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In other news, I'm probably the only person here who's mad enough to mix Evangelion and Halo together. I just needed to do something, anything to exorcise the writer's block demons that seem to have taken up permanent residence in my head.

Future Cananaan posts may or may not involve Asuka cultists and/or decrepit Titans fighting giant monsters.

Titans would be good. You can never have too many Titans.

Well, unless you're worried about parking space...

Ha! Nice going for Dr. Susie. [Chuck]Too good for 'im I say![/Chuck]

Great posts guise! Dr. Susies!

CANANAAN! I feel pumped for writing some Kingdom of Heaven. If that Instrumentalitification thing decimates their planet, this means AL-HUMUNGUS can go trawling the wasteland with his postapocalyptic hordes!

Dammit I accidentally posted my character notes twice in a row.


Sorry guys. False alarm.

So, Langley, what's gonna happen to that place in Cananaan?

Shroom Man 777 wrote:

So, Langley, what's gonna happen to that place in Cananaan?

Terminal Dogma will be destroyed, along with everything else in an 89 km radius. Ms. Shikinami and the three technicians will make a VERY narrow getaway, as will a few of the Byzantine and Klavostani soldiers. That particular Cananaan colony world will be under the influence of a nuclear winter effect for the foreseeable future. I just need to get around to writing that part.

Oooh! Then the Klavostani and Byzantine Cananaanites can blame each other! Heightening interstellar tensions in and around the region! PERFECT! Asuka cultists FTW!

Steve wrote:

Simon_Jester wrote:

PeZook wrote:Man, those Pendletonians must've been really desperate to hire this guy

No doubt they were. One wonders what Governor Tarkington's policies are...

Actually, by this time he's got a multi-national committee looking over his shoulder (Hiigarans and ESR, maybe Ascendancy if Baerne wants to sign on) so his more aggressive policy aims will not necessarily be approved.

Baerne wants to sign on, but has made the mistake of appointing a bloodthirsty slaver-hater to the committee. If Tarkington wants to nuke the planet from orbit and then dump enough salt on the planet to create a salt winter on top of the nuclear one, he'll have my vote. Just to make things interesting.

Master_Baerne wrote: Baerne wants to sign on, but has made the mistake of appointing a bloodthirsty slaver-hater to the committee. If Tarkington wants to nuke the planet from orbit and then dump enough salt on the planet to create a salt winter on top of the nuclear one, he'll have my vote. Just to make things interesting.

Heh.

Anyway, since Teleros and A-Wing are not around but I'm sure would be interested, I'm going to presume Altacar and the ESR signed onto the commission as well. Don't think Akhlut's dinos would, too far away and little point of interest. So there'd be five states on the committee and contributing various amounts of funds and personnel to Pendletonian reconstruction.

Yeah, like we're going to leave unexploded nuclear ordnance laying around.

I consider that entire post non-canon and having never happened.

Steve wrote:Yeah, like we're going to leave unexploded nuclear ordnance laying around.

Considering that they were fired from orbit and had orbital velocity plus whatever velocity the railguns imparted on them, it's going to be mighty hard to recover supposed railgun 'duds' from the deep holes they buried themselves in.

It's worth noting in 1990/91, we simply gave up on recovering the special deep penetrators we built for the Gulf War and tested out west. We basically stopped after digging 50-60 feet with a backhoe and just left the bombs in the earth.

That said, if the aforementioned penetrator round is nuclear tipped, people will go to a bit more effort to extract it, since if it goes off it's going to either blow a big fucking crater a la Plowshare and throw umpty zillion tons of radioactive crap in the air, or it's going to cause a big nasty subsidence event.

Either way, you're not going to give up just because your poor widdle backhoe crews are getting tired.

In any case, the post may be noncanonical; the Technocracy of Umeria neither knows nor cares. It is nonetheless amusing.

MKSheppard wrote:

Steve wrote:Yeah, like we're going to leave unexploded nuclear ordnance laying around.

