The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[KlavoHunter]

So, just to be sure here, we just nuked Jesus?

[CaptainChewbacca]

So, just to be sure here, we just nuked Jesus?

No. We hit a forward troop division. The main body of the Heavenly Host is elsewhere.

[phongn]

Good job, Stuart, as usual! Can't wait to hear more about the first nuclear strike in heaven!

Having read his description of the state of Duren after The Big One, I can wait. It is likely to be extremely unpleasant.

His description of chemical warfare in Armageddon? was supremely unpleasant as well.

[Stuart]

No. We hit a forward troop division. The main body of the Heavenly Host is elsewhere.

That was the main body of Yahweh's personal command. The forward division is the one that was tackling Caesar's Third Legion.

[Enforcer Talen]

Does Jesus have another army to play with? I remember one of the scary things of LotR was when you defeat one of Sauron's armies, he just rolls up with another one. We going to encounter the virtually unlimited armies of heaven, or is it a wrap for them?

[nightwyrm]

That would be extremely useful for historians to uncover time periods that were not very well documented. I think it will be interesting to find out Caesar's opinion about the late Roman Empire and the Byzantine Emperors.

Maybe in salvation'verse we'd be able to do Deadliest Warrior with something remotely resembling accuracy.

[CaptainChewbacca]

No. We hit a forward troop division. The main body of the Heavenly Host is elsewhere.

That was the main body of Yahweh's personal command. The forward division is the one that was tackling Caesar's Third Legion.

My appologies, I stand corrected. At any rate, if its Yaweh's personal command, he probably wouldn't trust Jesus with it.

[ray245]

That would be extremely useful for historians to uncover time periods that were not very well documented. I think it will be interesting to find out Caesar's opinion about the late Roman Empire and the Byzantine Emperors.

Maybe in salvation'verse we'd be able to do Deadliest Warrior with something remotely resembling accuracy.

Not really, given that the show still managed to fuck things up when it comes to comparing modern troops/police units.

[Edward Yee]

According to Deadliest Warrior, LAPD SWAT > GSG-9... in an episode that had originally been labeled "SWAT vs. GSG-9."

So if Yahweh's personal command was hit, what of Elhmas' command other than the one that was fighting Third Legion?

[Saint_007]

"Oh, the rockets' red glare, the nukes bursting in air..."

Sorry, just seemed too good to pass up. So yeah, I got the nuke I've been waiting for. Only one, apparently, but evidently I'll soon learn what it means to be hit by a nuke regardless of numbers. Skin burning, flesh melting, feathers and hair falling out...

Is it just me or am I an utter sadist for wanting to read about these things?

Oh, and here's a parody song for the hell of it:

"Onward, Heavenly Soldiers
Marching without fear,
And the Mighty Yahweh
Safely in the Rear

He rants and raves all day and night,
And thinks He's very Brave
But the ones who fought for Him
Are dead and in their graves

Onward, Heavenly Soldiers
Marching Without Fear,
And the Mighty Yahweh
Safely in the Rear!

Amen!"

Admittedly, it's an adaptation of "Forward Joe Soap's Army", which is itself a parody of "Onwards, Christian Soldiers". Yet something tells me one or two former Great War Tommies will be singing that as they blast away on the artillery.

[Saint_007]

As for the army that got nuked, it's pretty clear it's Elhmas' main force. Which now includes the survivors of the feint, which got utterly slaughtered. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that the Angels in the feint got away when their big push failed; it disappoints that for all their brave talk and holier-than-thou posturing they don't stand and fight, but it doesn't surprise me.

Hopefully, the next chapter will have a few survivors of the feint tell Elhmas how they got slaughtered by a human-demonic army that can belch fire and thunder, only to get knocked flat by the shockwave from the nuclear initiation. Then Elhmas turns around and describes to us in detail WTF had happened to his half-million-man host.

But seriously, Stuart. We pestered you, but you delivered all the same. I humbly submit to your storytelling prowess, and I doubt I'll pester you for anything about The Salvation War ever again...

[Michael Garrity]

Stuart:

Now that the HEA has busted a nuke on that heavenly army, might we see the deployment of nuclear artillery? Even though all such shells ahve already been dismantled, I'm sure Pantex could build some W33s or W48s; maybe even the W82 'neutron bomb' shell.

Mike Garrity

[Saint_007]

Now we can really get the party started!

