A bit of analysis: Posleen War

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-21 04:51pm

@Connor
The o.3 c and the 3x2 mm rounds both come direct from the text. I tend to agree with you, about it being too fast, with too high a rate of fire. For vs. debates, anyone challenging Posleen-verse humanity would be facing the same sort of overkill, unless they nuke them from orbit.

The number of bullets they shoot is a factor both because they run out of the ammunition on hand quickly, and strategically they use up their units ammo faster. Also, because each round that doesn't hit several Posleen (and there will be many, especially when you use a thousand rounds to try and kill fifty) are going to shred the surrounding area. In one of David Weber's early books, the Apocalypse Troll IIRC, a character from the future had a pistol with nuclear potential, and it was treated as an object of awe and dread. Here we have weapons that aren't much weaker being treated like super-soakers.

In Gust Front, grav guns are explicity stated to be recoiless. Nothing is mentioned of the mechanism behind its recoiless nature, but could there be one besides magic, umm... forcefields and QUANTUM!?

There are dates on every chapter head, the Darhel contacted earth in march 2001, and the events of the first book cover until just after the victory at Diess, November 02. The first five battle globes land in Oct 04, and the events of Dance with the Devil and Hell's Faire take place over the course of a single year, 2009. They were actually meant to be a single book.

@MkShep
Yeah, I remember that. The armor is even tougher than suits, but then its two feet thick, and still an easy kill for an HVM. Apparently, the regular human armies have been using GalTech minefields since PosleenFall.

I'm not going to touch on the Russia/Canada thing yet. I may have to start drinking heavily first.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2011-09-21 05:14pm

Connor MacLeod wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:I think he retconned that.
It wouldnt surprise me. I like the Posleen series, don't get me wrong, but the series is one giant series of retcons after another. It sorta starts breaking suspension of disbelief for me the way Honorverse space combat does post-podnaught (I can't quite wrap my head around the resource wastage they use in sheer numbers of missiles.)

Hmm?

Yeah, I suppose- they write off something like 10-100 tons of mass per missile fired, right? The production capacity it takes to make it happen must be staggering, as is the fact that they can do it without crashing GDP. They've got to be strip-mining entire asteroid fields, and if there's rare earths and whatnot in the hardware... hell, I'd be surprised if they could do it at all without transmutation of the elements. Although I dunno- not sure what the numbers look like.

But then, plenty of space opera features stuff like that. Part of the draw of the subgenre is the sheer scale on which resources are made available, and on which the creation and destruction takes place.

To be honest though I'm complaining about a rather minor facet of the whole "resource allocation/usage" aspect of the novels themselves. It's not so much that its bad per se - I could accept "bad" if it were, say, a satire on the American procurement system, but the way it's handled in the books in all aspects is positively schizophrenic. One novel things are impossible, the next they suddnely become possible (like the way later novels decided to introduce the Abrams.) Some more consistency on that score would have been nice.

Do remember that A Hymn Before Battle was Ringo's first novel- he probably wasn't entirely sure there would ever be a sequel, so the sequel probably wasn't planned out in as much depth as it could have been.

I don't think that he really ruled out tanks in the first novel- it was just that they didn't have the advantages they would against an Earthly opponent because effective antitank weapons are more common among the Posleen, so that fighting the tanks anywhere but from berms and hull-down positions at long range becomes unsurvivable. There's a lot of logic to the idea of mass-producing Terrestrial weapons to fight the Posleen, though, so as to reduce the need for GalTech that is not and can never be supplied in adequate quantity.

The justification, not saying I approve, seems to be that basically all GalTech weapons are handmade prototypes. The difficulty of making them has a lot more to do with availability (since they're made in specialized tanks of nanites controlled by psychics) than it does with weight or machine tool steps or the things that govern Earthly manufacture. To the point where making a hundred thousand ludicrously overpowered rifles was actually more viable than making a hundred million equivalents of the Posleen 1mm railgun to arm the entire militaries of Earth.
I vaguely recall that too, so you have a point, but then again I was probably 'missing the forest for the trees' - it's that damn schizo way tech gets used in this series and the way shit gets introduced or applied. I mean if we really are honest, there was nothing wrong with all the basic weapons the humans had in dealing with the posleen, barring the problems with the saucers and landers.

I was thinking about this last nite - do they really even *need* large numbers of railguns or lasers, except perhaps as anti-vehicle weapons (if that?) All they would really need would be fancy explosive ammunition (which, given what they could provide to the ACS, could be provided for SHEVAs, etc.shouldn't be an issue, especially if they use only a fraction of the antimatter that goes into powering the ridiculously-overpowered grav guns.) for grenades or bullets- but if they put say a tiny particle of antimatter inside a 5.56 mm bullet or something, wouldn't that help enhance the kill-power or something? And if not for regular rifles, then they could adopt something akin to the 20mm micro grenade launchers that have been proposed.

Hell the ACS suits worked perfectly fine as grenade launching platforms iwhtout the grav guns (mortar yield grenades with a 1.2 km range? seems okay to me.) I could have bought that.

I think I see the argument- the grav guns are overkill. But what they'd really want to improve the defenses of Earth would be, yes, lots of antilander defense weapons. The Planetary Defense Centers were supposed to have that job, but were not completed in time (Darhel screwing over); nothing short of the heaviest Posleen God King weapons or their GalTech equivalents could do the job of lander-hunting.

And what you'd really need to optimize the defense is that lander-hunting capability, the ability to cause massive attrition to the Posleen whenever they try to use air or space mobility.

Connor MacLeod wrote:It's more the lack of internal consistency that bugs me, rather than the poor use of physics terminology. That's not uncommon for sci fi, but it's pretty grating in this novel. Like in book 4 when they suddenly decide thy can use mass nukespamming to attack the Posleen - I'm pretty sure that was declared "impossible" early on.

More like... it works, but not well. You need to use a LOT of nukes to make sure some of the nukes get through, and Posleen are radiation-resistant enough that the fallout zones won't stop them as well as they would a normal army. It's not that they're physically immune to nuclear attack, it's that nuclear attack isn't a "push button end war" option with them the way it would be against a human opponent of comparable technological prowess.

It's possible there was Darhel intervention there which hampered things - there was supposed to be alot of Darhel meddling which fucked things up for the humans, but again thats where things start to break down for me. I can't quite buy the idea that these super Darhel manipulators have such fine and absolute control that they could fuck things up so precsiely as to contrive them the way Ringo wanted it. It just seems so artificial. And that everyone would be totally, absolutely unaware of this...

Yeah. Although honestly, humans are starting to recognize the problem as early as Gust Front- that the allocation of resources needed for their defense isn't what they were promised, for reasons that aren't making a lot of sense.

I remember some changing numbers for tha ttoo. The velocity being around 2 kms or so in book 3 but I think it hit 10 km/s in book 4. Or something.

2 km/s is at least not totally batshit in the absence of GalTech. To get ten, you need elf magic.

This is where the schizo aspect bugs me again. I could buy some of the absurdity and stupidity (like the grav gun) being a satire on say, American Military Procurement, but it never really consistnetly comes across as that - they seem to think it's actually a useful weapon, and it never gets replaced despite all the flaws it has (like the "running out of antimatter and having t power it off the suit.' - that wouldn't have been a problem had ACS suits been designed as grenade platforms, for example.)

As a "serious" weapon (or even one conceived of as serious) it doesn't stand up either given its flaws and its grossly overinflated power vs infantry (yes it blows up a posleen like 100-50 kilos of TNT per hit. that IS overkill when regular infantry can kill them with standard human rifles too)

Well, it wouldn't be overkill if they were used as semiautomatic weapons- pull trigger once, blow the shit out of that group. Shift target, blow the shit out of that group. With even a modest number of riflemen on the line, you could make this weapon stop a basically unlimited attack force, because you can cover a front too large for them to cross in lethal blast footprints.

It's a desirable weapon, but not at the rate of fire described, if you ask me.

It just comes across as the sort of weapon some retarded fanboy would dream up just to have some bizarre 300-esque "Last stand" scenario involving small numbers with ridiculous firepower against massive hordes (Which, ironically, we get in Helle's Faire.)

Yep, that's the ticket...

MKSheppard wrote:Oh god, you made me remember the whole bit about powering the grav guns with little particles of antimatter; which of course, you can only get from the Galactics.

NOBODY in the Posleenverse military procurement system saw that huge bottleneck in logistics coming -- namely making your super infantry suit rely on a item that can only be obtained via reverse lend lease from the Galactics -- meaning its doubtful if you can actually keep up supplies of the stuff once Posleenfall occurs and resupply runs from Galactic-land become problematic to impossible.

Not to mention the absurd waste of the ACS grav guns' rate of fire excaberating this problem a million times.

They might have simply been promised enough antimatter to kill every Posleen in the galaxy six times over- I wouldn't be all that surprised. Although yes, they should have been more suspicious about the whole "will we really get enough?" issue, and started trying to figure out ways to equip ACS with a weapon that doesn't require GalTech ammunition.

The problem then being- how do you arm them with a usefully powerful weapon that doesn't burn GalTech ammunition? At what point does it stop being worth having the suits at all? And will the Galactics play along if you're not also training and equipping these elite expeditionary units with high-end equipment to go kill aliens on their planets. Remember that the human agreement to provide sepoys to stop other Posleen invasions was directly tied to the aliens' agreement to provide them with any support at all.

Connor MacLeod wrote:The actual problem with the grav gun comes in the form of the overkill "per shot" and that doesn't make sense. You really don't need to explode people as if you cram tens or hundreds of pounds of TNT into their bodies - half a pound per target at most, if that, should guarantee a kill on a Posleen (probably much less than that given normal assault rifles still work fine.) And considering that energy draw (powering the grav gun off the suit's own batteries) was itself a huge problem...) a few kj per pellet should be MORE than sufficient to kill a posleen, and would massively ramp up the suit's power endurance.

Well, part of the point is that each shot has the potential to kill more Posleen than just the one struck by the round... but then, that reduces the need for extremely high rates of fire. A better choice would be lower-velocity ammunition that runs off the battery at very high rates of fire but not much more than 7.62mm level impact energy, yeah.

MKSheppard wrote:
I don't see why the "number of bullets they shoot" is neccesairly the problem
It's a big problem when each microbullet you fire uses antimatter to go bang.

You later point out in your post, that producing the microbullets was never a problem for humanity -- it was just getting the antimatter to make the microbullets go bang. You also pointed out that if they had lowered the firepower of the M300 downwards, then they wouldn't have needed the antimatter in the first place.

You are not a military strategist/logistican. Neither am I. Yet we both saw this issue right away with the M300 as a weapon.

What does that say about the US Military in Posleenverseland? That they've all gotten total lobotomies?

Or, yeah, they were promised an assload more antimatter than they actually got.

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.
I kind of like how we had to wait most of a half decade after Posleenfall before people realized how stupid it was to give ACS suits GalTech exclusively.

This may actually be lower-end GalTech than what goes into the suits- because they can pile on twelve inches of armor instead of one, they can use lower-strength materials to achieve comparable protection. But yeah, you're totally right about that.

I wonder when the M1A4's design started coming on line- maybe they were trying to get prototypes done during the Gust Front period, and they didn't show up in quantity with the armor inserts needed to make them work until later?

The problem would then become one of producing time fuzes for mortars, since I am assuming you cannot use VT Fuzes (which work using a little radar in the nose) and then training the mortarmen in their use.

Best part is, since the mortar is an indirect fire weapon, you automatically gain protection from Posleen line of sight insta-death weapons because you can park your Humvee or Stryker behind a hill, and rain mortars onto them.

This gets done to some extent- mortars show up in Gust Front in several places, and I'm pretty sure they show up elsewhere. I think the main problem is just not enough mortars, which, yeah, is a problem.

Less miniguns, more mortars. Gotcha.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2011-09-23 12:58pm

More like... it works, but not well. You need to use a LOT of nukes to make sure some of the nukes get through

Not really. Remember that their ADA won't shoot at ballistic targets. A lot of nukes were shot down because we stupidly decided to use Minuteman III ICBMs launching from the Midwest to hit targets within CONUS.

But once the nukes debussed from the Minuteman IIIs, the Posleen stopped shooting them down, since they were now ballistic targets.

So....just produce a shitton of 2S4 Tyulpan 240mm self propelled mortars that can fire nuclear, biological, chemical, and high explosive shells.

and Posleen are radiation-resistant enough that the fallout zones won't stop them as well as they would a normal army.

Uh, no. They may be a tad more radiation resistant than the puny 'oomies; but they're quite simply put, idiots. They'll stand out in the open as the fallout dusts down on them, and eat radiation contaminated corpses/wildlife, and travel through contaminated areas in mass swarms.

They essentially have no real conception of ABC warfare; and this will hurt them hard.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-23 10:13pm

Ok, I'm back with all the somewhat interesting Posleen bits from Gust Front, it will probably be at least a few days until I can update again. Where previously I have posted page numbers in case anyone wanted to check on my quotations, here I'll simply ask you to trust me. After this book I won't be able to anyways.

I'm doing the Posleen first because it addresses a couple of the issues brought up here already, WRT anti-Posleen tactics.

Posleen:

However, the cargo vehicle had many other types of food, many of them oddly spiced and prepared. Some of the material, sporting a picture of a white avian, tasted remarkably like nestling.

Stay classy, Mr. Ringo, stay classy.

There were several ways to distinguish the God Kings of the Posleen from the combatant "normals" that made up the bulk of the Posleen forces. The first thing was that they were larger than normals, being about seventeen hands at the complex double shoulder versus the normal's fourteen to fifteen hands. The second thing was that they had high feathery crests running along their backs and opening forward like the ceremonial headdress of the plains Indians. But the main way to distinguish a God King from its bonded normals was the silvery ground-effect saucer it rode.

Posleen sizes, and the physical differences between a normal and a God-king.

The device was not only transportation. A pintle-mounted heavy weapon—in this case a hypervelocity missile launcher—bespoke its prime reason for existence. In addition the vehicle mounted a mass of sophisticated sensors. Some God Kings used them actively, others passively, but the sensor suite was just as dangerous in its own way as the heavy weapon. Denying information to the enemy is the second oldest lesson of warfare.

Tenar capabilities.

The weapons that the Posleen God Kings mounted on their saucer jeeps had continental range and autotargeting ability. While they seemed to have a blind spot where ballistic weapons were concerned, they would sweep away any item under power that crested the horizon. Therefore, tactical operations involving aircraft were basically out the window.

Finally found a reference to Posleen AA capability.

He had chosen to set up on a slight mound behind the company and across the gurgling ford from the likely direction of contact. His coverall, sewn all over with dangling strips of burlap, made him invisible to the naked eye. However, the God King's sensors would not be fooled.

Tenar sensors.

The power crystals used a charge field to hold molecules in a state of high-order flexion which permitted tremendous energy to be stored by the crystals. However, the flexion was maintained by a small field generator embedded deep in the matrix. When the dynamic shock of the bullet shattered the field generator, the energy of the crystals was released in a blast equivalent to half a ton of high explosives.

Tenar power source, and its fragility.

The problem with fighting the Posleen was rarely killing them; the problem was killing enough of them to matter. Unless the promised reinforcements arrived he was going to have destroyed his whole company for nothing.

Accurate enough, with their numbers and insane breeding rate. This is also the chief problem of artillery.

In general, once their God Kings were killed the normals gave one burst for glory then ran. But some of them were more aggressive than others. This group was hanging around, exchanging some fairly effective fire and generally being a pain in the ass

Feral, unbounded Posleen behavior. Sometimes the feral Posleen are herded towards the enemy by surrounding units as cannon fodder.

The advancing Posleen forces had done their usual bang-up job of removing all the corpses from the battlefield. Since humans and Posleen were both edible, they considered humans nothing but tactical problems or rations. The Posleen word for human was "threshkreen." It translated more or less as "food with a stinger." Which made the captain's unmolested body all the more unusual.

Threshkreen. Post battle cleanup.

Duncan picked up the stick thrust into the ground beside the officer. Duncan had seen one exactly twice before, both times when bodies of commanders were left unmolested. This time, however, the body was on a mound of dirt that must have taken some time to construct. Duncan examined the indecipherable writing on the stick for a moment then picked the stiffening corpse up in his arms.

The symbol was one that had become universally familiar since the landing. Many were to be found among the rear area troopers, each supposedly authentic. In fact there had only been eight confirmed recoveries of them and the real ones were all accounted for, all carefully laid to rest with their owners. Between them the owners of the staffs had collected four Medals of Honor, three Distinguished Service Crosses and Silver Stars innumerable. The staff alone was guarantee of at least the Star. The colonel's hand went over his mouth and unmanly tears coursed down his cheeks at the sight of the ninth. He cleared his throat again and took a deep breath.

Each God-king carries a single kessenalt stick, to leave by the body of a worthy opponent or dead ally. The only form of medal or battle-honors acknowledged by the Posleen. The bodies of these men are not consumed, but left out in the open. Amusingly, the first reaction of Posleen on learning that humans bury their dead is ‘that can’t be sanitary.’

Light kinetic energy weapons dropped towards the planet below as probable threat locations were spotted or a God King simply wanted to make a pretty explosion. Dozens of the small, smart entry vehicles dropped through the atmosphere striking cities and military bases across Earth. Four of them for some reason struck the Great Pyramids in Cairo and another half dozen were targeted on deserted areas in the Central American jungle. The detonations—equivalent to a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon—were tiny, white pinpricks on the surface of the planet.

The Posleen do as many said the RDA should, and open the invasion by dropping things from orbit. Of course, their threat assessment might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Also, there are two things that get mentioned very, very often in these books: terawatt lasers and ten-kiloton explosions. The lasers are used by the ACS on Diess, by the Posleen everywhere, by the Space Fighters, etc. While almost every nuclear or near nuclear event is said to be ten kilotons, the HVMs Posleen ships use, the SheVa, and so on. Therefore, I have decided to make a drinking game of it. One glass for every mention of terawatt lasers of 10 KT explosions. I considered adding ‘relativistic’ and ‘hyper-velocity’ to the list, but why turn my bit of fun into masochism?

"Antiship surface weapon detected," the androgynous voice stated. "Request permission to engage."

Sten'lonoral leaned forward and inspected the readout. It was so much gibberish but he did not want this supercilious Alld'nt piece of crap to know that. "Very well, you have my permission to engage."

The signal was sent to an outer lander with a kinetic energy weapon launcher. The large weapons platform shot the massive hyper-velocity round out like a pumpkin seed and continued on its path.

The kinetic round took a moment to orient itself, nosed over and dove for the planet. The drivers in its body accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light then cut out. At those speeds additional aiming was unnecessary.

Even the Posleen ships can autotarget threats, though it requires permission to fire. The Posleen really don’t understand how a lot of their technology works. They’re like kids with an iPad who’ve figured out through trial and error how to make four apps work and then given up. Some are more technically skilled, but because of the feudal nature and shifting alliances of the Posleen, they would never freely share that information with potential rivals.

And then there were the landings. Over fourteen B-Decs had exited hyperspace in the last twenty-four hours. Four had been totally destroyed by the remaining fighters and frigates. But that had been at the cost of three frigates.

B-Decs independently hyper-capable.

"The proponents ignore every wargame ever played around it. Their contention is that the Posleen can be defeated in decent terrain because it permits maneuver of armored and mechanized forces. But when we've actually gamed it out, the Posleen can move nearly as fast and are more maneuverable than armored or mechanized forces. The Posleen may use primarily unaimed weapons and depend on mass fire, but between the heaviness of their weaponry and the aimed fire of the God Kings, mechanized forces in vehicles within one thousand meters of Posleen are slaughtered.

"If they are out of their vehicles and in prepared positions—not fortresses, just dug in—standard Army units have about a ten-to-one advantage over the Posleen. That is based on game theory and observational evidence from Barwhon.

"However, projections place Posleen forces at over one hundred to one for the total invasion.