Considering that they were fired from orbit and had orbital velocity plus whatever velocity the railguns imparted on them, it's going to be mighty hard to recover supposed railgun 'duds' from the deep holes they buried themselves in.

It's worth noting in 1990/91, we simply gave up on recovering the special deep penetrators we built for the Gulf War and tested out west. We basically stopped after digging 50-60 feet with a backhoe and just left the bombs in the earth.

Yes, because the technology available in the freaking 35th Century is going to be so similar to the early 1990s.

Oh, and just what were the occupation forces being "paid off" with? Worthless Pendletonian script?

I'm sure a few (or even just one) nukes could conceivably slip out of detection. It's not like the occupying forces don't have other priorities, and sifting through the wreckage of two nuked-out cities will be a total pain in the butts. If the Shepistanis had, I dunno, lead-cased nuke "mines" just to make them even more harder to detect, it could be conceivable that one (or more) of them could be missed.

This was part of the story, the Sum of All Fears!

Fine whatever.

Uh, how deep would it go?

Hard to say... quite possibly so deep that you'd get an impromptu subterranean nuclear test, with the blast not really reaching the surface. Then again, these are Sheppo nuclear bunker busters, so they're probably designed to go just deep enough to blow the maximum amount of tasty fallout into the air by excavating a really big crater. If you need to dig deeper, you just throw more of them.

Steve wrote:Yes, because the technology available in the freaking 35th Century is going to be so similar to the early 1990s.

It's kind of irrelevant; even with the tools we had today we'd probably put a lot more work into retrieving a dud nuclear bunker buster than we would into retrieving a dud conventional bunker buster. The nuclear round will make a much bigger crater, with much larger side effects, after all.

Oh, and just what were the occupation forces being "paid off" with? Worthless Pendletonian script?

Dunno. Gold bricks? If you don't simply confiscate the property of every member of the plantation-owner class on the planet (the commie Umerian way!), there will be people left around with sufficient assets to pay bribes, should they deem it necessary to do so.

The real question is whether the Anglian authorities are, on the whole, corrupt enough for bribing them to be a safe way to achieve objectives. If they're usually honest, trying to bribe one is more likely to get your ass landed in jail regardless of what you were planning than it is to let you get away with the plan.

My impression is that since Anglia is a First Galaxy nation and not a shithole, by and large trying to bribe local Anglian authorities is a risky proposition.

I'm sure some situation could be conceived where six bombs were missed by clean-up crews. Maybe there's a lot of armed resistance. Maybe this city is the Pendleton equivalent of Fallujah, i.e. a place you don't go unless you have a lot of military guys with you, which would make cleaning up the post-nuclear holocaust mess a lot more difficult than it otherwise might've been -- so things got missed, or the Pendleton version of ODESSA thought they were simply duds and planned to extract the nukes for use as super-IEDs... Bribing some local officials with gold or diamonds or whatever to stay away from neighborhood XYZ whilst obfuscating the reason why. I wouldn't find that hard to believe at all.

Edited it to just one bomb, with the sheppoes admitting that several nukes MAY have been fired with wrong time fuze settings.

I say a Shep-nuke could conceivably go undetected if it was specifically designed to linger after the war and detonate afterwards, like modern day cluster bombs. Especially if the bomb was designed to be hidden from sensors, with lead lining or something, ala modern day plastic land mines. These are the Shepistanis we're talking about, and I'm sure they're not above using technologies like this to leave concealed thermonukes lying around in abandoned warzones.

Obviously seeding the place with bajillions of nuke-mines would make them more detectable, because there's so many of them. But if the Sheps used them sparingly, then some could slip by.

Doesn't matter, Dogadishu and Eel are already wastelands anyway!

Uh...I'd imagine you can get quite a lot of useful things on Pendleton for Pendletonian money, so it's hardly worthless ; Anglian grunts stuck occupying some craphole in the middle of galactic nowhere would probably find plenty of uses for it, along with favors and simple barter. Higher ups could be bribed with collector's items or Anglian pounds which I'm sure can be acquired in qunatity by the sufficiently wealthy.

