "I guess I forgot to mention: we're out. We've only got five minutes and we used it up before."

Limits of the squirt gun.

But since the MetalStorm system replaced not just the ammunition in firing, but the barrel as well, there was no reason that the track was locked in to using 105mm. And a similar pack, even larger, was designed and fielded in 40mm.

The design used the basic 40mm grenade, the same projectile as was found in the venerable Mk-19 Mod 4. It fired a "bullet"-shaped projectile with a three-thousand-meter range that was just under a pound and a half of wrapped explosives and wire. On contact the projectile exploded, sending out a hail of notched wire that killed or injured anything in a five-meter radius.

Each of the MetalStorm "40 Packs" contained twenty thousand projectiles.

Instead of twelve barrels there were one hundred, ten across and ten down in a square block of metal that actually weighed more than the "heavy" pack. And instead of one hundred rounds packed into each barrel, there were two hundred.

Metal Storm frag grenade launchers. Which is mostly what the Metal Storm turrets on Bun-Bun are packing. 20,000 rounds in 4 seconds.

"Yes, sir." There was a pause. "We're shot out on turrets one through six and twelve. The others don't have the angularity."

"How long to reload?" Mitchell asked, turning his head sideways as the tech rep waved one arm in his direction.

"About another three minutes, sir," Chan said awkwardly. "We fire this stuff off way faster than we reload."

"Hold on a second," Mitchell replied, cutting the intercom audio and furrowing his brow at Kilzer's gestures. "Yes?"

"Rotate the turret," Kilzer said.

There were 6 Metal Storm tanks that followed Bun-Bun. Now there are 12 turrets. Maybe the repair crew brought more? Oh well just so they're ready to unleash eleven- er... thirteen-hundred and twenty-one barrels of hell!

She popped her head out of the TC's hatch and watched as Glenn manipulated the loader. There were four packs, three 40s and a 105, connected to the SheVa's top directly behind the turret. The loader was a multi-angularity forklift that connected to special points on the bottom of the packs. Once it was connected, which was the most ticklish part, all that Glenn had to do was hit the "Load Sequence" button and the multi-ton pack was lifted through three dimensions and carefully dropped into the gun-cradle. Once in place the gun system inserted the pintle and trunnions making the whole system ready to fire.

Simple. So simple that they'd be reloaded before Nine's turn to fire came up. And so would Nine. The question was whether to continue the fire-mission.

There were packs stashed in the interior. But to get to those would require the crane and someone, Pruitt probably, who was qualified to operate it. Which meant an hour or so to replace all her ready-packs. Which meant she really didn't want to shoot off all her reloads blind.

Metal Storm turret reloads.

Unfortunately, even two hundred thousand rounds could be expended in a short period of time. Which was why after only four seconds Turret One fell silent. After a moment Glenn hit the eject button and the massive steel firing pod was ejected backwards to lie on top of the SheVa.

"I'm out, ma'am," the gunner said, flipping on the reload winch. "I'll be up shortly, though."
Chan had seen the effect of the 40 packs often enough, but never in such a concentrated location and it took her a moment to react. "That's fine. Not a problem. Turret Two?"
"Two."

"Continue engagement. Three, when two goes dry . . ."

"Three, gotcha."

Chan flipped off of the company frequency and down to the SheVa intercom. "Major Mitchell, we're going to be out of targets soon."

Firing pattern and RoF, I mentioned that earlier, but I got it from here.

Because of their height, the 40mm rounds had about a four-thousand-meter range. And they would arm within fifty meters. But the guns could only depress a few degrees below the horizon. Therefore the SheVa had a large zone around it in which the guns could not engage, depending on the MetalStorm and the angle at which the SheVa was at, that could range anywhere from five hundred to a thousand meters.

Limits to the coverage of Bun-Bun’s Metal Storm turrets.

"Hang on, Colonel," Kilzer said, touching a button. Another boom, much more massive than the first, shook the hull. "Problem solved."