** Cues up the 1812 Overture**

I prefer the Hell March 3. Much more modern, and the 1812 Overture symbolized that while the French had the upper hand, they lost in the end. The HEA's battle against Heaven will be less equal footing and more red-hot craters.

And yes, Mike, there probably would be nuclear artillery. IIRC, Petraeus was told that all weapons are free. So it's not just nuclear, we're looking at the whole NBC rainbow...

EDIT: just thought of something. What happens to armor (both Angelic and modern MBT) in the heat of a nuclear initiation? Assuming you're not dead-center, in which case, as Stuart said in his essay, you'd be reduced to extra-crispy hamburger to worry about what happens to your armor.

[Dave]

Suggestion: After this is all over, Drippy gets invited to Luga's show.

Stuart:

Now that the HEA has busted a nuke on that heavenly army, might we see the deployment of nuclear artillery? Even though all such shells ahve already been dismantled, I'm sure Pantex could build some W33s or W48s; maybe even the W82 'neutron bomb' shell.

Mike Garrity

I doubt it.

The logic is that using ballistic missiles in Heaven and Hell is questionable since the strange geometry might make them come down somewhere completely unexpected. So, cruise missiles were a better choice.

[Simon_Jester]

Dave, artillery trajectories are fine. Ballistic missiles are more problematic because:

-They fly farther, and therefore small errors in trajectory become more relevant
-They fly higher; I'm not clear on whether the upper atmosphere in Hell/Heaven thins out to vacuum the way Earth's does. If it doesn't, ballistic missiles are damn near useless because they can't coast to their targets.

As for the army that got nuked, it's pretty clear it's Elhmas' main force. Which now includes the survivors of the feint, which got utterly slaughtered. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that the Angels in the feint got away when their big push failed; it disappoints that for all their brave talk and holier-than-thou posturing they don't stand and fight, but it doesn't surprise me.

They're not conditioned to it. Demons grow up in conditions of internecine warfare that make them culturally somewhat like some of the more hardass pre-modern societies. They will charge machine gun fire, and more impressively the survivors will get up and do it again tomorrow.

Angels aren't; they live in a pharaonic monarchy more like ancient Egypt, with relatively little internecine fighting of any kind and almost no army on army warfare. Their warrior-class is accordingly unused to having to fight an opponent that slaughters huge numbers of them. To make matters worse (as it were) they have no concept of shock tactics, giving or receiving.

And there are demographic reasons for them to fight this way, as Stuart covered.

[Chris OFarrell]

Just for comparision purposes...

This army was 500,000 strong, 50K Angels, 450K Humans.

Abigor came to Earth with 400K something. And it took several days of running battles (albeit without air support) to eventually eliminate this force.

One nuke...

[EuelB]

Yet another Kick Ass chapter. Stuart! I just might go back to the beginning of the first story and read it again.

Lead Elements, Third Legion, Heaven.

It didn't look good. That much was obvious to Dripankeothorofenex as he looked over the metal wall of his armored personnel carrier at the battlefield opening up in front of Third Legion. Below them, 1st Mechanized Infantry Battalion (Demonic) was obviously in trouble. Their front line was being enveloped by the leading edge of the Angelic Host advance. Some of their infantry positions were being overwhelmed while others were being outflanked and engaged from the sides and rear. Most disturbing of all were the black columns of smoke that marked the spots where the battalions armored personnel carriers were being knocked out. He could see where most of the problem lay; the angels had got in close enough to severely limit how much the battalion could use its artillery support.

As you said, we get to see Drippy in action again, sorta...

"So I see. Only four hundred angels dead? Out of ten thousand?"

"They fled Sir. When the battle turned against them, they abandoned their human troops and fled. The fighters from our allies got many but the rest escaped."

Angels, you are pussies!!

Petraeus looked at the operational displays, calculating safety margins and degrees of separation. Yes, it would work. "Sodom, for Gomorrah they die."

Erg! And my friends bitch at me for lousy puns! In fact, this is a good pun, a proper pun, for the time and place.

And so it was that the prophecies were fulfilled. The Sun Of Man was indeed rising over Heaven.

Ooooo! Much nukey goodness! Somebody's channeling Tom Clancy...

[Darth Yoshi]

I have to admit, I've never actually sat down and thought about how complicated modern nukes are. The amount of detail is pretty awesome, and just shows how humanity has broken down killing into a science.