It depends what the rich Pendies are trying to do ; I'd imagine corruption would be mostly related to things like overlooking charges, not running ID checks, not confiscating assets, acquiring false identities, etc.

It's probably made easier because Pendleton was a XX/XXI century world and will still use hard cash for a while before it gets a proper financial infrastructure set up so that Tarkington can just elliminate cash and thus make bribery much more difficult (you can't really slip a wad of cash into a soldier's pocket if all you have are constantly tracked debit cards...)

As for nukes, it's not like the Anglians will even know precisely how many were fired and how many detonated and how many were recovered. With 35th century sensors they'd probably have a good enough idea, but missing one nuke out of hundreds is not really implausible.

I would, however, imagine they'd spend considerable time running around with ground-penetrating sensors anyway for reasons everybody stated and which are really quite obvious.

EDIT: Also, diamonds and gold are very likely to be extremely cheap in our universe. Especially the diamonds: we don't have stupidly massive diamond conglomerates to artificially inflate prices.

PeZook wrote:EDIT: Also, diamonds and gold are very likely to be extremely cheap in our universe. Especially the diamonds: we don't have stupidly massive diamond conglomerates to artificially inflate prices.

Sure. Point is, there will be commodities of intrinsic value such that you can get real money for them. Unless you confiscate all the wealth on the planet, you can't prevent there from being people rich enough to bribe the authorities if the authorities are at all bribable.

Also, there are other ways to bribe authorities. You can bribe them with your cooperation: "Stay away from Neighborhood A and I will help you rout out the guerillas in Neighborhood B." You can bribe them with an offer of alliance: "Stay away from Neighborhood A and I will use my influence to ensure that it stays quiet and you receive no trouble in the surrounding neighborhoods." You can indirectly bribe them by making contacts with people who have more authority in the occupying state than the local occupation officials do: "I am buddy-buddy with Space Halliburton, and they want you to stay away from Neighborhood A."

All these methods may or may not work, of course, but they exist.

My foot's coming down this time. Before I've bargained and relented but I'm done with that. Shep said nothing about secret delay-fused nukes when he launched the bombardment initially, he didn't come to me asking me if he could run with this before just posting it, and it beggars belief that over six months occupation forces would not invest the time and resources necessary to ensure there were no undetonated nuclear weapons in the area and to safely remove them, especially since this is not 1990-1991 and we're not dealing with conventional explosives; this is a space operatic sci-fi setting with a tech base to match and we're dealing with atomic weapons.

Ergo, there are no unexploded nuclear devices to initiate and Shep's post is null and void as a real event. Would make a fun event for a dark holocomedy series, though...

Didn't you guys want a mod for these games? And didn't pretty much everyone agree on Steve? Why is it when he feels a post is unjustified and should be retconned, then, that everyone fights him over it?

But if we're going to play this game, I could point out that A) given the Shepistanis nuked the place against orders in the first place, B) the Anglians are theoretically attempting to win hearts and minds, C) given the amounts of ordnance dropped the chances of UXO are high, D) the consequences of a nuke going off would be a Very Bad Thing and E) the Anglians are not idiots...it would thus make plenty of sense for them to give the area the Sheppos nuked extra special attention at rebuilding. Thus making it more likely that they would have found the device before it went off. Because they were looking really hard in that area, you see.

Of course we could go around like this endlessly. But the end fact is this: Steve is mod, he made a ruling, it's done and over with. If you don't like it, take a page from the SDN Rulebook and PM him asking for clarification or whatever, rather than having an argument in here. Because I'd just as soon not read pages and pages of OOC arguments again. And if he doesn't agree, live with it. If you don't like having a mod, then we can discuss having no mods for SDNW5 or whatever. But we agreed to a mod for SDNW4 so live with it.