What is the |value| of captured enemy systems?

Vince wrote:bit of text

One thing that's always bothered me about that. It's inefficient and ineffective to just nuke all the new construction. Even with multiple hits, big chunks of the ships and infrastructure are going to survive. Maybe not big enough to rebuild into functioning hardware, but certainly large enough to examine and reverse engineer individual bits of tech.

Instead, why aren't missile wedges used? One missile sweeping a ship with its wedge is going to shred every single bit of that ship, leaving nothing larger than dust to examine. Or even use for materials reclamation .

It makes sense that the Yawata strike doesn't use that technique, at least on the stations. They couldn't risk a missile that close to the planets, and DID want the rain of debris they got to do planetside damage that wasn't a technical violation of the EE. But the dispersed yards would have been the same type of targets for wedges. Total destruction with only a missile or three aimed at each building slip (for redundancy just in case the first misses).

Taxation.

Galactic Sapper wrote:
It makes sense that the Yawata strike doesn't use that technique, at least on the stations. They couldn't risk a missile that close to the planets, and DID want the rain of debris they got to do planetside damage that wasn't a technical violation of the EE. But the dispersed yards would have been the same type of targets for wedges. Total destruction with only a missile or three aimed at each building slip (for redundancy just in case the first misses).

Nah, the MAN just didn't worry about collateral damage. They were not planning on it. They didn't take extensive measures to avoid it because it just didn't matter much to them. The stations are also just so big that it's impossible to destroy them utterly no matter what you do.

There is also some limits to the ability of a wedge to handle mass impacting it. It eventually overloads and fails, though David has been very vague about that.

Lord Skimper wrote:Taxation.

Darwin still rules so don't forget the sex slaves. A capured enemy system offers billions and billions of insemination opportinities. Ship in millions and millions of occupation troops, mostly male. Deny the conquered women modern conteaception to ensure that tens of millions upon hundreds of millions of impregnations will result. The occupation will bear fruit. If you're inspired by the Babalonian conquest of Israel, castrate all of the conquered males to ensure that they have no sperm with which to compete. Lets see the regeneration therapies heal that! The conquered populace will embrace matrilineal geneology to salvage their savaged pride. Your genes triumph over the enemy's. Political and religious dogmas are irrellevant.


Yes, I understand that this is stereotypical TFLYTSNBN vulgarity, but when you seriously examine human history, this is what war is all about. Just ask the American Indians or Australian aboriginies why their Y chromosones are almost extinct. Ask the Chinese why most of their men are descendants of Ghengis Kahn. Africans are the only primitives whose men have not become Darwinian failures only because sub Sahara Africa is a tropical disease factory that selectively kills Europeans.

BTW, the Palin family is a classic example of European genes conquering the aboriginal population. Family lore is that old "Glass Eye" Palin the sled freighter took notice of Great Grandmother Leonna as she was bending over to fetch water. He was just admiring her boots, yea, that's the ticket. (The stereotype of the obese Eskimo is very innacurate. The Inuit and Yupik women tend to be beautiful by most European standards. Bristol, Willow and Piper inherited genes fornhotness from their dad as well as their mom). Palin family lore makes no mention of any relatives that dsscended from Great grandmother Leona's brothers or male cousins.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Taxation.

Darwin still rules so don't forget the sex slaves. A capured enemy system offers billions and billions of insemination opportinities. Ship in millions and millions of occupation troops, mostly male. Deny the conquered women modern conteaception to ensure that tens of millions upon hundreds of millions of impregnations will result. The occupation will bear fruit. If you're inspired by the Babalonian conquest of Israel, castrate all of the conquered males to ensure that they have no sperm with which to compete. Lets see the regeneration therapies heal that! The conquered populace will embrace matrilineal geneology to salvage their savaged pride. Your genes triumph over the enemy's. Political and religious dogmas are irrellevant.


Yes, I understand that this is stereotypical TFTSNBN vulgarity, but when you seriously examine human history, this is what war is all about. Just ask the American Indians or Australian aboriginies why their Y chromosones are almost extinct. Ask the Chinese why most of their men are descendants of Ghengis Kahn. Africans are the only primitives whose men have not become Darwinian failures only because sub Sahara Africa is a tropical disease factory that selectively kills Europeans.

LMAO. A serious contender. IOW, capturing an enemy system is much like a bank robbery?