[Dave]

Dave, artillery trajectories are fine. Ballistic missiles are more problematic because:

-They fly farther, and therefore small errors in trajectory become more relevant
-They fly higher; I'm not clear on whether the upper atmosphere in Hell/Heaven thins out to vacuum the way Earth's does. If it doesn't, ballistic missiles are damn near useless because they can't coast to their targets.

Alright, so artillery is fine, but how is a cruise missile on inertial guidance (as the chapter seems to represent) significantly different from a ballistic missile, accuracy-speaking?

Perhaps I'm asking the wrong question. What kind of cartographic deviation rates (for lack of a better term) do we see in Heaven/Hell?

Somebody's channeling Tom Clancy...

My understanding is that the author is likely to take that as an insult.

[Ritterin Sophia]

-snip-

-snip-

If either of you are decent human beings you will recant these rather quickly, privately most likely, after Stuart gives his description of the survivors. Just be glad this time it doesn't include little girls and women like it did when I first read one of his descriptions.

Having read his description of the state of Duren after The Big One, I can wait. It is likely to be extremely unpleasant.

I don't think this is going to be as bad as Duren, primarily because the scene I talked about from TBO is not going to be included.

[Edward Yee]

Just for comparison purposes...

This army was 500,000 strong, 50K Angels, 450K Humans.

Abigor came to Earth with 400K something. And it took several days of running battles (albeit without air support) to eventually eliminate this force.

One nuke...

Actually there was extensive air support -- once the skies were thinned out enough by fighters for transports (fixed- and rotary-wing) and attack helicopters to safely fly, the latter went to town, the army finally broke, and some proportion of the casualties came during the retreat to the Hellmouth.

The "one nuke" was actually touched on back in Armageddon by the hapless gorgon Lakheenahuknaasi, who'd been trying to use a certain invocation called 'wicca pee-dee-ah,' but was constantly thwarted by a spell that caused the pages to turn of their own will until she was reading about a blue hedgehog and "Yugi Mutou, King of Games"...

She was fairly sure that this 'James Bond' was a most dangerous enemy assassin, but the notion of whole cities being destroyed by pieces of the sun was clearly either mythology or propaganda. The 'yoo tuub' and cee-enn-enn spells had shown her images from Abigor's pathetic defeat – for all his failures, his warriors had managed to slay some humans. She was sure that if the humans had possessed such impossible magics, they would have destroyed his army outright rather than face the demons at such close quarters.

Clearly someone that didn't get economy of force, the eventual necessity of learning how human infantry would fare against demons in close quarters, or heck, the value of an "ace in the hole." The latter is notable considering her own background in presumably intrigues at Tartarus' court, but I guess she didn't consider it since knowledge of the existence of "pieces of the sun as weapons" wasn't being hoarded by the human "warlords."

[Saint_007]

Does Jesus have another army to play with? I remember one of the scary things of LotR was when you defeat one of Sauron's armies, he just rolls up with another one. We going to encounter the virtually unlimited armies of heaven, or is it a wrap for them?

I'm thinking Yahweh has a lot more soldiers at his command. It's been stated that Heaven has a population of 700 million angels and 10 billion humans, which means a greater manpower pool. However, it was explicitly stated that the armies of Heaven have about 90 million Angels (full strength, includes reserves) and about 10 times that in human infantry. So yeah, we're going to have a lot of bodies to wade through. Which is why Petraeus was given the thumbs-up on using NBC weaponry; the HEA wants as few casualties as possible to prevent their best from going over to Caesar. And in any case, I would make a case for the use of Uriel and the Seven Bowls of Wrath as WMD's (or intended as WMD's) so Heaven's just being paid its due.

Still as Stuart said and Simon_Jester pointed out, we don't need to kill too many. Just drive them over the Despair Event Horizon, when they realize that fighting humans will by definition mean paying in numbers they're not ready or able to handle. Something tells me this is *exactly* what Michael-Lan wants: the moment for the Angels to realize Yahweh isn't as divine or invincible as they thought he was, at which point he (Michael) will step in and depose the old fart and make peace with the Humans. Ironically, Dagon and the Succubus Queen tried that, only to fail because the Humans had other plans.

