The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Beowulf]

How... REAL is Scalpel 1?

Fairly, though it looks to be a one of a kind at this point, IRL.

[LadyTevar]

How... REAL is Scalpel 1?

I remember something bout a laser on a Boeing being tested about 5yrs back... it was to blow up missiles in flight.

[Count Chocula]

How...REAL is Scalpel 1?

Here's the beast in all its glory. I present to you...the Boeing YAL-1!



It's real, though AFAIK there's only one prototype.

[Singular Quartet]

How... REAL is Scalpel 1?

Very. IIRC, they've done a full-power test of the laser, and they've done a low-power in-flight test on a ground-based stationary target, but they have yet to do a full-power in-flight test on a ground-based target.

[TimothyC]

How... REAL is Scalpel 1?

In real life, the YAL-1 was cut from a production program (which it finally reached under the end of Bush's second term in office) back down to an R&D program, and only one YAL-1A is to be built (well no further ones are to be built, unlike the previous budgets which had up to 6 of them being built I think).

The program was reinstated in Chapter 27 following Uriel's attack on San Diego.

Stuart - any idea if the NKC-135A (Link for those who have never heard of the Airborne LASER Lab) can be brought back into service to act as a minor back-stop for the YAL-1s?

I'd also bet that the Advanced Tactical Laser program got a boost about the Time the Airborne Laser Program did. (the ATL Testbed is a C-130 that can burn the paint off of a stationary Truck in test flights) Link.

[ray245]

Stuart, I find that this chapter in particular seems to have a lack of connectors. Certain sentences feels rather disjointed in my opinion.

[Simon_Jester]

“Well done Colonel, a masterly exposition that completely fails to answer the question. I said, what’s going on up there? Or would you prefer I sent you in a jeep to find out?” General Marosy closed his eyes and muttered some choice epithets under his breath. A classically-trained officer he had long believed that the IDF were a superb example of the concept of lions lead by donkeys. It was significant that there was not a single Israeli officer in multi-national command positions anywhere in the Human Expeditionary Army. They were brave enough, gallant to a fault, but their staff-work was appalling. And, in the final analysis, staff-work won wars.

I have heard it said that Napoleon's presence on the battlefield was worth 40000 men, in an age when armies numbered on the order of a few hundred thousand, tops. I have also heard it said that Napoleon would have gotten his head handed to him if he'd gone up against an equivalently equipped and sized army with a decent modern-style staff.

I think the juxtaposition of those two comments is useful food for thought, myself.

“Excuse me General.” al-Zahari was standing at one side of the room, looking at the operational display. “I thought you had three submarines at sea?”

“We do. Dolphin and Tekuma were at sea anyway, Leviathan sortied as soon as this attack started.”

“Well there are only two on this map.”

Marosy looked at the map and saw that the Palestinian was right. There were display indicators tagged for Dolphin and Leviathan but no sign of Tekuma .

"WhatdoyouMEAN you've lost a nuclear-armed attack submarine!?"
_______

And I thought getting a pointer laser into one's eye was bad enough. This was just brutal.

A laser pointer delivers a few milliwatts; the YAL laser delivers a few megawatts. So, yes, about a billion times worse.

Remember the AEGIS cruiser that microwaved Uriel several chapters back? Normandy's main radar array is also in the multimegawatt range, maybe as much as ~10 times more powerful; I very much doubt it would be on the order of 100 times more powerful. I'm still a little skeptical of the 'needle beam' capability that Normandy used to deliver a weaponized microwave beam, because I could swear that violates the diffraction limit, but we'd be talking about the same general power range with that as with the YAL-1's laser cannon.

...Come to think of it, you could make a good case for a 25mm-type chaingun being in that power range, too...
_______

Ya-Ya is gonna be angry when he finds out, that's for sure. Wonder how Michael is gonna phrase it? And would he even understand the concept of Laser weaponry? He seems to 'know' a lot about human weapons, but 'understanding' is something different.

I think he can comprehend the idea of a weaponized beam of light. How a laser works is a different story, but very few people actually know that, anyway. The explanation involves quantum mechanics. However, since Uriel never realized what hit him, and definitely never got the word out, Michael may not know anything beyond "Uriel is dead."

[JBG]

"...and the Man himself skewered on the Crystal Cathedral..."