"Holy shit!" Pruitt said, looking at the monitor. Mostly what could be seen was dust. But what was visible of the Posleen company looked like someone had pounded it with a giant meat mallet. "What in the hell was that?"

"Claymore," Kilzer replied. "There's two on the front, two on the back and three on each side. It's got six shots."

There are now 10 6-shot claymores, at least two to a side on Bun-Bun. For when they get inside that safe zone in the Metal Storm turrets fire.

Mitchell no longer considered the odd nature of reply. Grid coordinates worked off of imaginary "lines" on maps and depending on the number of digits used, the accuracy of the location got higher and higher. At eight digits the accuracy of the location was less than a meter. So what he had just done was give a location that was accurate to the millimeter. For a "tank" that was a hundred meters wide.

Often he got asked about it. Normally in the military, when someone was just reading a map, they would use, at most, six digits for a location coordinate. So when he gave locations in twelve digit coordinates, it occasioned comment. His answer was fairly simple: The location tracker in the SheVa guns read out in twelve-digit coordinates.

SheVa distance and targeting computers give coordinates precise to the millimeter. Because god only knows what might happen if your 100 Kt AD rounds landed half a meter to one side.

"Fuck you, Pru," the driver, who was not noted for his intelligence, replied. He locked one track then threw the other into full drive, spinning up a roostertail of dirt and rocking the seven-thousand-ton gun sideways down the hill.

"Ah, I know what you're doing," Kilzer said with a grin. "Watch it, though. You can get yourself stuck as hell."

"Okay, I'll bite," Mitchell said in a bemused voice. "What are you doing?"

"He's trying to dig in a fighting position," Kilzer explained for the driver, who was repositioning the tank. "Dig out the upper side of the position by spinning the track in place."

And it appeared to be working. The friable stone of the hillside was shattering under the weight and power of the SheVa's tracks and with each spin the upper side of the SheVa sank lower. After a moment Reeves spun the monstrous vehicle in place and moved some of the dirt over to create a wider spot, then went back to work.

SheVa digging itself into a hull-down position.

"You've got a what?" Jack Horner rarely shouted so it was that much more surprising when he did.

"We can range to the Gap." Gerald Carson, the President of the University of Tennessee, was not happy about the call. But he had been asked a question so he was answering the question. Calmly, politely and with sweat pouring down his face.

"We've got a gun project," he continued to the general's nod. Since the Posleen apparently couldn't hit ballistic projectiles, practically every school with an engineering program did. "It's able to range. It lofted a fifty-pound package into a low temporary orbit last month. It's a modified Super-Bull, three hundred millimeter. And we've also got this professor in the nuclear program, Mickey Castanuelo. He's a . . . he was considered a bit of a tenured nut before First Contact because he's been crazy about antimatter. Since First Contact he's been crazy about production and containment, which is why he's been getting a blank check from Ground Force R and D. He was working on energy systems."

"So we paid for this?" Jack asked.

"I don't know exactly what he was supposed to be researching," the president frowned furiously, "but he finally figured out a way to microencapsulate. Unfortunately, it was useless from an energy standpoint. But he's been from nuke energy to weapons and back so I guess he went back again. And he apparently got the specs for the Supergun so what he went and built was an antimatter cluster bomb . . ."

Ok, 300 mm is about 12 inches, so it’s smaller than a SheVa gun, and it was able to launch a small object into a low orbit.

And I’m sure the man who built an antimatter cluster bomb in his spare time because he thought it might be useful isn’t any kind of nut.

"The system consists of fifty-five sub-projectiles with an Indowy initiator in each," Dr. Castanuelo said, pointing at the diagram on the screen. "After firing, the system reaches its target point and begins to spread projectiles. It doesn't just drop them, which would cause massive overlap, but lays them down during its flight. Each projectile has slowing fins. These have been shown to not "trip" Posleen defensive systems. This system lets all the projectiles attain complimentary altitudes. At a preprogrammed height above ground, which is determined by radar altimeters in each sub-projectile, the Indowy containment field releases a burst of anti-protons into the fullerene matrix which then sustains a rapid chain reaction."

