Drakon vs Lensman

[Darth Hoth]

Scenario 1: Slugfest. Kimball Kinnison, tooled up in full power armour (as of CotL) with DeLameters, dureum space-axe and other typical hand-held weaponry, versus Gwendolyn Ingolfsson from Draka with the personal weapons and armour they have as of Drakon. They meet on neutral ground, in a typical (by present-day Tellurian standards) human city on Planet Wherever (not native to either setting).

Scenario 2: Mind Games. The scenario from Drakon, but replace LeFarge with Kinnison, granted general knowledge of Gwen's plans and capabilities.

Since Draka do not have any psychic defences against Lensman mind control, we assume that Kinnison does not use it (or his mind-destroying mini-weapon) as an autowin. I know this is unfairly limiting one side, but it is needed for the scenario to work; Lens-fans can be content that the Draka would be no threat whatsoever against his full capabilities.

[Imperial Overlord]

Your vague on Ingolfsson's equipment in scenario one. Is she kitted out with what she came through with in the book, which is an archaic particle beam pistol and personal body armour, or the city-wrecking powered armour with the low kiloton (.25kt IIRC) beam weapons and anti-matter explosives?

If just the pistol and the blacks, then Kinnison. The Draka are fucking fast and Gwen is an excellent shot, so unless Lensmen have enhanced reflexes or Kinnison's armour can withstand low kiloton weaponry, then Ingolfsson probably has the edge.

As for scenario two, Kinnison has to be able to deal with:

1) the bioweapons Gwen is cooking up

2) the plan to contact home using a fusion reactor

3) Her influence over various powerful people and organizations

I don't know the character well enough to comment on how well he would handle those problems.

[NecronLord]

Your vague on Ingolfsson's equipment in scenario one. Is she kitted out with what she came through with in the book, which is an archaic particle beam pistol and personal body armour, or the city-wrecking powered armour with the low kiloton (.25kt IIRC) beam weapons and anti-matter explosives?

If just the pistol and the blacks, then Kinnison. The Draka are fucking fast and Gwen is an excellent shot, so unless Lensmen have enhanced reflexes

Possible. Kinninson's children had phonmenal reflexes (think machine-speed) mentally, but I don't know about him.

or Kinnison's armour can withstand low kiloton weaponry,

Easily. In one of the early books, he wears armour with an inertialess drive - an FTL drive that renders the user invulnerable. What this means is that it's essentially invulnerable to ordinary force - it'd shoot him up into space, but the guy inside would be unharmed, and back. Unless they've been shown to have substantial artificial gravity to hold him in place, there's nothing the Drakensis have that's a threat to a Galactic Patrol suit of combat armour. They could make him effectively vanish, but he'd be back to annoy them later, provided he can dump the excess velocity somehow.

then Ingolfsson probably has the edge.

As for scenario two, Kinnison has to be able to deal with:

1) the bioweapons Gwen is cooking up

2) the plan to contact home using a fusion reactor

3) Her influence over various powerful people and organizations

I don't know the character well enough to comment on how well he would handle those problems.

Really, he's seriously hamstrung by not having any mental powers. However, 3 would be easily dealt with, as would 2. I don't know enough about 1 to say, but he's not a medic.

Of course, if he had his usual suite of mental powers, this'd be over in ten seconds. And then he'd go and singlehandedly topple the Draka - yeah, he's singlehandedly taken over chronically ruthless planetary systems before. And force them to un-modify their serfs.

[Imperial Overlord]

Well, that pretty much settles it. Kinnison in a walk.

[Darth Hoth]

Possible. Kinninson's children had phonmenal reflexes (think machine-speed) mentally, but I don't know about him.

There is a lot of hyperbole on how fast he draws, but no hard number that I can recall. He outdrew and shot four gunmen surrounding him at one point in Gray Lensman. Mental battle reaction times are somewhere in the milliseconds range, I think, but I do not think those applied to physical reactions.

Really, he's seriously hamstrung by not having any mental powers. However, 3 would be easily dealt with, as would 2. I don't know enough about 1 to say, but he's not a medic.