I hope I enjoyed that as much as you Stuart!

The first significant angel kill. So far two big daemons have gone down, one defected to us. one to heaven and the rest are sort of under control.

The arch angel toll, in the long run, could be larger than the grand duke daemon toll.

Let the good times roll

[drakensis]

Looking forward to how Michael-lan will report this one to Yahweh.

"Uriel fought the humans in a great battle, divine one. Fires rise from the place that the humans name the City of Angels. It is reported that Uriel killed a dozen or more humans before he was cut down." and.... duck!

[Simon_Jester]

That would be... scarily honest. I mean, it would seriously cheese off the boss, but so would anything else that explains the facts.

What I don't understand is why the AWACS that was overseeing the Battle of Los Angeles didn't say "screw it, this is ridiculous, pull back and attack him one squadron at a time" or something along those lines. Trying to mob one target with dozens and dozens of planes is just stupid.

EDIT: unless you're doing it from very far away, with guided missiles... which, given the prevalence of gun and rocket attacks here, they weren't.

[DataPacRat]

Another possibility, since we're now at the halfway point and Stuart has demonstrated humanity's in charge, is for Michael to give Yahweh the news in the most wrath-inspiring method possible... and for Yahweh to /not fire any lightning at all/... and then to /stand up from his throne/. In his mind, it would be to start some /real/ divine intervention; but, written the right way, with some symbolism of the Throne of Heaven becoming 'empty' or 'vacant'.


And, going back to my questions on the Resurrection Machinery... (I'm almost nervous about what sort of character would be based on my questions...)

How does the Resurrection Machinery treat someone with a severed corpus callosum, whose left and right brain hemispheres are disconnected? Do they appear in their Second Life with it still severed and as two-brains-in-one; with it repaired... or do two people in two separate bodies appear?


And now for some of the odder questions I've thought of:

If you draw some blood from a Hell inhabitant, then, presumably, their Not-Really-Magic healing factor soon replaces it. But... do Hell bodies have blood types? What happens if you inject the drawn blood into someone else?

The demons have been doing this torture-for-maximum-effect for a /long/ time, so is anyone interviewing them to find out what their reports of the limits of what a Hell body can survive are?

How much of a Hell-body needs to be intact for it to start recovering, rather than proceeding to Second Death?

How exactly does the N-R-M healing factor deal with, say, broken bones? Let's say an arm or leg is stuck in a pair of vices, and bent until it breaks... and then /held/ there. Presumably, the N-R-M factor would start to try to fix things... but the external restraints prevent it from healing the bones back into the original configuration. Would the bone end up knitting in the 'bent' position? If someone is put on a rack-like devices that constantly stretches their limbs to the point of damage, but prevents them from being released, do those limbs' tissues heal 'longer'?

If a pair of hands or feet is amputated, and the N-R-M healing factor tries to regrow it, but the cleverly malicious demons hold the 'wrong' appendage to the stump, does the N-R-M healing factor try to 'heal' the wrong part into place? If so, what about some other Hell-body's hands or feet? At the extreme, what about swapping heads?


And on another note... how long is it going to take for someone to bring a rocket into Hell, aim it straight up, and see how far it has to go to get to the other side? Even with Hell's twisted geometry, and Stuart's comments on it being on the 'inside of a bubble', I can imagine some clever fellows at NASA treating the centroid of Hell as something like the unstable L1/L2/L3 points, where gravity is zero but active stabilization is required to hold anything in place there...

[Simon_Jester]

If a pair of hands or feet is amputated, and the N-R-M healing factor tries to regrow it, but the cleverly malicious demons hold the 'wrong' appendage to the stump, does the N-R-M healing factor try to 'heal' the wrong part into place? If so, what about some other Hell-body's hands or feet? At the extreme, what about swapping heads?

My impression is that Hell-bodies do not survive decapitation, so this last is probably a moot point, I sincerely hope. At the very least it's going to be given Iron Age medical skills on the part of the demon doing the attempted head transplant.

And, going back to my questions on the Resurrection Machinery... (I'm almost nervous about what sort of character would be based on my questions...)

You probably should be; at this point I'm picturing a cross between Satan and Josef Mengele...

Come to think of it, he's down there somewhere.

