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.