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He's so big he'd have to drink the stuff by the pint just to get tipsy, though. I wouldn't be at all surprised if even for his own personal supply he has to compromise on quality to get volume at a sane cost.

Simon_Jester wrote:I fail to see how this is does not make him a foe of scientific rationalism.

Pelranius wrote:Couldn't the British bomber command just settle for modified C-17s?

Pelranius wrote:Couldn't the British bomber command just settle for modified C-17s?

Count Chocula wrote:

Pelranius wrote:Couldn't the British bomber command just settle for modified C-17s?

Sure, as an idea. Then, of course, there's the whole "where would you put the bomb bay doors, and the bomb racks, and oh yeah we need to but a bomb-drop-capable radar in this thing, and we need a MIL-STD data bus run into the fuselage to load target data to the bombs and tell them when to drop, oh don't forget about the electrical requirements. Gee, is the C-17 GPS nav capable of loading coordinates into a JDAM? Don't forget a SNIPR pod, most of our smart bombs are laser guided don'tcha know, and need the target lased before and during the drop. Oh shit, can we just drop a BUFF's nav/attack system in this thing? No, you say, all the B-52Hs are already being used and the boneyard BUFFs are being recommissioned too? Goddamn, this is a pain in the ass. How about we just slap some pylons on the wings, and run control and power leads to them? What's that? We'll have to reinforce the main spars, and do wind tunnel testing, and still have to put all that electronics in the plane to drop mebbe 20,000lb of pylon attached bombs, which is like 1/3 a BUFF's load? And what about the main landing gear that's on the fuselage, and how do we reinforce the fuselage to account for the gaping holes of the bomb bay doors, and what kind of bomb racks do we use, and do we need to add lateral bracing to the fuselage, and by the way do we need in-flight refueling capacity? and, a little aside, how long will it take to make all these mods? Then train the pilots and bombardiers?" issue.

Unless you're talking about deploying bombs out the aft loading ramp a la the C-130/MOAB, converting a cargo ship to a bomber role is tantamount to designing a whole new airframe. You'd be better off putting those people and material into a production line to turn out more B-1Cs.

hongi wrote:

Simon_Jester wrote:I fail to see how this is does not make him a foe of scientific rationalism.

What makes him a foe of scientific rationalism in your view?

Pelranius wrote:I wonder how hard it would be for the doctors to start messing with Michael (though it might violate the Hippocratic Oath).

Simon_Jester wrote:

Pelranius wrote:I wonder how hard it would be for the doctors to start messing with Michael (though it might violate the Hippocratic Oath).

They need his protection; if he decides that he'd be better off without them he can just throw them out onto the street (or rip them apart with his bare hands if he's mad enough). Also, Michael is smart, and it would be difficult for doctors to manipulate him the way that, say, Dr. Morrell manipulated Hitler.

Re: Converted transport planes as bombers
I suspect you could do it if you really wanted to, but it would be more trouble than it's likely to be worth for the reasons Chocula describes. You'd be using so much in the way of specialized resources and personnel that you'd be better off putting all that effort into speeding up production of existing bombers.

Pelranius wrote:For messing with Michael, you don't necessarily need to poison him or something. They could convince him to start behaving erratically (I don't think Michael really understands biology anymore than he does with electronics). That would probably only happen once things get really pear shaped for Heaven.

Yeah, the only reason I thought of the converted C-17s was because I think Stuart mentioned a while back (or I might be imagining things again).

Jeremy wrote:So Humans starting from the Cro-magnon like races populate the depths of Hell and Heaven. What distinguishes post Cro-Magnon on from the other races and subspecies of Humans that populated the Middle Pleistocene and early half of the Upper Pleistocene?

The Salvation War: Pantheocide Chapter 16 wrote:Once again, he back-winged neatly and landed on the ledge, this one of a temple devoted to Yahweh. Who else Michael-Lan thought with a certain level of scorn. Yah-yah never grew tired of people worshiping him. Still, he'd found a whole new planet full of primitive sentients he could convert into a new cult. Had things gone the way they had before, the discarded humans would have been condemned to Hell, there to disappear slowly, just as they themselves had replaced the ones who had gone before them. Michael-Lan wondered if, somewhere tucked deep in the bowels of Hell, there were still survivors of those earlier races.

Simon_Jester wrote:He argued directly against the only major school of rationalists to be found in the classical Muslim world, with considerable success, and helped shift the focus of Muslim intellectuals away from trying to reason out truths about the world towards trying to figure out the truths about the world by looking them up in a collection of ancient books. This was probably not his intention, but he wound up doing it anyway.

Simon_Jester wrote:

Pelranius wrote:I wonder how hard it would be for the doctors to start messing with Michael (though it might violate the Hippocratic Oath).

They need his protection; if he decides that he'd be better off without them he can just throw them out onto the street (or rip them apart with his bare hands if he's mad enough). Also, Michael is smart, and it would be difficult for doctors to manipulate him the way that, say, Dr. Morrell manipulated Hitler.

MariusRoi wrote:

Pelranius wrote:Couldn't the British bomber command just settle for modified C-17s?

I'd guess that they are even further out than the Lancer B.1. I'd also imagine that a whole lot of C-17s in the pipeline might be built as KC-17s.

If Micheal was also in charge of indoctrinating young impressionable dead humans who went to Heaven, that might explain why he's so experienced and so cool with humans in the first place. He would've been the angel who had most exposure to them, even before he went rogue after seeing the Renaissance or something, and maybe even before his mutiny, those centuries or millennia of him de-educating humans made him develop soft fuzzy-wuzzy feelings for 'em.

I wouldn't mind knowing why the Brits are not planning their own strategic bombers now that the universe has changed, so to speak. Britain used to be able to do it, there should be no reason why they cannot do so again if the political will is there this time (as opposed to the 1960's/1970's)

Stuart Mackey wrote:

MariusRoi wrote:

Pelranius wrote:Couldn't the British bomber command just settle for modified C-17s?

I'd guess that they are even further out than the Lancer B.1. I'd also imagine that a whole lot of C-17s in the pipeline might be built as KC-17s.

I wouldn't mind knowing why the Brits are not planning their own strategic bombers now that the universe has changed, so to speak. Britain used to be able to do it, there should be no reason why they cannot do so again if the political will is there this time (as opposed to the 1960's/1970's)

MariusRoi wrote:The way I understand it the B-3 takes the wings and tail of a C-17, and mates them to a new (as of yet undesigned) fuselage. The resulting aircraft would be a conventional bomb truck, and would replace the B-52 in that role.

Simon_Jester wrote:

Pelranius wrote:For messing with Michael, you don't necessarily need to poison him or something. They could convince him to start behaving erratically (I don't think Michael really understands biology anymore than he does with electronics). That would probably only happen once things get really pear shaped for Heaven.

How do you see that working?