My God! My God, the seccies have guns!

Just throwing this out there, as a former light infantry support type.

Good armor does not equate to survivability. In fact, in the tightest areas, especially constricted hallways, heavy armor merely means the enemy won't miss you.

Training, tactics, weapons, and terrain - these are the factors that are important in a battle. 'Modern' Honorverse weapons are made for maneuver warfare in the open with long-range engagements. A battle armor suit is vulnerable to a 'squash' charge (see 'We Few' or 'March to the Stars' for a version called a one-shot). Is a six-ounce shaped charge the best weapon for long range? No. Is it capable of delivering a fatal concussive blow to a battle-armored individual when slapped on his armor at point-blank range. Oh, hells yes.

Without clean lines of fire (textev confirmed for obstructions) you have to try and clear out room by room. Not fun. Or you can nuke it from orbit, just to be sure. More seriously not fun, especially since it is your city you're nuking (ok, KEW, but pretty much the same stuff). And you have to be careful with those seccie neighborhoods, because your vital services run through them to get to the inner 'elite' city. That's why they didn't KEW indiscriminately, IIRC. There were several instances of unintended services damage in textev.

Only 12,000 guys, not all in battle armor, to clear out 2-3 million seccies (not all armed, but still). Very, very big job. I'll be nice and say that's 250 people to kill/capture/whatever per trooper in just the one area. Don't forget the ammo counts and resupply, plus the endurance of the armor (it is limited to a few hours, IIRC).

And not all 12,000 of the oppressors are going to be completely gung-ho about killing people. It's hard to find sociopaths in those numbers, even on Mesa.

I can believe several months, especially if they can't cordon areas to prevent re-infiltration. Add in improvised explosives, traps, and the morale costs of a long city fight and you're there.

I can't imagine the 'peace forces' of Mesa would be as strident in their attacks as one might suspect. There were probably a lot of patrols that consisted of 'get past the first turn and under the ceramacrete to hide our tracking systems from the boss and hunker down for an hour'. Like a lot of jungle patrols in Vietnam and Korea (and other conflicts). Those sociopaths' mothers may not have raised nice boys, but that doesn't mean they raised stupid ones.

Anyhow, just my two centicreds.

Dave

There were a couple thousand defenders, not a couple of million.

Well, after you do it a time or two the upper part of the building comes down. On You ---- and everyone around.
This is a bad thing.
Among other things it tends to cut in the recruiting of replacements, you know, for the guys the building turned into goo. Also there is the problem of own-goals, when you fire the missile and it keeps going and gives your troops in another part of the building the wedgie to end all wedgies.





Plus, every military in the honorverse uses wedge based aa and at missiles. What would the effect be of flying one of those through a hole in the wall and down a central corridor? Note that the wedges, while small by mdm standards, are quite a bit larger then the corridors described. What happens to the people waiting in the corridor to ambush the troops when the wedge goes by? How popular will ambush duty be after you use that the second time?

And they won't just have a few of these, they will have hundreds to thousands of them.[/quote]

When taking a building it also shows how gas can be your friend, either tear gas or a more powerful contact irritant or poison. One wonders why over 2000 years no one has improved tear gas or incorperated a knock out component to it.

Your standing in a corridor the gas roils in and everyone falls over unconscious. Is less exciting than a good battle in the halls of a smashed 300 storey apartment block.

exiledtoIA wrote:Well, after you do it a time or two the upper part of the building comes down. On You ---- and everyone around.
This is a bad thing.
Among other things it tends to cut in the recruiting of replacements, you know, for the guys the building turned into goo. Also there is the problem of own-goals, when you fire the missile and it keeps going and gives your troops in another part of the building the wedgie to end all wedgies.

Destroying the building is NOT a side effect or an unintended consequence. Who the hell care about the building? Converting it into a giant pile of gravel is a perfectly acceptable outcome. You certainly don't send anyone into the second building after the unfortunate outcome encountered in the first building. The only regret that anyone had about blowing up the first one was that they did it about the stupidest possible fashion.

The Seccies gangster government is kinda a homage to the original Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action On Mesa where there is not Government the gangs come in to provide it while the Star Trek episode dealt with the non interference doctrine, a society based on a book The Gangs of Chicago.

Poker

Hi LazarLives, or Dave as you prefer;

Kudos for the excellent points!

To clarify some other posters' comments:

About 90% of the seccies in New Rostock had been evacuated, leaving 3000+ fighters, not counting the volunteers, who did have some gas masks, besides controlling the interior environmental systems, which probably involved reversing any attempts to gas several times given all the hints about what impossible things were done with the environmental systems, NTM the KEW's ruined all that equipment mounted on the roof.

It was several weeks, not month's, specifically about 3 weeks just for New Rostock, from September into mid-October 1922 PD.

Even at only 4-5 LY/day, Zilwicki took around 12-15 days to get to the Manticore WHJ, so that chapter was technically out of the proper timeline, but that's the author's prerogative, and didn't it work quite well?