Jack looked at the presentation as the projectiles fell out of the back of an imaginary artillery shell and scattered across a wide area. The effect looked similar to a cluster bomb until you realized that what looked like gullies and small hills in the background was a backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.

"What's the footprint?" Horner asked. He had commandeered a shuttle and flown down to the university as soon as he got the word. He still didn't know if he had the answer to a maiden's prayer or the worst nightmare since the word of the invasion.

Dr. Castanuelo cleared his throat nervously. "Thirty-five miles deep, fifteen miles across. It's the equivalent of a one hundred and ten megaton bomb, but with significantly different gross effects. For example the thermal pulse is equivalent to a two megaton."

"And you built this on your own?" Jack asked quietly. "Without authorization? Or even mentioning it? One hundred and ten megatons?"

"Well, I had the hyperfullerene and the initiators just sitting there," Dr. Castanuelo said hotly. "I thought it might come in handy."

Antimatter Cluster bomb. The Posleen just call it ‘the hell-weapon’ and it’s a hard name to argue with. 35 by 15 mile footprint?

"No, General. The soil, the rocks, the fucking mountains. It's all orange. And not 'international distress' orange, boss. It's a redder orange than that."

Horner's face turned up in a gigantic smile as he looked over at Dr. Castanuelo. The good doctor had just pulled a can of dip out of his back pocket and was reading over the shoulder of one of the techs. He had on a University of Tennessee ballcap and a UT Volunteers windbreaker. Both of them bright orange.

"This is what you get for letting rednecks playwith antimatter, boss," O'Neal said.

Horner didn't bother to point out an accident of birthplace. There was no question in his mind that the guy who had just painted half of north Georgia in the colors of one of their bitterest football rivals was well described as a "high-tech redneck."

It’s a color marker, in theory it will fade out at about the same rate as the radiation, so when everything stops being orange it’s safe to come out. I’m kind of skeptical about it all working out so smoothly, but at least we got a prank any drunken high-schooler would be proud of. And that’s what’s important here.

I'm trying to keep the redneck jokes down, but this is a little much. I guess it helps that Ringo can make all the redneck jokes in my stead.

[Simon_Jester]

Why sohon is the basis of all Galactic science and manufacturing. That’s a very interesting capability, and I can’t help but notice that contrary to statements in the first book, it isn’t really invalidated by assembly line production. The two could actually complement each other nicely.

No, because of the way they do it. For practical purposes, they have to have a psychic (Sohon adept) stand over the material and will the material into being organized the way they want it to. The Sohon adept's skills cannot be replaced by a piece of machinery, and so it is impossible to accelerate production to speak of without training more adepts.

[Ahriman238]

Why sohon is the basis of all Galactic science and manufacturing. That’s a very interesting capability, and I can’t help but notice that contrary to statements in the first book, it isn’t really invalidated by assembly line production. The two could actually complement each other nicely.

No, because of the way they do it. For practical purposes, they have to have a psychic (Sohon adept) stand over the material and will the material into being organized the way they want it to. The Sohon adept's skills cannot be replaced by a piece of machinery, and so it is impossible to accelerate production to speak of without training more adepts.

Oh, not what I meant. In the first book it was said that the Galactics chose a 'cottage industry' system because assembly-line type industry would create far more products than were needed, and thus create pressure to expand and create new markets, and the ultra-stable Galactics don't want that.

I was simply pointing out that even if you build factories to churn out stuff, sohon isn't going to fall by the wayside, it's too insanely useful.

[CaptainChewbacca]

In later fan-written works made canon, its stated that a good chunk of the UK was able to survive in Scotland after a retreat north and the construction of a new 'Hadrian's Wall' stopped the Posleen advance. Ireland also survived, and several islands (iceland, Cuba) were never seriously attacked.

