The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[Blayne]

However, the basic point is that handling the arrivals isn't an impossible task, its large certainly but it's within human abilities. The reception area itself is basically equivalent to three or four modern hospitals with a very rapid throughput of patients. So, everybody gets more or less the same treatment when they arrive, its what happens afterwards that gets awkward. The big redeeming feature is also the same as the big problem - sheer numbers. There are large numbers of humans arriving (plus an even larger number being freed from the pit and that has immense problems associated with it) but that same number also provides a large workforce to handle the problems. That's a key point as well, there's a large workforce but there's also a massive amount of work to be done. The problem is going to come in the future when that workload begins to ease down (the roads and cities and airports etc are all built. What do we do now?) It's rather like the end-game in "Civilization" where the cities are complete, there's no wonders left to build and one's left with cities that have nothing left to spend their resources on.

Reminds me of 1984 where the collective manufacturing output of each superstate was focused into military production which would get destroyed and keep the people distracted as anything else would threaten the survival of the Party.

[phongn]

Would like to point out 'Second Life' is probably a trademark of whichever game company that created the hellish horrible game.

Trademarks are not universal in scope.

[Ast]

When only one missile is fired, it kind of gives away a submarine's position and if it chooses to fire its remaining missiles sometime later, the element of surprise has already been given away and the enemy now knows the sub's general location and will be going after it, thus decreasing the chances of success of the later launches.

If all are launched at the same time, the enemy's reaction times will be shorter, and the enemy has to deal with multiple missiles, so the chances of a successful attack will be higher.

Yeah, but they are not fighting another country with lots of cities to wipe out here, but a single beast.
And that beast happens to be on their home ground no less.
So a single warhead should do the job and in case of a miss the other warheads remain for further tries.

Shooting everything at once isn't really necessary nor sensible in this situation and the sub's captain should be aware of that.

The only thing that would prevent him from having doubts about what he just did (if there is a way to have no doubts about launching several nuclear warheads) would be that the simultaneous launch of all warheads is somehow hardcoded into the system.

[Blayne]

Would like to point out 'Second Life' is probably a trademark of whichever game company that created the hellish horrible game.

Trademarks are not universal in scope.

If you create a television show called "Second Life" and there's a game called Second Life the game company can sue if there's a reasonable chance that the television show's name distracts profits from the game, I forget the law term but it is common knowledge.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, but they are not fighting another country with lots of cities to wipe out here, but a single beast.
And that beast happens to be on their home ground no less.
So a single warhead should do the job and in case of a miss the other warheads remain for further tries.

Shooting everything at once isn't really necessary nor sensible in this situation and the sub's captain should be aware of that.

You’re forgetting that the captain thought he was attacking the beast in the narrow gap between it leaving Jerusalem, and arriving at Tel Aviv. That’s a distance of only about 30 miles and the Israeli missiles are slow subsonic weapons. He had to fire more then one to be sure that at least one would initiate, no weapon is 100% reliable. If he waited all the way until the first shot failed, there might not be enough time for another shot before the beast is in Tel Aviv.

Plus if all the missiles are targeted on the same spot then the collateral damage will be no different if he fired one or he fired all five. The first missile to explode will destroy the other four, or at worst they’d explode at the exact same spot. This will not increase the radius of destruction. You don’t take half measures with nuclear bombs and in this case from the sub captains point of view firing all five really would be no worse then firing just one. But its much more certain to accomplish the objective.

[Valiran]

Yeah, but they are not fighting another country with lots of cities to wipe out here, but a single beast.
And that beast happens to be on their home ground no less.
So a single warhead should do the job and in case of a miss the other warheads remain for further tries.

Shooting everything at once isn't really necessary nor sensible in this situation and the sub's captain should be aware of that.

You’re forgetting that the captain thought he was attacking the beast in the narrow gap between it leaving Jerusalem, and arriving at Tel Aviv. That’s a distance of only about 30 miles and the Israeli missiles are slow subsonic weapons. He had to fire more then one to be sure that at least one would initiate, no weapon is 100% reliable. If he waited all the way until the first shot failed, there might not be enough time for another shot before the beast is in Tel Aviv.

Plus if all the missiles are targeted on the same spot then the collateral damage will be no different if he fired one or he fired all five. The first missile to explode will destroy the other four, or at worst they’d explode at the exact same spot. This will not increase the radius of destruction. You don’t take half measures with nuclear bombs and in this case from the sub captains point of view firing all five really would be no worse then firing just one. But its much more certain to accomplish the objective.

