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Information I'd love to know

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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Feb 17, 2020 9:40 pm

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tlb wrote:Why would you use an extremely expensive restaurant to support your contention? You might as well have used The Wages of Sin for comparison. At the lower end of the accommodation scale, it is possible that living in an orbital efficiency apartment is preferable for a single person; because it saves on the time and cost of a commute.

And getting a double-high space in any multi-tenet commercial building is going to be expensive because leasing it to your company means that they can't lease that second floor to a second business.

The owner's going to want the same income whether there's another store there, or a 2nd floor of your, or because you happen to like high airy ceilings. So you're basically paying double the normal price per square foot and then not using that extra space for anything directly producing revenue.


That's not evidence that the residential areas of the station are vastly more expensive that the same apartment in tower in downtown Landing would be. Much less a house in one of the low density zoned areas of Manticore (sure land's almost certainly cheaper on Sphinx or Gryphon - but then you're not a 20 minute shuttle flight away)
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Feb 18, 2020 2:22 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:That's not evidence that the residential areas of the station are vastly more expensive that the same apartment in tower in downtown Landing would be. Much less a house in one of the low density zoned areas of Manticore (sure land's almost certainly cheaper on Sphinx or Gryphon - but then you're not a 20 minute shuttle flight away)


There's also no evidence that they are cramped either. HMSS Hephaestus is 110 km long. We aren't told how wide or tall it is, so let's take the minimum of 1 km wide and two decks. That's 220 km² of surface area.

We know 5 million people died during the Yawata Strike. Since most of Weyland didn't die and though Yawata was struck, the population wasn't very high. So let's say 3.5 million people were aboard Hephaestus when it was destroyed. That gives us a population density of nearly 16000/km². Manhattan density today is 25846/km², Paris is 20300/km², San Francisco is 18560/km². And in Paris, most buildings are less than 5 storeys tall.

These numbers are an absolute minimum. Hephaestus has probably more than 2 decks and is probably wider than 1 km (1:110 would make it very long and skinny). Even if you discount armour and engineering spaces, people aboard it would have more space than people today have in large metropolitan cities. It might cost through the nose (and Manhattan, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo do), but people affluent enough might afford it. Or companies could provide a subsidy for their long-term workers. Hell, I lived in Paris on a student's income, though my 19 m² student studio wasn't by any means luxurious.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by tlb   » Tue Feb 18, 2020 10:57 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:That's not evidence that the residential areas of the station are vastly more expensive that the same apartment in tower in downtown Landing would be. Much less a house in one of the low density zoned areas of Manticore (sure land's almost certainly cheaper on Sphinx or Gryphon - but then you're not a 20 minute shuttle flight away)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:There's also no evidence that they are cramped either. HMSS Hephaestus is 110 km long. We aren't told how wide or tall it is, so let's take the minimum of 1 km wide and two decks. That's 220 km² of surface area.

We know 5 million people died during the Yawata Strike. Since most of Weyland didn't die and though Yawata was struck, the population wasn't very high. So let's say 3.5 million people were aboard Hephaestus when it was destroyed. That gives us a population density of nearly 16000/km². Manhattan density today is 25846/km², Paris is 20300/km², San Francisco is 18560/km². And in Paris, most buildings are less than 5 storeys tall.

These numbers are an absolute minimum. Hephaestus has probably more than 2 decks and is probably wider than 1 km (1:110 would make it very long and skinny). Even if you discount armour and engineering spaces, people aboard it would have more space than people today have in large metropolitan cities. It might cost through the nose (and Manhattan, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo do), but people affluent enough might afford it. Or companies could provide a subsidy for their long-term workers. Hell, I lived in Paris on a student's income, though my 19 m² student studio wasn't by any means luxurious.

You are off by about two million on the total deaths (but about right for just the orbitals), from Mission of Honor, chapter 30:
Counting the known casualties on the planetary surfaces," Abercrombie concluded softly, "the civilian human death toll so far is approximately seven million, four hundred and forty-eight thousand.

From Mission of Honor, chapter 29:
Between the two space stations, alone, the first ten seconds of Oyster Bay had already cost the Old Star Kingdom over four million dead.
*** snip ***
Twenty seconds was far too little warning to do any good, too little time for anyone to react. Alarms were only beginning to sound in the city of Yawata Crossing, emergency messages only starting to hit the public information channels, when an even larger impactor—three hundred thousand tons of wreckage, the size of one of the old Star Knight-class heavy cruisers—struck approximately five and a half kilometers from the exact center of the city of one and a quarter million people . . . with an effective yield of better than two megatons.
The three follow-on strikes by fragments in the forty thousand-ton range were barely even noticeable.