"Don't you think you are underplaying the effect of armor and artillery on the Posleen, General?" asked the President. He actually appeared to be listening to General Taylor and considering his arguments. But after nearly a year's experience with the chief executive, Taylor was fairly sure he was not changing his mind.

"The Posleen three millimeter railguns go through Bradleys the long way and about one in ten carry a three millimeter. One in twenty carry an automatic hypervelocity missile launcher, which will take out an Abrams with a frontal hit. While they are 'unaimed,' what the term actually means is that the weapons don't have sights.

"However, the Posleen seem to be naturals at firing from the hip. And don't forget that those numbers discount the God Kings, whose weapons are automatically targeted and frighteningly accurate. They're accurate enough to act as antiaircraft fire against stealth fighters, for God's sake. There will be some five thousand God Kings in that mass. That's nearly a division of God Kings alone. And a God King is worth about five troops even if they are in the defense."

"I thought they dealt with them through sniper fire," commented the secretary of defense.

"That works in an ambush, sir, or where there is an intense conflict in limited terrain. But the God Kings are not all stupid. Most of them move in random evasion patterns that are hard as hell to hit and that is a lot of targets for snipers, even four or five at a time. The problem with Posleen is always a situation of target overload."

"Artillery," said the President.

"Probably our best bet," the infuriated general admitted, "but artillery is a wounder not a killer. And the Posleen can take more wounding than humans.

The President, Secretary of Defense, and General Taylor discuss some of the anti-Posleen tactics already mentioned in this thread, and why they won’t work. Well, they won’t work now, maybe if during the planning or procurement stages they had thought things through, it would be different.

"So you're saying that we can't stop them with artillery?" asked the President.

"Sir, every indication is that the Posleen don't retreat or suppress under fire. The only option is to kill them before they overrun you. While artillery reduces their numbers, it can only stop them with masses of firepower that are not realistic in this scenario. What I mean is we don't have that many tubes on hand. The artillery is useful for reducing their numbers. But it does not have the consequential effect that it does with humans. It does not make them stop and hunker down or retreat. They just wade through it, the stupid bastards, and if it kills all but one of them, that stupid bastard is too stupid not to charge the guns anyway.

"Unfortunately, what has generally happened on Barwhon is that artillery fire kills maybe thirty percent of maneuvering Posleen and then the other seventy percent hit the defenses like a tsunami. In this case, that would be, AID?"

Artillery against the Posleen is essential, but the effects are a lot less pronounced than they are on humans. Emphasis mine.

"Every shooter has to kill, not slow, not wound, kill seventy-four Posleen for a forward defense plan to work. That won't happen even with massive artillery support; it's just not in the cards. Those Posleen can pin the divisions with a fraction of their force and go around or they can overrun them and keep going.

Again, the Posleen pretty much line up and beg you to kill them, the only problem is killing enough of them fast enough that you aren't overrun.

It takes approximately three minutes for a Posleen to gallop a kilometer. The forward edge of the ambush zone had been placed at a kilometer and a half from the cav unit while the surviving Posleen forces were an additional half a kilometer back. The cavalry company commander called for fire to be adjusted outward as the follow-on Posleen companies charged forward.

Posleen infantry speed and resolution under fire. They happily charge over the butchered bodies of the first thousand to try charging. 1 Kilometer in 3 minutes, 20 KPH?

Above these embankments temporary "Jersey" walls, easily recognized as the low temporary walls seen around highway construction, had been emplaced, creating a continuous barrier from behind which the infantry and armor of the Seventy-First Infantry Division could pour fire into the passing centaurs with relative impunity. While the three-millimeter railguns and HVMs of the Posleen would easily breach the wall, the majority 1mm and shotguns would bounce off. Although there would be casualties, the defenders had an excellent position.

Standard Posleen shotguns and light railguns unable to penetrate concrete highway barriers. Heavy railguns and HVMs penetrate easily, no word on lasers or plasma weapons. I’m actually a little surprised they can stand up to the light railguns.

The area surrounding Fredericksburg had been designated as "secure" by the information Net and the distributed processors were beginning the assignment of resources. How the Net decided what area was to be distributed to what Kessentai was not understood by the aliens; the technology predated their recorded history. But it was generally fair and the best way to distribute initial booty. Often, it was the only way to prevent an early descent into orna'adar, the apocalypse of post-conquest worlds.

There was even trade and wagering based on future conquests. Ardan'aath owed quite a chunk of the area he had been bequeathed to the late Aarnadaha; a matter of a wager on offspring hatched during the voyage. The debt was now void. All debts were voided by death.

"And as we take more of these lands from the thresh," said Kenallai, joining the conversation, "the amount will grow. At this rate we'll be the richest Kessentai in seven systems. You are going to need a castellaine soon."

Kenallurial flared his nostrils in agreement. His previous service as a scoutmaster had granted him a bare minimum of range. A small farm, a bit of land for hunting and a minor factory. All of them were managed through a proxy castellaine. There had been no need for the expense of one of his own with such meager resources.

The results from the last three days' work was not a minor fortune but a major one. With the income from the miles of arable land, several industrial areas and four chemical processing plants he could retire. The choice was retire or refit. Ardan'aath, for example, had the most heavily armed oolt'os in the host. He had been involved in five conquests and his only interest was the Path. That being the case, he poured his riches into outfitting his oolt'ondar and eson'antais. The result was that he took fewer casualties and was able to take more land; paying for better refitting. His entire oolt was now armed with three-millimeter railguns and the oolt of his "subordinates" were nearly as heavily armed.

Posleen economics. The Posleen Datanet divides up conquered territories, allotting larger shares to more effective units. The Posleen have a complicated barter system, and even have credit based on presumed future victories. Funny that most Posleen don’t even understand the algorithms the Datanet uses to assign the spoils. Sometimes the ‘Net fingers a God-king as a coward (or just really ineffective) and he is made to give up combat to serve as an accountant/manager (castellaine) for other God-kings.

Also a good time to talk about orna’adar. After conquest, the Posleen see to their new territories and start doing all the things people do when not fighting. Farming, mining, building, breeding, and hunting. For a time this works well, new ships carry the new Posleen and many of the old ones to new worlds to conquer, they trade and produce food and live in more-or-less peace. But eventually their rapid reproduction catches up with them, their planet isn’t big enough anymore, they start fighting over the territories assigned by the ‘Net so long ago. Inevitably, this escalates into a nuclear conflict which destroys the planet.

Most smart God-kings pack up and move on some time before this happens. At the same time, some won’t leave and let the other God-kings win. It’s a vicious cycle that can take as little as a decade, or as long as a couple of generations to come around. So it has been for the two-hundred years that the Posleen have been attacking the Galactics, so it probably has been for some time.

Taking a side street he sent teams of oolt'os into the buildings lining the roads. They reported nothing of value. Some of the buildings had fine artwork or well-made equipment, but nowhere were the heavy metals, refined chemicals or production facilities that he craved. Such a find would assuredly be assigned by the Net to the first to capture it. And it would permit him to equip his oolt with much better weapons.

More Posleen economics. When it comes to valuable loot that can be carried off easily, it’s pretty much ‘first come first served.’ Sometimes this is true even with territory.

Of course, the threshkreen had already helped in that regard. The oolt had exited the lander equipped mostly with the cheapest of shotguns along with a few missile launchers. The tenar that he had started off with sported the company's sole 3mm railgun.

The tenar was the same, but it now was mounted with a gigawatt laser and a new sensor suite. The Kessentai that had "improved" his vehicle would never miss the equipment. And their oolt, scattered in death from the threshkreen's ballistic weapons, had yielded a mass of weapons. So, now, the normals of the company were armed with a decent mix of weaponry. He had been able to double the number of hypervelocity missile launchers in the company and most of the remaining normals were now armed with railguns. True, many of those were 1mm rather than 3mm. But there were several plasma cannons to make up the lack. There was not a single shotgun left in the oolt; he was as well armed as a senior battlemaster. Now if he only could avoid using all that might!

Posleen grabbing heavy weapons from their fallen brethren. It’s mostly senior God-kings who have completely done away with the shotguns of their early years. Oh my God! Is that a less-than-terawatt laser? I thought those didn’t even exist in these books! :Takes a drink anyway:

The scout's eyes were flared wide to drink in every bit of luminance. The battle to the north occasionally caused painful flares in his vision, but he paid it no mind. He paid mind to few things, he was focused on the link between himself and his god and the question of where the thresh were. He hungered for them, for the approval of his god in the gathering and the harvest. Well down the hierarchy was self-preservation or pain.

Bit more on the bond between a God-king and a superior normal. Posleen priorities.

Bravo Company of the ACS was the first to fall, left exposed on the flank of the mechanized company. Their lines of silver lightning stretched out to the charging Posleen and tore them apart like paper. The same carnage would have shocked a human force into immobility. But there were over twelve thousand Posleen charging down the narrow front and dozens of God Kings. And Posleen just don't stop.

More on the Posleen’s sheer bloody-mindedness.

To avoid the ambushes that had plagued his fellows, he had a scout well out in the lead of his oolt. The oolt'os was a superior individual, it could nearly talk. The Kessentai's sole eson'antai had been born from their coupling and he trusted the oolt'os to respond effectively to mildly complex problems. If any of the oolt'os would spot a problem, it would be that one.

So he froze his tenar then slid to the side when the point let out a surprised cry. However, the cry was not one of fear or anger and the point almost immediately turned and ran towards him.

In the oolt'os's hand was a strange device. A metal stake, dirt dribbling to the ground unnoticed, topped with a symbol. The metal of the symbol looked like . . . but it couldn't be . . .
The God King let out a cry like that of his scout and practically snatched the golden trinket from its hand. He patted the excited semimoron on the back and gave it bits of thresh from his own hand in approval.A trailing scoutmaster slid his tenar forward, wondering what the excitement was about.
The God King held the implement overhead. "Pure heavy metal," he crowed, waving it back and forth.

"No," shouted the newcomer his crest standing straight up in excitement. "Is there more?"

"Let us find out," he cried and waved to his oolt. "Forward, find more! Follow the road!"

Posleen looting behavior leads them to follow a trail of gold ornaments into an ambush.

"Horrible," snapped Arstenoss. "There is nothing out there, the buildings burned, the roads destroyed or scattered with these." He held up a caltrop. "I've half my oolt injured, many of them made to thresh by these damn things."

The battlemaster took the offending item and looked at it curiously. It was a small bit of metal. He understood its purpose, to present a small knife turned upwards. "How could these kill an oolt'os?"

"They don't kill. But when they are driven into a foot, many of the oolt'os panic and roll. Then they are driven into them all over their body. I had to put nearly two dozen down. I finally said enough and came back. There is nothing of interest out there. I understand that there is a road of heavy metals here?"

Posleen reactions to caltrops. It’s been said, but the Posleen normals are morons.

The Posleen normal was responding to a call of nature. Posleen would drop solid and liquid waste without question. But it was time for a birthing, and that required a modicum of privacy lest a fellow oolt'os succumb to hunger. In camp, even a temporary camp, there would be an egg pit where the leather-skinned egg would be dropped until it hatched. And there would be designated nursemaids to remove the hatchlings to the hatchling pens, there to fight for survival until they reached maturity.

But when the host was moving, the best that could be done was to set the eggs aside and let the hatchlings free. Most would die, even more than in the pens. But there was no easy way on the Path and the normal could care less. All it wanted to do was relieve the discomfort and nausea of the fully mature egg.

It trotted away from its group and down off the interstate to the east; the western wall towards the thresh was a sheer bluff topped with barbed wire so there was no going that way. It had to cut a fence, but that was easily done with its monomolecular short sword. There was a small building of nondescript purpose immediately available. It was under strict instructions not to enter buildings without permission, but being out of sight was enough for the purpose. It trotted around the back of the building and started the birthing process.

Its abdomen began to ripple and the ripples spread quickly up its neck. It had almost waited too long. A bulge appeared at the base of its neck and traveled upward like a python swallowing a cat in reverse. Finally it spat up a spotted, leathery egg the size of a small chicken. It licked the last birth juices off the egg, tossed it disdainfully against the wall of the abandoned subsidized housing and trotted back towards the interstate. Mission complete.

Posleen reproduction. Forgot to mention that Posleen are hermaphrodites and lay eggs by puking them up, didn’t I? We also see that warm and loving affection the Posleen have for their young, going out of one’s way to prevent another Posleen from eating the egg, only to literally throw it at the nearest wall.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-23 10:29pm

Somehow I always seem to miss one. This is another 'already said everything in it, or believe it to be understood, but it helps to be clear.'

The Posleen were used to fighting enemies who were visible. Most of their opponents had no history of warfare and, therefore, had never heard of such items as camouflage, cover or concealment.

However, they had developed a process for dealing with humans' cowardly tendency to hide themselves while fighting. The God Kings' saucers possessed not only weapons, but excellent sensors. So, even if the position of a firing platform was not clear, the sensors could pinpoint it. When there were hundreds of positions firing they tended to become overloaded with information, but when there was a single target it was easy. And wherever the God King fired, there fired its company.

And a lot of Posleen weapons are very good at shooting through cover.

Vehrec · Post by **Vehrec** » 2011-09-25 12:27pm

On the subject of 'The Polseen can eat any carbon-Oxygen-Hydrogen-Nitrogen life and survive all toxins and bioweapons':

I've been thinking about this, and I've come to a number of conclusions. The Polseen are horse-sized, but they must eat a lot more than any earth horse ever has. Eating, in fact, must be their primary activity. The cellular processes that would allow them to shrug off radiation, free radicals, various toxic chemicals and disease are all similar, but they are also energy intensive. And to be able to digest the all food they eat? Well they're going to need a VERY broad selection of enzymes, or very general ones that need to be produced in huge quantities because they just don't work as well as more specialized ones. And if they're so general, they'll wind up destroying themselves and the Poor horse-crocodile's digestive system as they eat it from the inside. So I'm thinking they do the other thing-have a massive amount of their DNA dedicated to auto-immune, cellular repair and digestive enzymes to cope with all possible outcomes. And that's inefficient in it's own way, since all those systems need to be constantly checking for something to respond to. And those testing chemicals need to be everywhere, all the time, constantly making more to replace the old decayed components.

On the other hand-they should also be clinically immortal without any medical assistance if it works as advertised. If they aren't, then I suspect bloody horrible autoimmune failure and cancer is the leading non-violent cause of death.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-25 03:42pm

Vehrec wrote:On the subject of 'The Polseen can eat any carbon-Oxygen-Hydrogen-Nitrogen life and survive all toxins and bioweapons':

I've been thinking about this, and I've come to a number of conclusions. The Polseen are horse-sized, but they must eat a lot more than any earth horse ever has. Eating, in fact, must be their primary activity. The cellular processes that would allow them to shrug off radiation, free radicals, various toxic chemicals and disease are all similar, but they are also energy intensive. And to be able to digest the all food they eat? Well they're going to need a VERY broad selection of enzymes, or very general ones that need to be produced in huge quantities because they just don't work as well as more specialized ones. And if they're so general, they'll wind up destroying themselves and the Poor horse-crocodile's digestive system as they eat it from the inside. So I'm thinking they do the other thing-have a massive amount of their DNA dedicated to auto-immune, cellular repair and digestive enzymes to cope with all possible outcomes. And that's inefficient in it's own way, since all those systems need to be constantly checking for something to respond to. And those testing chemicals need to be everywhere, all the time, constantly making more to replace the old decayed components.

On the other hand-they should also be clinically immortal without any medical assistance if it works as advertised. If they aren't, then I suspect bloody horrible autoimmune failure and cancer is the leading non-violent cause of death.

It is quite possible. As far as I can tell there is never an explanation given for this ability. It clearly baffles the best Galactic scientist-philosophers.

Anyway, on to the ACS lines from Gust Front. We have a two new types of suits, one which I guess was there the whole time and simply never mentioned, an explanation of the gestalt, suit flying and running speeds, sensors and more.

ACS:

The GalTech Armored Infantry Design Team had been composed of knowledgeable and careful individuals. They were people who had either experienced or extensively studied a variety of calamities. To a man, or in one case, woman, they were pessimists where combat was concerned; Murphy was an old and dear friend that they kept always at the forefront of their brains.

And the award for understatement of the year goes to…

The Marine and Airborne Units were or would soon be Armored Combat Suit units, mobile infantry units whose personnel fought encased in powered battle armor and wielded grav-guns that hurled depleted uranium teardrops at relativistic speeds or plasma cannons that could go through the side of a World War II battleship.

American ACS drawn from a mixture of Airborne Infantry and US Marines. Also, the closest thing to a quantifiable statement about the firepower of a plasma cannon.

The worth of the suits was finally being proven as they followed the fire. Although the barrage would eventually devastate the Posleen force, the fire that the battalion was taking was enough to wipe out a conventional infantry force or even tanks. But the suits shed all but the fiercest flame. In some cases the fire from the Posleen force was so great it was like walking into a rainstorm, but it had as much effect. Only the three-millimeter railguns could penetrate the suits, if a round hit perfectly, and the rest of the 1mm and shotgun rounds were no problem. The occasional HVM that fired out of the mass or the fire of a God King's plasma cannon would remove a luckless trooper. And then it would be silenced by mass fire. The battalion was still able to advance with "acceptable loss."

Armor protection and the justification for the hideously expensive suits.

Staff Sergeant Bob Duncan closed the sightless eyes of the captain and looked around.
The autoprojector of his helmet system sensed the tensing of his neck muscles and swiveled the viewpoint around the area of the ford. Target points and intelligence information—trickled deep into his eyes by tiny laser diodes—cascaded across his view unnoticed. Calculations of Posleen and human casualties flickered across the top of his view as the artificial intelligence that drove the armor calculated blood stains and damage assessment. The soft puffs of recycled air that drifted across his mouth and nose were, fortunately, devoid of smell. Nannites swarmed across his eyelids, automatically collecting the water that threatened to drown the vision tunnel.

The powered combat armor automatically adjusted the light levels so they remained constant. The resulting lack of shadows gave the scenery a flat look. After a year and a half of combat Duncan had become so used to it the effect was unnoticeable unless he took his armor off. Since that had last happened nearly six weeks before, "real" vision seemed abnormal.

A few of those visual options. Suit AID automatically counts bodies.

The Galactic-supplied combat suits were made without any face shields; their visual repeaters took the place of that possible weakness. The MPs and security troops were faced with a featureless front of faceted plasteel that was impregnable to any Terrestrial weapon; a similar suit had survived a blast from a nuclear weapon. Although there were a few hypervelocity missile launchers in the area, there were none at the TOC. So there was no stopping this juggernaut unless reason or orders worked.
One of the MPs decided to try. She was either braver or more foolish than her fellow as she stepped out into Duncan's path and held up a hand like a traffic cop.
"Hold it right there, soldier. I don't care if you are Fleet, you don't have authorit—" Duncan never even slowed and the half-ton suit tossed her aside like a rag doll. Her fellow MP rushed to her side but other than a bruised rib and an assault on her dignity she was unharmed.
The TOC was three prefabricated structures hooked together. The doors were not designed to accommodate armored combat suits but that was moot. The door and frame resisted his suit as well as wet tissue paper and he continued through the briefing area and down a short hall to the commander's office.

Suits are ‘impregnable to any terrestrial weapon’ and strong enough to walk through walls without special effort or significant resistance.

In Arnold's case, the new weaponry and employment techniques were the problem. He was having to adjust to ranges of fire and maneuver he had previously never considered. At the same time he was overseeing the training of troops in a variety of weapons beyond their dreams.

The military had learned some lessons on Diess and Barwhon, and the ACS heavy weapons platoons now packed so much firepower they were jokingly referred to as the Grim Reapers. They had initially been deployed with 75mm automortars and terawatt lasers. Diess had proven that the standard suit grenade systems were superior to the automortars at short ranges while the lasers were too bulky and awkward for the sort of rapid movement ACS had adopted. The mortars and lasers were effectively retired, but in their wake came a diversity of suit-mounted special weapons. From this diversity the platoon leader was supposed to choose which would be appropriate for the probable mission. Since no mission ever went as planned, there were far more wrong choices than right.

