The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Ilya Muromets]

A car ride (Yukari? -_-)

D...did you just make an Azumanga Daioh reference in a Salvation War thread? The sheer unexpectedness of it just caught me by surprise and almost made me shoot the juice I was drinking out my nose.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

So in other words, the effect is only temporary, and both Caroline and Rex will start looking their true ages soon enough.

I very much doubt that.

A car ride (Yukari? -_-) or meeting causing someone to "look ten years older" is merely a figure of speech; they don't actually look ten years older, they just look really stressed out.

Meanwhile, in this case Caroline and Rex have apparently gained instant wrinkles and gray hairs..

...which makes no sense at all. Both of these take quite a lot of time to develop; even if Uriel's attack affected the follicles, there is no conceivable reason why it would also affect the hair. It might grow in grey afterwards, but unless you're willing to propose that it also affected loose hair, wigs and probably house paint, there's no reason it should have this sort of instant effect.

I was thinking about this and thought "Well, what if the place Uriel sends them to is not a bubble universe like Hell or Heaven, but a cold, dead universe caught in the grips of runaway expansion." We know that, in the Armageddon-verse, invaders from pocket universes seem to carry a localized version of their laws of physics with them. What if Uriel, at full power, is attempting to dispatch them to somewhere where entropy has reached it's maximum? Where the expansion of spacetime is ever accelerating towards a Big Rip. We could then handwave an explanation how Uriel's targets were suddenly subjected to a huge energy and temporal flow differential. So they genuinely are aging much, much faster when in Uriel's grip (Hence the "basking in the cold light of entropy" remark.)

The chief problem with this theory is the dog. Were this the case, Rex ought to have been a moldy pile of bones, though this could be explained by suggesting that Uriel was completely focused on the humans, since the animals were largely beneath his notice. So, as a result, the dog only got the "Lay down and die" part of the attack and not the "Off to a really nasty part of the multiverse" part of the attack.

EDIT: Eh, another problem with my theory. If they were both experiencing time at a greatly accelerated rate, they shouldn't look twenty years older, but dead from starvation.

[Simon_Jester]

Re: Terwynn:
If, contrary to the movie, dogs do not go to Heaven (or Hell) and do not have souls, this seems quite likely. You wouldn't be able to send a dog to a really nasty part of the multiverse any more than you could send a pile of concrete, which would make dogs effectively immune to the 'bioelectric energy' drain or whatever it is that causes extreme aging.

And it seems Habu-Zero-One has been outed as an Aurora, as previous posters have speculated. Then again, it is from a smug but silent proclamation of a character so it may be intended as open-ended.

This is just a guess, but:

Remember, Serafina is talking to a captain who obviously doesn't know a lot about the high-end secret capabilities of the US military*. He's very likely not cleared for "Top Secret code word HYPER RAVEN" or whatever the US military's hypersonic recon aircraft are called in official documents.

At the same time, she has a duty to inform the captain of more or less what's going on- that they have an SR-71 equivalent on station helping them out. So what does she say?

Well, it's an "open secret"** that the US has or had a hypersonic recon aircraft called "Aurora." So since she needs to communicate "hypersonic recon plane" to the captain without alerting the entire Pit crew to the details, she just looks at him significantly and whispers "Aurora."
________

*I find this a bit surprising, especially the part about him not knowing the terminal homing capability of his own missiles...
**I use quote marks because I don't know whether the "secret" is actually true.

[Jamesfirecat]

Wow I missed a lot over the weekend okay let take it slow and steady and catch up….

“and his skin itched with the memory of that battle. and his skin itched with the memory of that battle.”

I sure hope Uriel can tell the difference between his skin itching at the thought of battle and it doing it from being pinged with radar….

“Then it occurred to him that his skin wasn't itching as a result of his memories of the battle over El Paso, it really was burning.”

