Jonathan_S wrote:Well each of her ships has a "broom" that's between about 10,000 and 29,000 km^2 -- and she's got 10 of them (5 BC, 4 CA, and a CL). Even the little CL's wedge is 100 km long (and thus about 128th the diameter of the earth) so it won't take too many sweeps to clear out anything.
Now, depending on how dispersed the ships were you might need to sweep an area wider than the planet -- to account for ships that were on a course beyond it'd limb, but which now have debris being angled back towards it. But still, with 3 hours and some mighty big brooms, at least the worst of the debris should be easy enough to clean up.
And using her ships' wedges for it is going to be more efficient that using her few light-craft -- which, in any case, are mostly going to be busy bringing over troops to enforce control of the Longstop transports. (Though she can probably scrape up enough ship handlers to still devote a few pinnaces to S&R of any bits of debris large enough that there might be crew alive on them)
There is definitely search and rescue to be performed; from chapter 49 of
Echoes of Honor:
The battlecruisers Ivan IV, Subutai, and Yavuz lurched madly as grasers and lasers crashed into their bows. Ivan IV's entire forward impeller ring went down, all of her forward chase armament was destroyed, and the ship staggered bodily sideways as hull plating shattered and the demonic beams ripped straight down her long axis. They could not possibly have come in from a more deadly bearing, and damage alarms shrieked as compartments blew open to space and electronics spiked madly. Molycircs exploded like prespace firecrackers, massive bus bars and superconductor capacitors blew apart like ball lightning, trapped within the hollow confines of a warship, and almost half her crew was killed or wounded in the space of less than four seconds.
But Ivan IV was the lucky one; her forward fusion plants went into emergency shutdown in time. Subutai's and Yavuz's didn't, and the two of them vanished into blinding balls of plasma with every man and woman of their crews.
Nor did they die alone. Their sisters Boyar and Cassander went with them; the heavy cruisers Morrigan, Yama, and Excalibur blew up almost as spectacularly as Subutai; and every surviving ship was savagely damaged. The battlecruisers Modred, Pappenheim, Tammerlane, Roxana, and Cheetah lived through the initial carnage, but like Ivan IV, they were crippled and lamed, and the cruiser Broadsword was at least as badly hurt. Durandel, the only other heavy cruiser of the main force, reeled out of formation, her forward half smashed like a rotten stick while life pods erupted from her hull, and chaos reigned as the crews of maimed and broken ships fought their damage and rescue parties charged into gutted compartments in frantic search for wounded and trapped survivors. Yet chaotic as the shouts and confusion over the internal com systems were, the intership circuits were even worse, for one of ENS Huan-Ti's grasers had scored a direct hit on Tammerlane's flag bridge.
Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman was dead. Citizen General Chernock had died with him, and neither of them had ever even known their task group was under attack. The grasers' light-speed death had claimed both too quickly, and with their deaths, command devolved upon Citizen Captain Isler, in Modred. But the StateSec officer had no idea at all what to do. In fairness, it was unlikely any officer— even a modern day Edward Saganami—would have been able to react effectively to such a devastating surprise. But Isler was no Saganami, and the sharp, high note of panic in his voice as he gabbled incoherent orders over the command net finished any hint of cohesiveness in his shattered force. It came apart at the seams, each surviving captain realizing that his or her only chance of survival lay in independent action.
A few missiles got off, and Pappenheim actually managed to turn and fire her entire surviving starboard broadside at Wallenstein, but it was a pitifully inadequate response to what Honor's ships had done to them. Wallenstein's sidewall shrugged Pappenheim's energy fire aside with contemptuous ease, and despite the short range, point defense crews picked off the handful of Peep missiles which actually launched.
And then Honor's entire squadron fired a second time, and there was no more incoming fire. Five of the enemy hulks remained sufficiently intact that someone might technically describe them as ships; all the rest were spreading patterns of wreckage, dotted here and there with the transponder signals of life pods or a handful of people in skinsuits.