Of course, if he had his usual suite of mental powers, this'd be over in ten seconds. And then he'd go and singlehandedly topple the Draka - yeah, he's singlehandedly taken over chronically ruthless planetary systems before. And force them to un-modify their serfs.

He did have some support, for those (Lensman Intelligence setting up a cover identity, and so on). But with mental powers, he might not need it.

(I did not mean to take them away entirely, just so he could not use it as an autowin; say the equivalent of "Gwen gets a Plooran thought-screen". He could still use them on others.)

Lens-verse medicine is more advanced than ours in at least some respects; they can manipulate hormones to cause spontaneous regeneration of lost limbs or organs, and at least Kinnison was expected to remain healthy and active well into his nineties (whether this is typical can of course be debated). We do not see how they deal with infectious disease; it is never mentioned in the series that I can recall (except that parasite the Overlords of Delon infected Kinnison with in GL). Kinnison, though, while an adept technician (he reverse engineered and improved Velantian thought-screens, among other things), is not to my knowledge educated in the finer points medicine or microbiology.

[NecronLord]

He did have some support, for those (Lensman Intelligence setting up a cover identity, and so on). But with mental powers, he might not need it.

(I did not mean to take them away entirely, just so he could not use it as an autowin; say the equivalent of "Gwen gets a Plooran thought-screen". He could still use them on others.)

Yeah, she's history. He'll just have them send the US army and air force in after her, in force.

Lens-verse medicine is more advanced than ours in at least some respects; they can manipulate hormones to cause spontaneous regeneration of lost limbs or organs, and at least Kinnison was expected to remain healthy and active well into his nineties (whether this is typical can of course be debated). We do not see how they deal with infectious disease; it is never mentioned in the series that I can recall (except that parasite the Overlords of Delon infected Kinnison with in GL). Kinnison, though, while an adept technician (he reverse engineered and improved Velantian thought-screens, among other things), is not to my knowledge educated in the finer points medicine or microbiology.

Quite. There's a fair chance he knows what's what - this being EE Smith, whose characters tend to be admirably well prepared for any mental challenge. But I don't know enough about the bio-weapon to say.

[Imperial Overlord]

Gwen was using it as a dead man switch doomsday device. From what's been said Kinnison has a good chance of being able to find away to neutralize it. Even if he fails to do so, that's not a victory for Gwen.

[NecronLord]

Could he not simply find release points and arrange a quarantine? Assuming total cooperation from everyone in the US government payroll.

[Darth Hoth]

Is Kinnison's mind-control that strong? I thought the high-end examples were single or low double digit people at any one time. Clarrissa might have exceeded that on Lyrane in CotL, though, come to think of it.

[Imperial Overlord]

Could he not simply find release points and arrange a quarantine? Assuming total cooperation from everyone in the US government payroll.

I assume he could. This would probably be hard if he's not allowed to mind read her, but let's recall that in Drakon they protagonists managed to get an agent inside Gwen's defences by distracting her and the agent deactivated the doomsday device by hacking her computer systems with Samothracian tech. Now, I've only read the first Lensman book and that was a long time ago, so I can't say how well Kinnison would handle the situation. Certainly it isn't an insolvable problem and even if he fails Gwen still loses. She just takes a lot of people with her if he doesn't take care of the dead man's trap.

[NecronLord]

Is Kinnison's mind-control that strong? I thought the high-end examples were single or low double digit people at any one time. Clarrissa might have exceeded that on Lyrane in CotL, though, come to think of it.

Yeah. Clarissa - another second stage lensman, but not at that stage IIRC - was able to dominate an entire alien parliament, who had mind powers of their own.

Everyone in the US, including the president, would just see Kim as the president, if he wanted to borrow their forces.

[kinnison]

Your vague on Ingolfsson's equipment in scenario one. Is she kitted out with what she came through with in the book, which is an archaic particle beam pistol and personal body armour, or the city-wrecking powered armour with the low kiloton (.25kt IIRC) beam weapons and anti-matter explosives?

If just the pistol and the blacks, then Kinnison. The Draka are fucking fast and Gwen is an excellent shot, so unless Lensmen have enhanced reflexes or Kinnison's armour can withstand low kiloton weaponry, then Ingolfsson probably has the edge.