And there’s the proverbial light bulb, well I called it…


Dam it I am literally getting all teary eyed over here! It must suck beyond measure to know that something is coming and while you may be able to survive it there’s nothing you can do for your pets. I sort of know the feeling the rage, the sadness the bargaining, the denial, the acceptance, because at one point one my cats (who was really only a year or two old at the time) did something (we thought at the time it was drink antifreeze) and it shut down her kidneys. The vets shook their heads and gave her back to us so that she could have a few more happy days at home before the inevitable came… and then suddenly the nine lives factor kicked in and her kidneys started up again. No explanation but it happened and she’s alive and frisky as ever, but still you do a great job tugging heart strings as you describe people trying to do whatever they can to save their pets….

Speaking of his power, if sometime in the future we managed to replicate it, could we use it to say, sterilze food, destroy red algae, - and when our understanding and control of it becomes great enough - kill pests, exterminate vermin, destroy cancerous tumours and even purge infections? This looks like it could have great potential if we knew how it worked.

I’m not sure how well the above would work on bacterial life forms, or how tightly focused such power could be but as the worlds first guaranteed way of killing off those damn cockroaches, or whatever I have to think, yeah, that would be a pretty good idea. It would certainly be a lot quicker than a bug bomb. You get your family your pets out into the car have the angel of pest control sweep over the house and when you walk back in all the ants, termites and whatever have gone belly up, no need to hang a giant tent over your house and move into a hotel!


Oh good there’s another chapter if I’d been left hanging I would have torn my hair out…

“I hope Uriel doesn’t see them and get behind the ridgeline again."

I personally would be more worried about the guy portalling out when he sees the missiles the same way he did in Mexico…

Yeah, that's right, cook that sumbitch, I wanna find out what he tastes like

If I had to guess, chicken.


And rats no new third chapter for me, guess I’ll just have to cross my fingers, and hope it comes up soon, and you sure as the place the Baldricks come from better continue writing about Uriel and not cut away to something else with the next chapter!

[tedisbest]

How does the portal detection system still work if the Normandy was blasting the region with high-powered radar? I thought it knocked out all other signals in the area.

[Land Phish]

Re: Terwynn:
If, contrary to the movie, dogs do not go to Heaven (or Hell) and do not have souls, this seems quite likely. You wouldn't be able to send a dog to a really nasty part of the multiverse any more than you could send a pile of concrete, which would make dogs effectively immune to the 'bioelectric energy' drain or whatever it is that causes extreme aging.

Except that the dog had clearly been aged (or at least his health had deteriorated) after the fight with Uriel, so I doubt that.

And besides, can you honestly look at this cute little puppy and tell me with a straight face that dogs don't have souls?

[Sute]

There was a banging at the door. Rex ran across and barked at the intruder, itching for a fight he could get his teeth into. She grabbed his collar and opened the door. A National Guard soldier was standing there, a clipboard in his hands.

Approximately how much time passed between Uriel getting hit by the missiles and this scene? The way the scene was presented it felt like he showed up almost immediately after the attack, but that doesn't seem right. It might work better if there was some mention of how much time had passed.

I assume the soldier is there to confirm survivors, am I correct? If so, then unless Caroline's house was the first one he visited, shouldn't he have expected the aftereffects of Uriel's attack?

I was thinking about this and thought "Well, what if the place Uriel sends them to is not a bubble universe like Hell or Heaven, but a cold, dead universe caught in the grips of runaway expansion." We know that, in the Armageddon-verse, invaders from pocket universes seem to carry a localized version of their laws of physics with them. What if Uriel, at full power, is attempting to dispatch them to somewhere where entropy has reached it's maximum?

We think that humans show up in Hell (and previously, Heaven) because of some sort of artificial mechanism (don't we?). I can't see how that mechanism could be manipulated to cause reincarnation into a dead universe. A different shrinking pocket universe, sure, but not a universe that doesn't have the energy to spare for a new body or constant healing.