Suit heavy weapon teams. Suit heavy weapons as of the battle of Diess, now retired. Also, suit ground speeds and ranges take some getting used to, suit tactics are still evolving, but are increasingly focusing on the heavy weapon teams. It took until the third book, but it turns out that yes, the Reaper is a fifth suit variant. It is described as pot-bellied in appearance, with somewhat thinner armor. The standard grav-gun and grenade launcher are given up in exchange for four hardpoints, two shoulder and two forearm, that can mount any of the Reapers’ heavy weapons.

If the probable mission was indirect fire-support, the platoon packed individual multimortars. These were enhanced grenade launchers and each weapon-suit packed four: one on each shoulder and one on each arm. They threw 60mm rounds up to five miles with pinpoint accuracy and had fourteen separate munition types from which to choose.

The basic munition was a standard high-explosive (HE) round that could be set for airburst, surface detonation or delay. The weapons graded up from there through "enhanced conventional munitions," i.e., cluster bombs, to antimatter rounds with a "soft kill" radius larger than the range of the mortar. Thus any unarmored humans, or Posleen, in the immediate area of the mortar platoon would be fried if these were used. Unfortunately, for everyone involved, these heavy weapons suits could run through the available onboard rounds in twenty seconds. The "Reapers" joked that they all needed one platoon of grunts apiece, just to carry ammunition.

Reaper mortars. The preferred long-range punch for ACS. They have a five mile range (8 kilometers, compared to the 1.2 for suit grenade launchers) and again I wish he’d use one scale consistently, if only while describing ACS weapon ranges… ah well. Along with HE and cluster bombs, we have antimatter rounds that annihilate pretty much anything within a five mile radius, and can be fired five miles away. Obviously not for use when there are friendlies around. Like the grav gun, these have a ridiculous rate of fire. Unlike the grav gun, they don’t carry hundreds of thousands of rounds for the mortars.

If the probable mission was close support there were three separate weapons systems to chose from, depending on how close and how personal. The simplest was a set of super shotguns with multiple types of rounds from which to choose. From there it got complicated.

Tease. ‘There are several more weapons used by the Reapers, but for now I’m just going to tell you about one and make a passing reference to another.’

Unfortunately each suit could only mount one type of weapon and choosing the right weapons mix could make or break an engagement. The Old Man was actually beginning to perfect some beautiful sucker moves for the playbook that involved the heavy weapons platoon. But they required that the platoon leader be able to read his mind. As the playbook got firmed up it might be a little easier but in the meantime there were far more wrong mixes than right.

Like I said before. Suit doctrine is still very much a work in progress. I wonder why they can only mount a single weapon type though, they do have four hardpoints. Probably it’s another ammo issue. Lucky there’s one more passage, much later in the book about our new friends the Reapers.

Three of the troops tumbled into the midst of the Posleen were from Alpha weapons: Grim Reaper suits. Realizing that they might need close-range support on the way, the platoon leader had switched out all four weapons points for flechette cannons.

Composed of twelve-barreled light flechette guns, each flechette cannon could spew forty thousand lethal steel slivers a minute. Of course, like all Grim Reaper systems, they could also run through the onboard munitions in less than six minutes of combat. Grim Reapers always preferred to be close to their ammo sources.

Two of the weapons troops, through a combination of luck and gymnastics, ended up on their feet and practically side by side in the midst of the Posleen. Most of the Posleen lining their backtrack were dead, or well on their way, but the final group that cushioned their stop was struggling to their feet even as the Reapers opened fire.

Dropping all four cannons to horizontal, the two suit troops went back-to-back and began to spin in place, throwing out a horizontal steel rain of destruction. The steel razors shredded any Posleen in their path, the yellow centaurs tearing apart under the fatal onslaught of the hypervelocity flechettes.

Reaper Flechette Cannon. The one weapon in the series with a higher rate of fire than the grav gun. And since they apparently don’t mix weapon systems, each Reaper suit has four. They must be carrying a lot of ammo to be able to feed four such monsters for six minutes of firing.

:Sigh: At this point in the book, the Indowy show up to give Mike a custom-made uber-command suit, as thanks for saving Diess. It’s pretty much the suit he first designed when he learned the extent of Galactic technology, with all of the features that were too expensive or hard to use to put in the regular suits. It's all very Mary Sue-ish, the hero has to be able to drastically outperform everyone at everything. Despite much of it never being previously tested, the suit is of course the pinnacle of ACS technology, and is described in loving detail. It’ll take a bit to get through this.

The first thing the officers noticed was the ornamentation. The suit was covered in complex designs that at first appeared to be three-dimensional, an absolute no-no when dealing with penetrating fire. On closer examination they appeared to be holograms somehow incorporated into the armor. There were some elegant fins running down the arms and legs that might help with heat dissipation, a major fault of most combat suits. The helmet was formed into the face of some sort of demon or horrific alien creature, smooth to the front with pointed demon-ears and fangs dangling nearly to the suit's chest. Both arms sported underarm daggers and more weapons peeped from unlikely places. It appeared that if it was surrounded the whole suit might start blasting.

Suits don’t have necks, so how does it have dangling fangs? Holographic designs to make a 40k Chapter Master blush. There are two retractable underarm blades, both mono-edge, and a lot more weapons than even the Reapers. IIRC, at least one is a flamethrower on each arm. Mike also convinces the Indowy to give all his battalion the underarm blades.

Please also note the fins to help with heat dispersal, a major weakness of the suits which is so serious that it will never be mentioned again. Also, since room-temperature superconductors are such a basic and fundamental component of Galactic technology, I’m a little lost as to why getting rid of waste heat is even an issue.

"Power source?" asked Mike glancing quickly at the suit. He moved the bit of dip to the side as a slight smile violated his face.
"Class Two antimatter reactor, as you specified. Equivalent to a five-kiloton antimatter warhead, but small enough to armor against almost any strike. Just such a warhead could go off next to the armor and not penetrate the energy core, so strongly is it protected."

Equivalent to a five kiloton warhead over the course of its life, or in output per second? Probably the latter, given some of the power-intensive things he does with it. Like I said, an antimatter generator can keep a suit running more-or-less indefinitely. The problem is what happens if it loses containment, which is why the reactor is so heavily armored.

"Armor?" Mike asked on a rising tone.
"Sixty-millimeter frontal monomolecular uranium-silicon alloy with energetic reinforcement. The energetic reinforcement is logarithmically autocontrolled against nonrelativistic–velocity projectiles. As the round comes closer to a penetrating angle, the deflection energy increases logarithmically."

So many questions. The only time we’re EVER told what precisely a suit is made of and how thick it is, it has to be this one-off custom suit that isn’t standard in any way. So are the other suits half as think? Do they simply lack ‘energetic reinforcement’? Or are they made of a different material entirely? How is it monomolecular? Does that just refer to the level at which the two are alloyed? I assume the uranium is DU and not radioactive.

What about the ‘energetic reinforcement?’ Is there a sort of force-field strengthening the armor? When it says it’s autocontrolled, does that mean it automatically reinforces threatened areas, or is just always stronger where a projectile is likely to penetrate? Or something else entirely?

Mike stepped gingerly down the steps and ran his hand down the front of the suit. "Inertial systems?"
"Two hundred eighty gravities with full lift and drive, seven inertial sump points. Sorry," he said with a shrug. The gesture was shared by Indowy and humans. "It was the best the Tchpth could do."

Inertial dampening limits to Mike’s ubersuit. Increased flight capability, which I’ll get to later.

He tapped a spot on his forearm and a two-foot blade sprang out from the underarm of the suit. The blade had been suggested by Duncan, and the Indowy fitters had been more than happy to oblige for the whole company. Now it came in handy as the monomolecular vibroblade slid through the Chobham armor like butter and sliced the hatch lock in two.

Mike’s company all have the mono-edge underarm blades, which are apparently two feet long and easily slice through tank armor.

The Posleen focused on this danger first, striking the company with direct-fire. The armor was usually proof against anything but a plasma cannon or an HVM. But as the mass of fire pounded them, occasional three-millimeter rounds would find a weakness. And there were over six hundred HVM launchers and nine hundred heavy railguns in the force. Between those and the God Kings the exposed ACS company was eliminated without killing more than five or six hundred of the enemy.

Green ACS unit gets slaughtered, another glowing recommendation for the suit’s robustness. Now heavy railguns can only penetrate with a lucky shot.

Furthermore it had posted guards clad in Fleet Strike gray "combat silks" outside the company offices and was running two-man patrols between the barracks. Since the weapons were M-300 grav-guns the show of force was impressive. The M-300 weighed twenty-three pounds—the same as the Vietnam-era M-60 machine gun which it resembled—but most of the soldiers in sight handled them easily.

Weight of the standard grav gun, in case you ever wanted to know. And they look like M-60s…I guess?

The thin uniforms were supposed to be proof against any normal cold and so it seemed; the lightly clad soldiers were handling the windy winter day with aplomb. Although combat silks were officially the daily uniform of Fleet Strike units, most personnel elsewhere in the battalion seemed to be wearing BDUs and field jackets.

Battle-silks again.

The original teams that designed the Galactic equipment that humans would use, such as the combat suits and the space dreadnoughts, designed a combat shuttle that was heavily armored, incredibly fast and surprisingly maneuverable. But on Diess they discovered it was still vulnerable to the God King launchers; of nine combat shuttles sent to succor then-Lieutenant O'Neal's cut-off ACS platoon, only one survived.

The answer was stealth. Using a combination of human and Himmit stealth technologies a new generation of combat shuttles was being created that would be slightly less heavily armed and armored, but even faster and more maneuverable. Best of all it would be extremely stealthy.

The shuttles had a negative radar cross-section to human systems and only showed up as ephemeral ghosts on Galactic detectors; projectors even smoothed turbulence zones at subsonic speeds. The first prototypes had been fielded on Barwhon, where the humans were engaged in a desperate struggle in the swamps. While they continued to take losses, the rate was much more acceptable.

But until Terran Fleet Strike units received them, the battalions used a mixture of modern and futuristic equipment, such as the converted Humvee with a Galactic communications and battle planning center on the back deck. It affected their strategic mobility, but not local combat.

Combat shuttles. Specifically, the ‘Banshee’ anti-grav transport used for ACS air-mobility. The old ones were still easy meat for God-kings, so the Banshee II focuses much more on stealth. They’ll go up to Banshee III before they’re done. Please note the same system the ACS uses to eliminate trackable turbulence works fine for the Banshees as long as they don’t go super-sonic.

Also, Posleen-verse schizoid-tech and some of the reasons behind it. Supplies are limited, thanks to Darhel meddling, and the off-world units have priority for new gear.

"Mike had a little present with him," said Harry with a grin.

"It's not a present," said the visitor, seriously. "It isn't even a loan. One of the things I was doing on my vacation was finding places to plant energy caches. We're seeding the coastal plains with power sources to recharge suit units that get caught behind the lines. When I was on Diess it was a pain in the ass trying to find power. So I came down with three antimatter generators. They've got a finite amount of power, but it's enough to run a small city for a year, so . . ." He shrugged and smiled again.

"Damn," said the boat captain, tossing him another tub. "Thanks."

"Well, the priority is any unit that needs it," Mike said severely. "And, technically, you're not supposed to tie into it. But since you don't have a power grid, it's not like the whole Keys are going to be hooked up to it." He shrugged again and frowned. "As screwed up as it is down here, it seems the least I could do for you. Just don't overuse it. It's like a really big battery and once it's gone, it's gone."

Antimatter power cache, in the event of suits being nearby and in need. Little bit on antimatter capability.

The overloaded tractor-trailers carrying the Third Battalion Five-Fifty-Fifth Mobile Infantry Regiment had left the secure Interstate 81 hours before. The laboring trucks packed with half-ton suits had crossed the outer Blue Ridge before descending into the Virginia horse country. This was no-man's-land. Even the police had evacuated with the last civilians, heading to the Blue Ridge and safety.

To the troops, packed like sardines in the trucks, it had been a nightmarish ride. Although they each had hundreds of hours in their suits, lying on their backs under, in some cases, a dozen suits while swaying from side to side for hours in a tractor-trailer had been a shattering experience. There were several cases of troopers panicking; in one case the spasmodic gyrations of the panicked troop tore open the side of the truck, spilling two squads of ACS troopers out on the interstate to the general detriment of any vehicle that hit them.

The result of not having enough Banshees to go around, ACS troops stacked up in the back of trucks.

In addition, the conditions that the company was in were remarkably similar to an insertion technique briefly considered during the initial phases of development. Thus, when these particular conditions arose, a series of planned and legacy software reactions occurred.

Inertial compensators did not slow the suits, but rather served to remediate the effect on the users. The apparent roll was significantly reduced, while the visual conditions were matched to the apparent inertial effects. Thus, instead of feeling like bowling balls, the luckless troopers found themselves wrestling with molasses. But the reduction allowed them to see what was coming and, at least partially, prepare.

ACS suits thrown out of a moving truck. Luckily, they were designed to be tossed out of vehicles at highway speeds, so they aren’t really disoriented or injured when they roll right into the middle of a company of Posleen.

"No! God dammit!" He yanked a cratering charge off the belt of the trooper who was shoveling dirt with his armored gauntlets. The suits could move a massive amount of dirt in a surprising hurry, but the digging charges were still faster. "Use your foxhole charges!" the NCO snarled over the company push, snatching another off a belt and slapping it into the gauntlet of a confused trooper.

ACS issued charges for making instant foxholes.

"Okay," sighed the captain. He walked over and sat on the edge of the conference table without asking permission. The President noted that crumbs from the secretary of defense's last meal danced off the table top and hung momentarily in the air. He finally realized that the suit's antigravity system must have activated to reduce the impact of the half-ton suit on the relatively fragile table.

"The first thing is, suits are fitted to a person," said the captain. "And once they've been 'hardened' to that shape, it takes an act of God, or at least an Indowy master-craftsman, to get 'em changed. That's why we try to make sure that people are gonna stay generally the same shape before we fit 'em. You can change slowly over time, that's okay. The suit will adjust itself to a slow change. But sudden weight gain is really bad. So is loss. The underlayer can expand and contract itself a fair amount, though, so generally we're okay.

"But somebody can put on another person's suit. If they are generally the same shape."

Some of the limitations of the suits autofit and ability to fit others and why each suit is custom-made for an individual user. Suit antigrav is also useful for not breaking the furniture.

The three companies of the battalion formed a box. Each of the suits could keep up a continuous stream of fire for over thirty minutes with onboard munitions.

Suits carry sufficient ammo for thirty minutes of continuous fire. At 30,000 rounds a minute that gives us 900,000 rounds. According to Connor, each is 0.3 grams. So, basically each suit carries 300 kilos of ammo. Suddenly it makes a lot more sense that the suits weigh half a ton.

"Okay. The way these things work is that they 'read' our nervous signals. It generally takes about thirty hours for them to get fully worked in. And the program that drives the pseudonerves is an autonomous AID that picks up not only our neural signals but also our 'personality.' And it's built off of a completely different algorithm than the AID's," the Marine continued, pointing at the President's AID on the desktop. "So the 'gestalt' is capable of taking over control of the suit if the human inside is injured and doing all sorts of things that an AID would be constrained against. Like, surgery, combat, all sorts of things."

Explanation of the autonomic nervous system/suit gestalt.

The armored combat suits were delivered and stored in large Galactic-supplied storage containers. The silvery "Morgues" looked like oversized shipping containers and held forty suits. They came equipped with a Federation Class Two fusion plant or antimatter generator for recharging.
The Morgues were designed for the suits to be readily accessed, each suit stored in an interior pod, the double row of pods aligned down both sides of the large container. When the troopers suited up they went into the container, tossed their uniforms in the provided laundry bin and loaded up in the pods. The struggle of naked bodies in the narrow corridor normally led to a certain amount of playful grab-ass, but it was an efficient process. The suits exited through portals in the sides of the container.
The Fleet Strike Armored Combat Suits included a full suite of inertial compensators and drivers. Given enough power, the suits could and did "fly" under the combination of compensator and drivers. The process, however, was power-intensive. A normal combat suit could only sustain about ten minutes of flight, a command suit twenty to thirty, compared to three days of use before having to recharge if conditions were perfect.
However, as stated, the Morgues had their own onboard power source. And they were designed for high-intensity charging.
* * *
Mike thought the silvery containers probably caused their fair share of accidents as they floated down the interstate. The speed was not much, not more than seventy or eighty miles per hour, but it had permitted the battalion to cover the distance from Harrisburg to Baltimore in an hour. And it would permit them to continue on to D.C. in no time at all—once they picked up a stray captain.

Suit donning procedures, the suits are all stored in a central changing area with an antimatter reactor for recharge. The reactor is the same rating as the one in Mike’s suit and can charge forty suits for three days. Simultaneously.

Suit flight is limited as above, a suit can exhaust its total power supply in ten minutes of flight, a command suit in 20-30 (which should also give you an idea just how much more power the command suits have.) Suit flight speeds no greater than 80 mph (129 kph) or a bit slower than a WWI biplane. Iron Man, they aren’t. Except, of course, for Mike O’Neal’s supersuit, which is both faster, and can fly pretty much indefinitely:

Stewart caught a flash out of the corner of his eye and started to track on it before he realized that it was the captain. The officer was taking full use of the almost unlimited power available through the antimatter generator in his suit. He now flew towards the reported contact. The lidar on Stewart's suit clocked him at over four hundred klicks an hour. When they all had those it would make things a lot easier.

Suits use lidar. Mike can fly at 400 kph (249 mph.) Faster than a WWI fighter plane, around the pace of a WWII. Is it really too much to hope Ringo would use the same units of speed while talking about similar units moving in a similar manner? Yes, it is.

The current speed of an average of eighty miles per hour was the fastest they could do. The alternative, exiting the containers and running, would be even slower. The maximum sustainable speed for suits was about forty miles per hour, if the roads were open.

Suit groundspeed is half their airspeed under ideal conditions, 40 mph (64 kph) which is fairly impressive when you think about it. They’re definitely the fastest infantry without wheels around, and this is sustainable speed, meaning they can keep up the pace for over an hour, not a sprint.

Although the physical strain was lower than a standard training run, it was fairly equivalent to a "long slow distance run." A well-trained unit in peak shape could generally sustain the pace for two to three hours. This gave the ACS an approximately sixty-mile range using the same technique, the difference being that a unit doing a "long slow distance run" usually did it in PT uniform, whereas the ACS did the same thing in battle armor.

ACS range over time. Possible continuity snag in that this has them doing 20 mph, where the above had 40 as a ‘max sustainable speed.’ But it need not be a contradiction, This is probably a slower, distance run compared to the 40mph figure above.

C-9 was an atomic catalyst explosive.

Someone finally explains what C-9 is supposed to be. Not that this line explains much.

"No, sir," said the sergeant. "We mounted sensor balls all over these things so we could see where we're going. We spotted it coming in and landed our ownselfs. The horses had a kinda hot reception."

More of the scouts remote cameras, I assume.

A quick sonic pulse indicated that it was a single layer of brick. Mike lifted himself on his AG drive and took a slice out of the ceiling.

Mike’s suit, at least, has ground-penetrating sonar as a sensor option.

The sensor wand was much more sensitive than the detectors on their suits. And Minnet was a maestro. For all the damn good it was doing.

Now they had come to the center. The detector would sniff out any living human, no matter how damaged, no matter how buried. But so far they were coming up empty.

Sensor wands that are more sensitive than the suit’s own sensor are carried by the scouts.

He picked up the securely bound lieutenant and held him again by the back of the head. "This officer ignored a direct order. He led this retreat. He is primarily at fault." Pappas closed his fingers and the skull of the officer exploded. The corpse of the lieutenant catapulted to the feet of the lined-up troops along with a splatter of blood and brains that covered the arrayed troopers in gray matter. The nearly decapitated body kicked and thrashed on the ground as undirected nerve impulses continued to fire for a few more moments. Most of the troop looked stunned, a couple looked satisfied. Then about half doubled over in nausea.

