Preview of the new Posleen War book: Eye of the Storm

[MKSheppard]

What I don't understand is how Ringo and his various authors utterly FUCKED up the US Military's systems.

I mean, we've had consistent experience with drafts dating back to 1860, 1917-18 , 1940-45, The Cold War, etc. So why is it that the Darheel somehow MAGICALLY make the entire apparatus completely fucked up? There's a lot to be said for institutional inertia; "why do we need to do this because Mr xx (a Darheel in disguise) says so? Fuck him, the book says we do it this way."

We've been spending money on the Draft system and doing dry runs of it ever since we went to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s. AND, like the earlier drafts of Vietnam, Korea, WWII and WWI, the draft system would basically be run with people with ZERO connection to the military at all, basically the political leaders of the various draft districts; who would simply say, take the election board workers, hand them the US Army's "EZ GUIDE TO RUNNING A DRAFT" and tell them to do it.

I can understand a few mistakes and errors, but for the entire US Draft system to produce total incompetents uniformly across the US Army is just incomprehensible and goes well into "Writer's fiat" territory.

Others have suggested that the reason things were screwed up was that Rejuv was heavily rationed by the Galactics; but this makes no sense, as we didn't need Rejuv to raise 11+ million men and women into our armed forces in World War II.

Additionally, the existing US Army/US Air Force/USMC is highly trained. So why do we have such a massive problem with such a huge cadre of experienced personnel, plus the tons of people we can Rejuv to help out in a pinch from Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc...

[Imperial Overlord]

Same reason that Canada is too cold but Russia is just warm enough and somehow doesn't have enough artillery tubes or tac nukes to make the difference Shep. Writer's fiat and the almighty railroad to the preselected outcome without regard for logic, facts, or sanity.

[Crom]

Are there interviews online where the authors talk about these issues? The Canada/Russia one especially screams writer's fiat, but also the whole SS-supermen controversy.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The whole invasion/conquest timeline has been severely retconned. Now there were Russian army survivors in the mountains of central asia and the northern plains of Russia who joined the counteroffensive after the Fleet broke the siege during the Battle of Rabun's Gap.

[Samuel]

Wow. Thanks Shep. I was going to mention the oddness of having enough rejuv for war criminals, but not the US army, but you beat me to it. It is FUN to see you rail against Ringo- you keep on learning something new. Sort of like Dominic Deegan and the Snark thread which essentially covers all of sociolgy so very quickly.

Uh, their wacko environmentalism isn't a religion, but an ideology. And it is obvious that it is followed by the government as if it wasn't, they would actually act more intelligentally. Their actions are irrational which fits perfectly with fundamentalists- the reason we don't see many believers in the story is because we see mainly their military which seems to be the best way to escape the hell that is their planets. Seriously, they are North Korea IN SPACE- not remotely plausible.

Really? Granted it's been a while since I read the book, but I thought the intention was that the Saint ship was atypical in that there were a bunch of non-believers and only one dedicated "cultural officer" or whatever. Also, they seemed more like they were space Russians rather than space North Koreans.

Which one? The first one we see has the commisar guy who the captain thinks is an idiot, the second one is filled with a crew that is almost entirely fanatics. As for being Space Russians... no. That was the intent, but it doesn't really work. The Soviet Union was many things, but consistently starving its own citizens is not one of them- they only starved them because of fuck ups. Sure, both groups have alcoholism in common, but unlike the USSR there is literally zero support for the regime which was installed by a monarch who had to crush a rebellion from the populance. The Saints are literally described as a dystopic civilization- a total shit hole.

Are there interviews online where the authors talk about these issues? The Canada/Russia one especially screams writer's fiat, but also the whole SS-supermen controversy.

He has an FAQ for the series. For Empire of Man, nothing, but he had this which was interesting.

Question
From the Bar Johnathon asks: When Subianto and Tebic are first discussing the Marduk house, Tebic mentally recalls a historical situation when intelligence operatives discovered a foreign conspiracy so deeply embedded, that notifying anyone would have been tantamount to suicide. IIRC, it's stated that this incident took place before even computers were used to crack codes. Could someone let me know what the historical (or fictional, if that's the case) incident is being referred to?

Answer
John says: It referred to Verona , a codebreaking group during the '40s and '50s. They finally broke a high level Soviet code and discovered, to their dismay, that the senior aide to the then Secretary of State, was a Soviet agent. Furthermore, they determined that the SecState, who was a very close friend of Truman, and even Truman, were so sympathetic to the Soviets that there was no way to expose the plant and ensure that anything would get done. So they just kept reading the mail in horror until Ike was elected and then turned everything over to him.