As for scenario two, Kinnison has to be able to deal with:

1) the bioweapons Gwen is cooking up

2) the plan to contact home using a fusion reactor

3) Her influence over various powerful people and organizations

I don't know the character well enough to comment on how well he would handle those problems.

The armour, if it's the same armour used in other books, has shields capable of shrugging off low-kiloton range beam weapons rather easily. "Shields as strong as those of a battleship". A Lensverse battleship, natch. Estimates I've seen here, and in other places, put Lensverse capital ship weapons into the double-digit gigaton range, and presumably capital ship shields can withstand capital ship weapons for a while. But hey, what's six or seven orders of magnitude between friends?

[Darth Hoth]

Yeah. Clarissa - another second stage lensman, but not at that stage IIRC - was able to dominate an entire alien parliament, who had mind powers of their own.

Everyone in the US, including the president, would just see Kim as the president, if he wanted to borrow their forces.

Clarrissa was second-stage by then; Kit upgraded her before she returned to Lyrane. Though as noted, she did possess their air defence commanders and everyone in their center of government, and they each had the psi-power of a first-stage Lensman or so. And come to think of it, there is Kinnison's disabling of Grand Base way back, which alone probably beats my low-end estimates. Yes, thionite killed most of them, but he took out the rest . . .

Hm, apparently Nadreck's skills at grand mindfuckery are not as unique as I took them to be when I first read the books. Once again I underestimate the Patrol's uberness.

The armour, if it's the same armour used in other books, has shields capable of shrugging off low-kiloton range beam weapons rather easily. "Shields as strong as those of a battleship". A Lensverse battleship, natch. Estimates I've seen here, and in other places, put Lensverse capital ship weapons into the double-digit gigaton range, and presumably capital ship shields can withstand capital ship weapons for a while. But hey, what's six or seven orders of magnitude between friends?

That must have been hyperbole. It is an absurd outlier when compared to everything else we see of power generation, which typically requires rather large structures for anything of that magnitude. (Till they integrate Medonian technology, at least.)

That said, have there ever been any calcs made on semi-portables, fire from which it did shrug off effortlessly? DeLameters incinerate aliens that are at least man-sized, so that would be double-digit megajoules easily.

[Darth Hoth]

I assume he could. This would probably be hard if he's not allowed to mind read her, but let's recall that in Drakon they protagonists managed to get an agent inside Gwen's defences by distracting her and the agent deactivated the doomsday device by hacking her computer systems with Samothracian tech. Now, I've only read the first Lensman book and that was a long time ago, so I can't say how well Kinnison would handle the situation. Certainly it isn't an insolvable problem and even if he fails Gwen still loses. She just takes a lot of people with her if he doesn't take care of the dead man's trap.

I would suppose that in a given scenario, Kinnison would be able to do much anything the Samothracian could; his technology easily matches for uberness, and unlike him he is actually an experienced and competent agent and investigator with familiarity with societies that are similar to 20th-century Earth. Information technology can pose a problem (contrary to popular belief, Lensman does have computers, but they are still nowhere near Internet or ubiquitous perscomps), but he could pull that knowledge from anyone off the streets. He should be able to meet up with Carmaggio and his club, and see the value in working with them - the Lensmen are good at picking up local allies, even without telepathy.

Kinnison would want to prevent collateral damage if he could, though he might view it as necessary if the alternative is a full-blown Draka invasion; he has demonstrated the "did what I had to do" mindset before (blowing up planets for housing the enemy, or threatening to do so). I forget - how extreme was her computer security? If you can get an agent in, is it possible to hack it from a terminal using Earth tech? Much as he knows other stuff, Kinnison by default would not be a software genius.

[18-Till-I-Die]

It probably isn't hyperbole.

Kinnison's armor was NOT normal lensmen armor, it didn't even "walk" it flew thanks to powerful rocket engines, and was SPECIFICALLY made for his mission if i recall. So when you say "armor" here, don't think like Iron Man...think Mazinger Z. It's not so much armor as it is a mechanical suit of weaponry with starship grade shields and engines strapped on, used by an extremely high-ranking officer.