"I want you to understand something," Pappas snarled. "The Posleen might kill you. If you try to run again, I will kill you." Pappas lifted his M-300 and fired over the head of the platoon. The blast of relativistic teardrops took out a section of the Longworth building, scattering debris into the street. "This weapon will go through your fucking tin cans long ways. You will be more terrified of me than of the enemy."

Ah, the 40K school of personnel management. Suit strength-enhancement isn’t mentioned often in this series, despite it being power armor-based, but here a man is easily killed, so there is clearly some strength enhancement there. Grav gun can kill tanks, just in case there was any doubt. Which would mean you were skipping large portions of my previous posts. Now why won’t the government let civilians have grav-waepons again?

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-25 05:05pm

Okay, on to the second-to-last post from Gust Front. There will be three broad categories here: I will discuss some of the new weapons and tactics employed by the military, basically the ways it is different from the present day military. This includes the reactivaiton of all previous military personnel and a general draft, but I'm not going to include the line for it. I will discuss the situation in space, as the human race gains its first assets and starts building a fleet to defend Earth/the Galactic Federation. Finally, I will discuss a couple of tidbits of amusing Galactic tech, or general universe notes like the FTL system.

Other/Misc:

"Anyway," said Horner, severely, "right after this conference is the big kickoff. To make sure nothing goes too wrong on one end of the spectrum, we will, with great ceremony, recall every single winner of the Medal of Honor still at large."

When the Galactic rejuv technology is unavailable in the promised quantities, some hard decisions have to be made about who becomes young enough to fight again. Some people, who shall remain nameless, (cough:Kratman:cough) use their limited rejuv on Waffen-SS. This is the Americans’ plan.

Mike nodded and decided to change the subject. "Apropos of nothing, sir, where is the equipment for all these mechanized and mobile divisions coming from?"

"Chrysler is back in the armor-making business, has been for nearly a year. They and GM have been producing like mad, son," said General Taylor. "They've not only stepped up their production rate beyond anything they expected, they've converted two factories in western Pennsylvania and Utah for M-1 production and four for Bradley production. The Toyota plant in Kentucky is about to get into the business as well. Modern equipment we have out the ass. What we don't have is GalTech."

"And even an Abrams can't stand up to Posleen for very long," continued General Horner.

The armor situation. Though I believe they’ll lose the Kentuckian and Penny plants in PosleenFall. Most of the draftees will wind up as armored cav or mechanized infantry.

Houses were a dangerous prospect on this thrice-damned planet, but the Posleen had slowly begun to recognize the signs. A single oolt'os would be sent to, carefully, open what looked to be the primary door of a building. If there was a beeping sound and a black box with a flashing light, the oolt'os would run like the demons of the sky were after it. Sometimes it made it, sometimes it did not. But at least they were not losing oolt'os by the double hand anymore.

Many houses are now equipped with a self-destruct, tied to a Posleen-sensor, or activated by a homeowner who’d rather be blown up than eaten. There's a rel tear-jerker scene of a family activating their self-destruct and reading to their kids, waiting for the end, but I decided including wouldn't it serve any purpose but sheer dickery. Kudos to Ringo for writing an emotional scene though.

The manjacks were heavy, bulky and awkward to carry in their large formed-plastic cases, but they might be the weapon that turned this tide. Each manjack consisted of an M-60F machine gun, the newest version of the venerable platoon automatic weapon that had first seen service in Vietnam, and a removable automated firing system. The firing system contained a mechanized tripod and a simple autotarget system. Place the weapon on a vector, let it "read" the area—get a laser picture of the zone of fire—and if the "picture" changed, if anything broke the continuously sweeping infrared lasers, it would fire down the broken vector. The weapon could be produced for one-third the cost and in a fifth of the time of the first "correct" version to be fielded. Already, in less than a year's time, there were sufficient manjacks for all the forces and more were being installed in the fixed defenses.

Since the M-60F contained the latest in barrel technology, the barrels actively dissipated heat. Thus the weapons could continue to fire as long as the ammunition held out. To assist in that, each team had hooked the machine guns up to a "battlecase," boxes preloaded at the factory with twenty-five-thousand rounds of 7.62mm ammunition. The boxes were backbreakingly heavy, one hundred rounds of M-60 ammunition weighs seven pounds, and awkward to maneuver into some of the manjack positions, but once in place they gave every team three times the throw weight of fire they could otherwise expect. In addition, the boxes could be ganged together, so that if one box ran dry, the weapon would be fed from a second. The joke went that if you used up two boxes, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, you were officially having a bad hair day and could take the rest of the day off.

Manjacks, automated machine guns. Simple enough, it uses existing lidar technology to measure the distance to the next surface during set-up, and checks it a few times a second. If the distance to the nearest surface becomes shorter, say the beam is interrupted by someone, the manjack fires until the distance is correct again. Simple. Allegedly idiot-proof. But you know what they say, never underestimate the ability or determination of idiots.

The one bright spot was artillery support. With the shift in emphasis from human-human to human-Posleen combat, the Army had radically changed its approach to artillery equipment. Although the bulk of the Army would remain mechanized infantry, the lack of counterbattery ability—the ability of one artillery unit to fire on another—by the Posleen meant that the division and corps artillery did not need to be armored. Thus the M-222 "Reaver" was born.

Modified from a South African mobile artillery piece, the Reaver was a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle mounting a 155mm howitzer. It had the speed to keep up with mechanized forces and the ammunition capacity to support them effectively.

Three full batteries of these artillery behemoths were in places to support the division and the resultant firepower exceeded the artillery of three divisions of the latter twentieth century. The Posleen might succeed in overrunning them, but they should take massive casualties in the process.

M-222 Reaver. Nice to see someone doing something about the insufficient artillery problem. Don’t think it’s quite enough though.

"We're under contract to produce something called caltrops for the mountain defenses," he croaked. "I don't even know what they are. One of our foremen told me you might want to buy a few."

Caltrops are being manufactured in large numbers. Another rare case of people actually thinking things through, and coming up with practical, useful ideas.

The F-22E Peregrine variant hosted a number of instruments the original F-22 designers would never expect would someday be standard equipment. The plane was originally conceived and designed, in the days of the Global Positioning System, as an air superiority fighter. If there was a ground autotargeting system to be installed, it would naturally be based on the GPS.

However, since the designers modifying the F-22 into a ground-attack variant recognized that there were not going to be any satellites, period, they had to come up with other measures. Eventually they fell back on three old but proven technologies.

First, the Peregrine could fix its position fairly well on the basis of inertial guidance. Given that it knew where it took off from, sensitive devices measured every direction vector on the craft and, on the basis of calculating all of those various vectors, could determine its current location with fair accuracy. It was '60s technology, but with more sophisticated computers, software and sensors, its degree of accuracy far exceeded any previous system. However, the farther the plane went from its starting point, called an IP, the larger the degree of inaccuracy. This was especially true when the plane was performing excessive maneuvers such as max thrusters on a hard terrain setting.

Second, the plane could "look" at the terrain and match it to a computerized map in its memory. A system originally developed for the much slower Tomahawk cruise missile, with modern computers, radar and software it was more than capable of taking terrain reads at twelve hundred knots. The terrain reads were primarily used to adjust the data from the inertial guidance system, correcting it as it got farther and farther off baseline. Thus, if the terrain was good the inertial guidance became much more accurate.

Last, the plane could fix its position in two dimensions quite well off LORAN radio direction finding.

A few navigation aids for the new Raptors. A few fighter jets are used to fly nape-of-the-earth in a suicide mission to provide some aeriel recon, and fire support. The hope is that stealth and pure speed would give them a chance of surviving. Of the four planes that fly the mission, one returns.

Also, the Posleen blow away most satellites, disrupting cell phones, GPS and the internet. However, the military planned for this eventually and conducts a massive surveying project to provide coordinates for artillery, and looks into alternative navigation technologies.

And the newly refurbished USS North Carolina, one of the seven remaining battleships in the world—pulled from her berth in Wilmington where she had spent nearly fifty years as a state monument—shivered as flame lanced from her sixteen-inch guns for the first time in over sixty years.

Thought about including the Missouri bit, decided it was redundant. The battleships are reactivated as off-shore artillery platforms. With a few modifications:

It was by far the most monotonous job on the ship. The Electrician Class Two was one of the close-approach lookouts, the eyes and ears of the ship. Since the environment the ship had been refitted for was projected to be extremely hostile, a duty that traditionally involved exposure to salt spray and fresh sea air was now performed in a crowded, air-conditioned compartment.

And instead of hefting a pair of heavy binoculars and spotting the occasional leaping porpoise or diving bird, the technician ceaselessly scanned a bank of twenty monitors hooked to low-light cameras. Five across, four down, numbered sixty through seventy-nine, back and forth, top to bottom, bottom to top, every odd monitor, every even monitor, back and forth, top to bottom, for eight long hours.

Lookout duty on the refitted North Carolina.

"Posleen report, monitor ninety, port forequarter," sang the soprano of a seawoman handling the portside monitors. The hull rang as the first hypervelocity missile struck the case-hardened steel of the bridge.

But I guess the Showboat’s sixteen inch steel armor can stand up to HVMs. Huh.

The original Close-in Weapons System, codename Phalanx, was developed in the 1970s as a defense against antiship missiles and other close air threats. A sophisticated radar guidance system was coupled with a rapid-firing Gatling gun. The guidance system was mounted atop the gun and the single housing looked for all the world like a little robot. The conical white weapons sprouting up on the decks of Navy ships all over were immediately dubbed "R2D2s." With the transition from a stance of the Navy fighting humans to the Navy fighting Posleen, the weapons appeared, like most of the Navy, to have become obsolete.

However, the same bright boys at Naval Sea Systems Command who pointed out the relative invulnerability of World War II battleships to Posleen ground weapons noted one other point about fighting the Posleen swarms. While the swarms might be difficult for weapons systems to distinguish when they were just moving or standing, once they fired it was a different story entirely. The conical white radome then disappeared, replaced by a heavy-action turret borrowed from the Abrams tank and a turret targeting system borrowed from the Hummer-25. Atop the turret was an infrared spike detector.

As the Posleen God Kings in their saucer-shaped craft came down to the river, they immediately opened fire with their pintle-mounted heavy weapons. The lasers, hypervelocity missiles and plasma rifles scored deep ridges in the battleship's plate, occasionally penetrating to the surface magazines of the vessel's secondary weapons. When they did, thundering explosions would rupture forth from the embattled dreadnought. But with the turn of a key, the tides of war changed sides.

The Thermopylae turrets—so christened for a famous defense in ancient Greece—swiveled outboard and the infrared spike detectors immediately found targets. It was the most robotic of actions, as each weapon noted spikes in their area of responsibility, double checked their safe systems, swiveled in two axes and fired.

Every fifth tungsten ten-millimeter penetrator was a tracer, and the shells were so close together that the tracers seemed one continuous beam, a curved orange laser searching out the impudent fools who had dared to challenge the Navy's battlewagon. The plasma cannons and lasers caused huge thermal blooms each time they fired and the signature was distinctive against the cold night background. Six CIWS on each side locked on to the targets in their area of responsibility and serviced them with the greatest of efficiency.

Each thermal spike was fed back from the CIWS and noted by the onboard defensive computer. It, in turn, swiveled the five-inch secondary cannons outboard and loaded them with canister ammunition. Its algorithm called for a certain number of spikes over a certain vector. At that point there was a seventy-five percent certainty of hitting significant numbers of Posleen normals.

Yes, those are HVMs, Terawatt lasers, and plasma weapons that can ‘go through a battleship…’ not going through a battleship. At least they’re doing some damage, and are a credible threat. Also, CIWS refitted for chewing up Posleen, and their 'autotarget whoever fires' trick used against them. Nice.

The one-hundred-millimeter grav-gun was fully automated and required no crew. There was, however, a crew of three detailed to respond to mechanical malfunction or to man it if the central fire control failed. The procurement process had insisted on a backup "local" control system that seemed as useful to most of the personnel assigned as teats on a boar hog. If the central control was out, aiming the weapon was going to be a matter of luck.

The weapon defied most conventional Air Defense Artillery concepts, as could only be expected of something designed to engage space cruisers and not lightly built aircraft. Instead of swiveling gears to track and aim it, the support struts flexed in a sinuous fashion that was mildly nauseating to watch. The struts also were only required to maintain its position against gravity; the grav-drive system had no recoil.

In addition, instead of sending up a hail of exploding "flak" like most antiaircraft weapons, it fired single free-flight bars of depleted uranium, accelerated to .3c in the path up the twenty-meter barrel. One hundred millimeters in diameter and two meters long, the bars would go through a command ship long ways when they hit. Besides the massive kinetic explosion such an impact would entail, as they passed through the atmosphere the bars created a standing relativistic wave in front of them that generated a blast of gamma and X rays sufficient to cook anything in the ships.

However, instead of nine such weapons there was a single gun. And, instead of the fortress being "buttoned up," a mass of concrete and steel, with concentric, compartmentalized defenses and multiple firing points of the main guns, there was sunlight coming in from both directions in the firing area. Both the armored outer door, which should have protected the compartment from impacts on the surface of the fortress, and the armored inner door, which should have protected the compartment from internal blasts, were missing.

Planetary Defense Center antiship grav gun. Similar speeds, but hundreds of times the mass of regular grav gun rounds. There are five PDCs; American, European, Indian, Chinese, Japanes, though three are destroyed almost immediately during the landings, and one just a little later. Each fortress was supposed to have 9 antiship cannon and be a bunker proof against orbital bombardment. Neither of these things happened in time, though the PDCs are rebuilt after Gust Front.
Just as an aside, I’d kind of like to know where all this depleted uranium is coming from. Yes, I know DU isn’t exactly rare, being common in armor-piercing munitions and as aircraft counterweights. But the only way I know of making it is as a byproduct of uranium enrichment. Which, admittedly gives you something like 10 units of DU for every 1 unit of U-235. But, a single suit can burn through 9 kilos of DU in a single minute, and there are five divisions of ACS. Then the PDCs and SheVa which both fire rather large projectiles of the stuff. Even the suits probably contain DU.

Althanara had just raised his arms in celebration when he realized the fire from the ship was not a palpable hit. He did not, however, have time to panic. Before the thousand-pound shells of the ship had made it halfway to the target, the uranium bar from the distant Planetary Defense Center arrived.

The round penetrated from the bottom of Athanara's ship and exited the top. Along the way it passed through the matter-antimatter converter and the antimatter storage tanks. Puncturing the plasma conduits of the HVM launcher on its way out was merely a formality.

The expanding ball of nuclear fire that had been a lander caught the main-gun rounds in mid-flight and disintegrated them. The shockwave and thermal pulse caught the Posleen along its path and incinerated them as well. From the exterior it was impossible to tell which round had arrived first.

This incident would create a running debate in history. The argument over whether it was the PDC round or those of the battleship that had destroyed the lander would be argued from boardroom to bar for years to come. The optimistic assumption was that it was the battleship's guns that had caused the destruction. Medals, commendations and lucrative defense contracts would be based on that, false, assumption. That, however, was for the future.

And was it ever a terrible mistake. But we’ll get back to that when I get to book 3.

Ok, I’m done with the ground-pounders for right now. And now, the Posleen-verse…. In Space!

There were two forms of hyperspatial transport known: "ley-line" transport and "quantum tunneling."

The Federation, without exception until recently, used "line" transport. A quirk of quantum theory first proposed by humans in the 1950s turned out to be true. Along the path from star to star was a "valley" or "line" that permitted easy entry into the alternative dimensions of hyperspace. These valleys permitted ships to travel at high "relative" speeds, far exceeding the speed of light. Although it was possible to "quantum tunnel" outside the valleys, it was slower and more power intensive.

The problem from a military perspective with the "valleys" was that the openings were both a known location and they were relatively distant from the inner planets. Therefore, it took hours or sometimes even days for a ship to travel from the habitable world to the "valley entrance." Nor were the entrances necessarily near each other or near planets. So most of a long hyperspatial trip involved movement in star systems from one valley to the next. Furthermore, the approach of a ship in the "valley" set up a harmonic that was detectable outside the "hyperspace dimension," but ships in the valley were blind to the outside. Although the Posleen did not, currently, set up space ambushes, the possibility existed. And that made Fleet dislike "ley-line" hyperspace intensely.

The Posleen, however, used an alternative method. Disdaining the "valley" method they used "quantum tunneling." Quantum tunneling had numerous items to its advantage. It permitted "small" jumps within star systems. It permitted the ships to come out relatively close to their target, be it a planet or some other location. And it was practically undetectable.

However, "tunneling" had two countervailing problems. First, it was slow and energy intensive, compared to the "valley" method. The trip from Diess to Earth took six months using the "valley" method; most of the time spent in systems going from valley to valley. Using the "tunneling" method it took almost a year and seven times as much energy. Second, the "exit" phase was highly random. Ships come out of hyperspace on a random course and at low velocities. But it was the preferred method of the Posleen. Indeed, the species seemed unaware of the "lines" between star systems.

The two forms of FTL in the Posleen-verse, with a discussion of their relative strengths and flaws. Having a travel time from Earth to Diess using both systems would be a lot more helpful if we knew how far away Diess was. Also, in the first book they referred to their FTL as ‘N-Space’ so another minor contradiction there.

"Commander," asked Weston, leaning forward and pinning her with that deep, black gaze, "how many systems are currently down on this barge?"

Sharon grimaced. "There are seventeen 'minor' systems down and four 'major' systems, ma'am. The major systems are limited to environmental and defense. All weapon systems and drive systems are on-line." She shrugged. "The crew is doing wonders, especially the Indowy, but we don't have the spares! We might have been able to get spares delivered for the heat exchangers and the number six forward fans by now if Captain Stupanovich had bothered to forward the requests!" she finished angrily.

Weston nodded. "Commander, there are seventeen frigates assigned to Earth system defense. You know that, right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you know how many are flying?" she continued, aggressively.

"Twelve, ma'am," said Sharon, wondering where the discussion was going.

Weston nodded again. "Do you know how many have more than fifty percent capability in weapons and drive? The two systems that you correctly pointed out are the most important?" She waved at the air. "It's hot! The exchangers are off-line, right?"

She shook her head and swore. "This is the only damned frigate circling Earth that has all its weapons on-line and a fully capable drive! And if you don't think Fleet notices that, you're not as smart as they say you are.

"We are currently the only frigate that is more or less ready to sail in harm's way!" continued the captain, seriously. "If there is an emergence of Posleen ships, the fighters and the other frigates will try. But most of the frigates, if they're not limping on one reactor their launch systems are off-line!"

A little something on the space situation. At this time, Earth has 17 “frigates” really ancient Indowy freighters with missile launchers attached, all in varying states of disrepair as a defense fleet. A third are completely inoperable, and only one is really approaching combat-ready. Actually, even ‘approaching combat-ready’ may be a bit of a stretch:

The fast frigates had never been designed for war. But human ingenuity had managed to work around some of the problems. The answer in this case was external Missile/Launch Pod Assembly systems for antimatter armed and driven missiles; the frigates could fit six of the big box launchers, each of which stored four missiles. However, because the frigates also lacked storage space, there was only room for two extra M/LPAs, and attaching them meant that a team had to go out of the ship, presumably in the midst of a battle.

Frigate armament. 24 antimatter missiles on external box launchers, with an additional 12 in storage that can be fitted on between combat. So if every frigate worked, and they were all to fire simultaneously on a single target, there’d be 408 missiles on their way. If their opponent survives, or has friends, they scurry off, reload, then fire off another 204. This is the first line of defense for Earth.
Well, the frigates plus three squadrons, however large that is here, of “F-2000 Space Falcons.” An aerial squadron can be anywhere from a dozen planes to twice that. So, 36 -72 fighters, not a lot for patrolling the near-earth orbit.