The Posleen FAQ is him trying to get antimatter yield figures right.

[MKSheppard]

Wow. Thanks Shep. I was going to mention the oddness of having enough rejuv for war criminals, but not the US army, but you beat me to it. It is FUN to see you rail against Ringo- you keep on learning something new.

I can has more railing?

In one of the books; the Posleen's weapons completely ineffective against ballistic weapons -- they're able to shoot down ICBMs in their boost phases; but once they go fully ballistic and the warheads debuss; they can't hit them.

In any rational world, this would be part of the briefing dossier the Galactics give the Humans -- "Posleen weaponry excellent against powered, transmitting targets; not very effective against unpowered ballistic, non transmitting targets"

So......why not create the MRLS Division?

Your typical US Army division consists of 8-11 Manuver battalions, and 3-4 Field Arty battalions, plus support units. Now, a hypothetical MRLS Division would probably have two manuver battalions as security elements, et cetera. That leaves 13 MRLS battalions in the unit; each MRLS Battalion has 29 M270 launchers. That's 377 M270 launchers in my Hypothetical MRLS Division. Each launcher carries 12 MRLS rockets. That's 4,524 MRLS rockets from a single MRLS Division.

Oh, did I also mention that I was going to use multiple MRLS divisions to pound Posleen landing zones?

Assuming 65% of the rockets from a single MRLS division are intercepted, we're still going to have 2,940 MRLS rockets impact the target zone. Let us look at the effects of this.

The M77 submunition used in the MRLS system is a shaped charge submunition which can penetrate up to 100 mm of RHA. The steel casing of the M77 also produces fragments which kill or wound to a radius of 4m from detonation. A total spill of all 12 rockets in a MRLS launcher will pretty much wipe out a grid square (1000 x 1000m).

Looking at a map of Virginia...Culpeper, Rapahannock, Fauqier, and Prince William Counties (Where the majority of the Posleen landings appear to have been in Gust Front) if you drew a circle around them, it would form a circle 70~ kilometers in diameter, with a total area of 219.8 square kilometers. Since 65% of all rockets are being intercepted (a SWAG), we're only assured of 128~ square kilometers of destruction per MRLS Division.

(I'm lowballing this, a different method of calculation gave me 245 sq km).

Luckily I did say that we were going to use multiple MRLS divisions.

Sure, it sucks for the people stuck in that place, but hell, we managed to get people to install bombs in their houses so they can commit suicide when the posleen knock on the door, we'll be able to eradicate four counties in Virgina with MRLS spills with little if any political backlash.

And since this is the initial Posleen landings in 2004, well, the Posleen will have not evolved the following tactics:

1.) Breaking up their battalion equivalents for assaults with spacing in between.
2.) Using houses/structures as cover from artillery

So the slaughter by MRLS will be terrible; God King saucers are open topped; and are killed easily by .50 BMG rounds, so even if we discount the fact that the KE of a .50 BMG round and the HEAT effect of a M77 submunition are different kinds of energy, the God King Saucers are still going to have their inhabitants shredded, and they will have the crap knocked out of them; 100mm RHA penetration is nothing to sneeze at.

So that means the majority of the Posleen in those four counties will have been decapicated by our MRLS mega-spill.

Oh did I mention that I'm following up with a second mega-spill in 20~ minutes as soon as my MRLS divisions reload? And with large parts of the Posleen ADA network suppressed, killed, or writhing in chaos, the second salvo will have even more missiles arrive, and the carnage will be awesome.

[MKSheppard]

One of the big problems that Mighty Mite faces in Book 4 is he's running out of power for his suits due to the way the M-300 Rifles are designed.

Human-manufactured 3mm by 4mm DU bullets for the M300 don't have their own antimatter power source, meaning that when the railguns are firing that kind of ammo, the power to accelerate the bullet to 0.3c comes from the suit's own power supply,which means they're slowly running out of power against a huge posleen horde.

First, a little system analysis. If each railgun round when it impacts a posleen, has the power of 100 kilos of TNT, killing the Posleen it impacts as well as inflicting splash damage on the nearby posleen, what reason is there for a rate of fire so high that it's described as "streams of silver lightning"?