That also brings up another point, only the lieutenant knew where those missiles would hit. To everyone else, programming in the coordinates was just a string of seemingly random numbers.

[PainRack]

The way it works is this. The death rate works out at 1.8 persons per second arriving through the Minos Gate (say a maximum of two persons per second to allow for surges and so on). They get grabbed by the Minos gate work teams (originally troops now Second Life Humans working in shifts) and put on a conveyor. That takes them out through the Human Minos Gate to Earth where they rumble across some open ground before going into a second gate that takes them to the reception area on the Phelan Plain. Once in the reception area, they are whisked off the belt by another work gang and placed in a hospital bed to recover. That takes between ten and twenty minutes. Then, when they wake up, their personal details and skill sets are taken down, entered into the computer system and then they are returned to their parent nation for care and employment. The whole arrivals process takes about an hour so the reception facility requires a total of 7,200 beds which is an entirely practical number. Originally the staff of the reception area were First Life humans but as more Second Life nurses and doctors become available, they're taking over running the place.

Do the gates control when second lifers pop up? If not, we will expect pulses of people coming into the reception area at times. This may overload reception capacity.

Apart from that, looking after people once they've arrived is a national responsibility (unless the person says otherwise). So each country is building facilities and accommodation to look after their own arrivals. These are refugee camps in every sense of the phrase (building them being one of the "road gang" jobs. They'll vary from the U.S. facilities which would be basic but reasonably comfortable to third world facilities that would be very basic indeed. Obvious problems there. There's a lot of details that need fleshing out here whoch is the subject of the last book.

That sounds like a receipe for certain disaster. Its hard to imagine Chad or the Sudan being able to set up refugee camps in hell.
If the administrators are humans as opposed to second lifers, the technological restraints alone would be prohibitive.

[Sea Skimmer]

That also brings up another point, only the lieutenant knew where those missiles would hit. To everyone else, programming in the coordinates was just a string of seemingly random numbers.

Yeah and that’s made possible by the Israeli submarine being a relatively small diesel boat built in Germany, with a limited crews and limited space. It isn’t a big cruiser sized strategic missile submarine designs with a 100 man crew onboard. So at least as far as the story goes they aren’t enforcing a two man rule regarding nuclear weapons command and control. We also don’t know just how many people are in on it, it could be several members of the boats crew was well as people higher up the Israeli chain of command.

[Saint_007]

Hey guys.

Yay! new parts up...

*reads through*



...holy SHIT... we lost a city? Crap.

So yeah, I'd imagine that whoever was responsible for the targetting coordinates gets a good, long stay in a gulag, or wherever the Israelis are keeping the retrieved Nazi Holocaust criminals.

I salute the Israeli commander. He sacrificed his city, seat of government, and a major industrial center so that Israel's enemies don't have any reason to complain. May the Israeli victims form a wonderful new homeland in the plains of Hell (and for some reason, that still sounds wrong).

The only reason Obama can't just replace the planned Thunder Run with a Nuclear Barrage is because, thanks to the non-Euclidian nature of Heaven, coordinates for nuclear missiles won't work. Seriously, Michael and Yahweh need a ****ing wake-up call. In the form of the mushroom cloud of a 1 MT yield nuke.

Oh, and Jester? Yahweh isn't obfusticating stupidity - he's just plain stupid. The only reason he rules Heaven is because he has a loyal, brainwashed secret police all over the place. Remember how he was planning to send the legions of angelic hosts to overwhelm the humans, and Michael had to restrain himself from screaming at how utterly stupid the plan was? Hell, if He truly was that smart, he would have realized that humanity wasn't so easily cowed anymore and just left it at the Message.

EDIT: Whoops, my bad. It's Blayne, not Simon_Jester, who suggested that Yahweh might only be obfusticating stupidity. Still, the guy is so deluded he actually believes what he says is the truth.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Yaweh also rules heaven by virtue of the fact that he could annihilate 100 angels with a flash of his godly power. He's far above the angels of heaven the same way Lucifer was above the lords of hell.

[Tandrax218]

Cant they just send a nuke in a form of a ruise missle through a portal and set it to cruise for 30 seconds in heaven and then detonate????