The fighters conceived of and designed by the GalTech Fighter Board were the most advanced spaceships ever built. Because the Posleen occasionally exhibited a degree of skill at jamming, and because the Galactics required a human in the fire decision loop, there had to be a body in the cockpit. To survive in the expected environment the ships had to mount not only impressive countermeasures but be able to maneuver in ways considered impossible by the first designers.

The primary Posleen weapons that would be used against fighters were either a terawatt laser system on the landers or a similar grade plasma cannon. Galactic reports and information developed on Barwhon and Diess determined that Posleen detection and acquisition systems were state-of-the-art. Indeed, there was mounting evidence that they surpassed the Federation in every respect. Furthermore, a laser beam traveled at the speed of light, a plasma ray only fractionally slower. While over extremely long ranges there was lag, at any practical engagement range the time between firing and impact was effectively instantaneous.
Given these two facts there was little hope for a fighter component, despite their obvious utility against landers. The entire battle would have to be fought by ships that could take a hit and keep coming.

However, in any weapons system there was a slightly longer lag between acquisition of target and firing, the "lock-on" phase. It was this inherent lag that was the single chink designers could foresee in Posleen antiship weapons. What would be required to survive in that type of environment would be a fighter capable of carrying a reasonable payload and sufficient projectors and deflectors to be able to somewhat spoof the Posleen acquisition systems, but most of all it would have to be incredibly maneuverable.

Why fighters are both necessary, somewhat survivable, and not terribly useful all at the same time. Posleen plasma cannons of ‘similar grade’ to the ubiquitous terawatt lasers. Which are also used as light weapons by all Posleen ships. :gulp:

The only thing that made this possible was inertial control. Inertial controllers were used in all space craft, otherwise they could not reach reasonable speeds without squashing their crew flat from acceleration forces. After months of research and development the Galactic science/philosophers, the crablike Tchpth, managed to create an inertial stabilization system capable of damping six hundred standard gravities with a reasonable field area and mass. Since the resulting craft would be at least the size of a conventional F-15 it had more than enough room for weapons and jammers. Acceleration, however, remained a problem.

The Federation in general used a reversal of the inertial damping field for reactionless acceleration. While it was a tremendously efficient system, it had some limitations that they had not yet overcome. Specifically, although they could damp six hundred gravities of acceleration, they could not generate them. Thus the fighter's dampers exceeded its actual abilities. This was where human ingenuity came to the fore.

The humans on the design team made a series of points on the subject of reactionary as opposed to reactionless thrust and the utility of some of the materials the Galactics used regularly. After a brief protest over the inherent danger of the system, the antimatter thruster and afterburner were born. Antiprotons and water were squirted into a plenum chamber at a three-to-one mix ratio. When the antimatter hit the water it created a thrust just made for getting down and busy. Dropping more raw antimatter into the thrust plume created an afterburner that gave new meaning to the name "Hammer." The Space Falcons could even do a maneuver previously the sole prerogative of the Harrier jump jet, a VSLP.

With a flip of the pilot's wrist the fighter could be pointed in the opposite direction, but because of inertial forces would continue along its initial vector. However, an application of antimatter thrusters and afterburners slowed all but the most extreme velocities and had the fighter headed in the new direction in no time.

Realistic space maneuvering! How novel.

As it was, for a moment he sustained over sixty Gs after damping. While likely to kill most human beings, with training and if they are sustained for only an instant, sixty Gs are marginally survivable. In the case of Takao Takagi it was an instant he would remember for the rest of his life. As he came out of momentary shock, he fired a volley of antimatter "lances." The small, "brilliant" weapons were about the size of a conventional AMRAAM that had hypervelocity drivers and penetration aids designed to get inside Posleen defenses. The Class Four antimatter warheads should be able to destroy or severely damage a lander. He knew that his AID would be broadcasting warnings so he didn't even bother.

With the antimatter afterburner on, the Space Falcon can hit 660 g’s of accel. The fighters are armed, as are the Frigates, with AI-equipped, hypervelocity, antimatter missiles.

After what seemed like days, but was in fact hours, Takao had expended all his lances and was reduced to peppering the globe with his dual terawatt lasers. The globe began to break up, exposing to fire more of the vulnerable landers and the more important command dodecahedrons as it neared the atmosphere.

But despite its increasing vulnerability, Takao had to break off. Space Falcons were exactly that: Space falcons. Only vaguely aerodynamic and without a heat shield, they would burn up entering the atmosphere at combat speeds.

Hours to fire off all his missiles? Then again, the SF is “the size of a WWII bomber.” And it has two terawatt lasers, how surprising. :takes a drink:

"I've got a case of ammunition for this out in the truck. The powers-that-be still frown on grav-guns in civilian hands but this is a pulser gun.

Gee, I wonder why.

It fires pulse darts. Each of the darts has an electrical charge in it powerful enough to kill an elephant, much less a Posleen. There are twenty-four darts in a clip. It's accurate to about a hundred yards with a good hand." He pulled a clip out of his cargo pocket. "This is a clip of practice ammunition and you can reuse an expended dart as practice ammo. But to fire it in practice, you have to charge the onboard capacitor." He turned to Mike Senior. "It charges on 220."

Galtech gun Mike gives to his eight-year-old daughter. Part of a failed attempt to arm the Indowy, apparently. This is actually a real thing, though it’s called XREP and not a ‘pulser.’ Basically a rubber bullet, with a built-in taser to make sure you don’t feel like getting up. Not fun, by any stretch of the imagination.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2011-09-25 05:33pm

And the newly refurbished USS North Carolina, one of the seven remaining battleships in the world—pulled from her berth in Wilmington where she had spent nearly fifty years as a state monument—shivered as flame lanced from her sixteen-inch guns for the first time in over sixty years.

This further shows how little Ringo actually knows.

Ever know why it was possible for the Iowas to come back (relatively) easily?

This is Why

Each ship had 1/2 of the machinery plant of an Iowa; which was used by utilizing long lead items ordered for Illinois and Kentucky.

They provided useful training and spare parts that kept a mobilization base available for the Iowas, which allowed their 1960s and 1980s reactivations.

The other battleships such as the North Carolinas and South Dakotas, didn't have this built in source of support, which is why the North Carolinas were stricken in 1960, and the South Dakotas in 1962.

Even more problematic is that while all four Iowas are preserved to some form or another, there's only one North Carolina left, and two South Dakotas -- the rest were scrapped.

At best, you can with a lot of effort bring back either BB-59 Massachusetts or BB-60 Alabama, by cannibalizing the other ship for spares; but not both.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2011-09-25 06:57pm

Ahriman238 wrote:@Connor
The o.3 c and the 3x2 mm rounds both come direct from the text. I tend to agree with you, about it being too fast, with too high a rate of fire. For vs. debates, anyone challenging Posleen-verse humanity would be facing the same sort of overkill, unless they nuke them from orbit.

Dude, you don't have to take dialouge as 100% gospel, even in novel analysis. This only causes you more grief if you worry over things like "relativistic." You do realize that blasting off these multi-kt superguns would be heating the air to lethal levels for any non-armoured person? Hell, any posleen hit by GIGAJOULES muchl ess terajoules is going to at least partly if not wholly turn to plasma. You'd be talking abou tturning posleens less into organic bombs and more about organic pocket nukes.

Furthermore, even if we ignore the recoil, and enviormentla issues, remember the bitching in the first novel about energy releases from kiloton level energy strikes being comparable to volcanic eruptions and ice ages (It's porbably oversimplifying the matter, but I find it hard to bleieve they intentionally designed a weapon even more insane than a volcanic eruption.)

The number of bullets they shoot is a factor both because they run out of the ammunition on hand quickly, and strategically they use up their units ammo faster. Also, because each round that doesn't hit several Posleen (and there will be many, especially when you use a thousand rounds to try and kill fifty) are going to shred the surrounding area. In one of David Weber's early books, the Apocalypse Troll IIRC, a character from the future had a pistol with nuclear potential, and it was treated as an object of awe and dread. Here we have weapons that aren't much weaker being treated like super-soakers.

At a fraction of a kilogram, ammo is actually a trivial concern for powered armored troops, at least relative to the fact that a.) the suit's batteries have to power more systems than just the guns and b.) the alternative for powering the guns was antimatter, which, as we see in the novel, puts a dangerous volatile (more dangerous at least than what they already have) on the suit. Moreover, it does it per bullet (why not antimatter in a clip?)

Of course, if you're going to change the ROF on the gun the entire gun might as well be redesigned or abandoned

In Gust Front, grav guns are explicity stated to be recoiless. Nothing is mentioned of the mechanism behind its recoiless nature, but could there be one besides magic, umm... forcefields and QUANTUM!?

I realize this is sci fi but... you do realize that part of the rules is that if you are going to do calcs, you can't ignore momentum, right? You have to address it somehow. The funny thing is, they HAVE a recoil compensation mechanism built into their suits with their built in flight capability... but the capability is nowhere near powerful enough to handle the ridicuolous recoil implicit in anything like the overpowered gravguns. especially your insane "terajoules/second" types. Even Mike's Super-suit (Tm) can't handle that, much less the regular suits.

Indeed I'll address the inconsistencies in the suits following. But the Ringo numbers are so far over the place as far as the ACS go that you really can't take things too literally.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2011-09-25 07:23pm

MKSheppard wrote: It's a big problem when each microbullet you fire uses antimatter to go bang.

You later point out in your post, that producing the microbullets was never a problem for humanity -- it was just getting the antimatter to make the microbullets go bang. You also pointed out that if they had lowered the firepower of the M300 downwards, then they wouldn't have needed the antimatter in the first place.

You are not a military strategist/logistican. Neither am I. Yet we both saw this issue right away with the M300 as a weapon.

What does that say about the US Military in Posleenverseland? That they've all gotten total lobotomies?

Frankly you have more confidence in the Military industrial complex of the united states than I do. I personally think it is governeed by greed and short sighted stupdiity, much like many other subsections of the United states (like the financial sector, politics in general, etc.) In that frame of mind human short-sightedness isn't all *that* surprising, especially with "Darhel meddling." The problme is more in Ringo's heavy-handed execution of it.

But he's still better than Kratman.

In the later novels, circa 2009 in Posleenverse time; the US Army deploys the M1A4 Abrams; which has:

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.

I kind of like how we had to wait most of a half decade after Posleenfall before people realized how stupid it was to give ACS suits GalTech exclusively.

I'm not quite sure I follow. From what I remember about the magitech suits it wasn't just high tech alloys built via imagineering. It was also magic forcefield tech. There's all sorts of possible problems in trying to rig that into a vehicle which could very well make it impossible, or even if possible more complicated. The "imagineering" stuff was a very slow and precise way of manufacturing, which isn't something you want to rely on in a war, as I recall things. The way it read to me was that they figured on rigging vehicles with some of the tech tricks they learned from the Galtech and could incorporate/build with their own tech base (there was something in one of the latter novels I recall where they were building warships in the solar system. If they can do that they probably shoudl be able to rig better materials into the tanks.) It doesn't seem that far fetched to me, compared to the ludicrous sort of armament they rigged the tank with. Moreover, I could kinda see what Ringo might be going for - the idea "we were told we could rely on Galtech to help bolster our support but those supply lines dried up mysteriously" so they're left trying to get along as best as they can (eg the antimatter.) It could work, its just Ringo totally failed to pull it off believably. It seems more like each subsequent novel featured him incorporating "hey thats a neat idea" stuff retroactively

But back to the point, the A4 had a dramatically revised armament outfit:

Yeah, slapping a ton more guns on the tank and calling that a good idea was pretty silly.

Likewise, he seems to like miniguns:

The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.

As I recal lthey were sticking gatling guns on some super-huge fortifications they were building to wall in the Posleen (they never finished that before they arrived either. Much like those crappy "hive cities underground" concepts that turned into high tech grimdark ghettos.)

Still I find this less objectionable than the Mary Sue Militia Grandpa defending his home against the evil foreign invader aliens. That aspect was so uttelry offensive to me it could only have gotten worse if they had the "Home Alone" Kid defending against the Posleen. Or perhaps replaced the Posleen with the Signs Aliens.

The entire thing is just a fantastically *fap fap fap* worthy thing; and I'd like to tie it into one of your comments:

Indeed given the "human wave" approach and the limited number of ACS suits period they probably SHOULD have gone with high rates of fire.

The problem is that when you fight epically mass human wave attacks; you don't want firehoses (aka Puff the magic dragon / M300 Grav Gun / Miniguns), because all that firepower in such a short time will just vaporize, shred, puree, and mistify the first rank or two of the Posleen human wave attack, leaving the rest of the mass of the Posleen alive and unharmed.

If you're using hypervelocity anything you have to run the risk of "explodey" stuff - thats why asteroid impacts that hit the earth can simulate nuclear weapons and why you want whipple shields on stuff. Relativistic makes that even more absurd/wasteful. Other than that it really depends on other parameters (how the projectile is shaped/designed, how fast it is moving, etc.) I'm not even sure you would want your ammo to be overpenetrating with a rifle to begin with.

Of course you could just say "forget the rifle and stick with the grenade launchers" - in this respect the Reaper suits made more sense.

(The third and fourth waves may get some fragmentation damage).

Previously, I had recommended using delay-fuzed 25mm Bushmasters and 40mm Bofors to deal with Posleen Human Waves.

That would work if you had open space and territory to trade or something else to hide behind that could keep the Posleen back and keep out of line of sight. And you could eliminate the air support. Never quite figured out why they couldn't use artillery to take out the tenars and possibly low-hanging landers.

ACS suits - if they insisted on using them, should hav ebeen sticking with just the grenade launchers. Rifles would have been backups.

We could even try to license produce the Russian 2B9 Vasilek 82mm automatic mortar; since it fires from four round clips and also can fire an anti-tank round that penetrates 100mm of RHA.

It didn't help the Russians in universe apparently

Generally, the US Military still tests intensively before releasing a brand new round or weapon to the troops; the Iraq-Afghanistan wars aren't existential, so we can afford to take a year or two for testing out a new gun or round before we issue it to the troops in the field.

[/quote]

Again you seem to have more confidence in the United states ability to industrialize and produce things intelligently than I do. I tend to look at it as emulating the galactic Empire more than anything practical.

Of course, if they fuck up a few times I'm quite willing to believe they might change.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2011-09-25 07:41pm

Simon_Jester wrote:Hmm?

Yeah, I suppose- they write off something like 10-100 tons of mass per missile fired, right? The production capacity it takes to make it happen must be staggering, as is the fact that they can do it without crashing GDP. They've got to be strip-mining entire asteroid fields, and if there's rare earths and whatnot in the hardware... hell, I'd be surprised if they could do it at all without transmutation of the elements. Although I dunno- not sure what the numbers look like.

But then, plenty of space opera features stuff like that. Part of the draw of the subgenre is the sheer scale on which resources are made available, and on which the creation and destruction takes place.

Perhaps. The main thing that bugs me is less the resource wastage itself (I mean it wouldnt make much difference if they were wasting millions of ships worth of tonnage in a war. That might fit in better in universe.) It's more like huge quantities of missiles which travel at fractions of ligthspeed, yet only deliver megaton warheads, the logistical/industrial/R&D magic pulling all this ongoing advancement off makes it feel more like "upgrades in an RTS game" to me.

As I recall the last HV debate had you asking how the Impeller wedges could make kinetic impacts totally, completely useless, which is still a good point no matter how one contrives it (I mean they have penaids to get the missile INSIDE the wedge and if you can rig some means to have the missile vaporize itself, wouldn't it behave like a nuke?)

Plus there's that small "tiny high tech system managing to defeat super huge retard empires" - it cuts uncomfortably close to the silliness of vs debates

I don't think that he really ruled out tanks in the first novel- it was just that they didn't have the advantages they would against an Earthly opponent because effective antitank weapons are more common among the Posleen, so that fighting the tanks anywhere but from berms and hull-down positions at long range becomes unsurvivable. There's a lot of logic to the idea of mass-producing Terrestrial weapons to fight the Posleen, though, so as to reduce the need for GalTech that is not and can never be supplied in adequate quantity.

I dont think they could use Galtech in tanks, - the suits were pretty much magically created from scratch and it implied to me there might be some logistical problems in incorporating that (esp since the battlesuits seem to have magic forcefields as part of the defense.) But their playing with Galtech has clearly advanced their own understanding of such things considerably, and while incorporating it would be difficult and time consuming, they clearly made SOME useful advances (at least managed to bring some near-term "cutting edge" stuff from real life into more use.) And they were building their own warships at some point (fighting in space went on throughout the ground war as I remember.) so they probably could have just borrowed from that to equip vehicles.

Like I said to Shep: I can buy the idea that by the time the Posleen arrive they had been under a mistkaen impression that they would be logistically supplied by the Galactics, find out this isn't the case, and then scramble after the fact to come up with alternatives. But Ringo's way of doing it just failed to really deliver that.. it just seemed so random like he found out about some new idea, changed his mind, or had some new revelation that he decides to stick in the next novel.

I think I see the argument- the grav guns are overkill. But what they'd really want to improve the defenses of Earth would be, yes, lots of antilander defense weapons. The Planetary Defense Centers were supposed to have that job, but were not completed in time (Darhel screwing over); nothing short of the heaviest Posleen God King weapons or their GalTech equivalents could do the job of lander-hunting.

And what you'd really need to optimize the defense is that lander-hunting capability, the ability to cause massive attrition to the Posleen whenever they try to use air or space mobility.

Alot of the high tech solutions were alot more overkill than they really needed. I'm not demanding 100% perfect prescience type of application of tech, or I'm not saying there is no room for error or experimentation - I've gathered from history that quite often figuring out how to properly use technology against an opponent required some trial and error, experimentation, and prediction (even with computers, I gather, you still have to test and experiment at least to some degree.) - but the concept just really isn't handled well in the Posleen novels. The sort of thing I was thinking of which seemed well handled to me was John Scalzi's Old Man's war. Now there were some sneaky bastards (although that had some of the "human hoo-rah" bullshit too, at least in the beginning...)

More like... it works, but not well. You need to use a LOT of nukes to make sure some of the nukes get through, and Posleen are radiation-resistant enough that the fallout zones won't stop them as well as they would a normal army. It's not that they're physically immune to nuclear attack, it's that nuclear attack isn't a "push button end war" option with them the way it would be against a human opponent of comparable technological prowess.

Well maybe, but they were making such a big fuss about using antimatter shells and grenades to blow shit up (CF Ahriman's latest post and the Reaper suit mortars) Missile delivered nukes are still a no no due to fiat of course, but missiles aren't the only way to deliver nukes.

Hell we know now that you don't even have to rely on direct impacts to do the damage. I'm surprised they didng manage to rig up some sort of fancy way to use bomb pumped lasers or a casaba howitzer type munition against the Posleen. That would have made a GREAT anti Lander weapon methinks, and would have suited the in-universe mentality lately (EG the use of Metalstorm or ETC tech or stuff like that.)

2 km/s is at least not totally batshit in the absence of GalTech. To get ten, you need elf magic.

Well I dont remembe the exact velocity. I just remember they needed to make this super-fuckoff huge 16 inch gun to launch some super-lander killing shell, and that for whatever reasons they needed to rig it into some fuckoff huge, nuclear powered Land tank the sorts of which would be at home in 40K. Now the rationale and the design of the Shiva itself does not bug me - I rather liked how Ringo clearly gave some thought to it - but I'm not sure that FUCKOFF HUGE DOOM TANKS automatically made it the only ideal lander-killing weapon. (nevermind that the logistics and design of it throw some other interesting questions out there.)

Really its just like the Abrams Battle tanks with sixteen fucking guns on it. Its just a huge WTF.

