Posleen in the Stargateverse

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2008-08-13 05:08pm

More so, while I haven't read anything past A Hymn Before Battle, if the Posleen have weapons capable of slagging mountains, why the fuck do mountains pose a serious problem for them? Are they seriously that retarded that they can't do a cost benefit analysis and go "You know, the gain in food is less than the material losses of assaulting these mountain strongholds, lets just nuke them from orbit". If they're that chronically stupid, then a particular vicious System Lord could just let them land on a world and paste their ships while they're wallowing about at the bottom of a gravity well. For all their own stupidity, the Goa'uld long ago figured out the first tenant of space warfare: "He who controls the high ground wins"

Gerald Tarrant · Post by **Gerald Tarrant** » 2008-08-13 05:15pm

Covenant wrote:
At which point nearly a quarter kilogram of antimatter detonated, with an explosion to rival the Big Bang.
Clearly a creationist writer here to know so little of the Big Bang.

Or a fan of purple prose a la Weber, someone he writes with. We have the mass for the anti-matter, how it's described is irrelevant. Last time I read a Weber space opera his A/M missiles exploded with similar descriptions.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2008-08-13 05:34pm

Gerald Tarrant wrote:
Covenant wrote:
At which point nearly a quarter kilogram of antimatter detonated, with an explosion to rival the Big Bang.
Clearly a creationist writer here to know so little of the Big Bang.
Or a fan of purple prose a la Weber, someone he writes with. We have the mass for the anti-matter, how it's described is irrelevant. Last time I read a Weber space opera his A/M missiles exploded with similar descriptions.

I agree with you, but it establishes the precedent of purple prose being used to describe weapon capabilities. This is only important because we've seen sparse facts with regards to the important weapon systems in question. We can't assume they have a capability beyond what we've seen demonstrated in an environment where the narration is so unreliable, so it just reinforces the need to have more literal accounts, less "slagging a mountain" type descriptions.

Gerald Tarrant · Post by **Gerald Tarrant** » 2008-08-13 06:03pm

Huh, the statement about slagging a mountain is useless for numerical purposes.

Watch on the Rhine wrote:...Athenalaras curse the loss, then issued orders for a concentration of fire against the thresh battery that had destroyed his ship. From dozens of ships, relativistic hail rained down on an obscure mountain in the French Pyrenees. To the defenders, below it looked like a cone of fire from the hand of God, obliterating everything at the point of the cone.

Far above, another screen showed the Posleen commander a glowing patch of ground, no longer so mountainous. The area was soon obscured from space by rising clouds of dirt and ash, flames from the ruinied surface glowing through the angry, dark nebulae.

Completely lacking in any useful numbers. "Hell's Faire" and "When the Devil Dances" contain some scenes of Posleen fire being directed against known quantities. I.E. "WtDD" has a dedicated support team of Landers firing against a fixed fortification built out of rebarred concrete, the dimensions of which are also described. Probably the best chance for any accurate measure of individual firepower. I don't have a copy of When the Devil Dances, if someone does we may be able to flesh out the capabilities of Postie ships

Post by **Beowulf** » 2008-08-13 07:14pm

When the Devil Dances

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2008-08-13 07:35pm

Beowulf wrote: Upper bound of what's necessary to wax a C-Dec is about a 10 MT warhead (stated .25 kg of AM).

You got your quote wrong.

Gerald Tarrant wrote:In the end he had one hundred kilos total weight, at least .005 percent of which was pure antimatter.

That is 5 grams or 0.005kg. Sure as hell not .25kg.

My post from spacebattles w.r.t to the yield issue;

Xon wrote:.005% of 100 kilograms is 5 grams of anti-matter, or 0.01 kilograms of total reactants. That is ~9x10^14 joules or ~0.215 megatons. Except, over half was radiated away from the C-Dec and the bulk of anti-matter reactions are in high energy gamma-rays which would vastly over-penetrate and not dump all the energy into the target.

So probably less than 0.1 megatons or 100 kilotons is enough completely core a C-Dec. This lines up with 20 kilotons nuclear artilery smashing landers to pieces

Gerald Tarrant · Post by **Gerald Tarrant** » 2008-08-13 08:24pm

Xon wrote:
Beowulf wrote: Upper bound of what's necessary to wax a C-Dec is about a 10 MT warhead (stated .25 kg of AM).
You got your quote wrong.
Gerald Tarrant wrote:In the end he had one hundred kilos total weight, at least .005 percent of which was pure antimatter.
That is 5 grams or 0.005kg. Sure as hell not .25kg.

Editing error I think, this was Ringo's first novel. The shuttles power pack was listed as .25kg of antimatter, see the last line of my big quote, it's possible that referring to 100kg .005% of which is antimatter excluded the shuttle power pack. Or it could just be he had multiple numbers when he wrote this, and never synchronized it.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2008-08-14 03:43am

Gerald Tarrant wrote:Editing error I think, this was Ringo's first novel. The shuttles power pack was listed as .25kg of antimatter, see the last line of my big quote, it's possible that referring to 100kg .005% of which is antimatter excluded the shuttle power pack. Or it could just be he had multiple numbers when he wrote this, and never synchronized it.