So basically, what i'm saying is, comparing the capabilities of Kinnison's armor to the normal Lensmen attire is like comparing Darth Vader's TIE fighter to the TIE interceptor. Guess which is better.

With that, in context, it most likely was just as bad ass as it is advertised.

[Darth Hoth]

Oh, I know it was powered armour. I still say it should not have the power generation of a mile-long starship with multiple total-conversion engines. The Lensmen do miniaturise their stuff to an impressive degree in some instances (their standard armour does have rockets and Bergenholms enough to reach c-fractional velocities, as shown in Galactic Patrol), but I doubt they could scramble down a power plant by that many orders of magnitude.

[NecronLord]

The Draka definately don't have much in the way of reliable AG. I've just been flicking through Drakon, and a major orbital installation (at the top of a beanstalk) is apparently all zero g.

[Connor MacLeod]

Kinnison is unliekly to have battleship-grade shields simply because even if the energies were absorbed/radiated away (and didn't fry him or the surroudnings doing it) the momentum would kill him (even charitably assuming a couple tons, the recoil of a multi-GT blast would be enough to be shoving ships around visbily, never mind a person. Since Kinnison never is thrown around at hypervelocities I think its safe to say its hyperbole.)

of course, the recoil issue makes the idea the Drakka are tossing around multi-TW beams on their armour also ludicrous, since I don't recall them stomping about in their equivalent of Terminator armour (The armour I remember from Drakon was rather form fitting, and even at uranium density you aren't goign to get enough mass to absorbthe recoil of even a 1 TW beam weapon, nevermind multi-TW) And if they don't have AG for their suits, then that's downright impossible.

[Imperial Overlord]

The Samothracian's had some kind of non-reaction drive and it's implied that the Draka had it too. If you have one of those and you can fuck with momentum. Other applications of that particularly techynology weren't mention, but then Stirling didn't go into much detail about what they could do. Frankly their battle armour was magic tech and so is the Lensman gear. It's pretty clear that kinnison wins this one. Next.

[NecronLord]

Kinnison is unliekly to have battleship-grade shields simply because even if the energies were absorbed/radiated away (and didn't fry him or the surroudnings doing it) the momentum would kill him (even charitably assuming a couple tons, the recoil of a multi-GT blast would be enough to be shoving ships around visbily, never mind a person. Since Kinnison never is thrown around at hypervelocities I think its safe to say its hyperbole.)

Err. His armour in Galactic Patrol has an intertialess drive. Which renders him quite immune to such concerns (until he switches it off, at any rate, there's quite a lot of detail about how inertialess drive conserves momentum in one of the books, and the precautions they have to do when transferring from one Free ship to another), but would result in him being catapulted backwards; but he'd be undamaged.

of course, the recoil issue makes the idea the Drakka are tossing around multi-TW beams on their armour also ludicrous, since I don't recall them stomping about in their equivalent of Terminator armour (The armour I remember from Drakon was rather form fitting, and even at uranium density you aren't goign to get enough mass to absorbthe recoil of even a 1 TW beam weapon, nevermind multi-TW) And if they don't have AG for their suits, then that's downright impossible.

I asked Stirling something to that effect in his brief sojurn here:

-- I couldn't give you figures, I'm afraid. It's essentialy a skin of memet -- memory metal, a single giant molecule which can assume a number of different states, including perfectly reflective and perfectly rigid. It's harder than a sheet of diamond, and vastly stronger.

You couldn't pierce it with anything short of a fusion-bomb pumped X-ray laser; though of course, damaging the person inside is easier!

Source.

Damaging the suit is hard; pureeing the Draka inside is much easier.

[NecronLord]

The Samothracian's had some kind of non-reaction drive and it's implied that the Draka had it too. If you have one of those and you can fuck with momentum. Other applications of that particularly techynology weren't mention, but then Stirling didn't go into much detail about what they could do. Frankly their battle armour was magic tech and so is the Lensman gear. It's pretty clear that kinnison wins this one. Next.