Well, it wouldn't be overkill if they were used as semiautomatic weapons- pull trigger once, blow the shit out of that group. Shift target, blow the shit out of that group. With even a modest number of riflemen on the line, you could make this weapon stop a basically unlimited attack force, because you can cover a front too large for them to cross in lethal blast footprints.

Depends on what you shoot them with. Even for a Tenar I can't quite see needing a bullet packing hundreds of kg/pounds of TNT equivalent to kill something.

It's a desirable weapon, but not at the rate of fire described, if you ask me.

The velocity and the power of each shot are part of what demanded the volatile antimatter to begin with as I recall. With the antimatter, the huge numbers of ammo only exacerbated that problem (as Hymn kinda demonstrated I believe)

The sort of gravgun I am thinking of is how Mass effect guns are supposed to be working as, or maybe Eldar Shuriken guns.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-25 08:40pm

Connor MacLeod wrote:
Ahriman238 wrote:@Connor
The o.3 c and the 3x2 mm rounds both come direct from the text. I tend to agree with you, about it being too fast, with too high a rate of fire. For vs. debates, anyone challenging Posleen-verse humanity would be facing the same sort of overkill, unless they nuke them from orbit.
Dude, you don't have to take dialouge as 100% gospel, even in novel analysis. This only causes you more grief if you worry over things like "relativistic." You do realize that blasting off these multi-kt superguns would be heating the air to lethal levels for any non-armoured person? Hell, any posleen hit by GIGAJOULES muchl ess terajoules is going to at least partly if not wholly turn to plasma. You'd be talking abou tturning posleens less into organic bombs and more about organic pocket nukes.

Furthermore, even if we ignore the recoil, and enviormentla issues, remember the bitching in the first novel about energy releases from kiloton level energy strikes being comparable to volcanic eruptions and ice ages (It's porbably oversimplifying the matter, but I find it hard to bleieve they intentionally designed a weapon even more insane than a volcanic eruption.)

The number of bullets they shoot is a factor both because they run out of the ammunition on hand quickly, and strategically they use up their units ammo faster. Also, because each round that doesn't hit several Posleen (and there will be many, especially when you use a thousand rounds to try and kill fifty) are going to shred the surrounding area. In one of David Weber's early books, the Apocalypse Troll IIRC, a character from the future had a pistol with nuclear potential, and it was treated as an object of awe and dread. Here we have weapons that aren't much weaker being treated like super-soakers.
At a fraction of a kilogram, ammo is actually a trivial concern for powered armored troops, at least relative to the fact that a.) the suit's batteries have to power more systems than just the guns and b.) the alternative for powering the guns was antimatter, which, as we see in the novel, puts a dangerous volatile (more dangerous at least than what they already have) on the suit. Moreover, it does it per bullet (why not antimatter in a clip?)

Of course, if you're going to change the ROF on the gun the entire gun might as well be redesigned or abandoned

In Gust Front, grav guns are explicity stated to be recoiless. Nothing is mentioned of the mechanism behind its recoiless nature, but could there be one besides magic, umm... forcefields and QUANTUM!?
I realize this is sci fi but... you do realize that part of the rules is that if you are going to do calcs, you can't ignore momentum, right? You have to address it somehow. The funny thing is, they HAVE a recoil compensation mechanism built into their suits with their built in flight capability... but the capability is nowhere near powerful enough to handle the ridicuolous recoil implicit in anything like the overpowered gravguns. especially your insane "terajoules/second" types. Even Mike's Super-suit (Tm) can't handle that, much less the regular suits.

Indeed I'll address the inconsistencies in the suits following. But the Ringo numbers are so far over the place as far as the ACS go that you really can't take things too literally.

Ah. I apologize for any confusion, I did not mean 'the numbers came from the source material and are thus inviolate' I meant to say 'the numbers came from the source material so if they don't make sense that's actually not my fault for once.' I'm basically trying to do two things here, collect the bits and pieces of numbers and stats scattered throughout the series and bring them together, and try to make some sense of the numbers, point out the inconsistencies and resolve them if at all possible. I may be guilty of compartmentalizing these two goals too much. Originally I was going to put a conclusion at the end of each post, but I eventually decided to just commentary to every quote and a conclusion when I've finished.

The grav-guns as the stats give us are unworkably overpowered. Even if they did not come apart as a spray of radiation, as you said, each would have the effect of a pair of mini-guns firing baby-nukes. That will never be a practical weapon, not if you ever want to live on the land you're fighting over.

But the grav-guns as their effects are described are quite different. They turn Posleen into a spray of blood, rather than a plasma. They kill the first six or seven ranks of Posleen, but the ranks behind those are safe. They don't destroy cities or gut buildings. They cannot seem to bring down the same landers that are utterly destroyed by 10 kt explosions, even with sustained fire. At least I presume this to be the case, since they call for support against landers (or equip the Reapers with special anti-lander weapons) rather than deal with it themselves. A strong platoon of ACS was also unable to bring down a C-Dec in the first book, despite a twenty minute running firefight with it.

Mind you, the more I do in this project, the more I learn just how many gaps there are in math/science training and even general knowledge. Which is probably how John RIngo feels every time someone points out the flaws in his books.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2011-09-25 08:45pm

Ahriman238 wrote:
Mike nodded and decided to change the subject. "Apropos of nothing, sir, where is the equipment for all these mechanized and mobile divisions coming from?"

"Chrysler is back in the armor-making business, has been for nearly a year. They and GM have been producing like mad, son," said General Taylor. "They've not only stepped up their production rate beyond anything they expected, they've converted two factories in western Pennsylvania and Utah for M-1 production and four for Bradley production. The Toyota plant in Kentucky is about to get into the business as well. Modern equipment we have out the ass. What we don't have is GalTech."

"And even an Abrams can't stand up to Posleen for very long," continued General Horner.
The armor situation. Though I believe they’ll lose the Kentuckian and Penny plants in PosleenFall. Most of the draftees will wind up as armored cav or mechanized infantry.

The interesting thing here is that they imply that "an Abrams can't stand up to Posleen for very long." I dont remember what "very long is" but I'm willing to bet that a few Tanks could still mow down hordes of Posleen even in direct ifre mode if they use those cannister-round analogues designed for tanks. It's not evne a new concept really. Or even just HE Especially since the tanks would greatly outrange the Posleen.

Many houses are now equipped with a self-destruct, tied to a Posleen-sensor, or activated by a homeowner who’d rather be blown up than eaten. There's a rel tear-jerker scene of a family activating their self-destruct and reading to their kids, waiting for the end, but I decided including wouldn't it serve any purpose but sheer dickery. Kudos to Ringo for writing an emotional scene though.

The sad part of this is that I could see alot of nutjobs doing this sort of thing. Especially the religious or the militia wackos. However, this kinda flies in the face of Grandpa O'Neal the Militia Babysitter, and just shows how much of an authorial fiat he was.

*snip quote*Manjacks, automated machine guns. Simple enough, it uses existing lidar technology to measure the distance to the next surface during set-up, and checks it a few times a second. If the distance to the nearest surface becomes shorter, say the beam is interrupted by someone, the manjack fires until the distance is correct again. Simple. Allegedly idiot-proof. But you know what they say, never underestimate the ability or determination of idiots.

Frankly you have to wonder why they bothered with any of the really high tech stuff or railguns hwen they were doing this from the get go. I have to wonder how much of this might have been applied to other things like grenade launchers or mortars.

M-222 Reaver. Nice to see someone doing something about the insufficient artillery problem. Don’t think it’s quite enough though.

Agan one of my holes in knowledge - isnt the US Military rather heavy on artillery already? Long range killing has always seemed to be one of the things it liked doing, even if they preferred precision guidance. I'd imagine the military had alot of MLRS stuff and such that might still work.

t about including the Missouri bit, decided it was redundant. The battleships are reactivated as off-shore artillery platforms. With a few modifications

Actually I suspect they were set up to create a reason to design and employ the SheVa tanks.

Wasn't it the performance of the super-wanked Iowas that lead to SheVas? (and then the Super-SheVa with Super Metalstrom tech in book 4? Althoughj I admit that remains one of my favorite parts for how it was written. Even I have a fanboy bit to me.)

But I guess the Showboat’s sixteen inch steel armor can stand up to HVMs. Huh.

HVM performance and velocities are pretty much liek every high tech/Galtech/Posleen weapon in the novels, they tend to vary dramatically.

Yes, those are HVMs, Terawatt lasers, and plasma weapons that can ‘go through a battleship…’ not going through a battleship. At least they’re doing some damage, and are a credible threat. Also, CIWS refitted for chewing up Posleen, and their 'autotarget whoever fires' trick used against them. Nice.

This maybe could have been used as a way to set up other things later, like the super Abrams and stuff (protection wise.) It would have made sense if, for example, they had decided they could build starships and were using that "battle steel" stuff to armor other vehicles.

*snip gravgun bit*
Planetary Defense Center antiship grav gun. Similar speeds, but hundreds of times the mass of regular grav gun rounds. There are five PDCs; American, European, Indian, Chinese, Japanes, though three are destroyed almost immediately during the landings, and one just a little later. Each fortress was supposed to have 9 antiship cannon and be a bunker proof against orbital bombardment. Neither of these things happened in time, though the PDCs are rebuilt after Gust Front.
Just as an aside, I’d kind of like to know where all this depleted uranium is coming from. Yes, I know DU isn’t exactly rare, being common in armor-piercing munitions and as aircraft counterweights. But the only way I know of making it is as a byproduct of uranium enrichment. Which, admittedly gives you something like 10 units of DU for every 1 unit of U-235. But, a single suit can burn through 9 kilos of DU in a single minute, and there are five divisions of ACS. Then the PDCs and SheVa which both fire rather large projectiles of the stuff. Even the suits probably contain DU.

Frankly the sheer power behind those guns is ludicrous. A solid DU slug would be around 300 kilos at those dimensions, for something like 1e18 joules at those speeds, or about 250 megatons. Which is 5x more than the biggest guns on earth. But they use missiles and TERAWATT lasers remember!

Also considering how little firepower you need to take out landers and shit... I wonder why they even bothered with just one super gun. And evne then why the fuck aren't they sticking these on mobile platforms?

Why fighters are both necessary, somewhat survivable, and not terribly useful all at the same time. Posleen plasma cannons of ‘similar grade’ to the ubiquitous terawatt lasers. Which are also used as light weapons by all Posleen ships. :gulp:

I would point out that "terawatt" and "terajoule" are not the same thing. alot of it depends on how the laser is designed. Is it CW or is it pulsed? We can do terawatt and gigawatt lasers today, they just have pathetically tiny energy outputs coupled to ridiciously short timeframes.

Ahriman238 wrote: American ACS drawn from a mixture of Airborne Infantry and US Marines. Also, the closest thing to a quantifiable statement about the firepower of a plasma cannon.

And as I reclal they heavily incorporated football analogues and tactics. AMERICA FUCK YEAH!

Armor protection and the justification for the hideously expensive suits.

That's the problme though. Whats to prevent the ACS from being targeted once these super-durable suits come out? And remember the designers of this suit were supposed to be super-practical, super predictive people who take into account every problem. You'd thinks taying out of line of sight (EG they had grenade launchers with over a km range for regular suits, and 8 km for the Reapers.) and accounting for possible logisitcal shortages (EG not designing a gun that requires a fuck ton more energy to operate than your indirect fire weapons) would occur to them.

As I recall they wanted to build a "practical raygun" as a justification for the grav gun (even though they has terawatt lasers, the posleen had lasers and plasma weapons. hell in the last Ringo only novel some SheVa scientist dude had a fucking plasma rifle!) UGh. Like I said, consistency is only a faint concern in this novel.

Suit heavy weapon teams. Suit heavy weapons as of the battle of Diess, now retired. Also, suit ground speeds and ranges take some getting used to, suit tactics are still evolving, but are increasingly focusing on the heavy weapon teams. It took until the third book, but it turns out that yes, the Reaper is a fifth suit variant. It is described as pot-bellied in appearance, with somewhat thinner armor. The standard grav-gun and grenade launcher are given up in exchange for four hardpoints, two shoulder and two forearm, that can mount any of the Reapers’ heavy weapons.

The fact they give up the grav gun automatically makes these suits more practical, IMHO.

Reaper mortars. The preferred long-range punch for ACS. They have a five mile range (8 kilometers, compared to the 1.2 for suit grenade launchers) and again I wish he’d use one scale consistently, if only while describing ACS weapon ranges… ah well. Along with HE and cluster bombs, we have antimatter rounds that annihilate pretty much anything within a five mile radius, and can be fired five miles away. Obviously not for use when there are friendlies around. Like the grav gun, these have a ridiculous rate of fire. Unlike the grav gun, they don’t carry hundreds of thousands of rounds for the mortars.

I have to wonder why they stick most of this shit only on the Reapers. as I recall all the gear the Reapers get is only a pale imitation of the shit the ACS gravgun does (or is reputed to do.) Which actually only highlights how the grav gun as designed is useless.

Tease. ‘There are several more weapons used by the Reapers, but for now I’m just going to tell you about one and make a passing reference to another.’

One of the weapons systems I recall was a Anti-Lander Grav gun type weapon. And oddly one that sounded less absurd than the grav gun (while also being only a shade less powerful, depending on your calcs.)

Reaper Flechette Cannon. The one weapon in the series with a higher rate of fire than the grav gun. And since they apparently don’t mix weapon systems, each Reaper suit has four. They must be carrying a lot of ammo to be able to feed four such monsters for six minutes of firing.

While the ROF is absurd, I still can't help but say that these weapons make far more sense than the grav gun does.

And while I hate the Tau as a rule, their use of battlesuits would have been far more useful in the ACS than how they were actually used.

Please also note the fins to help with heat dispersal, a major weakness of the suits which is so serious that it will never be mentioned again. Also, since room-temperature superconductors are such a basic and fundamental component of Galactic technology, I’m a little lost as to why getting rid of waste heat is even an issue.

I have a hard time believing there are heating issues with the suit givne the magic grav guns.

"Power source?" asked Mike glancing quickly at the suit. He moved the bit of dip to the side as a slight smile violated his face.
"Class Two antimatter reactor, as you specified. Equivalent to a five-kiloton antimatter warhead, but small enough to armor against almost any strike. Just such a warhead could go off next to the armor and not penetrate the energy core, so strongly is it protected."
Equivalent to a five kiloton warhead over the course of its life, or in output per second? Probably the latter, given some of the power-intensive things he does with it. Like I said, an antimatter generator can keep a suit running more-or-less indefinitely. The problem is what happens if it loses containment, which is why the reactor is so heavily armored.

That interpretation doesn't work, unless you're assuming the antimatte rstorage is some sort of weird pocket dimension only trickling it out by the gram or something, because if the suit went off it would be far more nastier than a 5 kiloton nuke. More to the point, you don't speak of sustained power output in terms of "kilotons" - at least not without adding "per second" to it. you'd use watts or joules/sec or -tons/sec. So it strongly suggests total capacity.

Look I know you're really fixated on taking the grav gun numbers seriously but really, they don't fukcing work out and the more you get into the novels the less sense they make from practically every perspective. It's just better to assume "relativistic" isn't quite so literal. I deal with this for nova cannons and Renegad eLegion shit all the time (eg near relativistiic") - hell I evne had Simon explain to me how precise "relativistic/near relativistic" was

Besides which, I should point out they contradict themselves (which you also quoted) by describing them as hypervelocity. Technically speaking, HV and relativistic are two different things, but in practice the lines can blur somewhat so its not aboslute.

The fact its just a 5 kt nuke yet is supposed to last indefinitely is simply further proof that the grav gun firepower is greatly overrated. Unless you want to attribute it to having some sort of magical self-regenerating antimatter power source (in which case you ownder why they have antimatter shortages.)

So many questions. The only time we’re EVER told what precisely a suit is made of and how thick it is, it has to be this one-off custom suit that isn’t standard in any way. So are the other suits half as think? Do they simply lack ‘energetic reinforcement’? Or are they made of a different material entirely? How is it monomolecular? Does that just refer to the level at which the two are alloyed? I assume the uranium is DU and not radioactive.

What about the ‘energetic reinforcement?’ Is there a sort of force-field strengthening the armor? When it says it’s autocontrolled, does that mean it automatically reinforces threatened areas, or is just always stronger where a projectile is likely to penetrate? Or something else entirely?

Yes its magic forcefields boosting the armor defense. If it helps think of it as a Structural integrity field, but its a bit more complicated than that. Or the powerfield augmentation 40K starships and mateirals can have. The whole "auto adjusting" bit is basically saying that the magic forcefields (I think) behaved like sloped armor on tanks and modern military vehicles, except that it can adjust the slope to increase teh chances of deflecton ( a computer does it because a human could not react fast enough or reliably enough to maximize the defense.) Monomolecualr maybe just refers to really compact or really magical really (maybe they use monomolecular threads/cables/wires/shit to weave the armor?)

also all the suits have this - Hymn mentions using forcefield magic for stealth and protective purposes (against explosions at least, but if they have it against that why not against KEWs)

Mike stepped gingerly down the steps and ran his hand down the front of the suit. "Inertial systems?"
"Two hundred eighty gravities with full lift and drive, seven inertial sump points. Sorry," he said with a shrug. The gesture was shared by Indowy and humans. "It was the best the Tchpth could do."
Inertial dampening limits to Mike’s ubersuit. Increased flight capability, which I’ll get to later.

It also sets some hefty upper limits on recoil handling. I shoudl also mention that the effort in handling the recoil probably drains suit power.

Furthermore it had posted guards clad in Fleet Strike gray "combat silks" outside the company offices and was running two-man patrols between the barracks. Since the weapons were M-300 grav-guns the show of force was impressive. The M-300 weighed twenty-three pounds—the same as the Vietnam-era M-60 machine gun which it resembled—but most of the soldiers in sight handled them easily.
Weight of the standard grav gun, in case you ever wanted to know. And they look like M-60s…I guess?

What's even worse is, IIRC there were UNARMORED people using them. This is a whole nother level of physics-breaking nonsense, and when I mean broken it shattered into itty bitty pieces and the remnants are defecated on messily.

Combat shuttles. Specifically, the ‘Banshee’ anti-grav transport used for ACS air-mobility. The old ones were still easy meat for God-kings, so the Banshee II focuses much more on stealth. They’ll go up to Banshee III before they’re done. Please note the same system the ACS uses to eliminate trackable turbulence works fine for the Banshees as long as they don’t go super-sonic.

Also, Posleen-verse schizoid-tech and some of the reasons behind it. Supplies are limited, thanks to Darhel meddling, and the off-world units have priority for new gear.

You know the magitech stealth systems make me wonder why they were supposed to be completely neutered as an air power now....

"It's not a present," said the visitor, seriously. "It isn't even a loan. One of the things I was doing on my vacation was finding places to plant energy caches. We're seeding the coastal plains with power sources to recharge suit units that get caught behind the lines. When I was on Diess it was a pain in the ass trying to find power. So I came down with three antimatter generators. They've got a finite amount of power, but it's enough to run a small city for a year, so . . ." He shrugged and smiled again.

"Damn," said the boat captain, tossing him another tub. "Thanks."

"Well, the priority is any unit that needs it," Mike said severely. "And, technically, you're not supposed to tie into it. But since you don't have a power grid, it's not like the whole Keys are going to be hooked up to it." He shrugged again and frowned. "As screwed up as it is down here, it seems the least I could do for you. Just don't overuse it. It's like a really big battery and once it's gone, it's gone."
Antimatter power cache, in the event of suits being nearby and in need. Little bit on antimatter capability.

Probably less than half the capcaity of Mike's reactor, assuming around 1 GW power usage for a city.

The three companies of the battalion formed a box. Each of the suits could keep up a continuous stream of fire for over thirty minutes with onboard munitions.
Suits carry sufficient ammo for thirty minutes of continuous fire. At 30,000 rounds a minute that gives us 900,000 rounds. According to Connor, each is 0.3 grams. So, basically each suit carries 300 kilos of ammo. Suddenly it makes a lot more sense that the suits weigh half a ton.