[Stuart]

What I don't understand is why the AWACS that was overseeing the Battle of Los Angeles didn't say "screw it, this is ridiculous, pull back and attack him one squadron at a time" or something along those lines. Trying to mob one target with dozens and dozens of planes is just stupid.

And yet it happens. Strange, I know, but true. There comes a point where airborne command control breaks down and the result is a giant furball. Sometimes it doesn't even need a lot of aircraft; there was a classic case of two UH-60s that were shot down by two USAF F-15s that was a total command control failure with only a dozen or so aircraft involved. This kind of thing is one of the issues I deal with professionally and I've seen all too many cases of massive C4I failure to be complacent about it. I saw one estimate a few years back (no source unfortunately, it's filed away somewhere) that suggested up to 20 percent of the casualties in WW2 were the result of "friendly fire". Even today, with all the equipment we have, mistakes get made with stunning regularity.

The determining factor here was the absolute necessity of preventing Uriel escaping via a portal. So, everybody converged on him and kept him from doing that. The price paid was several blue-on-blues and more than one collision.

[Simon_Jester]

What's the fourth C again?

[Ryan Thunder]

I assume that the fighter pilots have better head-shielding than the poor sods on the ground? Because otherwise I could see a bunch of them going down to the death field...

[Simon_Jester]

I assume that the fighter pilots have better head-shielding than the poor sods on the ground? Because otherwise I could see a bunch of them going down to the death field...

They're zipping in and out of the area of effect very rapidly; repeated short exposures to the death field might well not have the same effect as one long exposure of equal total duration, because it gives your body's autonomous functions time to reset themselves.

Come to think of it though, the death field might help to explain some of the friendly fire and mid-airs.

EDIT: Not that, strictly speaking, any explanation above and beyond the activity of the nightmarish devil Murphy is required.

[Murphy is far too powerful to be a daemon in the Salvation War setting; he must surely be one of the dreaded "devils."]

[Stuart]

What's the fourth C again?

C4ISR = Computerized command control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconaissance.

I assume that the fighter pilots have better head-shielding than the poor sods on the ground? Because otherwise I could see a bunch of them going down to the death field.

Oh yes. Take a look at a modern fighter aircraft, the cockpit is seriously shielded. Instead of using aluminum (which isn't actually very good shielding) fighter aircraft canopies are inlaid with gold. There are special ranges where shielding designs are put through their paces and the most effective ones exploited while the least effective are junked. Air forces spend very large sums on this area.

Come to think of it though, the death field might help to explain some of the friendly fire and mid-airs.

May well indeed although the field was breaking down by then. Pre-war, it might also explain some odd incidents where civilian aircraft crashed for no apparent reason

[Murphy is far too powerful to be a daemon in the Salvation War setting; he must surely be one of the dreaded "devils."

I had that in mind as well

[Simon_Jester]

The devil Murphy:

"Run for your lives! It's the anthropomorphic personification of the Second Law of Thermodynamics!"

[Ryan Thunder]

"Run for your lives! It's the anthropomorphic personification of the Second Law of Thermodynamics!"

Sigged. XD

[Darth Raptor]

Having a vague and really unworkable mechanism in mind does not make super powers any less fantastic. We have a vague idea how hypermatter works in Star Wars; it is still a totally implausible and unobtainable superfuel. The same is true for the powers in TSW. That we know which physical laws they break and where doesn't make them any less magical. So the idea that you 'had' to nerf the demons because you were restricting them to 'realistic' powers is pretty absurd.

I'm a fan of soft science-fiction and fantasy. But false pretensions of hardness (especially when it makes your conflict into a one-sided curbstomp with no tension) are hardly a defense for having a curmstomp war with no tension. Your creatures have some of the most magical magic out there, cursory 'quantum' sticker notwithstanding. It just doesn't help them much against lolguns.

[Stuart]

Having a vague and really unworkable mechanism in mind does not make super powers any less fantastic. We have a vague idea how hypermatter works in Star Wars; it is still a totally implausible and unobtainable superfuel. The same is true for the powers in TSW. That we know which physical laws they break and where doesn't make them any less magical. So the idea that you 'had' to nerf the demons because you were restricting them to 'realistic' powers is pretty absurd.

I disagree on your basic premise here. We are dealing with a mythology that is two thousand years old and is massively distorted. We know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that much of it is flat untrue, that much more is allegorical. Your analogy would be more accurate if you were using as a basis a version of Star Wars that was a retold and distorted version of the original having gone through multiple generations of oral retelling in teh meantime.