Cutting the rate of fire down to 8 rounds per second, or about 500 rounds, or about the rate of fire of a Maxim machine gun of WWI infamy, will signifcantly extend the ACS' suit's battery supply, as well as ammunition supply while retaining a significant proportion of lethality against the Posleen. Hell you could probably lower it to about 200 rounds a minute, especially if each individual 3x4mm DU round has the lethality of 100 kilos of TNT.

High rates of fire simply expend the majority of the 3x4mm DU rounds in converting the front ranks of Posleen into red mist, when blowing them into bloody chunks will do the job more efficiently.

This systems analysis of how fast you really need to fire to kill posleen can also carry into other aspects of the ACS suit. Without the need for obscene ammunition stowage for the railgun, you can free up a lot of space on the ACS suit for more armor or additional support weapons, like 60mm micro mortars, which will allow you to kill Posleen in the mass behind the front ranks while you mow down the front ranks with railgunfire.

[MKSheppard]

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Why Ringo's Military Designs Make No Sense
*********************************

Let us look at what he designed the "A4" Abrams to be:

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.

Y'know, this should have been done by 2004, instead of waiting until 2009 to appear, instead of building fantastically expensive ACS suits, the Indowy should have been building huge slabs of armor capable of defeating railgun rounds instead of complicated suits.

To reduce the possibility of being flanked, and to deal with the main problem of the Posleen, the fact that there were just way too many of them, the gunnery of the tanks was modified. On either side of the turret "add-on" weapons were installed. These were 25mm cannons like the main gun of a Bradley, but where a Bradley had one gun the Abrams were mounted with first two, one on either side, then four and finally eight. The .50 caliber TC gun was replaced with a 7.62 Gatling gun capable of hurling 8000 rounds a minute and the "coaxial" 7.62 machine gun mounted alongside the main gun was switched out for another. Even excepting their main gun, the "A4" Abrams could hurl an amazing mass of lead.

The main gun, however, remained a problem. It seemed a shame to pull the weapon, since it was about as good as it got from a cannon perspective. Finally, it was decided to leave the cannon in place and simply change the ammo mix. The ammo bin still carried a few "silver bullets" for old time's sake, but the majority of the rounds stored in an A4 were canister.

Let's not get to the Bradley:

The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.

What a bunch of bloody stupid designs. Did Mr. Ringo even stop to think in his wanking to consider:

1.) Where the hell is the ammo coming to come from?
2.) It's not firehoses of firepower which kills posleen, it's sustained deep firepower.
3.) Where the hell is the ammo coming from?

To elaborate on the firehoses of firepower vs deep firepower, let us considerthe following:

1.) Posleen are big centauroid horse sized aliens.
2.) Posleen like to attack in waves which make the chinese blush
3.) Posleen really like to attack in human wave attacks.

The ideal weapons system for dealing with such attacks is the 25mm Bushmaster or 40mm Bofors firing HE Frag rounds fuzed so that they will penetrate through three or four Posleen ranks, killing four posleen through massive trauma from 25mm-40mm holes, before detonating and cutting down the Posleen mass behind the first few ranks.

7.62mm Miniguns, or Metalstorm units firing 40mm Grenade rounds, or even 25mm Bushmasters firing HE shells fuzed to superquick will simply just vaporize, shred, puree, mistify the first rank of the Posleen, leaving the mass of posleen behind the unfortunate first ranks alive and unharmed.

***********************
SheVas and why they make no sense
***********************

In Book 2, when a salvo of 16" shells from a battleship accidentally hits a Posleen lander over Virginia and annihilates it, what does the USA do? They build 16" smoothbore guns using fixed cases with electro-thermal propellant, and a depleted uranium sabot with a 10 pound antimatter breaching charge....instead of producing 1 billion LOSAT armed Bradleys.

Let's do the math:

A 16"/50 HE Shell has a muzzle velocity of 820 m/s, and a weight of 862 kilograms; that equates out to 289.8 megajoules if my math is correct.

(NOTE: the rounds fired at Fredericksburg, VA were HE, not AP, they were firing for effect on massed formations of Posleen)

The 16" Smoothbore of a SheVa is stated to have the power of six 16" shells; so that's 1,738.8 megajoules. LOSAT is stated to have 40 megajoules of KE; so that means a 43.5 LOSAT missiles equal the firepower of a SheVa.

Now, seeing as the original LOSAT was a stretched Bradley, carrying four LOSATs ready to fire, and 16 more in an autoloader, with average reload time for all four missiles 15 to 20 seconds.