That's not bad. Considering their enhanced strength and antigrav they can probably handle that. And 30 min of continuous fire is actually quite alot for a soldier, I'm pretty sure. Most troopers only carry a few hundred rounds and could run out in far less time I think.

This also begs the question of whether the ACS suits actually do nothing but fire on full auto all the time simply spraying out a burst of pellets would not really count as "fully automatic" (if they fire a few dozen or so per trigger pull)

The armored combat suits were delivered and stored in large Galactic-supplied storage containers. The silvery "Morgues" looked like oversized shipping containers and held forty suits. They came equipped with a Federation Class Two fusion plant or antimatter generator for recharging.
The Morgues were designed for the suits to be readily accessed, each suit stored in an interior pod, the double row of pods aligned down both sides of the large container. When the troopers suited up they went into the container, tossed their uniforms in the provided laundry bin and loaded up in the pods. The struggle of naked bodies in the narrow corridor normally led to a certain amount of playful grab-ass, but it was an efficient process. The suits exited through portals in the sides of the container.
The Fleet Strike Armored Combat Suits included a full suite of inertial compensators and drivers. Given enough power, the suits could and did "fly" under the combination of compensator and drivers. The process, however, was power-intensive. A normal combat suit could only sustain about ten minutes of flight, a command suit twenty to thirty, compared to three days of use before having to recharge if conditions were perfect.
However, as stated, the Morgues had their own onboard power source. And they were designed for high-intensity charging.
* * *
Mike thought the silvery containers probably caused their fair share of accidents as they floated down the interstate. The speed was not much, not more than seventy or eighty miles per hour, but it had permitted the battalion to cover the distance from Harrisburg to Baltimore in an hour. And it would permit them to continue on to D.C. in no time at all—once they picked up a stray captain.
Suit donning procedures, the suits are all stored in a central changing area with an antimatter reactor for recharge. The reactor is the same rating as the one in Mike’s suit and can charge forty suits for three days. Simultaneously.

Suit flight is limited as above, a suit can exhaust its total power supply in ten minutes of flight, a command suit in 20-30 (which should also give you an idea just how much more power the command suits have.) Suit flight speeds no greater than 80 mph (129 kph) or a bit slower than a WWI biplane. Iron Man, they aren’t. Except, of course, for Mike O’Neal’s supersuit, which is both faster, and can fly pretty much indefinitely:

It goes without saying that the power generation implications here, while they cna vary quite a bit, still don't come anywhere close to "terawatts" - triple digit GW was the best I ever got, and more likely single/double digit GW was likelier. Which makes the idea of running grav guns off the suits impossible, especially for the TJ level grav gun outputs (but it even laughs at GW level outputs.)

Although the physical strain was lower than a standard training run, it was fairly equivalent to a "long slow distance run." A well-trained unit in peak shape could generally sustain the pace for two to three hours. This gave the ACS an approximately sixty-mile range using the same technique, the difference being that a unit doing a "long slow distance run" usually did it in PT uniform, whereas the ACS did the same thing in battle armor.
ACS range over time. Possible continuity snag in that this has them doing 20 mph, where the above had 40 as a ‘max sustainable speed.’ But it need not be a contradiction, This is probably a slower, distance run compared to the 40mph figure above.

[/quote]

They mentioned the 40 mph thing on open/clear roads (on road speed, I believe) terrain can greatly impact your mobility, even in a super duper high tech battlesuit. And its quite obvious that with suit enhancement, prolonged running can train or tire out the person inside, which can be bad as far as combat or other things go.

Ah, the 40K school of personnel management. Suit strength-enhancement isn’t mentioned often in this series, despite it being power armor-based, but here a man is easily killed, so there is clearly some strength enhancement there. Grav gun can kill tanks, just in case there was any doubt. Which would mean you were skipping large portions of my previous posts. Now why won’t the government let civilians have grav-waepons again?

I should note that this is a pretty good indicator that the guns do not fire at "full auto" all the time, and are capable of less extreme bursts. But more to the point, they're nowhere near even nuclear-level outputs.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2011-09-25 08:47pm

Again you seem to have more confidence in the United states ability to industrialize and produce things intelligently than I do.

WARNING:

GRAEPHS AHEAD! BALLS SAID IKE ONG!

To give you an example of the US Military Industrial Complex development cycle; I give you the M1028 120mm Anti-Personnel Tank Round.

It's basically a giant shotgun round for the Abrams.

In January 1999, the commander of US Forces in Korea said that the theater needed a short range (100-300m effective) tank fired anti-personnel round.

In December 1999, HQ US Forces Korea issued a Urgency of Need Requirement for this.

The requirement was to kill 50% of an advancing squad with a single round; and 50% of an advancing platoon with two rounds.

From January 1999 to July 2002, United States Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) did initial R&D into the concept.

They tried out different ideas to achieve the lethality requirement:

What they finally settled on was using 1,100~ tungsten spheres as the lethal payload.

On July 2002; the contract to do final development and production was given to General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (GD-OTS). A 23 month Design Optimization and Product Qualification Testing period then occured under GD-OTS Direction.

During DO-PQT, the user community requested performance demonstration of the M1028 against the following alternate targets:

Block Wall
Triple Strand Concertina
Car

in addition to the stated squad/platoon kill requirement.

They tested all four target types with actual tests:

400 meter canvas target

55 meter canvas target

And used computers and maths to make GRAEPHS to figure out the statistical disperson of each ball, and whether the XM1028 would meet the US Army's ComputerMan lethality model for incapacitation of a human subject via fragment impacts.

They also used very high speed cameras to check things out

M1028 taping

As part of the primary target testing, it appears that at ~minimum, they fired 60 rounds at ambient temperature, 55 at hot temperatures, and 50 at cold temperatures to get an idea of how they would behave over a range of temperatures with enough datapoints for statistical evaluation.

Finally, in December 2004; Milestone C (Low Rate Production) was achieved and on 24 June 2005, they type classified the round as standard.

So basically, it took about 6.5 years for the Army to basically develop a shotgun round for a tank.

Of course, most of the development was in peacetime, so YMMV.

Of course, if they fuck up a few times I'm quite willing to believe they might change

All US tanks from the M4 Sherman to the M60 Patton had an escape hatch in the belly, that let the crew escape from the tank under armor, or escape if it flipped over.

This was deleted in the M1 Abrams, due to the new type of suspension adopted, which precluded such an escape hatch.

Normally, it's not a problem until...

you drive onto a bridge that's not rated for the weight of an Abrams and you are dropped upside down into the Euphrates River...

(This is not exclusive to the Abrams, many older tanks are having their escape hatches plated over with slabs of armor to reduce the mine/IED threat, such as the IDF's M60s)

The Abrams' twin Halon systems (at least before Iraq War) in the engine compartment and crew compartment had just one shot each.

It means that the halon system puts out the first fire; and then the next volley of RPGs comes in and restarts the fire...

While this is enough to enable the crew to escape serious injury in the initial flashfire from an enemy round; it's not good for sustained combat.

And of course, the easiest way to defeat an Abrams is to hit the side/rear bustle stowage; where the crew stores all their shit like sleeping bags, etc to set the stuff on fire. The fire then can drip flammables down onto the engine compartment, disabling the tank, and it eventually burns up.

And of course we have the famous Stryker botchups.

Tl;dr; army overloads the Stryker's suspension and transmission with 50% more weight than they were designed for and they break excessively!

But generally, the military does weed out a lot of the really bad issues during the testing phase, so they're annoyances, rather than lethal issues.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2011-09-25 08:50pm

Ahriman238 wrote: Ah. I apologize for any confusion, I did not mean 'the numbers came from the source material and are thus inviolate' I meant to say 'the numbers came from the source material so if they don't make sense that's actually not my fault for once.' I'm basically trying to do two things here, collect the bits and pieces of numbers and stats scattered throughout the series and bring them together, and try to make some sense of the numbers, point out the inconsistencies and resolve them if at all possible. I may be guilty of compartmentalizing these two goals too much. Originally I was going to put a conclusion at the end of each post, but I eventually decided to just commentary to every quote and a conclusion when I've finished.

The grav-guns as the stats give us are unworkably overpowered. Even if they did not come apart as a spray of radiation, as you said, each would have the effect of a pair of mini-guns firing baby-nukes. That will never be a practical weapon, not if you ever want to live on the land you're fighting over.

But the grav-guns as their effects are described are quite different. They turn Posleen into a spray of blood, rather than a plasma. They kill the first six or seven ranks of Posleen, but the ranks behind those are safe. They don't destroy cities or gut buildings. They cannot seem to bring down the same landers that are utterly destroyed by 10 kt explosions, even with sustained fire. At least I presume this to be the case, since they call for support against landers (or equip the Reapers with special anti-lander weapons) rather than deal with it themselves. A strong platoon of ACS was also unable to bring down a C-Dec in the first book, despite a twenty minute running firefight with it.

Mind you, the more I do in this project, the more I learn just how many gaps there are in math/science training and even general knowledge. Which is probably how John RIngo feels every time someone points out the flaws in his books.

The Grav gun performance is one of the more hilariou sinconsistencies, in my mind, of the book, because it is from the get go and remains one of the most bizarre weapons ever. And you're talking to a person who has argued for terajoule multimeltas and contemplated gigawatt hellguns (not that I do anymore...) The real killers for anything close to truly "relativistic" grav gun teardrops is the power draw on the suits and the recoil issue. Those are irreconcilable differences that you quite simply cannot get around. Mike's super suit only caps that in a more egregious manner.

Besides, it just comes across as aribtrary. What about the absurd "two ounce" grav pistol bullets mentioned in the first book? how about the way it skips betwene suggesting each round has something like 200 lbs of TNT equivalent packed into it in one quote, then suggesting another that a barrage makes posleen blow apart like they were crammed iwth 100lbs of TNT, and then a third (one I remember in Hell's Fiare) where a certain number of pellets in the barrel had the equivalent of 50 kilos of TNT or some such? It can literally slide all over the place, but the only place where you find anything remotely *consistent* numbers wise is to revise downwards. And evne then they are still abominably powerful by sci fi terms.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2011-09-25 09:35pm

Connor MacLeod wrote:I dont think they could use Galtech in tanks, - the suits were pretty much magically created from scratch and it implied to me there might be some logistical problems in incorporating that (esp since the battlesuits seem to have magic forcefields as part of the defense.) But their playing with Galtech has clearly advanced their own understanding of such things considerably, and while incorporating it would be difficult and time consuming, they clearly made SOME useful advances (at least managed to bring some near-term "cutting edge" stuff from real life into more use.) And they were building their own warships at some point (fighting in space went on throughout the ground war as I remember.) so they probably could have just borrowed from that to equip vehicles.

There's really nothing stopping them from taking slabs of "alien metal," possibly somewhat less magitech than the stuff in the ACS suits, and slapping it on the front of a tank... it just won't have the kind of protection per ton of armor that ACS suits do, because the production process for ACS suit material is so limited.

Like I said to Shep: I can buy the idea that by the time the Posleen arrive they had been under a mistkaen impression that they would be logistically supplied by the Galactics, find out this isn't the case, and then scramble after the fact to come up with alternatives. But Ringo's way of doing it just failed to really deliver that.. it just seemed so random like he found out about some new idea, changed his mind, or had some new revelation that he decides to stick in the next novel.

Yeah, pretty much.

Well I dont remembe the exact velocity. I just remember they needed to make this super-fuckoff huge 16 inch gun to launch some super-lander killing shell, and that for whatever reasons they needed to rig it into some fuckoff huge, nuclear powered Land tank the sorts of which would be at home in 40K. Now the rationale and the design of the Shiva itself does not bug me - I rather liked how Ringo clearly gave some thought to it - but I'm not sure that FUCKOFF HUGE DOOM TANKS automatically made it the only ideal lander-killing weapon. (nevermind that the logistics and design of it throw some other interesting questions out there.)

Yeah, as a solution it left a lot to be desired, but if you want to kill landers at all you kind of need something in that range- it takes a nuke to kill them, more or less. You need naval-caliber artillery, actively guided missiles are not going to cut it, so you need one hell of an AA gun, and if it has to be mobile you need one hell of a chassis to move it on.

I don't know what can be done for that.

As to the sixteen guns, part of the issue is that Posleen are so ridiculously numerous and soft that I can see the appeal of numerous antipersonnel automatic weapons. Maybe not so many quad and minigun designs, but the logic for putting on a boatload of .50 caliber machine guns to supplement the fire of the main gun is there. The Posleen don't necessarily present lots of targets individually worth expending 120mm rounds on, but they sure present lots of targets worth firing a machine gun at.

Depends on what you shoot them with. Even for a Tenar I can't quite see needing a bullet packing hundreds of kg/pounds of TNT equivalent to kill something.

The point is that each shot from this hundred-kg TNT equivalent rifle is like firing an artillery shell at something in a direct fire mode. You fire, flatten all Posleen within... what, ten or twenty meters of the impact point. You fire again, and flatten another area the same way. And again, and again. Each shot is itself meant to clear an entire area, and there's a certain logic to doing it this way, sort of like sweeping a curtain barrage of artillery across an area.

Connor MacLeod wrote:The interesting thing here is that they imply that "an Abrams can't stand up to Posleen for very long." I dont remember what "very long is" but I'm willing to bet that a few Tanks could still mow down hordes of Posleen even in direct ifre mode if they use those cannister-round analogues designed for tanks. It's not evne a new concept really. Or even just HE Especially since the tanks would greatly outrange the Posleen.

As long as you kill the God Kings (whose sensors are likely to be able to localize tanks and take them out with heavy weapons from long range) quickly, this will probably work- tanks fighting from emplacements and berms can perform against the Posleen.

It's mostly just a problem of putting down enough fire to keep them from shooting back in sufficient mass to start landing killing hits. Which is difficult with tanks unless said tanks are laying down tremendous amounts of antipersonnel fire... which is when you start wishing you had more machine guns on your tank.

The sad part of this is that I could see alot of nutjobs doing this sort of thing. Especially the religious or the militia wackos. However, this kinda flies in the face of Grandpa O'Neal the Militia Babysitter, and just shows how much of an authorial fiat he was.

Uh, I don't know.

I might go for "blown up" over "eaten alive" too, without being a whacko, especially if I get to kill some invading alien monsters instead of just being their lunch.

Also, I'm not sure this really relates to the Grandpa O'Neil thing. Having a bomb in your house to blow yourself up rather than be eaten isn't very reassuring if you want your child to live, after all. It's just a less bad way to die than "eaten alive."

M-222 Reaver. Nice to see someone doing something about the insufficient artillery problem. Don’t think it’s quite enough though.
Agan one of my holes in knowledge - isnt the US Military rather heavy on artillery already? Long range killing has always seemed to be one of the things it liked doing, even if they preferred precision guidance. I'd imagine the military had alot of MLRS stuff and such that might still work.

It works, but the current US army is quite small compared to the conscript military we'd be seeing here. So there's a need to procure all sorts of weapons to expand that capability, for there to be enough artillery to go around.

Actually I suspect they were set up to create a reason to design and employ the SheVa tanks. Wasn't it the performance of the super-wanked Iowas that lead to SheVas? (and then the Super-SheVa with Super Metalstrom tech in book 4? Althoughj I admit that remains one of my favorite parts for how it was written. Even I have a fanboy bit to me.)

Apparently, the SheVa program began because someone thought a battleship shot down a Posleen C-Dec, when in fact the kill credit should have gone to a GalTech planetary defense gun.

Although the idea was, apparently, credible enough that you could build a battleship-scale gun capable of shooting down landers.

Ahriman238 wrote:American ACS drawn from a mixture of Airborne Infantry and US Marines. Also, the closest thing to a quantifiable statement about the firepower of a plasma cannon.
And as I reclal they heavily incorporated football analogues and tactics. AMERICA FUCK YEAH!

For purposes of explaining the tactics to American infantry grunts, hell yes using American football analogies is a good idea.

You know the magitech stealth systems make me wonder why they were supposed to be completely neutered as an air power now...

Possibly aircraft can't fire weapons effectively without defeating the point of the stealth- suddenly they become targets again, and about the only thing they can do without getting spotted is sneak around hauling cargo or scouting.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-25 09:36pm

MKSheppard wrote:
And the newly refurbished USS North Carolina, one of the seven remaining battleships in the world—pulled from her berth in Wilmington where she had spent nearly fifty years as a state monument—shivered as flame lanced from her sixteen-inch guns for the first time in over sixty years.
This further shows how little Ringo actually knows.

Ever know why it was possible for the Iowas to come back (relatively) easily?

This is Why

Each ship had 1/2 of the machinery plant of an Iowa; which was used by utilizing long lead items ordered for Illinois and Kentucky.

They provided useful training and spare parts that kept a mobilization base available for the Iowas, which allowed their 1960s and 1980s reactivations.

The other battleships such as the North Carolinas and South Dakotas, didn't have this built in source of support, which is why the North Carolinas were stricken in 1960, and the South Dakotas in 1962.

Even more problematic is that while all four Iowas are preserved to some form or another, there's only one North Carolina left, and two South Dakotas -- the rest were scrapped.

At best, you can with a lot of effort bring back either BB-59 Massachusetts or BB-60 Alabama, by cannibalizing the other ship for spares; but not both.

Forgive me if I'm revealing a greater ignorance, I freely admit this is not something I know muuch about, but by this part of the book the Military has been aware of the impending invasion, and taking steps like reconditioning the battleships, for about three and a half years. That strikes me as very difficult but not inherently impossible, even if you need to have many parts custom made.

The President authorized the GalTech conference to bypass the regular testing and procurement process, though the individual members of GalTech earned themselves a lot of ill will in the process. It also alienated a lot of military officers who might have otherwise listened when told how the suits and tactics were supposed to work.

There's even a second guy who gives the procurement process an end-run in the second book, getting his manjacks demostrated for individual officers who then wrote good reviews and securing popular and political support for his design over the offcial one. I get the impression Mr. Ringo is not a fan of the process.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-25 10:10pm

Connor MacLeod wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:Hmm?

Yeah, I suppose- they write off something like 10-100 tons of mass per missile fired, right? The production capacity it takes to make it happen must be staggering, as is the fact that they can do it without crashing GDP. They've got to be strip-mining entire asteroid fields, and if there's rare earths and whatnot in the hardware... hell, I'd be surprised if they could do it at all without transmutation of the elements. Although I dunno- not sure what the numbers look like.

But then, plenty of space opera features stuff like that. Part of the draw of the subgenre is the sheer scale on which resources are made available, and on which the creation and destruction takes place.
Perhaps. The main thing that bugs me is less the resource wastage itself (I mean it wouldnt make much difference if they were wasting millions of ships worth of tonnage in a war. That might fit in better in universe.) It's more like huge quantities of missiles which travel at fractions of ligthspeed, yet only deliver megaton warheads, the logistical/industrial/R&D magic pulling all this ongoing advancement off makes it feel more like "upgrades in an RTS game" to me.

As I recall the last HV debate had you asking how the Impeller wedges could make kinetic impacts totally, completely useless, which is still a good point no matter how one contrives it (I mean they have penaids to get the missile INSIDE the wedge and if you can rig some means to have the missile vaporize itself, wouldn't it behave like a nuke?)

Without turning this into an Honor thread (we have quite enough baggage thanks) my understanding is that KEWs are still used in the Honorverse, as weapons for orbital bombardment. It isn't so much that the wedges negate impact, it's that point defense have gotten so good that missiles actually hitting the ship simply never happens. Look how many missiles get shot down just trying to get within the 8000 mile window for laser-head detonation.

I can't really argue with the 'you got MDMs-Achievement unlocked!' vibe.

