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Mongoose wrote:Even if the demons did destroy a bunch of major human cities, wouldn't that just prompt a human retaliation that would completely glass all of hell's demon population centers? There would certainly be a lot more cause to nuke them then there was to nuke the Japanese. There are of course a lot of problems with that kind of solution, from an ethical/strategic perspective, but it seems to me that it would be the solution that the people of earth will be screaming for if major cities start exploding.

I have to agree; if they actually managed to cause a huge death toll, it seems that humanity would almost certainly exact its revenge by nuking some part of Hell. I can't imagine them failing to do so, since they must surely have the technical ability. Figuratively, it's the only way to respond.

Demons: Fuck you.
Humans: Oh yeah? Fuck YOU!

Darth Wong wrote:Mind you, if he had seen that film sequence the night before his attack began, it might have given him pause. But I imagine he still would have believed he could prevail.

The problem with this for me is that I can't see how he would have believed he would have prevailed, unless it really meant nothing to him and imparted no true understanding of the human way of war.

How much damage gets caused will depend heavily on what the attack really is. If the demons use one of the methods people have proposed, dumping lava through a portal, then it’s possible that lava flows could block the Thames and the Detroit rivers. The resulting flooding could then be much worse then the lava damage. Still, even if the demons had atomic bombs no two cities are all THAT important to the global war effort.

I would rather like to see both cities utterly destroyed, down to the last kitten. While it might not be what was imagined by the writers talking about Soddom and Gomorragh, I'd rather like to see the demons have at least one effective strike in the war.

Then fifteen or twenty demon cities can be nuked within the day.

Also, all hail the Commander-in-Chief; he comes for you, Satan!

I suspect the attacks will be more elaborate and destructive than that. We've been scoffing at a weapon system we know nothing about. Yes, Sodom and Gomorrah were small in relation to modern cities. Yes, the bombings were of marginal necessity. But we still don't know what exactly happened. It's the story of Lott's wife that bothers me, assuming it has any basis in fact. I'm not predicting fifty megatons of thermonuclear death, but I'll refrain from laughing until the magic fizzles. Here's hoping it does.

Darth Raptor wrote:I suspect the attacks will be more elaborate and destructive than that. We've been scoffing at a weapon system we know nothing about. Yes, Sodom and Gomorrah were small in relation to modern cities. Yes, the bombings were of marginal necessity. But we still don't know what exactly happened. It's the story of Lott's wife that bothers me, assuming it has any basis in fact. I'm not predicting fifty megatons of thermonuclear death, but I'll refrain from laughing until the magic fizzles. Here's hoping it does.

Lot's wife could have been claimed by a pyroclastic flow, broadly, but I can't think of anything else.

Well Darth Wong, we were both wrong or that chapter introduced us to a particularly nasty pretzel, previously unknown! I have had food poisoning but.....

Lt Kim was referred to as "deceased" at the head of the chapter. Now that humans both from earth and from hell are operating together there has to be a way of distinguishing between them. "Deceased" and 'Living" seems to be the solution adopted. But those in Hell are living in Hell. recall when Kim told Madeuce that this was her world now. So in a sense those in Hell are living, just in a different world. All that occurs to me are "earth" and "hell", eg Lt Kim ( hell ) and Lt Rollins (earth ), or Lt Kim (h) and Lt Rollins (e).

Nine had been more or less useless, civilians, ancient, modern and in between, without any useful skills and she had sent those to Rahab.

I have to question this. You can train a person to fire a weapon pretty fast, and keep it clean, and since dead people magi-heal fast in hell, there's no problems involved in long marches which tend to strike down unfit people.

So....why not give them guns (surely a lot more guns have arrived by this point); and make them sort of a "Hell Home Guard" to guard outposts etc?

Limited ammo, mang. Can't waste any bullets learning to shoot by firing at beer cans or stuff.

I wonder what's up with Abrigor right now. I miss him

MKSheppard wrote:

Nine had been more or less useless, civilians, ancient, modern and in between, without any useful skills and she had sent those to Rahab.

I have to question this. You can train a person to fire a weapon pretty fast, and keep it clean, and since dead people magi-heal fast in hell, there's no problems involved in long marches which tend to strike down unfit people.

So....why not give them guns (surely a lot more guns have arrived by this point); and make them sort of a "Hell Home Guard" to guard outposts etc?

Ah yes, they can be trained. The bigger issue is, I think, their mindset. If they have to recover from mindsets like Rahab's -- where the demons are all-powerful, and all you can do is hide -- then they're going to be useless from a military standpoint.

You know, if and when they pull that Special Forces trooper out and send him to the PFLH, he is going to get it.

I mean the dressing down he is going to get for getting his ass killed, from his CO...let alone the ribbing from his still alive friends...

Darth Wong wrote:We've improved our methods since 1944, and Abigor has seen them first-hand. I doubt SPR would have any impact on him. He'd probably say "That wasn't nearly as bad as what they did to us."

Mind you, if he had seen that film sequence the night before his attack began, it might have given him pause. But I imagine he still would have believed he could prevail.

True. They should start beaming some of our epic war movies straight into the minds of demons in Hell, then, especially if they're high-ranking dukes. But I don't think that's feasible yet; so far we're only torturing one demon that way.

Everyone seems to be forgetting Uriel.

Col. Crackpot wrote:Everyone seems to be forgetting Uriel.

Well, he hasn't been around in a while. And his capabilities are as yet unknown; while he can apparently make a crowd of people drop dead with a thought, we don't know whether this has something to do with the infamous telepathy of angels and demons, hence whether it would work through tinfoil hats. It's possible he's a divine WMD of sorts, but it's also possible that he'll fizzle.