What this means is that three platoons of LOSAT-Bradleys (12 in all) will be able to put 48 LOSATs onto target at best, or about 1,920 megajoules of energy; enough to cripple or knock about a Posleen Lander. And they will be vastly cheaper, easier to maintain, easier to replace than SheVas.

***********************
Why the US Military's Artillery Doctrine Makes No Sense:
***********************

Posleen do not have the following:

1.) Artillery
2.) Counterbattery Fire
3.) Firefinder radars

So why does the US Army spend so much time mass producing 155mm wheeled opentopped guns based on South African Chassis, when they should have been producing M270 MRLS. A Posleen attack meeting a MRLS Division would cease to exist under steel rain.

What's the reason for producing guns anyway?

Guns are good for:

1.) Sustained fire (useful, but we can just get 8" Howitzers to do that for us instead of 6.1" (155mm))

2.) Counterbattery fire (Uhm, since the posleen have no artillery, why do we need this capability?

The US Military KNOWS the way the Posleen attack; they've had five years to prepare, analyze and they build the WRONG DAMN THINGS! If you gave me a few MRLS Divisions, I could annihilate entire military map sheets of anything that lives in minutes, inflicting millions of Posleen casualties for zero Human. Yet Ringo's Humans all do it the stupidest possible way, muddling along the fighting for five years, allowing the Posleen to slowly learn basic military tactics, making their jobs much harder in the end.

Wait? What about the Posleen's uber anti rocket device which does nothing against shot and shell?

Firstly, it's nothing of the sort. It only tracks and destroys POWERED projectiles; or projectiles that are TRANSMITTING. In the books, artillery shells with cameras in them that transmit pictures back are shot out of the sky easily, but dumb shells aren't.

And in book 4, hundreds of ICBMS are launched from the Northwest against Posleen positions in Tennesee; most of the ICBMs are shot down by the posleen in the BOOST phase, but once the warheads debuss and are on pure ballistic trajectories, the posleen can't do anything to stop 'em.

**************************
What would I have done if I was in charge instead of Mighty Mite?
**************************

I would have simply done the following for my anti Posleen force:

1.) Obtain M-1 and M-2/M-3 armor upgrade packages from the Indowy before Posleenfall.

2.) M-1 Abrams gets cannister, and the capability to airburst 120mm HE rounds like some Russian tanks do, and a 25mm coaxial chaingun firing HE fuzed rounds.

(The Abrams actually was considered for a 25mm Bushmaster in the design process, so this isn't insane.)

3.) The M-2/M-3 Bradleys obtain said 25mm HE rounds fuzed for detonation shortly after impact.

4.) Hordes of LOSAT armed Bradleys are procured to deal with Posleen landers.

5.) Hordes of M270 MRLS systems are built and scores of MRLS rounds are stockpiled, along with 8" tracked howitzers.

6.) Hordes of 120mm Mortar Armed M113A3s are built and assigned to the Abrams/Bradley/LOSAT task forces.

7.) Mass production of Watercooled Browning .50 Caliber HMGs; are distributed all over the United States to anyone who has the space to store 1 billion rounds of .50 BMG.

8.) I mass produce the M-14 once again, and re-equip my infantry forces with it. Horse sized aliens won't be dropped by 5.56mm

9.) M249 SAWs are replaced on a one-on-one basis with M-240Gs.

When the Posleen land; I move up my armies; and then begin the process of reducing the Posleen pockets. A hour or two of MRLS salvos from my MRLS Divisions to clear the landing areas of anything ALIVE (hey, if people are caught in there, they're dead anyway), then I move in my M-1s, M-2s, M-3s, under a constant hail of 8" gunfire and 120mm Mortars, with LOSAT armed bradleys picking off Posleen Landers.

Mechanized task forces of M1s and M2s proceed in, eliminating scattered bands of Posleen who survived the MRLS barriages. Once the majority of Posleen have been eliminated, the infantry dismounts and proceeds to mop up the few scattered Posleen who survived all this with their infantry weapons.

I estimate total eradication of all organized Posleen resistance in the Landing Pocket in a day or two, with mop up of scattered bands of Posleen in out of the way places for several months after the main pocket has been eliminated.

**************************************
Why are the Humans as stupid as Star Trek Ground Forces?
************************************

I realize that Mr. Ringo must make the book exciting and he obviously wants to write more than just one book; but did he have to make humanity, in particular, it's militaries so terminally brain dead? Having the conflict drag on for years and years on Earth wasn't necessary to keep the story going; there are 70~ planets that the GalFed has lost to the Posleen in the last couple of years; they all have to be retaken...which is room for several more books...