It is also highly probably that while the shuttle could carry that much anti-matter it doesn't actually have that in it at the time. This would also make sense in-universe that it would be underfuelled due to the aliens attempting to get humanity killed off by the Posleen.

One major issue is that humans use what is described as anti-matter encapsulated in magnetic buckyballs which will exaberate the problem of the anti-matter getting kicked away from the target.

Gerald Tarrant · Post by **Gerald Tarrant** » 2008-08-14 04:13am

Xon wrote:
Gerald Tarrant wrote:Editing error I think, this was Ringo's first novel. The shuttles power pack was listed as .25kg of antimatter, see the last line of my big quote, it's possible that referring to 100kg .005% of which is antimatter excluded the shuttle power pack. Or it could just be he had multiple numbers when he wrote this, and never synchronized it.
It is also highly probably that while the shuttle could carry that much anti-matter it doesn't actually have that in it at the time. This would also make sense in-universe that it would be underfuelled due to the aliens attempting to get humanity killed off by the Posleen.

Directly from the book in question

At which point nearly a quarter kilogram of antimatter detonated, with an explosion to rival the Big Bang.

This is not a character's assessment of the facts; this is an omniscient narrator telling you nearly a quarter kilo of antimatter. This provides a decent upper limit to Posleen lander survivability. The additional fact, you sited, that the lander wouldn't realistically absorb more than 50% of the blast is fine. But quibbling over how much under .25 kilos of A/M it is is silly, and defeats the purpose of establishing a firm upper limit.

One major issue is that humans use what is described as anti-matter encapsulated in magnetic buckyballs which will exaberate the problem of the anti-matter getting kicked away from the target.

You're confusing some of the issues. The A/M used in the above quote was galactic produced. The buckyball encapsulated Anti-Matter was built for a human only super-bomb project.

Thanatos · Post by **Thanatos** » 2008-08-14 04:33am

Watch on the Rhine, with it's tanks massing in the thousands of tons, introduces the series to some undeniably bad science and the descriptions we have of things often makes no sense.

Things started to go wonky before then. Gust Front is the last readable book in the series IMHO and it still had weird shit like ludicrous numbers of Bushmasters added to the Abrams among a suite of other problems.

When the Devil Dances and on, it just got wacky. It also undercut the logic of using power armor over tanks when we hear that an upgraded Abrams can shrug off the majority of Posleen fire.

Oops.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2008-08-14 03:48pm

I interpreted the grenade/mine section to mean that the 5 grams of antimatter was in the ammo, and the .25kg was in the power pack.

Stargate Nerd · Post by **Stargate Nerd** » 2008-08-14 04:33pm

Covenant wrote: While I think the wording of your reply is fairly cowardly, I did a quick search of the forum and it seems like there's a painfully large amount of discussion on just that matter. I was about to call you full of shit, but ah well. In the future, a link to the previous debate or something would be nice, since you're presenting it without any degree of substantiation.

No need to attack the messenger, I was just letting you know what the consensus around here seems to be. I'd hate for you type an elaborate argument based on those two insights only to have people dismiss it altogether because they don't agree with the evidence.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2008-08-16 02:03am

Stargate Nerd wrote:No need to attack the messenger, I was just letting you know what the consensus around here seems to be. I'd hate for you type an elaborate argument based on those two insights only to have people dismiss it altogether because they don't agree with the evidence.

Ahh, yeah. I apologize then, I should have figured out the context before snarking at you. As it stands, it was good to bring up, since I wasn't aware of the big debate about those numbers. I watched all the Stargates as they came out, but rarely did with a critical eye towards firepower calcs, so I'm suprised to see the oddities. I remember things like blowing away planets and reigniting the fires of the underworld, sitting in the sun's corona, and blasting between galaxies in a week or so. I do forget the gasoline-bomb special effects.

Stargate Nerd · Post by **Stargate Nerd** » 2008-08-17 12:10am

Covenant wrote: Ahh, yeah. I apologize then, I should have figured out the context before snarking at you. As it stands, it was good to bring up, since I wasn't aware of the big debate about those numbers. I watched all the Stargates as they came out, but rarely did with a critical eye towards firepower calcs, so I'm suprised to see the oddities. I remember things like blowing away planets and reigniting the fires of the underworld, sitting in the sun's corona, and blasting between galaxies in a week or so. I do forget the gasoline-bomb special effects.

Personally I actually lean towards accepting the 200 megaton numbers, but I don't know if that's in line with what we see in Continuum. That movie seems to present an ideal opportunity to actually do some calcs, but I'm afraid I don't know how to.