[Raxmei]

But since the MetalStorm system replaced not just the ammunition in firing, but the barrel as well, there was no reason that the track was locked in to using 105mm. And a similar pack, even larger, was designed and fielded in 40mm.

The design used the basic 40mm grenade, the same projectile as was found in the venerable Mk-19 Mod 4. It fired a "bullet"-shaped projectile with a three-thousand-meter range that was just under a pound and a half of wrapped explosives and wire. On contact the projectile exploded, sending out a hail of notched wire that killed or injured anything in a five-meter radius.

Each of the MetalStorm "40 Packs" contained twenty thousand projectiles.

Instead of twelve barrels there were one hundred, ten across and ten down in a square block of metal that actually weighed more than the "heavy" pack. And instead of one hundred rounds packed into each barrel, there were two hundred.

Metal Storm frag grenade launchers. Which is mostly what the Metal Storm turrets on Bun-Bun are packing. 20,000 rounds in 4 seconds.

Note that the real life MetalStorm systems don't work like that. You don't replace the barrels, you actually reload them. Of course you could design a weapon based on the same principles which did make you swap the whole barrel out but it isn't an inherent property. MetalStorm really has produced systems in 40mm that fire real warheads, though I don't know if they had done so at the time this book was written. As said upthread, the real life 40mm MetalStorm systems actually only put four or so rounds in each barrel. The point of their current offerings isn't so much inflated rate of fire as it is mechanical simplicity and electronic control lending itself well to remote weapon stations. This system is still less insane than the 105mm version. Standard M430 grenades are only about four inches long so even two hundred of them packed nose to tail is less than 70 feet and a 40mm grenade launcher is much less punishing in terms of recoil and barrel pressure than a 105mm cannon.

"The system consists of fifty-five sub-projectiles with an Indowy initiator in each," Dr. Castanuelo said, pointing at the diagram on the screen. "After firing, the system reaches its target point and begins to spread projectiles. It doesn't just drop them, which would cause massive overlap, but lays them down during its flight. Each projectile has slowing fins. These have been shown to not "trip" Posleen defensive systems. This system lets all the projectiles attain complimentary altitudes. At a preprogrammed height above ground, which is determined by radar altimeters in each sub-projectile, the Indowy containment field releases a burst of anti-protons into the fullerene matrix which then sustains a rapid chain reaction."

Radar altimeters work by bouncing a radar signal against the ground to determine how far away it is. This raises the question of why the Posleen can't shoot them out of the sky like they do to anything else that transmits.

[PeZook]

Radar altimeters work by bouncing a radar signal against the ground to determine how far away it is. This raises the question of why the Posleen can't shoot them out of the sky like they do to anything else that transmits.

They could be either too small, or use some ingenious system like a double altimeter (pressure altimeter determines roughly when to turn on the radar, for example)

[Simon_Jester]

Or they could use a laser altimeter, which would arguably make more sense. Sigh.

[Vejut]

Things I notice:

At work now, but it should be possible, knowing that the SheVa gun has 6x the recoil of a 16"/L50, and that it shoots 2500m/s, we should be able to figure roughly how much the shot weighs, assuming somebody goes onto navweaps and finds how much the recoil that is, though we may have to guesstimate away the reaction products that also shoot out the barrel.

SheVas have 6" of steel stock on their front. That gets doubled on Bun-Bun, therefore, Bun-Bun has 12" of steel plate armor. This would be ~300mm of steel, and thus less than half of a stock A1 variant Abrahms. Yet somehow, SheVas with the uparmor can bounce HVM and Plasma, mostly, but stock Abrahms get run through by weaker 1-3mm. Okay...

Induction motors are a real peice of tech.

There was one other thing, but I can't recall now. I'll probably remember and post it later.