So HH-A or GA reinforcements might arrive sooner than some expect.

The Mesa government's reaction and attempted coverup to the first KEW indicates that they knew two such holes in the ground was too much for even credulous young children, so turning NR into gravel wasn't an option.

Secondly and mainly though, it would also have been rightly seen by everyone on Mesa [and especially by the seccies and slaves] as a retreat or a admission by the military that they couldn't cope with a few thousand real armed seccies, however lacking in numbers of the heavy weapons ratio the Mesan military had, the very last thing the Mesan military or government wanted the seccies to know and believe, so it wasn't going to happen.

Again kudos, Dave.

L

Lazalarlives wrote:Just throwing this out there, as a former light infantry support type.

Good armor does not equate to survivability. In fact, in the tightest areas, especially constricted hallways, heavy armor merely means the enemy won't miss you.

Training, tactics, weapons, and terrain - these are the factors that are important in a battle. 'Modern' Honorverse weapons are made for maneuver warfare in the open with long-range engagements. A battle armor suit is vulnerable to a 'squash' charge (see 'We Few' or 'March to the Stars' for a version called a one-shot). Is a six-ounce shaped charge the best weapon for long range? No. Is it capable of delivering a fatal concussive blow to a battle-armored individual when slapped on his armor at point-blank range. Oh, hells yes.

Without clean lines of fire (textev confirmed for obstructions) you have to try and clear out room by room. Not fun. Or you can nuke it from orbit, just to be sure. More seriously not fun, especially since it is your city you're nuking (ok, KEW, but pretty much the same stuff). And you have to be careful with those seccie neighborhoods, because your vital services run through them to get to the inner 'elite' city. That's why they didn't KEW indiscriminately, IIRC. There were several instances of unintended services damage in textev.

Only 12,000 guys, not all in battle armor, to clear out 2-3 million seccies (not all armed, but still). Very, very big job. I'll be nice and say that's 250 people to kill/capture/whatever per trooper in just the one area. Don't forget the ammo counts and resupply, plus the endurance of the armor (it is limited to a few hours, IIRC).

And not all 12,000 of the oppressors are going to be completely gung-ho about killing people. It's hard to find sociopaths in those numbers, even on Mesa.

I can believe several months, especially if they can't cordon areas to prevent re-infiltration. Add in improvised explosives, traps, and the morale costs of a long city fight and you're there.

I can't imagine the 'peace forces' of Mesa would be as strident in their attacks as one might suspect. There were probably a lot of patrols that consisted of 'get past the first turn and under the ceramacrete to hide our tracking systems from the boss and hunker down for an hour'. Like a lot of jungle patrols in Vietnam and Korea (and other conflicts). Those sociopaths' mothers may not have raised nice boys, but that doesn't mean they raised stupid ones.

Anyhow, just my two centicreds.

Dave

kzt wrote:Destroying the building is NOT a side effect or an unintended consequence. Who the hell care about the building? Converting it into a giant pile of gravel is a perfectly acceptable outcome. You certainly don't send anyone into the second building after the unfortunate outcome encountered in the first building. The only regret that anyone had about blowing up the first one was that they did it about the stupidest possible fashion.

It's not a matter of caring about the building you're dropping the KEW onto. It's the fact that the size of KEW you'll need to bring it down will cause huge collateral damage to the surround areas, including (in this case) sectors of the city that are surrounding by full citizens. A lot of those citizen's homes will be destroyed, and a lot more will suffer from the infrastructure damage.

Using a multi-megaton KEW was moronic. A series of kt range weapons at rapid intervals would have done minimal damage to anything outside the tower. That was what the Mesa military leader wanted to do.

If you cannot do that, getting 40% of your total combat capability for the entire planet rendered combat ineffective taking one building is totally insane when there are dozens if not hundreds of other such buildings. It's hardly an effective threat to tell the secies "yeah, act up and we'll kill ourselves", which is what it amounted to.

Part of the problem the Mesans had was that they didn't know exactly what they were getting into.
They were not used to seccies fighting back at all.
You are thinking of the Mesan units as military units.
In reality they were just thugs.
Having all the fancy equipment in the world won't help if you aren't trained to use it properly.
You have to remember the Mesan "military" has not been in combat. They just get used to backup the "police" and security forces.
Then you throw them and the Mesan government into a situation they have never faced before.
An armed uprising led by an experienced military leader who was being helped by an artist at dirty tricks.

kzt wrote:Using a multi-megaton KEW was moronic. A series of kt range weapons at rapid intervals would have done minimal damage to anything outside the tower. That was what the Mesa military leader wanted to do.

If you cannot do that, getting 40% of your total combat capability for the entire planet rendered combat ineffective taking one building is totally insane when there are dozens if not hundreds of other such buildings. It's hardly an effective threat to tell the secies "yeah, act up and we'll kill ourselves", which is what it amounted to.