[SylasGaunt]

Granted I'm not that familiar with LOSAT but wouldn't it come under fire from postie point defense as soon as it launched?

Also if I remember right with regards to the Sheva it was built because of the mistaken impression that the 16 inch shells has destroyed the lander, IIRC it was hit at the same time by a blast from a PDC though I haven't read the books in a while so I could be remembering wrong.

[Samuel]

Shep... I... wow.

Granted I'm not that familiar with LOSAT but wouldn't it come under fire from postie point defense as soon as it launched?

Also if I remember right with regards to the Sheva it was built because of the mistaken impression that the 16 inch shells has destroyed the lander, IIRC it was hit at the same time by a blast from a PDC though I haven't read the books in a while so I could be remembering wrong.

The second part is correct- however, they presumably hit opposite sides. Since Shevas were able to kill landers the landers are actually that weak.

[Connor MacLeod]

Edit: forgot to add in the first part dammit.. lol

So the slaughter by MRLS will be terrible; God King saucers are open topped; and are killed easily by .50 BMG rounds, so even if we discount the fact that the KE of a .50 BMG round and the HEAT effect of a M77 submunition are different kinds of energy, the God King Saucers are still going to have their inhabitants shredded, and they will have the crap knocked out of them; 100mm RHA penetration is nothing to sneeze at.

Small clarification. THey're not "killed" directly by the rounds themselves. They have to hit that technobabble battery thingy to blow the saucers up (They need .50 cal rounds to do that IIRC). Not that I am saying the MLRS couldn't be designed to do that. (Actually if they managed to salavage or figure those batteries out, I bet they could have used them as some sort of explosive.

One of the big problems that Mighty Mite faces in Book 4 is he's running out of power for his suits due to the way the M-300 Rifles are designed.

You mean above and beyond the actual design/nature of the grav guns in general, right? An Actual laser or plasma weapon (hell if the Posleen have them I'm sure Earth could) would have made more sense than that, though railguns probably would have been better. Or somethign firing HE rounds (or just antimatter rounds)

Human-manufactured 3mm by 4mm DU bullets for the M300 don't have their own antimatter power source, meaning that when the railguns are firing that kind of ammo, the power to accelerate the bullet to 0.3c comes from the suit's own power supply,which means they're slowly running out of power against a huge posleen horde.

I don't remember any actual velocities given for the grav guns the ACS use. Of course, there's so many calc-oriented problems iwth how the grav guns are depicted I'm not even going to get into velocity (or the recoil issues - I did analysis of all that and I believed that the gun's firepower was both overrated and unrealistic from a recoil standpoint even with technowank power armor.) The antimatter-powered rounds were even more ludicrous given how utterly fragile they were (First book is a good example there)

First, a little system analysis. If each railgun round when it impacts a posleen, has the power of 100 kilos of TNT, killing the Posleen it impacts as well as inflicting splash damage on the nearby posleen, what reason is there for a rate of fire so high that it's described as "streams of silver lightning"?

Depends alot on interpretation. Ther'es some variants on how much TNT the grav guns are (50-100 kilos, in some cases more) and how many rounds (some depict it for many rounds, others for a single round.) Its too bloody inconisstent. Though I tned to believe 100 kilos for a barrage of bullets. Of course, that's a rather minor issue considering they designed the things to act like a "sci fi raygun" as I recal (which is stupid, since if you wanted a raygun a laser would be more practical and I find it hard to believe they couldn't have engineered laser guns)

Frankly I don't see why they didn't copy the Posleen and make some sort of sclaed up railgun, or just use some weapon that fires "explosive" rounds (the antimatter charged rounds would have made more senes that way I think.) Or if you ARE going to stick with the gRav guns stick them on an armored vehicle.

Cutting the rate of fire down to 8 rounds per second, or about 500 rounds, or about the rate of fire of a Maxim machine gun of WWI infamy, will signifcantly extend the ACS' suit's battery supply, as well as ammunition supply while retaining a significant proportion of lethality against the Posleen. Hell you could probably lower it to about 200 rounds a minute, especially if each individual 3x4mm DU round has the lethality of 100 kilos of TNT.

Considering how often I remember them fighting from fixed positions, rigging the guns to fire from a stationary power source (or one that could be wheeled in rather than carried) probably would have helped alot more. The "lack of power problem" in the latter books kinda bugged me, because you'd think that recharging stations would be something they'd plan ahead on.