Darth Raptor wrote:I suspect the attacks will be more elaborate and destructive than that. We've been scoffing at a weapon system we know nothing about. Yes, Sodom and Gomorrah were small in relation to modern cities. Yes, the bombings were of marginal necessity. But we still don't know what exactly happened. It's the story of Lott's wife that bothers me, assuming it has any basis in fact. I'm not predicting fifty megatons of thermonuclear death, but I'll refrain from laughing until the magic fizzles. Here's hoping it does.

Nothing about that story requires enormous power. So while you can't rule it out, you can't say it's necessary either. Even a 50 megaton blast would not have turned Lot's wife into salt while her husband standing right next to her was unaffected. That part of the story is obviously some sort of parlour trick, not evidence of enormous power.

JBG wrote:Well Darth Wong, we were both wrong or that chapter introduced us to a particularly nasty pretzel, previously unknown! I have had food poisoning but.....

Lt Kim was referred to as "deceased" at the head of the chapter. Now that humans both from earth and from hell are operating together there has to be a way of distinguishing between them. "Deceased" and 'Living" seems to be the solution adopted. But those in Hell are living in Hell. recall when Kim told Madeuce that this was her world now. So in a sense those in Hell are living, just in a different world. All that occurs to me are "earth" and "hell", eg Lt Kim ( hell ) and Lt Rollins (earth ), or Lt Kim (h) and Lt Rollins (e).

It's only used to distinguish between those who've died and those who haven't, accuracy's not of paramount importance.

Before everyone starts to get nuke-happy...

Is it possible for humans in hell to recover from the nuke blast?

ray245 wrote:Before everyone starts to get nuke-happy...

Is it possible for humans in hell to recover from the nuke blast?

Its been covered before, but pretty much you can heal from anything that doesn't kill you outright. But if your "soul" dies in Hell, it dies for real this time.

ray245 wrote:Is it possible for humans in hell to recover from the nuke blast?

Resurrected humans seem to work rather like zombies; to kill them for good you have to seriously maim the brain tissue.

Alferd Packer wrote:True. They should start beaming some of our epic war movies straight into the minds of demons in Hell, then, especially if they're high-ranking dukes. But I don't think that's feasible yet; so far we're only torturing one demon that way.

I also think that you have to give the appropriate context (I guess giving away info) for them to actually appreciate the difference, considering how much Belial misinterpreted Bob Reed's information; result is that he's not cowed at all or deterred.

ray245 wrote:Before everyone starts to get nuke-happy...

Is it possible for humans in hell to recover from the nuke blast?

If it's a 1 megaton device, everything in an approximately 1.5 km diameter circle is obliterated. Flesh, bones, hair, everything. Gone.

Outside that circle, things are crushed by the shockwave and burned by the radiation. Their resiliency to this effect is difficult to predict given the things that the undead have been seen to survive. If they're smart enough to cover their heads and allow their bodies to take the brunt of the blast, and if they're not crushed by flying and falling debris, then it seems to me that they could survive damage that would normally be fatal.

Sea Skimmer wrote:How much damage gets caused will depend heavily on what the attack really is. If the demons use one of the methods people have proposed, dumping lava through a portal, then it’s possible that lava flows could block the Thames and the Detroit rivers. The resulting flooding could then be much worse then the lava damage. Still, even if the demons had atomic bombs no two cities are all THAT important to the global war effort.

What they're assembling for the attack on Sheffield and Detroit don't seem to involve dumping lava through a portal. They're forging gigantic metal "shrine rods," which doesn't seem to fit throwing rocks or lava through a portal, but does, for some reason, conjure up the phrase "Commence primary ignition" in my mind.

That's a good point; maybe it's the infamous "pillar of fire" that we hear about God unleashing on occasion: some kind of flame attack which is launched through a portal.

These demons have no idea what's coming to them if they hit Detroit and Sheffield.

I wonder when we'll meet Abigor again.

The Vortex Empire wrote:These demons have no idea what's coming to them if they hit Detroit and Sheffield.

I wonder when we'll meet Abigor again.

Probably as soon as Detroit and Sheffield get hit, because the humans are bound to ask him what the fuck that was. Could be pretty tense, as they might believe that Abigor witheld this information deliberately, and Abigor would have to explain that it hadn't been done for thousands of years and the possibility simply didn't occur to him.

However, Abigor should be able to tell them that the attack was probably launched by the last person who ever pulled off such a stunt: Belial. He'll even be able to tell them where Belial is located, which will be bad news for Belial.

Well, I think that rather than the dump lava tactic, they're going to create a portal and then collapse it in a way that causes unpleasant things to happen. We know that there aren't residual portals laying around from Soddom and Gomorra, so obviously the ones used there were no where nearly as big as the Hellmouth in Iraq because that one is so big it has been permanently (at least within the lifetimes of humans) propped open by natural forces.

We also had what I think may have been a bit of foreshadowing during the discussion of the portal mechanics where the detonation of a nuke on the hell side of the portal caused the simulation to crash. What may have happened there was that under the right circumstances a chaotic event is produced on the earth side (eating up all of the computer's processing power trying to model it) instead of of causing the portal to increase in size as you feed it more energy. Possible events could be the sudden release of all the energy that went into the creation of the portal and possibly some of the energy cascading down the dimensional barrier, producing a large explosion, to some sort of bizarre temporary imposition of the higher dimensions onto our regular four which would obvious result in very bad things.

Of course, this sort of thing would presumably have the size of the portal as the limiting factor as they could have just done whatever trick to the Iraq Hellmouth to close it down and cause of damage to the human armies at the same time. This would cause problems for Belial as most ancient major cities would be considered suburbs these days just in terms of space taken up, so trying to get the largest concentrations of "arsenals" under the burst would be a major problem.