Oh, and the reason we didn't nuke Abigor the moment he stepped out of the Hellmouth? The humans were terrified, unsure of their opponent, and those who actually had a plan didn't want to pull out their trump cards too soon. So we took the fight to them the traditional way, and it turned out they weren't invincible after all; just pretty damn tough. Plus Iraq is our territory; we don't want any more radiation on our Earth than is necessary.

Now, however, we've got a damn good idea of what to expect, want to finish this war ASAP, and want minimum casualties, since we're going to have to rebuild Heaven the way we rebuilt Hell. Nukes are just our way of saying "I'm too tired for this bullshit so I'll just clean up quickly".

EDIT: As for Elhmas, he just might get thrown back into the fray - assuming he wasn't fricasseed by the nuke. Or annihilated by incoming HEA fire. It was specifically stated that he was given 50,000 Angels and 450,000+ humans to take on the closest human army (the one near the concentration camp). So he's going to have to run back to the Heavenly City and ask for a new army, and hope the F-22's don't catch him on the way.

BTW, anyone remember what Michael-Lan said?

Michael smiled wryly. "I slipped up there, thankfully Yah-yah didn’t notice. I ordered the preparation of the human levies almost by instinct. I forgot that doing so was telling Yah-yah that the fighting would take place here in Heaven. The human levies can't fight on Earth. That was a bad mistake, but he missed it, I think. Jesus will take the Guard and the levies in. This attack has got to look good. I just hope the humans bring their artillery and aircraft in with them. We need one of their clean sweeps badly. Jesus has to die and I want that guard torn apart. The defeat of the Guard and its levies has got to be stunning and we need the humans to fatten our casualty list."

Oh shit. He got one. I'm just wondering how far his jaw would drop at how clean a sweep we did. Of course, there would be survivors to the nuke, just in the lower 4-digit range instead of the half-million that they started out with.

[Snaake]

...
Quoting the relevent parts from Stuarts essay, mostly because it's more readable.

Very interesting essay, although from the point of view of how 'useful' it is, would've been nice to read more about "what you can do to ensure your survival in the event of nuclear holocaust" (mostly about surviving the bombing itself, there're separate forums for actual postapocalyptic survival).

Pretty off-topic, but one paragraph caught my attention:

In this situation the US has a terrific advantage over the rest of the world. Its called the Second Amendment. The B-country population is largely armed, sometimes quite heavily. They do exactly what Founding Fathers envisaged - provide a body of armed people whom the local authority can assemble to maintain order. (The Supreme Court may argue that interpretation of the Second Amendment but by now they are doing so with the people who wrote it). In a more general sense, post-holocaust fiction usually has gangs of outlaws preying on the defenseless citizenry. Interestingly that doesn't seem to happen. In disasters people tend to work together rather than against each other (for example in US urban disasters Hells Angels biker gangs have made sterling contributions to relief efforts using their bikes and riding skills to get emergency supplies through to places others can't). While lawlessness and disorder do occur, the ease of forming a civilian militia (using the term properly here meaning something very much like the Sheriff?s Posse beloved of Westerns) brings that situation under control. Other countries are unlikely to be so fortunate.

My first instinct would be to rather state that rather than the US, countries with more guns/person but less gun-related crime and less of these being handguns would have an even greater advantage. Say Canada. Or European countries that like Canada, have plenty of hunting weapons but also extensive conscription armies. I'm thinking mostly of the Swiss and eg. Finland & Sweden (although the latter has given up conscription recently, and it's army is geared to pretty much just peace-keeping etc rather than conventional war). Of course, these countries also aren't major powers in the sense that the US is, definitely not nuclear powers, and the population is pretty spread out to begin with.

[Scorpion]

If either of you are decent human beings you will recant these rather quickly, privately most likely, after Stuart gives his description of the survivors.

If...

Just be glad this time it doesn't include little girls and women like it did when I first read one of his descriptions.

My friend, I'm a /b/tard. I've watched footage from the Nanking Massacre for fun. I've seen the worst humanity has to offer and come out on the other side. I relish it.

inb4 internet tough guy

[Edward Yee]

For songs I prefer Ao wo Torimodose: "You wa SHOCK!"

Butchea... I also recall Stuart discussing why there aren't tactical nuclear weapons; I wouldn't be surprised if that rule and the rationale still held up, but that Elhmas' main army, having yet to advance to contact (unlike the forward angels/human levies fought by Third Legion) was thus deemed a strategic target.