So Yawata Crossing could have contributed about 17% of the total fatalities.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Feb 19, 2020 2:50 am

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tlb wrote:From Mission of Honor, chapter 29:
Between the two space stations, alone, the first ten seconds of Oyster Bay had already cost the Old Star Kingdom over four million dead.
*** snip ***
Twenty seconds was far too little warning to do any good, too little time for anyone to react. Alarms were only beginning to sound in the city of Yawata Crossing, emergency messages only starting to hit the public information channels, when an even larger impactor—three hundred thousand tons of wreckage, the size of one of the old Star Knight-class heavy cruisers—struck approximately five and a half kilometers from the exact center of the city of one and a quarter million people . . . with an effective yield of better than two megatons.
The three follow-on strikes by fragments in the forty thousand-ton range were barely even noticeable.

So Yawata Crossing could have contributed about 17% of the total fatalities.


So I was wrong about the total, but mostly right about the stations. It says 4 million aboard the two, so Hephaestus at 3.5 million is actually on the high side.

Note the math doesn't add up. If it's 4 million on the stations plus 250k on Yawata, where do we get 3 million more?
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by kzt   » Wed Feb 19, 2020 4:38 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Note the math doesn't add up. If it's 4 million on the stations plus 250k on Yawata, where do we get 3 million more?

None of the math makes sense there.

For example, on both an absolute and percentage basis, much more of the human population died than the treecat population died, but the tiny percentage of the treecats that got killed got about as much attention as all the humans.

As a second example, what percentage of the population of the stations would you guess is manufacturing workers, vs the navy personnel, the base employees, the freight handlers, the kindergarten teachers and bartender or the children of the millions of people on the station?

I’d expect under 10% are the actual people involved in industrial work. So the entire industrial might of Manticore was 400,000 people. With a 50 year career, that’s 8000 people per year entering the field.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by tlb   » Wed Feb 19, 2020 9:37 am

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tlb wrote:From Mission of Honor, chapter 29:
Between the two space stations, alone, the first ten seconds of Oyster Bay had already cost the Old Star Kingdom over four million dead.
*** snip ***
Twenty seconds was far too little warning to do any good, too little time for anyone to react. Alarms were only beginning to sound in the city of Yawata Crossing, emergency messages only starting to hit the public information channels, when an even larger impactor—three hundred thousand tons of wreckage, the size of one of the old Star Knight-class heavy cruisers—struck approximately five and a half kilometers from the exact center of the city of one and a quarter million people . . . with an effective yield of better than two megatons.
The three follow-on strikes by fragments in the forty thousand-ton range were barely even noticeable.

So Yawata Crossing could have contributed about 17% of the total fatalities.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:So I was wrong about the total, but mostly right about the stations. It says 4 million aboard the two, so Hephaestus at 3.5 million is actually on the high side.

Note the math doesn't add up. If it's 4 million on the stations plus 250k on Yawata, where do we get 3 million more?

I do not believe that the numbers are as bad as you state. For one thing there is another million people at Yawata Crossing that you inexplicably ignore (1.25 million, not .25 million). Next the initial orbital damage only lists that caused by the graser torpedoes and does not include the follow up missile attacks on construction sites. Finally there were other people killed on the surface outside of that one city.

KZT: Why complain about the attention to the dead treecats? In a catastrophe, we feel the worst about the loss of those we know; so in a telepathic community it is possible that each being has personal knowledge of every other. Even if they do not, the empathetic factor will ramp up the anguish.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Feb 19, 2020 11:52 am

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tlb wrote:I do not believe that the numbers are as bad as you state. For one thing there is another million people at Yawata Crossing that you inexplicably ignore (1.25 million, not .25 million). Next the initial orbital damage only lists that caused by the graser torpedoes and does not include the follow up missile attacks on construction sites. Finally there were other people killed on the surface outside of that one city.


Oops, missed the "one and". Thanks for the correction.

We're still about 2 million short then. What construction sites are you talking about? Unlike the dispersed yards in Yeltsin Star, they would have been almost totally connected to the stations. And even if they weren't, how many people are needed per ship? If there were 500 ships under construction or repair (there weren't), we'd need something like 4000 people per ship.

Unless the total kills of the torpedoes didn't include the entirety of the stations. That is, they got most of the stations themselves, but not all of them. The torpedoes finished the job. I still think the handful of torpedoes, even a couple dozen, couldn't have made that much damage to targets that weren't as concentrated as the stations themselves.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by tlb   » Wed Feb 19, 2020 12:46 pm

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tlb wrote:I do not believe that the numbers are as bad as you state. For one thing there is another million people at Yawata Crossing that you inexplicably ignore (1.25 million, not .25 million). Next the initial orbital damage only lists that caused by the graser torpedoes and does not include the follow up missile attacks on construction sites. Finally there were other people killed on the surface outside of that one city.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Oops, missed the "one and". Thanks for the correction.