I think it's more likely that when Uriel tells people to die the signal he sends out interferes with whatever mechanism figures out when people die and reincarnates them in Hell.

And besides, can you honestly look at this cute little puppy and tell me with a straight face that dogs don't have souls?

I can't, but that seems like exactly the sort of dick thing Yahweh would say.

[Stuart]

It's not decided by the government, it's decided by the author of the story in this case. I was just trying to figure out your rationale is all because I did not understand the decision at all.

To give you just one quote from your previous posts.

I would think that the people in charge would want to treat it more seriously. Doesn't exactly inspire a lot of vigilance.

So, say again, whay makes you think government decisions had anything to do with it.

I refer you to the following section of the story.

The people on Earth had been cheering their armies on, and still were in some senses, but the film of the battlefields in Hell had stunned them. Especially the scenes along the Phlegethon River with the piles of mangled Baldrick corpses that went on for square mile after square mile. For perhaps the first time, they realized the incredible disparity of firepower that had existed between the human armies and the Baldricks. The sight of the dead where the Baldricks had tried to fight tanks with bronze tridents had changed opinions in a subtle but very marked way. Humans now pitied the Baldricks who had stood so little chance and had died not even understanding what it was that was killing them. It was rumored that change in attitude was also causing trouble in Hell, with the refugees from the pit unable to understand why the newly-dead from Earth should be sickened by the slaughter they’d inflicted."

That emphasizes the war was completely one-sided, people who complain about it being so are completely missing the point of the whole story, that the value and importance of science and technology massively outmatch those of faith and dogma. But, when they see the films of what our weaponry did do the daemons, it makes people realize that the daemons never stood a chance, that their warmaking capability was, by our standards, a joke. Add in the wry contempt prevalent in nicknames and the fact that "Curb-Stomp" is current slang for a completely one-sided fight and it becomes a natural popular-use nickname. I would be very surprised if a walk-over of that magnitude didn't get named a curb-stomp war.

Very suitable. The captain may not have been fully briefed on all his hardware yet (which seems damned weird if you ask me), but I think he's got the right general instincts.

Remember, its been stated he's only been in command for three days and he has a specialist air warfare crew who handle his AAW systems. Remember AEGIS and SPY-1 are very highly classified systems and their capabilities are very closely guarded (and AEGIS-ABM is even more so). This story pushed what is public domain about the system as far as it can. It'll take him weeks to run up to speed on what his ship can do. So, its quite natural that a new captain would still be learning (and finding out a lot of what he believed about AEGIS was wrong or horribly outdated).

At what... 300 or 400 watts per square meter, at range? I'm a little skeptical that you'd get that effect even at a power level orders of magnitude greater than the 'official' numbers... over time, but... unless they tune it to the 2.5 GHz band and start exciting water molecules, at which point... OW. OK. Yeah, that would work.

Firstly, SPY-1 is a software driven radar so it can pretty much be tuned to anything. As long as the electronic characteristics are on file, it can simulate anything from a navigation radar to a long-range surveillance set. However, your power estimates are way off. The peak transmission power on the original SPY-1 prototype mounted on the trials ship Norton Sound was 4,000 kW - and that was limited by the ship's electrical generating capacity. Ships like CG-47s and DDG-51s have enough generating capacity to run their systems at full power. Remember the note that the turbines were running flat out to generate enough power - running SPY-1 at full power continuously cuts a CG-47s operational range by half. What is that maximum power? Classified but we can take it for granted it's far higher than 4,000kW and for an AEGIS-ABM its higher still (note the little bit about turning a key to authorize maximum power). Now, when Uriel got fried in mid air, the system wasnt running in target tracking mode, it was operating in target designation mode. Factoid for you, AEGIS/SPY-1 does not need dedicated target tracking radars, it has them but they are back-ups and load-distributers. AEGIS/SPY-1 is perfectly capable of generating target designation beams on its own. How many? Classified but lots of them. The power down each beam depends on how many beams there are, cut the number of beams to a minimum (for obvious reasons the minimum is four) and dial three down to minimum power settings (dummy load) and concentrate the rest down the one beam in use and we're off. Now, note, target designation beam. They're called pencil beams for as reason, that's roughly how big they are. At 70 - 80 miles, that beam is tiny. How small? Classified. But, using other fire control radars as an example, we're talking a beam that's probably a couple of centimeters across at most. Let's be really generous and assume its 5 cm across, that means its area is roughly 75 sq cm and its getting a power input of way over 4,000 kW. I'll leave somebody else to do the maths. Now, note something else. This is AEGIS-ABM. It's target designation beam is powerfuil enough to illuminate a target more than 1,000 nautical miles away (how much more: classified) and detect motion irregularities in that target. That suggests that at the range in question, the beam is still relatively tiny. 80 miles is a diddle.