High rates of fire simply expend the majority of the 3x4mm DU rounds in converting the front ranks of Posleen into red mist, when blowing them into bloody chunks will do the job more efficiently.

Again, some sort of more sophisticated grenade launcher type device probably would have been more sensible. I remember a number of military people discussing flaws in the ACS books and the limited use of indirect fire weaponry (like MLRS) was a big drawback.

This systems analysis of how fast you really need to fire to kill posleen can also carry into other aspects of the ACS suit. Without the need for obscene ammunition stowage for the railgun, you can free up a lot of space on the ACS suit for more armor or additional support weapons, like 60mm micro mortars, which will allow you to kill Posleen in the mass behind the front ranks while you mow down the front ranks with railgunfire.

I wouldn't have bothered with the suits at all. Given the level of AI they developed or what the interfaces with the suits - autonomous or remote-controlled combat vehicle/robots probably would have made more sense (Tracked or wheeled), especially if you stuckthe grenade/mortar launchers on them. Or even just plain old railguns. This is particualrily annoying as they manage to rig up some quais-autonamous weaponry in latter novels (I remember something about tripod mounted machine guns and stuff)

Let us look at what he designed the "A4" Abrams to be:

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.

Y'know, this should have been done by 2004, instead of waiting until 2009 to appear, instead of building fantastically expensive ACS suits, the Indowy should have been building huge slabs of armor capable of defeating railgun rounds instead of complicated suits.

Or just go for indirect fire. As I recall its quite possible to design the Abrams to fire guided munitions (I know soviet tanks can do it). The Posleen can't kill what they can't see/hit) A HE or cannister type round at 8-12 km would be nasty on infantry.

What a bunch of bloody stupid designs. Did Mr. Ringo even stop to think in his wanking to consider:

1.) Where the hell is the ammo coming to come from?
2.) It's not firehoses of firepower which kills posleen, it's sustained deep firepower.
3.) Where the hell is the ammo coming from?

To elaborate on the firehoses of firepower vs deep firepower, let us considerthe following:

1.) Posleen are big centauroid horse sized aliens.
2.) Posleen like to attack in waves which make the chinese blush
3.) Posleen really like to attack in human wave attacks.

The ideal weapons system for dealing with such attacks is the 25mm Bushmaster or 40mm Bofors firing HE Frag rounds fuzed so that they will penetrate through three or four Posleen ranks, killing four posleen through massive trauma from 25mm-40mm holes, before detonating and cutting down the Posleen mass behind the first few ranks.

as I remember the ACS suits had grenade/mortar launchers that could already fire some high-tech grenades, so I dont see why they couldn't have adapted existing machines to shoot them, rather than wasting time with the suits or Grav guns anyhow.

7.62mm Miniguns, or Metalstorm units firing 40mm Grenade rounds, or even 25mm Bushmasters firing HE shells fuzed to superquick will simply just vaporize, shred, puree, mistify the first rank of the Posleen, leaving the mass of posleen behind the unfortunate first ranks alive and unharmed.

ringo adapted Metalstorm to one of the SHeVas in the fourth book as I recall.

In Book 2, when a salvo of 16" shells from a battleship accidentally hits a Posleen lander over Virginia and annihilates it, what does the USA do? They build 16" smoothbore guns using fixed cases with electro-thermal propellant, and a depleted uranium sabot with a 10 pound antimatter breaching charge....instead of producing 1 billion LOSAT armed Bradleys.

Let's do the math:

A 16"/50 HE Shell has a muzzle velocity of 820 m/s, and a weight of 862 kilograms; that equates out to 289.8 megajoules if my math is correct.

(NOTE: the rounds fired at Fredericksburg, VA were HE, not AP, they were firing for effect on massed formations of Posleen)

The 16" Smoothbore of a SheVa is stated to have the power of six 16" shells; so that's 1,738.8 megajoules. LOSAT is stated to have 40 megajoules of KE; so that means a 43.5 LOSAT missiles equal the firepower of a SheVa.

Now, seeing as the original LOSAT was a stretched Bradley, carrying four LOSATs ready to fire, and 16 more in an autoloader, with average reload time for all four missiles 15 to 20 seconds.

What this means is that three platoons of LOSAT-Bradleys (12 in all) will be able to put 48 LOSATs onto target at best, or about 1,920 megajoules of energy; enough to cripple or knock about a Posleen Lander. And they will be vastly cheaper, easier to maintain, easier to replace than SheVas.