[Raxmei]

Another math & measures note. A cubic foot of steel weighs 490 pounds. The turret of a SheVa is a hundred foot cube with 6" walls. A face measures 100x100x.5 feet, or 5000 cubic feet. Each of the cube's five faces (not counting the bottom, which would of course be different) weighs about 1200 tons, for a total of 6000. Stats posted upthread say the SheVa weighs 7000 tons in total. Of course the stats posted upthread also say the vehicle is wider than itself so we already know they aren't exactly reliable.

[Ahriman238]

Radar altimeters work by bouncing a radar signal against the ground to determine how far away it is. This raises the question of why the Posleen can't shoot them out of the sky like they do to anything else that transmits.

The only idea I have has already been brought up, a dual altimeter with the radar just confirming the proper altitude before detonation. If it initiates before the Posleen can track and fire it, it's not a big deal.

At work now, but it should be possible, knowing that the SheVa gun has 6x the recoil of a 16"/L50, and that it shoots 2500m/s, we should be able to figure roughly how much the shot weighs, assuming somebody goes onto navweaps and finds how much the recoil that is, though we may have to guesstimate away the reaction products that also shoot out the barrel.

We already know the whole package; cartridge, propellant, shoe and round is 16 tons. From the size and composition figures given in Dance, I earlier calced the final round (remember it's a sabot) at roughly 1100 kg.

If you think you calculate the round weight that way, you are welcome and encouraged to so, if only to see if our numbers match up. Will the existence of secondary firing chambers be an issue? We never get hard numbers on them.

SheVas have 6" of steel stock on their front. That gets doubled on Bun-Bun, therefore, Bun-Bun has 12" of steel plate armor. This would be ~300mm of steel, and thus less than half of a stock A1 variant Abrahms. Yet somehow, SheVas with the uparmor can bounce HVM and Plasma, mostly, but stock Abrahms get run through by weaker 1-3mm. Okay...

Say rather that the top surface, weather shield and anything else that might have to bear the weight or recoil of the gun is at least 6" steel. I don't believe anything is said about the front armor specifically, besides that it is doubled by reinforcement on Bin-Bun. To further muddy the waters, at least some of the steel in the SheVas (specifically, surrounding the magazine) is "battlesteel" an advanced Galactic metal "4 times stronger than homogenous steel." Some or all of the SheVa could conceivably be made from that.

The discrepancy has already been noted, when the battleship North Carolina was able to repel assault by heavy Posleen weapons, including HVMs and plasma guns, despite having considerably inferior armor. They even admit in the book they have no damn idea why homogenous steel stands up better to such things.

Induction motors are a real peice of tech.

So they are. Thanks Vejut!

Another math & measures note. A cubic foot of steel weighs 490 pounds. The turret of a SheVa is a hundred foot cube with 6" walls. A face measures 100x100x.5 feet, or 5000 cubic feet. Each of the cube's five faces (not counting the bottom, which would of course be different) weighs about 1200 tons, for a total of 6000. Stats posted upthread say the SheVa weighs 7000 tons in total. Of course the stats posted upthread also say the vehicle is wider than itself so we already know they aren't exactly reliable.

There are so many contradictions about the SheVa we could easily blow a page just cataloging them. At least the basic dimensions and weight seem to remain consistently used throughout the book, even if they make no sense in and of themselves.

Captain Chewbacca eariler said that the picture I posted was fan-art and non cannon, but it is included in the back of Hell's Faire among the maps and appendices (maybe it tickled Ringo or something.) Ultimately, the last book gives us 3 SheVa pictures, the one I first posted, this:


and the cover art for Hell's Faire:



All of which feature the four treads side-by-side. Thoguh to be honest, the cover art for this series is generally shit.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

I've been following this thread and I have a couple questions so far. If I missed the answers already I apologise.

-I know the SheVa isn't really supposed to make sense, but is there even a handwave as to why it's filled with so much empty space? If the first and second images are anywhere close to accurate, you could make the turret probably 1/6 as wide and not lose anything but air and wasted mass.