By the way, the appearance of Aurora is a sort of gift to the people who wanted the SR-71 back. That can't be done, there are no SR-71s that can be restored to service status. So I tossed Aurora in as a consolation prize.

Approximately how much time passed between Uriel getting hit by the missiles and this scene? The way the scene was presented it felt like he showed up almost immediately after the attack, but that doesn't seem right. It might work better if there was some mention of how much time had passed. I assume the soldier is there to confirm survivors, am I correct? If so, then unless Caroline's house was the first one he visited, shouldn't he have expected the aftereffects of Uriel's attack?

The last sequence is about an hour or two after the main attack was over. The soldier was checking for casuaties and Caroline Howarth's was the first he visited (the house I selected as hers is the first in her street). They're actually U.S. Volunteers, not National Guard by the way. I'll have to ammend that.

How does the portal detection system still work if the Normandy was blasting the region with high-powered radar? I thought it knocked out all other signals in the area.

She'd switched back from ultra-high power target designation to low-powered surveillance. Generating those ultra-high-powered pencil beams plays hell with the ship's phased array antennas and she'll probably need a refit to fix the damage. One doesn't use them unless one absolutely has to.

[Surlethe]

its area is roughly 75 sq cm and its getting a power input of way over 4,000 kW. I'll leave somebody else to do the maths.

5.3e8 W/m^2. If we're talking 10,000 kW, then on the order of 1e9 W/m^2. For comparison, the at the surface of the Sun the intensity (solar luminosity / surface area) is 6.2e7 W/m^2 (using figures from Wiki for back-of-the-envelope calcs). So: 10-100 times worse than sitting on the Sun.

[dragon]

Ouch thats alot of energy to be hit with.

[CaptainChewbacca]

That's not just an anti-angel weapon, that'd fry a regular human too, right?

[Darth Wong]

I'm having trouble believing that such a high power level would not melt the equipment.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I was thinking about this and thought "Well, what if the place Uriel sends them to is not a bubble universe like Hell or Heaven, but a cold, dead universe caught in the grips of runaway expansion." We know that, in the Armageddon-verse, invaders from pocket universes seem to carry a localized version of their laws of physics with them. What if Uriel, at full power, is attempting to dispatch them to somewhere where entropy has reached it's maximum?

We think that humans show up in Hell (and previously, Heaven) because of some sort of artificial mechanism (don't we?). I can't see how that mechanism could be manipulated to cause reincarnation into a dead universe. A different shrinking pocket universe, sure, but not a universe that doesn't have the energy to spare for a new body or constant healing.

This may be why they would experience accelerated aging. Instead of being tossed into a Fountain of Youth bubble universe, they're being forced into Cold Dark Entropy Hell, causing them to age faster, instead of becoming youthful supermen. Since Cold Dark Entropy Hell has no energy to spare for reincarnating bodies, they get drained of 'life-energy' here and suffer from the accelerated temporal effects of the bubble of Cold Dark Entropy Hell Uriel is trying to push them into.