My problem with that analysis is that you seem to be only accounting for KE, not the issues of force/momentum of a physical impactor. Moreover, what you are talking about is dozens of individual rounds vs one single round - that also introduces issues of pressure and/or intensity (depending on whether you talk about force or KE, respectively - I doubt dozens of LOSATs will hit the same area the way a single round would.)

IIRC the Kinetic aspect was only one part of the Anti-Lander system: they also used a small antimatter warhead to do it (which I imagine you could duplicate with the LOSATs).

I vaguely recall those heavy weapon suits had some sort of heavy weapon that might have been anti lander, but I havne't read the fourth book in ages, so maybe the LOSAT idea might still work.

In any case, there's still other problems with SHeVA. For one thing in Gust Front those big planetary battle stations that were never completed. They armed those with some big ass antiship railgun type weapon that flung heavy projectiles at a considerable fraction of c and was far smaller than SHeVa. Why not have mounted those into mobile platforms from the getgo?

Even worse, we learn from the latter novels (book 3 onwards and Watch on the Rhine) that humans CAN use posleen weaponry, including the lander based railguns (those SHEVA wannabes in Watch were one such example) so they still had ways to get around the ETC Battleship gun. hell, those HVMs were very effective and would have been a more sensible weapon.

I'm also pretty sure that given gravgun wank, they could have devised some sort of "nuclear shaped charge" design and done away with the need for a kinetic penetator aspect at all.

In general:

The "no nukes" aspect of the novels bugged me as well, because I remember them acting as if the only useful nukes would have been ICBM, when there exist nukes down to the man-portable level. With access to higher technologies they probably could have come up with even better nukes (I'm sure alot of the antimatter wnak would bea pplicable).

What also bugged me is that they decided to wait until the third novel to bring up salvage of Posleen weaponry, when this should have been something they were doing from the get go. Nevermind the tech they acquired should have been more along those lines than what they came up with with those wanktastic ACS suits.

[Connor MacLeod]

Really, alot of the problems with the Posleen books can be summed up in that its a series of books built on so many different contrivances (technological, military, political, etc.) that they just come out as being forced or artificial. I could largely tolerate most of this simply by turning my brain off (I can do this quite well for alot of stuff) but that doesnt excuse that there is alot of stupid shit in there.

[Ford Prefect]

I'm honestly curious about what the SheVa actually is. Ig et that it uses a sixteen inch gun, but is it seriously some kind of ridiculously scaled up mobile artillery?

[Samuel]

I'm honestly curious about what the SheVa actually is. I get that it uses a sixteen inch gun, but is it seriously some kind of ridiculously scaled up mobile artillery?

Yes, it is a giant mobile artillary so large that the US has only a handful of them. That has its own nuclear power plant and anti-matter rounds.

Of course, there's so many calc-oriented problems iwth how the grav guns are depicted I'm not even going to get into velocity (or the recoil issues - I did analysis of all that and I believed that the gun's firepower was both overrated and unrealistic from a recoil standpoint even with technowank power armor.)

He openly admits in the FAQ...

John says: Unfortunately, the writer was not a physicist. And despite several people trying to help him get the physics right, some of it just ain't.

Also, he is being helped out by another Conrad to be his calculations right.

[Connor MacLeod]

There's no way to get the calcs right. Its popped up in so many novels in so many variants that its just a fucking headache. He's described them as being relatavistic weapons even though that's not possible. He's described the rounds as 2 ounces (although that isnt possible with a 3mm slug unless he's hurling firgging spikes) etc etc etc.

I really just threw my hands up and said "variable settings and or models" and left it at that.

[Mr Bean]

I'm honestly curious about what the SheVa actually is. Ig et that it uses a sixteen inch gun, but is it seriously some kind of ridiculously scaled up mobile artillery?

Imagine a tank.

A tank the size of a skyscraper. A Ratte sized tank

Modeled here in BF1942 FH(FHSW minimod) as all intents and purposes a land-battleship. Instead of twin guns however the SheVa mounted some sort of massive something or other railgun throwing DU spikes with antimatter cores or something.

It was wank of the highest and purest level.... But what can you do when you've already stacked the deck?

[Darth Hoth]

From what I recall he was basically ruling unopposed at that point. I certainly couldn't say what imaginary political party, if any, would be needed to join his coalition because the political landscape certainly doesn't resemble Germany at all. That, of course, is another reason the book sucks.

I thought the Nazis joined the government by then.