-Is there a reason the Posleen don't seem to make any landings after each wave arrives? From the descriptions it sounds as if they use the ships as oversized helicopter gunships sometimes, but what stops them from massing ships behind lines, lifting into space, and then dropping troops off in Nebraska to get around the US defenses?

[Mr Bean]

-Is there a reason the Posleen don't seem to make any landings after each wave arrives? From the descriptions it sounds as if they use the ships as oversized helicopter gunships sometimes, but what stops them from massing ships behind lines, lifting into space, and then dropping troops off in Nebraska to get around the US defenses?

The Posleen ships are not Posheen friendly and they only have a rough understanding of how things work, BattleGlobes which are C-Decs with attached Lamprays formed around core ships are all slaved to the core ship for interstellar travel, they pick a destination and go. They are designed to take off, land and do some local manoeuvrings not fly across the terrain like gunships. From what is understood there is an endurance issue as whatever the ships use (Reactor mass, space gasoline whatever) is designed to take off from a world, move around in space to de link from ships and then land. Some few months or years later they are designed to take off again and head for a another world. From descriptions each landfall while not exactly a one way trip is close to it without local refueling. So they could fly around with the C-Dec's like Apaches but how long they can do that before running dry of whatever power is unknown but suspected to be not much.

[Ahriman238]

-I know the SheVa isn't really supposed to make sense, but is there even a handwave as to why it's filled with so much empty space? If the first and second images are anywhere close to accurate, you could make the turret probably 1/6 as wide and not lose anything but air and wasted mass.

Not really, no. One of the design requirements was that the gun needed to be able to rotate 360 degrees, depress to -2 degrees from horizontal and elevate to 97 degrees. So at the very least you need a swivel base, and probably some serious support for the gun and the cantilevering. But it shouldn't take up THAT much space. They say several time that it's not a turret it's just a weather-shield, thus something to weather-proof the whole operation. Fair enough, but a weather shield still doesn't need hundreds of feet of empty space.

Out of universe, of ocurse, we know its so there's room for the Metal Storm turrets to be added. In universe, it's just a massive waste of space.

-Is there a reason the Posleen don't seem to make any landings after each wave arrives? From the descriptions it sounds as if they use the ships as oversized helicopter gunships sometimes, but what stops them from massing ships behind lines, lifting into space, and then dropping troops off in Nebraska to get around the US defenses?

I don't know, presumably the Posleen don't see any real difference between flying through the atmosphere and hopping up to orbit for airmobile ops. There ARE scattered globes and B-Decs that show up before and after each wave and land wherever they feel like. Even the airmobile ops are comparitively rare, with about 1 in 20 God-kings thinking to do so. Also consider that the Posleen ships are not originally their ships, and few know how to fly them beyond instructing the ship AI to do something. It is likely that most Posleen just consider the ships the things that take them to other planets. There are similar gaps caused by their lack of understanding of how space works, for instance they do not attack deep space or outer system installations, they stick to the "goldilocks band."

As for what's stopping them, the SheVa presumably couldn't touch them in orbit, but the PDF grav cannon still can, and there's at least a couple still operational by the end, being saved for a rainy day.

[Samuel]

I think the Posleen use their ships to move troops around and conduct assults in Watch on the Rhine. I'd check, but it doesn't seem to be in their free library.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Posleen using landers to move troops was rarely done, and was an anomalous occurrence by a 'one percenter' God King.

[Ahriman238]

Posleen using landers to move troops was rarely done, and was an anomalous occurrence by a 'one percenter' God King.

'Five percenter' to be pedantic. As far back as Hymn, though, the ships were taught not in the sense that they moved Posleen behind the lines, but in the sense that they flattened every obstacle that stopped the horde on foot and silenced artillery.

[Simon_Jester]

Even that seems relatively rare- no more than a few ships doing it in a battle which involves many, many thousands of Posleen (who presumably came with a lot more ships than that).