Of course, since Cold Dark Entropy Hell has no energy available for body reincarnation, the "souls" of Uriel's victims end up as a collection of stray electrons and a few photons of ridiculously long wavelength, effectively gone forever.

As for the dog, we might suggest that he wasn't as strongly affected by the accelerated aging part of Uriel's attack due to not having a complex enough mind to support the sort of "soul" that would allow him to feel Uriel's full wrath. As a result, he only ages ten years, while his person ages twenty. Still doesn't explain how they managed not to starve to death.

[Stuart]

I'm having trouble believing that such a high power level would not melt the equipment.

Remember, there isn't a single emitter, there's thousands of them and the power output is split between them and then focussed. That's the big difference between a modern phased array radar and the old single-emitter mechanically-scanned type.

[Darth Wong]

Aging does not work that way. I could see there being after-effects, but nothing that immediate; there just wasn't enough time for such drastic large-scale changes.

I know it, you know it, now we'll have some fun with it. How could we make it appear as such? Let resisting Uriel burn a lot of energy and make his victims weary and depleted on an unprecedented scale. You've got baggy eyes, the roots of your hair start greying (visible after a few days) and you're making faces subconsiously while fighting back the urge to die.The lines of these may not etch forever but would probably last a few moments to hours to at least the time you can start to relax.

Who said it has to be actual aging? All it needs to do is simulate some of the apparent effects of aging. Sucking most of the oils and moisture out of the skin's surface layers might make even a young person look quite dramatically wrinkled. The hair turning grey could be similar: some kind of chemical leaching effect.

As for the dog, let's keep in mind that dogs don't really look much different as they age; you mostly identify a dog's age by the way he moves, not the way he looks. My dog Fuzzy was always described by strangers as a "puppy" even when he was old, because he still looked like one. It was only people who knew dogs well who could look at him and tell that he was an old dog, because they could see it in the way he moved.

If this is what happened, there could be hope for the residents of the town. Many of these effects might be temporary, and they might recuperate to something near their original state, assuming the skin damage is not so deep that it leads to permanent scarring.

[Darth Wong]

I'm having trouble believing that such a high power level would not melt the equipment.

Remember, there isn't a single emitter, there's thousands of them and the power output is split between them and then focussed. That's the big difference between a modern phased array radar and the old single-emitter mechanically-scanned type.

Ah yes, that makes more sense.

[Stuart]

I'm having trouble believing that such a high power level would not melt the equipment.

Remember, there isn't a single emitter, there's thousands of them and the power output is split between them and then focussed. That's the big difference between a modern phased array radar and the old single-emitter mechanically-scanned type.

Ah yes, that makes more sense.

Your comment was quite right though, cooling systems like this is a serious problem. All ships that carry modern electronics have to produce large volumes of chilled water for cooling purposes. That's often a serious design restriction; for example, the British Type 23 frigates can't be fitted with modern phased-array radars because their chilled water generation capacity is inadequate for the load those radars represent. That means that any such refits would have to install enlarged chilled water generation capacity and the design is too tight to allow it. This is another reason why ships carrying phased array radars have jumped up a notch in size over older designs.

[Pelranius]

Once again, great work.

I wonder if angelic resilience is enough to regenerate Uriel. After all, he did lose an eye, which doesn't seem to be regrowable.

As for the aging, it could be a combination of stress, various electromagnetic tomfoolery associated with 'telepathic' powers to mess with cells to cause wrinkling, but I admit that I still am at a loss to explain for the change in hair color.

It would been nice to use the Aurora to do a few hypersonic flybys to knock Uriel around, but flying aircraft (no matter how fast) near a hostile target that you're shooting at isn't a very good idea.

[Baughn]

Given a surface of five square centimeters, it's a fair bet that most of the energy will be absorbed by Uriel.

How much energy?

Well, if all four turbines were running flat out, that's at least 100kW of energy to distribute between the ship's systems. Since it's probably an exaggeration to claim that all of it is going down the beam, and some would be lost to scattering or be absorbed by atmospheric water, let's be very conservative and call it 50kW of effective heating.