The Posleenverse is effectively althistory, with politics that do not even attempt to resemble real life. They are not supposed to. It makes as much sense railing at TBO because it does not have Kennedy as President.

I have lots of problems with Ringo, but I'm not going after the man's spelling.

Obviously it is not his only problem, but the one that one would first notice (fewer words are needed to provide poor spelling and syntax than to show wank, retarded plots, or poor character building). When I read fanfic, the spelling and grammar of the first few paragraphs is my first filter; if the author has not bothered with the absolutely minimal effort to check this, one can be fairly certain that there are a lot of other things he did not wish to expend energy on doing well. Ringo aptly demonstrates the validity of this approach, except that he is an actual published author rather than a fanfic writer.

1) Strawman's opposing viewpoints

2) Sadistically proxy kills political opponents

Arguably true.

3) Writes unengaging characters

I would disagree, but that is a matter of personal opinion.

4) Railroads his plot

5) Has unconvincing superscience and unbelievable human behavior

6) Is dishonest in his portrayals of existing countries and their political systems

Because he is writing in a universe where this is determined beforehand. He does not exactly have free hands to avoid its inherent retardedness.

7) Predictable plot wise and his battles were dull

Again, a matter of personal opinion.

[Darth Hoth]

And, well, it is realistic to suppose that one smaller, tightly knit group with paranoid security measures that gets special privileges by being outside the normal chain of command should suffer less than standard units from organised sabotage.

Except that you know, all these "Standard" units are essentially brand new. So what are they going to go by? Why yes! The Book! And we have lots of Books from WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam on building mass armies that FIGHT, and FIGHT damn well.

So when did I defend the whole line about the U.S. military being total retards? It does not make sense, even in-universe, and is yet another example of Ringo's deplorable world-building. None of which changes the fact that an elite unit with superior security and special privileges, also with a strong sense of common history and identity, would be less vulnerable to penetration or sabotage. Yes, realistically the sabotage should not be as succesful in the first place, but the SS suffering less is not in itself inherently ridiculous.

[Imperial Overlord]

From what I recall he was basically ruling unopposed at that point. I certainly couldn't say what imaginary political party, if any, would be needed to join his coalition because the political landscape certainly doesn't resemble Germany at all. That, of course, is another reason the book sucks.

I thought the Nazis joined the government by then.

The Posleenverse is effectively althistory, with politics that do not even attempt to resemble real life. They are not supposed to. It makes as much sense railing at TBO because it does not have Kennedy as President.

This is not an excuse. The Posleen verse is supposed to be recognizable as the modern world and it has the same political and social history up to the deviation point. TBO has twenty years of radically changed outcomes between its deviation point and the time of Kennedy's presidency. Nor is "Ringo is crap" an excuse for Kratmann consistently spewing that same garbage.

[Samuel]

Uh, they have "Operation Monsoon Thunder" as a deviance, but the timeline is essentially the same.

[consequences]

And the preview chapters for the one after this are up. Retcons and annoying bullshit ahoy!

[DrStrangelove]

I'm honestly curious about what the SheVa actually is. Ig et that it uses a sixteen inch gun, but is it seriously some kind of ridiculously scaled up mobile artillery?

Shevas are wannabe bolos.

[Companion Cube]

Goddamn, it's even got a webcomic character painted on the front.

[Samuel]

Goddamn, it's even got a webcomic character painted on the front.

Bun-Bun? Someone introduced Ringo to Sluggy Freelancer after he started on the book which is why.

Also, book 3 Chapter 45

SheVa I Specifications
Height: 170 ft. ground to top of turret

Treads: four

Tread height: 27 ft.

Tread width, individual tread: 150 ft.

Weight of individual tread: 37 tons

Total vehicle width: 385 ft.

Total vehicle length: 468 ft.

Gun length: 200 ft. including barrel and breech

Gun bore: 16"

Round weight: 16 tons, projectile, cartridge and propellant.

Cartridge length: 14.7 ft.

Cartridge diameter: 27 inches

Reactors: 4 Johannes/Cummings pebble-bed uranium/helium

Drive motors: 48

Total power: 12,000 horsepower

Unloaded weight: 7,000 tons approximate

Also, the last 4 comics on this page are origional work by him.
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/11-U ... _Faire.htm

[CaptainChewbacca]

As I recall, Bun-Bun had a few dozen metalstorm turrents installed on her flanks, as well as thicker armor. During the Battle of Rabun's Gap, she was the first earth war machine to ever ROUT a Posleen assault.