[Kodiak]

If you create a television show called "Second Life" and there's a game called Second Life the game company can sue if there's a reasonable chance that the television show's name distracts profits from the game, I forget the law term but it is common knowledge.

But if you have a book called Armageddon! where people talk about their "Second Life" nobody is going to care. I read a sci-fi book once where people moved through transporter-esque machines called "Doors" and I doubt they got sued by the band.

[Buritot]

Whee, finally! After 3 months break from Salvation War...

*reads*

I'm somewhat disappointed all four missiles could be intercepted. I don't know the likelyhood or chances of that, mind you, but from a dramatic point of view it was kind of obvious. The one getting through the inappropriate defences of Tel Aviv was likely, but one of the others glassing a city would have been dramatic. I'm kind of Drosselmeyer in that regard...

Anyways, how does the Minos gate deal with mass deaths? Statistically speaking Stuart said 1.8 persons per second, or 2 for catastrophic rises or somesuch, but... Sorry, it's not making sense. Unless the gate increases in size for an increased output or literally hurling them out its logistics is flawed, unless it's buffering people and chunks them out with (arbitrarily chosen value) 2.5 pps until the buffer is empty.
Incidentally, if Tel Aviv had 70k instant deaths the buffer would empty after 70 ks (19 1/2 hours).

[Edward Yee]

So yeah, I'd imagine that whoever was responsible for the targetting coordinates gets a good, long stay in a gulag, or wherever the Israelis are keeping the retrieved Nazi Holocaust criminals.

That would be the fifth columnist lieutenant who fed false coordinates to the WCO (who by procedure it seems was supposed to be ignorant as to which targets they corresponded to) and a false situation report to the CO who made the only viable decision based on that information.

Just had an eerie thought of the possibility that maybe Michael-lan's scheming went deeper than simply appearing and recruiting Israeli Navy personnel and went as far as being responsible for the nuclear weapons handling procedures that left the WCO and as many non-conspirators as possible out of the loop? Here's hoping that the message from al-Zahari got out in time, as it appears that the Arrow ABM failed...

Replying to Tandrax218 -- cruising for 30 seconds in the general direction of what? Even now after the attempted assassination of Michael and the Tekuma launch, nuclear missile launches "at" Heaven still seem to be a last resort.

EDIT: Possibility, not probability -- when I originally typed that I'd inadvertently skipped a good bit of the subsequent posts after the chapter.

[Stuart]

Do the gates control when second lifers pop up? If not, we will expect pulses of people coming into the reception area at times. This may overload reception capacity.

The figure I gave was an average for an average Earth day, used to calculate the system capacity at the receive end. There is no buffer so the system is about to get seriously overloaded (two nukes going off over cities and the deaths in LA mean about a quarter of a million people are likely to have died in a few hours.

That sounds like a receipe for certain disaster. Its hard to imagine Chad or the Sudan being able to set up refugee camps in hell.
If the administrators are humans as opposed to second lifers, the technological restraints alone would be prohibitive.

I would think that a lot of aid gets handed out for that purpose. As I said the one good thing is that there's no labor shortage to build things.

[open_sketchbook]

Not to mention that many of the concerns of modern refugee camps, like getting food and clean water in, combating diseases, and so forth are not nessesary; these camps could be little more than tents with token security.

[Stuart]

Just looking at command and control system and location of the Israeli sub, wouldn't it been plotted electronically?

No, the missile carrying-subs aren't tracked for obvious reasons. Their position on the status board is a matter of reports at regular intervals. On between those reports, the position is unknown.

[Stuart]

It seems likely that the nuclear strike was the work of the "second conspiracy." But that raises an interesting question: how did this conspiracy know who to subvert? The odds that they'd have agents in position to do that are insanely low unless they've subverted much of the human race (in which case their presence should have become known by now, to the readers if not human leaders in-setting), or unless they specifically targeted people who might one day have the authority to launch nuclear missiles. But that implies a great deal more knowledge of human weapons and organization than anyone else in Heaven or Hell has shown.

The secret to infiltrating an organization is not to put a large number of people in. That ends up being detected too easily. It's to suborn the head of the personnel department. He then puts the right people in the right place. That's what was done here. The conspiracy(ies) didn't subvert somebody who might one day have the authority to launch nukes, they subverted somebody high up in personnel who put a fellow-conspirator into the right place. Much easier.