Now, it takes approximately 74.5 joules to heat one mol of water one degree. The molar mass of water is 18 grams, so that's ~4135 joules to heat one kilogram of water one degree, or ~25kJ to heat one kilogram of water from normal body temperature to the boiling point. It takes a fair bit more to actually boil it, but of course all biological activity will long since have ceased by then. Angels aren't made of just water, but as it turns out, water has an extremely high heat capacity; any other molecules will take less energy to heat. Angels are tough, though, so call it ~12.5kJ of heating required to destroy one kilogram of tissue.

Problem is, the beam is 50kW, and covers only five square centimeters. Microwaves penetrate only a few centimeters into living tissue, and the hotter the water gets, the less penetration they have. The beam isn't going to deposit just enough energy to destroy the tissue; it's going to boil it, fast. Let's say it's heating ~50 cubic centimeters at any given time; a highly conservative number. It's probably lower.

50 cubic centimeters should be less than 50 grams of tissue, though not much less; we're lighter than water, the same probably goes for angels. That's 1/20 of a kilogram. With a 50 kW beam, it'll take approximately 1/40th of a second to heat the heated volume to the boiling point; the heat of vaporization for water is a staggering 2.27MJ/kg, though, so it'll take a further 2.27 seconds to actually boil it. This discrepancy should be well known to anyone who has tried to boil water in a pan.

Shall we take a moment to mourn Uriel, though? With those kinds of parameters, what he got hit with is no longer a target designator, microwave oven or even death ray; the energy is being dumped so fast, quite a lot of the water in his tissues would boil before much manages to escape. With an expansion of several hundred thousand times to deal with, his flesh won't be melting, or even boiling; it'll be exploding.

[Baughn]

Ach.

I just noticed, it's 75 square centimeters, not 5. Well, that becomes much less impressive then, and might actually produce the effects described in the story.

I think I'd prefer the 5-cm version for death-ray purposes, though.

[Androsphinx]

Actually, if it's 5 cm across the surface area is c.20 square cm rather than 75. It's still an impressive amount of energy, though.

[Darth Wong]

Why do you presume everything gets decided by the Government?

It's not decided by the government, it's decided by the author of the story in this case. I was just trying to figure out your rationale is all because I did not understand the decision at all.

The rationale is that it would fucking happen that way. What part of this do you not understand? Do you not understand that in a work of fiction, there is nothing wrong with portraying human beings acting like ... human beings? You're actually saying that they should not do something in this story that human beings would realistically do in that situation, because you feel it sends the wrong message. That's fucking retarded.

[Baughn]

Actually, if it's 5 cm across the surface area is c.20 square cm rather than 75. It's still an impressive amount of energy, though.

No, Stuart said 75 cm square. I just misread that as 5.

[Androsphinx]

Actually, if it's 5 cm across the surface area is c.20 square cm rather than 75. It's still an impressive amount of energy, though.

No, Stuart said 75 cm square. I just misread that as 5.

Looking back, he said both 5 cm across and 75 square cm. One is in error & I assume it's the latter (i.e. he used Pi*d^2 rather than Pi*r^2). Surlethe's figures should presumably also be quadrupled.

[Shroom Man 777]

Goddamn, they fucked Uriel up! After they TORE HIM TO PIECES with goddamn super SAMs they FUCKED HIM UP by making his SKIN MELT OFF with goddamn RADAR! Holy shit, man! That totally sucks - for him! Hah! Oh man, oh man. Between "sonar pings in port to kill the fuck out of saboteur divers" and "melting people miles away with full-power radar" Jesus Christ the Runaway Defense Budget has definitely created complete technological badasses. Oh man.

MURRICA - FUCK YEAH!

I wonder if the Russkies have equivalent to these systems.

AMYWAY - man, this must so be shit for Uriel. A whole lot of horrible things are going to happen to him now.