The naval officers exchanged glances. "We'll have to leave now anyway," Starns replied. "They're going to detect us when we run for the transit molehole back to the Centauri system." Modern drives transferred momentum between ship and cosmos directly, but the process inescapably bled energetic quanta far above the level of vacuum energy.

Presumably. But there's no indication of that in an infantry scale.

[Imperial Overlord]

Presumably. But there's no indication of that in an infantry scale.

We have very little indication of anything at all on the infantry scale. Hell, we didn't even know what the suit was armed with from the book, other than the weapons were "city wrecking". The suit is armed with the big bad beam weapons and AM explosives. We know that. Period. If the only logical way those beam weapons to be usable is that they have infantry scale application of the tech, then they have infantry scale application of the tech.

[NecronLord]

Err. You may have noticed Connor talking about the possibility of a Terawatt rifle - this more than fits the description of 'deadly enough to savage whole cities' - every second discharge from such a weapon would be .23 kilotons. In one minute, such a weapon could literally put out about as much power as the Hiroshima nuclear bomb (14 kilotons approx). Even a miniscule fraction of that would more than qualify as 'city-savaging.'

What's more, as the man says, they have half-kiloton grenades, which are also a real bad day for your city if one is set off there.

In short, no, they don't need personal momentum control technology to have 'city wrecking' personal weapons.

Lafarge's personal armour explicitly lacks anything that seems to break CoM.

A diminished pinnnnnng caught at the edge of his attention as the ricochet whined off to lose itself in a computer or potted plant or water cooler. He twitched, fingers scrabbling at the synthetic carpet. The softsuit could sense the bullet coming and turn instantly harder than diamond and more frictionless than liquid mercury on dry ice. It couldn't repeal the law of conservation of momentum. A substantial fraction of the bullet's energy moved his head forward, and his brain surged backward in its bath of fluid as inertia prevented it from moving quite in synch.

[...]

The enemy came walking through the fire like an eyeless statue of living metal, his armor covering him in a fluid surface the color of mercury lit from within. Scraps of cloth flickered away from the softsuit's perfectly reflective surface in flame and ash. Her first shot struck the ground at his feet, lifting and toppling him backward. The second struck at the weapon in his right hand. The Samothracian curled around it protectively and rolled backwards into the fire, hiding himself in its heat and glow.

Of course, it's light armour in comparison: but it is modern.

On the other hand, Gwen makes something equipped with such an engine that's a mere twenty meters, and presumably they can do much better with something smaller. But there's no indication they have it for personal scale, and a distinct indication that they (or at least the Samothracians) do not.

[Darth Hoth]

Err. His armour in Galactic Patrol has an intertialess drive. Which renders him quite immune to such concerns (until he switches it off, at any rate, there's quite a lot of detail about how inertialess drive conserves momentum in one of the books, and the precautions they have to do when transferring from one Free ship to another), but would result in him being catapulted backwards; but he'd be undamaged.

It only conserves the momentum you had before you activated it, as I understand it; it does not absorb additional momentum while free. That exchange (in Second-Stage Lensman, right?) was dangerous because those ships had been travelling at different speeds before they went inertialess.

Err. You may have noticed Connor talking about the possibility of a Terawatt rifle - this more than fits the description of 'city wrecking' - every second discharge from such a weapon would be .23 kilotons. In one minute, such a weapon could literally put out about as much as the Hiroshima nuclear bomb (14 kilotons approx).

What's more, as the man says, they have half-kiloton grenades, which are also a real bad day for your city if one is set off there.

In short, no, they don't need momentum control technology to have 'city wrecking' personal weapons.

Did Stirling ever give any numbers on how powerful those beam weapons were supposed to be? Otherwise the rifle need not even be in the terawatt range, Occam's Razor is happy with grenades only.

[NecronLord]

It only conserves the momentum you had before you activated it, as I understand it; it does not absorb additional momentum while free. That exchange (in Second-Stage Lensman, right?) was dangerous because those ships had been travelling at different speeds before they went inertialess.

You are of course, correct; when they deactivate the inertialess drive, they resume the inertia they had before activating it.