I don't think that he really ruled out tanks in the first novel- it was just that they didn't have the advantages they would against an Earthly opponent because effective antitank weapons are more common among the Posleen, so that fighting the tanks anywhere but from berms and hull-down positions at long range becomes unsurvivable. There's a lot of logic to the idea of mass-producing Terrestrial weapons to fight the Posleen, though, so as to reduce the need for GalTech that is not and can never be supplied in adequate quantity.
I dont think they could use Galtech in tanks, - the suits were pretty much magically created from scratch and it implied to me there might be some logistical problems in incorporating that (esp since the battlesuits seem to have magic forcefields as part of the defense.) But their playing with Galtech has clearly advanced their own understanding of such things considerably, and while incorporating it would be difficult and time consuming, they clearly made SOME useful advances (at least managed to bring some near-term "cutting edge" stuff from real life into more use.) And they were building their own warships at some point (fighting in space went on throughout the ground war as I remember.) so they probably could have just borrowed from that to equip vehicles.

The plan was always to have a shipyard in the outer system (posleen leave space stations alone if they're outside the habitational band.) They are producing ships and fighting in space the whole time, it's just that most of the senior command of the 'Space Navy' are morons and space duty is considered a death sentence.

Like I said to Shep: I can buy the idea that by the time the Posleen arrive they had been under a mistkaen impression that they would be logistically supplied by the Galactics, find out this isn't the case, and then scramble after the fact to come up with alternatives. But Ringo's way of doing it just failed to really deliver that.. it just seemed so random like he found out about some new idea, changed his mind, or had some new revelation that he decides to stick in the next novel.

The Darhel wanted the humans and Posleen to wipe each other out, or come close enough they could control the victors. They withdraw their support and make excuses about insuffcient resources when it seems humanity might pull out alright anyway.

I think I see the argument- the grav guns are overkill. But what they'd really want to improve the defenses of Earth would be, yes, lots of antilander defense weapons. The Planetary Defense Centers were supposed to have that job, but were not completed in time (Darhel screwing over); nothing short of the heaviest Posleen God King weapons or their GalTech equivalents could do the job of lander-hunting.

And what you'd really need to optimize the defense is that lander-hunting capability, the ability to cause massive attrition to the Posleen whenever they try to use air or space mobility.
Alot of the high tech solutions were alot more overkill than they really needed. I'm not demanding 100% perfect prescience type of application of tech, or I'm not saying there is no room for error or experimentation - I've gathered from history that quite often figuring out how to properly use technology against an opponent required some trial and error, experimentation, and prediction (even with computers, I gather, you still have to test and experiment at least to some degree.) - but the concept just really isn't handled well in the Posleen novels. The sort of thing I was thinking of which seemed well handled to me was John Scalzi's Old Man's war. Now there were some sneaky bastards (although that had some of the "human hoo-rah" bullshit too, at least in the beginning...)

The grav-rifles I see as working out alright, as a secondary weapon on a space cruiser or something like that. The grav cannon (what I'm calling the PDC 100mm grav gun) has its own issues, besides the obvious. I'll get to that in a bit.

More like... it works, but not well. You need to use a LOT of nukes to make sure some of the nukes get through, and Posleen are radiation-resistant enough that the fallout zones won't stop them as well as they would a normal army. It's not that they're physically immune to nuclear attack, it's that nuclear attack isn't a "push button end war" option with them the way it would be against a human opponent of comparable technological prowess.
Well maybe, but they were making such a big fuss about using antimatter shells and grenades to blow shit up (CF Ahriman's latest post and the Reaper suit mortars) Missile delivered nukes are still a no no due to fiat of course, but missiles aren't the only way to deliver nukes.

I've read the passage now. A signifigant yet indistinct chunk of America's nuclear arsenal was fired at one point in the thin hope of saturating the Posleen AA defenses. Thousands of missiles went up, less than a dozen hit. So yes, they said it was impossible before, but you can overload their defenses against these things with missile spam. It may be instructive to learn if Mr. Ringo had met Mr. Weber before writing that.

Hell we know now that you don't even have to rely on direct impacts to do the damage. I'm surprised they didng manage to rig up some sort of fancy way to use bomb pumped lasers or a casaba howitzer type munition against the Posleen. That would have made a GREAT anti Lander weapon methinks, and would have suited the in-universe mentality lately (EG the use of Metalstorm or ETC tech or stuff like that.)

The GalTech team did design a 'Howitzer 2000' but all we see of it is a single throwaway line about it being held back. The idea of nuking the Posleen was brought up in Gust Front, but dismissed for want of a better delivery system than loading a warhead into the back of a pickup truck.

Well, it wouldn't be overkill if they were used as semiautomatic weapons- pull trigger once, blow the shit out of that group. Shift target, blow the shit out of that group. With even a modest number of riflemen on the line, you could make this weapon stop a basically unlimited attack force, because you can cover a front too large for them to cross in lethal blast footprints.
Depends on what you shoot them with. Even for a Tenar I can't quite see needing a bullet packing hundreds of kg/pounds of TNT equivalent to kill something.

.50 cal rounds can kill a tenar if they're aimed carefully, or just sprayed around until it goes down. Less so the teneral, the flying 'tank' to the tenar's 'jeep.'

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2011-09-25 10:30pm

Forgive me if I'm revealing a greater ignorance, I freely admit this is not something I know muuch about, but by this part of the book the Military has been aware of the impending invasion, and taking steps like reconditioning the battleships, for about three and a half years. That strikes me as very difficult but not inherently impossible, even if you need to have many parts custom made.

Even if we have GalTech nanolathes pooping out parts for the battleships, we run up against another sticky wicket -- crew size.

Iowa BB: 2,700 crew in WWII; 1,800 crew in 1980s
Des Moines CA: 1,800 crew in WWII; possibly 1,200 in modern setting
North Carolina/South Dakota BB: 2,340 crew in WWII; possibly 1,600 in modern setting

Against this:

Spruance Class DD: 334 crew
Arleigh Burke DDG: 281 crew

Hell, just look at the various mounts:

16"/50 Mark 7 Triple Mount:
94 men.
1,730~ tonnes
6 RPM, 390 rounds per mount (130 per gun).
Range of 23 miles with 1,900 lb HE shells.

8"/55RF Mark 16 Triple Mount
44 men
458 tonnes
30 RPM, 450 rounds per mount (150 per gun).
Range of 17 miles with 260~ lb shells.

8"/55 Mark 71 Major Caliber Lightweight Gun
6 men
101.8 tonnes
12 RPM, 75 rounds of ready ammo, and 425 stowed ammo.
Range of 18 miles with 260~ lb shells.

It's worth noting that all Spruance Class DDs (31 ships) were constructed with the strengthened hull framing required to have a single 8"/55 Mk 71 mount on the bow.

Likewise, in 1991, Gibbs and Cox concluded it was feasible to install a 8"/55 Mk 71 mount with 204 rounds on the DDG-51 Flight I. But it would restrict the view of the bow from the bridge, causing safety issues while manouvering in congested waters. Additionally, it would have made it much harder to use the bow for VERtical REPlenishment via helicopter.

And of course, who says we have to mount these on warships?

Reduced magazine capacity (75 ready round drum) mounts on river-going barges spring to mind, as well as taking a merchantman and reinforcing them to carry a ton of them.

Even more evil: take a large oil tanker you're not using anymore, mount guns on deck in superstructure, and fill empty oil tanks with foam: Ship won't sink, ever.

Of course, you can also lash Self propelled howitzers or towed guns to the decks of ships, like the Chinese have done in recent exercises:

122mm MRLs volley fire from a container ship platform

By the way, this is not a CHINEEEEEESE exclusive.

Operating in the Mekong River Delta during the Vietnam War, the 9th US Infantry Division was forced to adapt to fighting while afloat.

All of these make more sense in getting heavy artillery to sea or river than recommissioning the BATTELSHEPS.

I think Raxmei nailed it earlier in this thread:

He [ringo] hits a lot of firearms fanboy buttons.

Decisions are made on the basis of 'cool' rather than 'practical'.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2011-09-25 10:54pm

The idea of nuking the Posleen was brought up in Gust Front, but dismissed for want of a better delivery system than loading a warhead into the back of a pickup truck.

US NUCLEAR WEAPONS -- The Secret History by Chuch Hansen, says regarding nuclear shells:

Mark 9: 11" diameter, 54.33" long, 803 lbs. Range of 15 miles. 80 produced.

Mark 19: 11" diameter, 54.33" long. 600 lbs. Range of 18.5 miles. 80 produced.

Mark 23 Katie: 16" Diameter, 64" long. 1,900 lbs. Yield of 15 to 20 kilotons. 50 manufactured. The US Army actually had a requirement for a 16" Nuclear shell, but then it's Coast Artillery Corps, which had 16" seacoast mounts was disbanded.

Mark 33 / M422 8 inch AFAP: 8" Diameter, 37" long, 243 lbs. Yield of 5 to 10 kilotons. 2,000 produced from 1957-1965. Retired from 1983.

M454 15mm AFAP: 6.1" Diameter, 34" long, 128 lbs. Yield of about 100~ tons. 1,060~ built between 1965-1969.

M753 8 inch AFAP: 8" diameter, 43" long. 215~ lbs. Yield variable from a few hundred tons to 2 kilotons. 550 produced. 340 remained in stockpile by 1987. 9 mile range. A rocket motor can double it's range to 18 miles, but that's not feasible due to GodKing CIWS.

M785 155mm AFAP: 6.1" diameter, 34" long. 95 lbs. Yield of less than 2 kilotons. Production was slated to be 1,000, starting in 1989. Don't know how many actually got built before the COLD WAR ended.

The last two are late 1970s/early 1980s "enhanced radiation" weapons that emphasize neutrons over blast.

And guess what's sitting around at Aberdeen Proving Ground?

28-cm-Kanone 5 (E), Anzio Annie, capable of tossing a 11-inch shell weighing 550~ lbsto 31 miles. I'm sure a little TLC can get her working again -- it's certainly going to be far less intensive than bringing museum battleships into commission; and we only need her to fire a few shots...

There are also several museum examples of the 280mm ATOMIC CANNON still exant, including one at Aberdeen...

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-25 11:00pm

The SheVa rounds are mentioned both as traveling at 2500 m/s and hitting a target twenty kilometers distant in a 'bit less than two seconds' in the same chapter. That blew my mind.

The interesting thing here is that they imply that "an Abrams can't stand up to Posleen for very long." I dont remember what "very long is" but I'm willing to bet that a few Tanks could still mow down hordes of Posleen even in direct ifre mode if they use those cannister-round analogues designed for tanks. It's not evne a new concept really. Or even just HE Especially since the tanks would greatly outrange the Posleen.

Yes and no. Except for the very poor or understrength units, ten or twenty percent of a Posleen company will have a weapon capable of one-shotting a tank, and every God-king has one. So mostly they use berms or fire hull-down or generally act more like mobile artillery than tanks. Every once in a while, like in Richmond, they fight in the open and slaughter vast amounts of Posleen, but they always take serious casulties in the process.

Again, the Posleen are soft targets, massed together, and stupid. They are easy to kill. The hard part is killing neough to make any real difference.

They are however, still mass-producing tanks as fast as they can. The old joke reborn "Careful now, we only three inches of armor.""Well how thick do you think this G.I. shirt is?" Tanks that are comparitively easy enemy kills compared to RL are still better than no tanks.

The sad part of this is that I could see alot of nutjobs doing this sort of thing. Especially the religious or the militia wackos. However, this kinda flies in the face of Grandpa O'Neal the Militia Babysitter, and just shows how much of an authorial fiat he was.

I'm just going to second Simon on this one. You don't have to be a nut to want to take some bad guys with you, or not die by a knife or digestion.

Agan one of my holes in knowledge - isnt the US Military rather heavy on artillery already? Long range killing has always seemed to be one of the things it liked doing, even if they preferred precision guidance. I'd imagine the military had alot of MLRS stuff and such that might still work.

Yep, but there's a glut of conscripts, and the existing artillery is insuffcient for dealing with the problem. So the answer is more tubes and more artillerymen.

Quote:
M-222 Reaver. Nice to see someone doing something about the insufficient artillery problem. Don’t think it’s quite enough though.

Agan one of my holes in knowledge - isnt the US Military rather heavy on artillery already? Long range killing has always seemed to be one of the things it liked doing, even if they preferred precision guidance. I'd imagine the military had alot of MLRS stuff and such that might still work.

Yep, but there's a glut of conscripts, and the existing artillery is insuffcient for dealing with the problem. So the answer is more tubes and more artillerymen.

Quote:
t about including the Missouri bit, decided it was redundant. The battleships are reactivated as off-shore artillery platforms. With a few modifications

Actually I suspect they were set up to create a reason to design and employ the SheVa tanks. Wasn't it the performance of the super-wanked Iowas that lead to SheVas? (and then the Super-SheVa with Super Metalstrom tech in book 4? Althoughj I admit that remains one of my favorite parts for how it was written. Even I have a fanboy bit to me.)

Sigh... yes.

Frankly the sheer power behind those guns is ludicrous. A solid DU slug would be around 300 kilos at those dimensions, for something like 1e18 joules at those speeds, or about 250 megatons. Which is 5x more than the biggest guns on earth. But they use missiles and TERAWATT lasers remember!

Also considering how little firepower you need to take out landers and shit... I wonder why they even bothered with just one super gun. And evne then why the fuck aren't they sticking these on mobile platforms?

The grav cannon firing lights up sensors on every Posleen ship, and a nuking follows shortly. This is why every PDC was supposed to be a super-GalTech-bunker. And they didn't get enough to fully outfit the PDCs, which I would presume to be a priority over mobile platforms.

I kind of assumed the grav cannon was a predecessor or prototype for the spinal-mounted SD weapon that one-shots battle-globes.

And as I reclal they heavily incorporated football analogues and tactics. AMERICA FUCK YEAH!

Well, they do have the benefit of being both simple and very well-known. It was mostly the basic suit drills that were run that way, though they do refer to their tactics as a 'playbook.'

As I recall they wanted to build a "practical raygun" as a justification for the grav gun (even though they has terawatt lasers, the posleen had lasers and plasma weapons. hell in the last Ringo only novel some SheVa scientist dude had a fucking plasma rifle!) UGh. Like I said, consistency is only a faint concern in this novel.

In Hymn the ACS used terawatt lasers themselves, as tripod-mounted heavy weapons. However, they were deemed too bulky and awkward for the fast-paced life of ACS combat, and a poor percentage weapon against the unarmored Posleen.

That interpretation doesn't work, unless you're assuming the antimatte rstorage is some sort of weird pocket dimension only trickling it out by the gram or something, because if the suit went off it would be far more nastier than a 5 kiloton nuke. More to the point, you don't speak of sustained power output in terms of "kilotons" - at least not without adding "per second" to it. you'd use watts or joules/sec or -tons/sec. So it strongly suggests total capacity.

Look I know you're really fixated on taking the grav gun numbers seriously but really, they don't fukcing work out and the more you get into the novels the less sense they make from practically every perspective. It's just better to assume "relativistic" isn't quite so literal. I deal with this for nova cannons and Renegad eLegion shit all the time (eg near relativistiic") - hell I evne had Simon explain to me how precise "relativistic/near relativistic" was

Besides which, I should point out they contradict themselves (which you also quoted) by describing them as hypervelocity. Technically speaking, HV and relativistic are two different things, but in practice the lines can blur somewhat so its not aboslute.

The fact its just a 5 kt nuke yet is supposed to last indefinitely is simply further proof that the grav gun firepower is greatly overrated. Unless you want to attribute it to having some sort of magical self-regenerating antimatter power source (in which case you ownder why they have antimatter shortages.)

Fair enough, I stand corrected. You only think I'm fixated on the grav-gun paradox. I'm much more amused by the idea that the same suits that weather thousands of railgun hits, hops out of planes, gets thrown out of trucks at highway speeds and smashed by mega-tons of material can be 'seriously damaged' by hitting things at 10 m/s.

What's even worse is, IIRC there were UNARMORED people using them. This is a whole nother level of physics-breaking nonsense, and when I mean broken it shattered into itty bitty pieces and the remnants are defecated on messily.

You can try and tell yourself that they were just sentries, holding big guns and looking intimidating. They never actually fire them unarmored. Of course, the man who orders his sentrys to carry useless weapons is an idiot. Unless it's a purely ceremonial guard.

You know the magitech stealth systems make me wonder why they were supposed to be completely neutered as an air power now....

I've been wondering that since I reread Hymn. Simon, I believe, has a good theory for that.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-25 11:36pm

@MkSheperd

I'll agree the battleships are probably not the best expenditure of their resources. They could probably fill the crew requirements, as long as they're conscripting nearly every able-bodied man, but putting artillery pieces on barges or other ships would probably be more useful.

I have no explanation for the lack of alternative delivery systems. Except, perhaps that they expected the GalTech super-howitzer that never made the field to fill that need.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2011-09-25 11:39pm

The Paris Gun of WWI had a range of 80 miles with a 210 lb shell; and NO ROCKET ASSIST.

I'm sure we can do better with modern computers for ballistics calculations, high strength steel/titanium alloys to increase shell payload and lighten the gun so it's easier to emplace...

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2011-09-26 12:13am

A last rant before I'm officially done with this book. In the back, Ringo includes a couple of appendices, a couple of maps, a glossary of military terms, a lexicon of the Posleen language. Hey it worked for Tolkien, right? Only, Tolkien was a renowned linguist and ancient scholar before he wrote. John Ringo... is not. Consequently, the language can be… interesting. Enjoy.

abat A nearly impossible to eradicate small pest on Posleen landers.

Alld'nt Demons or sky gods of the Posleen pan-theology. Reputed to give great gifts but to also cause great harm.

Aradan Posleen name for the star the Federation calls Diess.

BattleDec Short for Battle dodecahedron. A Posleen conglomerate ship consisting of an inner dodecahedral command ship (C-Dec) and twelve landers.

Battleglobe A large Posleen conglomerate ship consisting of multiple hundreds of B-Decs.

Battlemaster Posleen grade. Equivalent to captain-full colonel. Although all Posleen God Kings (Kessentai) are nominally independent, in general junior officers look to senior officers for direction.

castellaine The manager of a Posleen estate.

DataNet Posleen information network. Very similar to the internet except without any indexing tools.

edan Posleen: Battle madness.

edas'antai Posleen: Primary genetic sponsor. Father.

esonal Posleen: Ovipositor.

eson'antai Posleen: Primary genetic derivative. Son.

Fistnal Posleen: Damned. (Lit. "Eaten" reduced from "Eaten by sky demons.")

fuscirt Posleen: Demons.

fuscirto
Posleen: Demons. Part of a wordy curse that translates more or less as "Demon Feces."

Kenstain Posleen: Term for a castellaine. Castellaines are a lower "caste" God King and are formed from God Kings that have either voluntarily stopped fighting or were incompetent or cowardly.

Kessanalt Posleen: Battle honor.

Kessentai Posleen: God King (translates literally as "Philosopher" or "Thinker").

oolt Posleen: Group or company. (Lit. "Pack")

Oolton Posleen: Battalion or brigade. Used interchangeably. (Lit. "Big Pack")

oolt'ondai Posleen: Battalion or brigade commander. (Lit. "Big pack leader")

oolt'ondar Posleen: Battalion or brigade.

oolt'os Posleen: Posleen normal. (Lit. "Pack member")

Oolt'pos Posleen: Command Dodecahedron. Holds 1400– 1800 Normals and 3–6 God Kings along with some light, simple armor.

orna'adar Posleen: Final battle or Ragnarok. A scramble for dwindling resources that leads to destruction of the world and extinction of all the Posleen on it.

Po'oslena'ar Posleen: "The People of the Ships."

Po'osol Posleen: Lander. Holds 400–600 normals and one God King.

Tel'enaa Battle Demons. Part of a wordy curse. (Demons of battle eat and defecate their souls!)

te'naal Berserk charge.

tenar Posleen God King's saucer vehicle. Has a heavy weapon mounted on it and a suite of sensors.

thresh
Posleen: Food.

Threshkreen
Posleen: Enemy. (Translates literally as "food with a bite.")

uut Posleen: Fecal matter.

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

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