Do we have reason to believe that this was factor in the USS Liberty bombing? I hadn't heard of it, but my knowledge of the incident is extremely limited.

Yes, we do. The process described was a key factor in the chain of blunders that led to the attack on Liberty. That's what so gut-wrenchingly unforgiveable about that attack. If it had been planned for a specific national purpose I could understand and forgive it (people - and nations - do things in their professional capacity that they would find abhorrant in their personal capacity). But they didn't. The attack took place because the people in charge were a bunch of arrogant, supercilious, boorish retards with delusions of grandeur (that's the polite version). They made blunder after blunder, mistake after mistake and followed each example of professional incompetence with a worse one. The bloody MTBs didn't even keep an attack plot! And having ballsed up in way's unparallelled in the history of the profession of arms, they didn't even fix the problems. They lost Eilat for exactly the same reasons and damned near ran a missile craft aground in Alexandria Harbor in October '73 by repeating the same mistakes.

[Simon_Jester]

Please excuse my ignorance, but are these weapons really that easy to intercept that all four of them were destroyed?

The Israeli nukes are relatively slow-flying cruise missiles fired through torpedo tubes, not ballistic missiles that go zooming through the upper stratosphere at many thousands of miles an hour. So they can be intercepted and shot down by jet fighters if those fighters are in the right position.

It seems likely that the nuclear strike was the work of the "second conspiracy." But that raises an interesting question: how did this conspiracy know who to subvert? The odds that they'd have agents in position to do that are insanely low unless they've subverted much of the human race (in which case their presence should have become known by now, to the readers if not human leaders in-setting), or unless they specifically targeted people who might one day have the authority to launch nuclear missiles. But that implies a great deal more knowledge of human weapons and organization than anyone else in Heaven or Hell has shown.

The secret to infiltrating an organization is not to put a large number of people in. That ends up being detected too easily. It's to suborn the head of the personnel department. He then puts the right people in the right place. That's what was done here. The conspiracy(ies) didn't subvert somebody who might one day have the authority to launch nukes, they subverted somebody high up in personnel who put a fellow-conspirator into the right place. Much easier.

Exactly. That's kind of what I was getting at. It's not plausible that they got someone who might one day have the authority to launch nukes, because that would require a shotgun approach and practically guarantee detection. But even subverting the head of the personnel department would require the conspiracy(ies) to be much better clued in on human organization than anyone else in Hell or Heaven, with the possible exception of Michael.

Unless I'm grossly underestimating how obvious this technique would be...

[Pelranius]

Just looking at command and control system and location of the Israeli sub, wouldn't it been plotted electronically?

No, the missile carrying-subs aren't tracked for obvious reasons. Their position on the status board is a matter of reports at regular intervals. On between those reports, the position is unknown.

I wasn't quite thinking of continuous tracking, I was wondering why they didn't have a computer screen that they updated from the status reports to show where the subs went.

[phongn]

For anyone wanting a somewhat more detailed look at the Liberty incident referenced above, Stuart has an essay available on his board.

[barricade]

I am curious, and I honestly can't remember if it was brought up but....
Can a 2nd Lifer get a 1st Lifer pregnant, or vice versa? Because sooner or later, someone's going to try it.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I am curious, and I honestly can't remember if it was brought up but....
Can a 2nd Lifer get a 1st Lifer pregnant, or vice versa? Because sooner or later, someone's going to try it.

I don't think humans are reproductively viable in their second-life.

[Valiran]

I am curious, and I honestly can't remember if it was brought up but....
Can a 2nd Lifer get a 1st Lifer pregnant, or vice versa? Because sooner or later, someone's going to try it.

I don't think humans are reproductively viable in their second-life.

I shudder at the thought of trying to figure that one out.

BTW, I just did a Google search on The Salvation War to see if it had gotten any media attention. I found this dreck instead. Will someone please give these folks what's coming to them?

[Edward Yee]

I am curious, and I honestly can't remember if it was brought up but....
Can a 2nd Lifer get a 1st Lifer pregnant, or vice versa? Because sooner or later, someone's going to try it.

I don't think humans are reproductively viable in their second-life.

Just like barricade said, if only "FOR SCIENCE!" Let's just hope that they don't feel like keeping it a secret?

*Looks at the events recounted in the essay* Sadly... I'm kinda at that level of organization, but at the same time I like to think that I have more potential to learn than... well, what's described. At the same time OHGAWDITALLHURTZ