My God! My God, the seccies have guns!

Actually it isn't quite correct to refer to all of the Mesa security forces as thugs. Those forces broke down into three groups, the OPS, the MISD, and the Peaceforce. Of these three, thug probably fairly characterizes the first two. But the Peaceforce was small but well trained and disciplined. They gave a very credible account of themselves invading the New Rostock tower under very adverse circumstances. They lost a third of their people doing so. They were about to win when the SDs turned up (I presume Mike Henke).

Don

Yes, the peaceforce did a reasonable job given the plan, but the plan was fundamentally flawed. Taking a fortress room by room is always a terrible idea unless there is absolutely no alternative. They had no hostages, they were not located next to the biggest art museum on the planet or a 500 TW fusion plant. Everything for hundreds of meters around it was of minimal value to the government. There was no reason given to not just stand off and flatten it with the plasma cannons they were flatly stated to have. Or, once someone got around to taking the tunnels under it, just blow it up or flood it with gas.

Almost anything beats a plan that amounts to "if we throw enough people into the wood chipper maybe it will jam."

kzt wrote:Yes, the peaceforce did a reasonable job given the plan, but the plan was fundamentally flawed. Taking a fortress room by room is always a terrible idea unless there is absolutely no alternative. They had no hostages, they were not located next to the biggest art museum on the planet or a 500 TW fusion plant. Everything for hundreds of meters around it was of minimal value to the government. There was no reason given to not just stand off and flatten it with the plasma cannons they were flatly stated to have. Or, once someone got around to taking the tunnels under it, just blow it up or flood it with gas.

Almost anything beats a plan that amounts to "if we throw enough people into the wood chipper maybe it will jam."

My only point was to note that the Peaceforce was not thugs, but trained and disciplined troops who even though they were inexperienced performed well, given the situation they were handed which was really the fault of the higher ups.

Don

n7axw wrote:

kzt wrote:Yes, the peaceforce did a reasonable job given the plan, but the plan was fundamentally flawed. Taking a fortress room by room is always a terrible idea unless there is absolutely no alternative. They had no hostages, they were not located next to the biggest art museum on the planet or a 500 TW fusion plant. Everything for hundreds of meters around it was of minimal value to the government. There was no reason given to not just stand off and flatten it with the plasma cannons they were flatly stated to have. Or, once someone got around to taking the tunnels under it, just blow it up or flood it with gas.

Almost anything beats a plan that amounts to "if we throw enough people into the wood chipper maybe it will jam."

My only point was to note that the Peaceforce was not thugs, but trained and disciplined troops who even though they were inexperienced performed well, given the situation they were handed which was really the fault of the higher ups.
Don

Italics above are mine.

And I think that is probably the key point, friend Don, as to why the tower was not steadily reduced by KEW's and Plasma Cannons, not to mention stingships or other air-strike vehicles.

While we didn't see those discussions in textev, I think that they wanted the tower "taken" with maximum harm to the people inside to show that what had happened in Hancock was not going to be repeated and that any sort of rebellion would be crushed by the foot on the throat, not just by destroying property (and causing inconvienence to their citizens).

And they thought they could get away with it because they (the Mesan leaders) saw Hancock as a one-off, a FUBAR by their 'thugs' that would not be repeated by their professional troops, and that the Seccies would very quickly lay down their weapons and run for it....as they apparently always had.

And once the Peaceforce was fully engaged and ran into a bloody stalemate, they felt that they couldn't 'back out' and be seen by the Seccies as 'weak', so they kept pounding away with the same stragety, albeit finally releasing the smaller KEWs to General Drescher.

But of course, civilian authority has never overruled military judgement in all of human history....

My impression is that by the time they had permission to use kews, the peace force was so thorougly tied up in the tower that they couldn't disengage their own people.

Don

n7axw wrote:My impression is that by the time they had permission to use kews, the peace force was so thorougly tied up in the tower that they couldn't disengage their own people.

Don

The thing that I was surprised by the entire Tower battle was the lack of cockroach drones... Send in several hundred thousand fairly dumb mechanical cockroaches to act as scouts, and snipers, assassains and door blowers at the same time and then follow-up with armored infantry. We know the US military is already using tracked small dog sized robots for MOUT combat, so 2,000 more years should allow for fairly dumb cockroaches each packing 2 or 3 grams of HE or a single fairly simple sensor etc.

IIRC, by the time the Peaceforce had made significant progress, they had already started using small KEWs on the upper levels.

Also, my impression when reading was that they didn't just plasma-gun the building to pieces because it was too big. These towers are supposed to put our biggest to shame, and are made of much tougher materials. Imagine a tower the height of the Burj Khalifa, the footprint of lower Manhattan, and made of solid granite and obsidian. A plasma shot might take a couple cubic meters per shot.

As for the idea of using impeller-head weapons, you have to remember that the impeller will atomize anything it touches, but the rest of the structure is going to be shattered, and that debris will probably kill the missile (remember the risk the tugs took when trying to block debris during the Yawata Strike). You wouldn't do much more damage than the plasma gun, and missiles take materials, not just energy.

Sure, and after an hour of a battery punching cubic meter holes in the structure 5 meter of the ground at a rate of 2 shots per minutes you have 6 tunnels 120 meters deep into the building.

Hmm, what could you do with that?

How about you fly a wedge missile into it? So it converts a meter diameter zone of destruction into a 10 meter wide zone. Then the missile slams into the end at mach 6+, which should be interesting in itself.

Then you traverse your guns aimpoint 10 meters to the left and do it again. At the end of 12 hours I've torn a 720 meter wide, 10 meter high and 120 meters deep slash in the front of the building.

I have no idea when the entire 100 story building (or whatever it was) will topple over, but it will soon enough.

Hi Fester,

Its an intriguing idea, but the Peace Force didn't have them because they never thought they would ever do what they were trying to do.

While the SLN marines considered assaulting such towers their worst nightmare, there's no indication they had made such cockroach sized scouts and bombs an equipment requirement.

But the RMN, BSDF [especially the BSC], GSN, IAN and RHN may have, and have far better smarter 'bugs'.

L


Given 8 LY/day even a db could only have gone about 80 LY and returned within the ~3 weeks of the siege, and I don't know of anyone within that radius who'd be willing to sell; Beowulf might have the tech, but sell to Mesa?

fester wrote:

n7axw wrote:My impression is that by the time they had permission to use kews, the peace force was so thorougly tied up in the tower that they couldn't disengage their own people.

Don

The thing that I was surprised by the entire Tower battle was the lack of cockroach drones... Send in several hundred thousand fairly dumb mechanical cockroaches to act as scouts, and snipers, assassains and door blowers at the same time and then follow-up with armored infantry. We know the US military is already using tracked small dog sized robots for MOUT combat, so 2,000 more years should allow for fairly dumb cockroaches each packing 2 or 3 grams of HE or a single fairly simple sensor etc.

lyonheart wrote:But the RMN, BSDF [especially the BSC], GSN, IAN and RHN may have, and have far better smarter 'bugs'.

L

We saw the Manticoran Marines in action in another book (when they were retrieving merchantmen illegally detained by an SL bureaucrat) and there's no indication that they or the Gendarmes they were fighting had any such "cockroaches".