We're still about 2 million short then. What construction sites are you talking about? Unlike the dispersed yards in Yeltsin Star, they would have been almost totally connected to the stations. And even if they weren't, how many people are needed per ship? If there were 500 ships under construction or repair (there weren't), we'd need something like 4000 people per ship.

Unless the total kills of the torpedoes didn't include the entirety of the stations. That is, they got most of the stations themselves, but not all of them. The torpedoes finished the job. I still think the handful of torpedoes, even a couple dozen, couldn't have made that much damage to targets that weren't as concentrated as the stations themselves.

No, the RMN had been forced by overcrowding to implement construction sites exactly like the dispersed yards in Yeltsin Star. Mission of Honor, chapter 29:
A version of the new weapon had been used with lethal effectiveness against Luis Rozsak's ships at the Second Battle of Congo. Unfortunately, the full report on that wasn't available to the RMN. They knew something had improved the range of the missiles which had been provided to the "People's Navy in Exile," and they'd managed to deduce approximately how it had been done, but that was about it. And even if they'd had access to Rozsak's report, it wouldn't have fully prepared them for this. Rozsak had faced the Cataphract-A, based on the SLN's new cruiser/destroyer Spatha shipkiller; the pod-launched missiles of Oyster Bay were Cataphract-Cs, based on the capital-ship Trebucht, with much heavier and more powerful laserheads. The combined package had a powered range from rest of over sixteen million kilometers and a terminal velocity of better than .49 c. That attack envelope would have made it formidable enough by itself, but installing the high-speed drive as the last stage also gave it far more agility when it came to penetrating the target's defenses during its terminal maneuvers.
That agility, however, was scarcely required today. There were no active defenses, just as their targets made no attempt at evasive maneuvers, because no one knew they were coming in time to react.
There was time for their targets—or some of them, at least—to realize they were under attack. To see the impossible impeller signatures of missile drives swarming away from the pods' ballistic tracks. Some of those missiles were effectively wasted because of targeting decisions made by officers who hadn't felt justified in relying solely upon the efficacy of the as yet untested torpedoes. Those laser heads either never fired at all or else used themselves up picking off chunks of wreckage large enough to satisfy their targeting criteria.
But the vast majority of them had other concerns. There really weren't many of them, given the number of targets they had to cover, but it didn't take very many to kill targets as naked as these. They roared in on the carefully plotted positions of the totally unprotected orbital shipyards floating around Manticore and Sphinx with devastating effectiveness.
Bomb-pumped lasers ripped deep, mangling and shattering, spewing bits and pieces of the Star Empire of Manticore's industrial might across the heavens. And behind them came the old-fashioned nuclear warheads—warheads which detonated only if they were unable to obtain a hard kinetic kill. Fireballs glared like brief-lived, intolerably bright stars, flashing in stroboscopic spikes of devastation, and more thousands of highly skilled workers and highly trained naval personal died in those cataclysmic bubbles of plasma and radiation.
Within a total space of barely eleven minutes, both of the Star Empire's major orbital industrial nodes and well over ninety percent of its dispersed shipyards, along with the better part of five and a half million trained technicians and naval personnel—and, all too often, their families—had been wiped out of existence.
By any yardstick anyone cared to use, it was the most devastating surprise attack in the history of the human race, and it wasn't over yet.

*** snip ***

That was the real reason the primary destruction of the space stations had been left to the torpedoes, which had overflown the planets, well clear of them. The follow up laser heads had come in on a similar trajectory, but some of the planners had argued against using any of them. Despite all the safeguards built into their guidance systems, there was always the chance, however remote, that one of them was going to ram into the planet at relativistic speeds. And, the critics had pointed out, if that happened, the Alignment's opponents would inevitably claim it had been deliberate.
The final distribution of fire had been a compromise between those who distrusted the torpedoes' ability to do the job and those who wanted no missiles anywhere near either of the inhabited planets. And as was the definition of any compromise, neither side had been completely satisfied.

Note the five and a half million fatalities in the orbitals do not count their families also living there.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by kzt   » Wed Feb 19, 2020 4:43 pm

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tlb wrote:Note the five and a half million fatalities in the orbitals do not count their families also living there.

No, that's TOTAL.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by tlb   » Wed Feb 19, 2020 6:14 pm

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tlb wrote:Note the five and a half million fatalities in the orbitals do not count their families also living there.

kzt wrote:No, that's TOTAL.

I think it is possible to read it either way, I see the dash as stopping the count to only be of trained personnel.
along with the better part of five and a half million trained technicians and naval personnel—and, all too often, their families—had been wiped out of existence.

But if you are right we still are within 700 thousand after we add the Yawata Crossing toll of 1.25 million and we still have not counted the other planet strikes, including the one that caused a tsunami.
seven million, four hundred and forty-eight thousand
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