"Freeze! This is a stickup! Empty your pockets!"


****** *

Fly, when your message is truth, then it isn't the message that is vulgar. It is the truth. I, for one, do not practice shooting the messenger. Sometimes truth, which oftentimes rubs one against the grain, is what is erroneously considered vulgar - if one cannot handle the truth.

If the truth is vulgar, then sharing it isn't what's vulgar. Denying it is what is vulgar. One must pick his own poison. You didn't create history. History created you. I, for one, won't heap that on your shoulders.

Someone has to tell the naked king he's, well . . . naked.

cthia wrote:

Joat t2 wrote:Did you know that our Man-made GPS-satellites had a maximum drift of 10ns during the period 2005 to 2015, and if you added the UTC offset data it was 2ns. Man's instruments are so very bad... I wonder how bad they will become after 2000 years of refinement...

What does that have to do with the price of tea . . . in China? An altogether different set of problems. Holding station locally is one thing. Claiming to be able to set a clock to measure time inside 10 minutes across the galaxy is preposterous. IMO. You're entitled to your own.

Joat42 wrote:Why would it be preposterous? You haven't refuted what I suggested , you just said it doesn't work without saying why.

Triangulate your position and use the measured spin from half a dozen pulsars to calculate a very accurate time.

Didn't the article I linked to explain that using pulsars you can get the same time keeping accuracy as an atomic clock?

cthia wrote:Without even attempting any calculations, which I won't. I can see the inherent problems in my head because I'm a programmer. I know the inherent limitation of computers and algorithms and the limitation of mathematics and the error of mathematics on the error of computers, both taken accumulatively. Compounded by inexact measurement of distant stellar bodies. Unless you're suggesting a tape measure held from one body to the next to get truly exact measurements vs accepted observable measurements. Small inaccuracies applied to large numbers fed into an algorithm and chewed up time and time again is the true meaning of GIGO.

I became privy to the problems studying the percent error of calculators long long ago. My understanding of the inherent problems of the accuracy of algorithms is solid. I was coding algorithms while I was still sucking snot.

The inherent problems are compounded by the inaccurate measurement of stellar bodies, to the tolerance needed. Using the same man made instruments with computers and the inherent limitations of the algorithms at its base.

When working with large numbers and repeating calculations (as an algorithm does) inaccuracies will add up. The larger the number, the larger the inaccuracy. Advanced computers in the Honorverse will undoubtedly go far to minimize the error, but it is an inherent error that doesn't go away simply because you have a fast computer. The fact that computers are used as the basis of calculations is the root of the problem.

Percent error calculations are utilized to minimize the problem, but then they too are privy to the same problem. It's like chasing your tail. All roads will end at the Entscheidungsproblem and Gödel's Incompleteness theorems and that darn halting problem.

I'm not saying incredible accuracies can't be managed, but the degree of accuracy you are proposing, well, I'm not buying it because I operate under the hood. Everything looks good on paper, until you attempt to program what's on paper into workable algorithms.

You are only considering the mathematics and that it works on paper, but you are completely oblivious to the applications and the inherent problems in the real world.

That is a common mistake on this forum, discounting the human factor and how things really work in the real world.

You don't truly understand the problem.

I even see related problems inherent in using your NTP-protocol. If to the second is what you want. Uh uh.

You say you see the problem in your head because you are a programmer.. You think a computer can't calculate a time accurate enough. What if I told you only need a 3D coordinate where the x, y & z values has 21 decimals accuracy to pinpoint a place in the Milky Way within 1 meter. A measurement of pulsars where you have an accuracy of 1ns needs 24 decimals of accuracy. An IEEE-754 128 bit float has ~34 decimals of accuracy and if you use a 256 bit float you get ~71 decimals of accuracy. And if you want to forgo binary fractions and use integer math you can have a 100 or a 1000 decimals places and run the calculations on a 50 year old computer without problems. It seems your beliefs in computers accuracy (or in-accuracy) is the typical programmers - only use the standard supplied libraries or frameworks with their limitations.

Calculating the time with enough precision to be usable can be mostly accomplished with the 4 basic math operations and enough decimals to satisfy the needed accuracy. Remember that we are using multi-sample measurements from multiple stellar objects which will help cancel out almost all of the noise in the measurements when combined. I do know a thing or two about doing accurate measurements, noise suppression and accurate calculations on mega-samples/s in real time.

