My God! My God, the seccies have guns!

evilauthor wrote:

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".

Major nit: It wasn't the Royal Manticoran Marines who retrieved the merchantmen from Saltash in Shadow of Freedom, it was Royal Manticoran Navy personnel led by Lt Abigail Hearns (and Lt Mateo Gutierrez of the Owens Steading Guard).

CPT Morgan (HMS Gawain), CPT Kaplan (HMS Tristram), and Commodore Zavala (squadron commander) all mentioned the "dearth of Marines" resulting in "not having any Marine detachment for momments like this is a pain in the ass" due to the the Roland class DDs not carrying any Marines.

evilauthor wrote:

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".

No, no Marines were used at Saltash except for Lt. Gutierrez a former RMMC sergeant the boarding party were all RMN personnel the Roland class destroyer carries no marine complement.

evilauthor wrote:

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".

Abbey had at least one low profile robot available that they used to plant explosives against a door they needed to blow through. That might not have been a "cockroach", but it does seem along that general line...

Don

kzt wrote: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.

Wouldn't work. Wedges destroy matter that impacts on the planes of the wedge, but not matter that passes between the planes - otherwise it would be impossible to launch a missile out of the wedge, even if the launching ship could survive. That means that the wedge planes would carve two chunks out of the tower wall, but the ceramacrete between the planes would remain perfectly intact and the missile would slam into it. The ceramacrete may take some minor damage; the missile won't fare so well.

evilauthor wrote:

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".

The problem with nanotech and micro-robots is power. Yes, the Honorverse will have better power storage systems, but will they be enough for micro-robots that have independent operation capability as overseen by high-functioning near-AI microcomputers?
While molecular circuitry can cut the power costs considerably, molecircs require a very, very high degree of accuracy during construction, something difficult to attain when you are creating them by the thousand. Recharging is also an issue as the linkages required (or even the energy-absorption arrays) take up valuable volume and mass. Sensors good enough to get recognisable images, variable-frequency transmitters (to avoid jamming), on-board data-storage for operations in areas shielded from transmitters, EM shielding... the list goes on.

As for nanotech (medical etc), a large portion of it must be energy storage, conversion. We see very little independent nanotech, therefore from that I believe that most of the computational work is done externally and then transmitted to the nanotech, along with power at a specific frequency chosen to avoid interfering with the patient's body. Self-propagating nanotech is very tricky according to the laws of thermodynamics. Sure, it can scavenge materials, but where does the newly constructed nanotech get its own energy from?

I could be completely wrong about this, but until RFC confirms/denies this, there is a chance that I am right.
Maybe.
Perhaps...

Dafmeister wrote:Wouldn't work. Wedges destroy matter that impacts on the planes of the wedge, but not matter that passes between the planes - otherwise it would be impossible to launch a missile out of the wedge, even if the launching ship could survive. That means that the wedge planes would carve two chunks out of the tower wall, but the ceramacrete between the planes would remain perfectly intact and the missile would slam into it. The ceramacrete may take some minor damage; the missile won't fare so well.

Oh, but there is a 120 meter deep tunnel a meter wide that the missile is being fired down. Which will easily accommodate the AT or AA missile body. It won't accommodate the wedge. So the missile screams down the tunnel until it hits the end at mach 6+, while the wedge around it turns the structural ceramacrete into very fine dust. I suspect the tensile strength of a cloud of sub-micron sized dust is pretty low.

The same trick works with a window or door too, after you blow it with a grenade or satchel charge. The door or window is suddenly a lot larger opening and anyone around it is dead.

kzt wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:Wouldn't work. Wedges destroy matter that impacts on the planes of the wedge, but not matter that passes between the planes - otherwise it would be impossible to launch a missile out of the wedge, even if the launching ship could survive. That means that the wedge planes would carve two chunks out of the tower wall, but the ceramacrete between the planes would remain perfectly intact and the missile would slam into it. The ceramacrete may take some minor damage; the missile won't fare so well.

Oh, but there is a 120 meter deep tunnel a meter wide that the missile is being fired down. Which will easily accommodate the AT or AA missile body. It won't accommodate the wedge. So the missile screams down the tunnel until it hits the end at mach 6+, while the wedge around it turns the structural ceramacrete into very fine dust. I suspect the tensile strength of a cloud of sub-micron sized dust is pretty low.

The same trick works with a window or door too, after you blow it with a grenade or satchel charge. The door or window is suddenly a lot larger opening and anyone around it is dead.

You could clear out a tunnel for the missile body, but on the other hand, the wedge extends beyond the middle body ahead of it as well as to the sides. So it will be doing damage to the cermacrete ahead of the middle body, causing rather large chunks to potentially drop into the missile's path. Not saying it is a bad idea, mind you, just not as simple as you seem assume.

On the gripping hand, we do have text ev of what happens when significant amount of debris strike a full up starship wedge. In that case it was chunks of a space station hitting the top of one plane of a tug's wedge that caused those kind of disruptions to the ship. In this case, it would be the front end of both wedges hitting an entire building, and then parts of the building falling on the outside of the top wedge and the inside of the bottom wedge, and then the edges and insides of both wedges intersecting more walls due to the angle of the grav planes; what would that do to a significantly smaller and weaker missile body? If these AA and AT missiles are designed to kill with their wedge, they would not be designed to hit multiple targets. As soon as the wedge hits a tank, the missile body would most likely be ripped to shreads upon or immediately after wedge contact. I doubt very very much it would make it through the second wall, let alone all the way through your tunnel.

Rocks fall very slowly compared to a hypersonic missile. It moving at well over a km per second, so no, that isn't a problem. By the time it would have reached the missile body the missile is no longer there.

The other issue, who knows. But you can certainly destroy the building with just the plasma cannon. Given that the much less powerful hand-held plasma guns caused sufficiently extensive structural damage to ceramacrete that you couldn't safely use them inside, I suspect that something that is probably at least two orders of magnitude more energy will do an amazing amount of structural damage per shot.

kzt wrote:Rocks fall very slowly compared to a hypersonic missile. It moving at well over a km per second, so no, that isn't a problem. By the time it would have reached the missile body the missile is no longer there.

What are the 3 laws of Newtonian motion again?
What is the 2nd law of thermodynamics again?

I love the dry sarcasm. Keep it up. Even managed it without calling several someones very appropriate names. Kudos.

kzt wrote:Oh, but there is a 120 meter deep tunnel a meter wide that the missile is being fired down. Which will easily accommodate the AT or AA missile body. It won't accommodate the wedge. So the missile screams down the tunnel until it hits the end at mach 6+, while the wedge around it turns the structural ceramacrete into very fine dust. I suspect the tensile strength of a cloud of sub-micron sized dust is pretty low.

The same trick works with a window or door too, after you blow it with a grenade or satchel charge. The door or window is suddenly a lot larger opening and anyone around it is dead.

Given that the structure of a residential tower can withstand a multi-kiloton nuclear weapon going off inside it without signigicant structural damage, I doubt that an anti-tank missile hitting it at mach 6 is going to do more than make an interesting scorch pattern on the surface.