mhicks wrote:Who ever put the OBS in place was not stupid enough to not track and destroy anyone trying to escape off the planet. If the whole point of the "Langhorn Plan" is to keep humans on the planet and safe from Gbaba means that they don't want anyone getting off the planet and at the same time not letting anything reach the planet. I have always been in the school of those believing the OBS is a multiple OBS system allowing full coverage and a large arching defense/offence net.
To me anything leaving the orbit of Safehold would be considered hostile to the Langhorn design and shot by the OBS. Anything leaving orbit short of using hyperdrive would get destroyed the minute it was detected. Use of Hyper drive would be picked up by the Gbaba, so it is a catch 22 trying to get away from the planet. Then any colony in the star system would still be capable of getting targeted by the OBS. Kinetic Energy Weapons take objects and shoot them at super fast speeds to cause massive damage. The weapon can use just about anything it can get its hands on and put in a magnetic rail gun type sled. If they are going to get off Safehold and just try to "start over" leaving the safeholdians behind would require going far away to another system and hope the OBS doesn't send in any high speed asteroids it shot at the new colony.
I'm dubious about the ability of the system to prevent orbital departure. Kinetic weapons are great for taking out ground installations, but shooting even hypervelocity projectiles at a manuvering spacecraft with the speeds the Skimmers are capable of or faster would require an incredible amount of luck to hit.
Now, if the platforms had Honorverse-style grasers or other powerful energy mounts, then it would be a different story, but now we're getting into territory we don't have much textev about... or if we do I don't remember it. We assume the system is intently monitoring the surface of Safehold for certain energy signatures, and that Merlin has, on several occasions, worried that pushing a skimmer past certain speeds might trigger a response. That means he's pretty certain that Federation tech can hide from the OBS sufficiently to operate pretty much at will below certain speeds, and indeed he's done so throughout the books.
If a spacecraft of the same tech level of the presumably OBS undetectable skimmers leaves the atmosphere, there's no way a kinetic projectile system is going to hit it before it's gone. I can't even imagine such a programmed mission... the system exists to attempt to keep the colony at a pre-industrial, no-electrical generation level. If they're building spacecraft they've blown right past that level.
I also can't really imagine a reason for the system to care about re-entry, other than just a generic attention getter to proscribed tech. They're not going to defend against the Gbaba.