The article about errors in calculators? A calculator is a compromise to make simple calculations somewhat accurate at an affordable price point and has no bearing on my post. I'm well aware of the inherit accuracy problems since I had to make a math-library for my HP-41CX for high precision iterative FEM calculations due to the fact that the stock functions precision wasn't enough. And your links about Gödels incompleteness theorem and the halting problem isn't relevant because the math involved isn't complex.

And FYI, "Because I'm a programmer" doesn't make you infallible or correct, it's just e-peen waving. And while we are on that subject, I have been a programmer for almost 40 years and hardware designer a little less than that and I started my first consultancy business when I was 14 doing custom software and later on also hardware for different companies so I do know a lot of the limitations a computer has, especially considering I have built a few of them from scratch. I currently work on a project that handles data in the Petabyte range every year solving problems involving extracting and classifying information from 40-50k messages/second in real time so it can be stored with full dynamic relational cardinality with the help of an ELK-stack.

As a final note, you often say A but not B. If you see a problem why not just spell it out exactly what it is instead of just ending the sentence with a quip or cryptic statement?

Okay Joat.

Let's call you and your followers Admirals of the Green and myself Admiral of the Red. If the calculations are a matter of life and death, I'll make another trip. If you manage to kill the first six ships before it's your turn, consider my post.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Vince wrote:bit of text

One thing that's always bothered me about that. It's inefficient and ineffective to just nuke all the new construction. Even with multiple hits, big chunks of the ships and infrastructure are going to survive. Maybe not big enough to rebuild into functioning hardware, but certainly large enough to examine and reverse engineer individual bits of tech.

Instead, why aren't missile wedges used? One missile sweeping a ship with its wedge is going to shred every single bit of that ship, leaving nothing larger than dust to examine. Or even use for materials reclamation .

It makes sense that the Yawata strike doesn't use that technique, at least on the stations. They couldn't risk a missile that close to the planets, and DID want the rain of debris they got to do planetside damage that wasn't a technical violation of the EE. But the dispersed yards would have been the same type of targets for wedges. Total destruction with only a missile or three aimed at each building slip (for redundancy just in case the first misses).

I've always had the same concerns Galactic Sapper. Foraker is very capable and capturing huge chunks or even smaller chunks of computer tech should allow her a close enough examination to reverse engineer the tech. Same for a lot of tech. Textev talks about large chunks of debris from explosions. This is why I suggested ejecting important tech and data all in one or more pods then detonating those pods. Pods tied together with core explosions should be sufficient since the explosion is all spent on the tech and not the entire shipyards.

Someone suggested that having that capability built-in as a button to be pushed could psychologically affect workers. But the entire process would take 30 minutes or so to complete. Think shutting down a nuclear power plant.

Generally there seems to be more than enough time before a force achieves a zero zero intercept.

At any rate, I can't believe these drills aren't routinely practiced and built-in like the drills that saved so many lives before the disaster of Hephaestus.

Kael Posavatz wrote:

cthia wrote:It's a cold slap in the face to lose a base to the enemy, but even colder to have to destroy your own with your own missiles. I understand the alternative is even worse, but can't believe bases aren't pre-built with this in mind.

Peep intelligence operations were geared more towards 'active operations,' assassinations, sabotage, things of that nature, than they were data collection. That being the case, I'd prefer not to give them the tools they need to give me a Bad Day.

Second, given the stuff being built there, losing Grendlesbane would have been right up there on my list with Vulcan or Weyland or Hephaestus being punched out. I'd spend more time worrying about making sure that it didn't happen. What to do in the extremely remote chance that the navy couldn't do its job probably wouldn't have been a major concern.

Third, the wars seen aren't fought to the absolute the way they came to be in the 2nd century anti-diaspora. We have multiple examples of captured vessels being used by the victor's side, and almost as many references to bases and infrastructure being used the same way. The possibility of surrendering a facility (after destroying the computers and top-secret-burn-before-reading) was probably assumed as a given when Grendelsbane was first built...as a repair facility (it didn't start out as a major fleet building yard, it just grew into one).

Understood. But wouldn't even repair facilities utilize classified techniques and tech?

Surely classified data isn't all kept in space and backups are kept on planet? Wouldn't classified groundside facilities be a must? Or would that simply represent another cutout to worry about?