Now, what I did was not "nerf" the daemons but work out what they could be reasonably expected to have allowing for a degree of kentucky windage in the basic science. The fundamental rule was that the divergence of scientific law had to be restricted to the level that would make interaction between dimensions possible. In fact, far from the daemons being "nerfed", I gave them every break possible. A simple example' almost every mythology had its gods throwing thunderbolts. In reality, try it and the thunderbolt simply arcs to ground. So, we had a breach of rules allowed that permitted thunderbolt-throwing. So, the daemons are actually much stronger, not weaker, than they should be. Don't blame me, blame the people who wrote the mythology

I'm a fan of soft science-fiction and fantasy.

Obviously.

But false pretensions of hardness (especially when it makes your conflict into a one-sided curbstomp with no tension) are hardly a defense for having a curmstomp war with no tension. Your creatures have some of the most magical magic out there, cursory 'quantum' sticker notwithstanding. It just doesn't help them much against lolguns.

There's nothing false about it. There is not one - not one - weapon in the earth side of The Salvation War that does not exist in reality. As far as the earth side of things is concerned the science is rock, concrete-hard. I agree that the daemonic side has some pretty strange physics working for it but what you are avoiding is that every breach or modification of hard science works in favor of the daemons. The point is that, despite being given every break possible, they still don't stand a chance. That was clear before the story was ever written; the whole point that kicked it off was that the mythology in question is hopelessly outdated by modern weaponry. As you say, even having been given every break reasonably possible, they didn't stand a chance against guns. Frankly, I find the whole "tension" argument a bit absurd. There is very little "tension" in most stories. We know Sherlock Holmes will solve the mystery, we know that "The Lootenant" in a TV copshow will solve everything in 44 minutes 23 seconds. The end destination is known and obvious. What matters is the route by which we get there , who we meet and what we learn on the way.

[Gil Hamilton]

There are tons of examples of that, actually.

Look at succubi. I've actually devoted some time (not as much as I like) to thinking on the biochemistry of their pheromone powers and what little time recently I've been able to devote to it has come to the conclusion that their "pheromones" aren't in fact what we think of as pheromones, but rather a psychotropic drug that effects the brain like beta-endorphines* the absorbs though all possible pathways (inhalation, oral, and skin absorption) and moves across the blood-brain barrier with ease.

*(think a runner's high, which has the physiological effects of an extreme sense of well being and deadening of aches and pains, which I believe combines with intonations in the succubus' voice such that person associates the glow with them and thus is favorably inclined to listen to them)

In terms of hard science, there actually exist compounds that absorb though all pathways like this and have powerful physiological effects in trace amounts. Thinks like nerve gas, for example, have really really low LD50s. Given that similar air scrubbing schemes for combatting chemical warfare agents have to be deployed against succubi to prevent their miasma from functioning on people, they have the psychotropic happy drug equivalent of VX vaporizing off their skin. That's pretty ridiculously powerful an ability. Frankly, Stu has hot-rodded the powers of alot of daemons and angels beyond what is actually feasible, to make them more potent, not less.

The snag is that Stuart also doesn't treat superpowers as an automatic win button, the way alot of fiction does.

[DataPacRat]

Yet more questions from your friendly neighbourhood igtheist...


Are the humans living their Second Life in heaven physically pretty much the same as the ones in Hell? That is, are they unable to go back to Earth... and can Heavenites survive in Hell, or vice versa?


Has anybody tried even something as simple as sticking a camera on a stick through the Minos Gate, through which all Hell's incoming dead are arriving through?


If Yahweh becomes more of an actual character than a lightning-flinging temper tantrum... I can imagine something along these lines being said: "The prophecies of the Christian religion are not being fulfilled! I declare that Christianity is a /false/ religion! Michael, what other faiths revere Me but declare Christianity to be false?" "Uh, well, sir, <thinking fast> there's Islam, but-" "Very well! I now declare Islam to be the One True Faith. Do not bother pouring the final Bowls; we will switch to the Islamic version of the End of the World. The humans will not be expecting /that/." "Uh... yessir, you are great, oh Lord. I'll have someone go tell Jesus that he's not your son, just a prophet... <thinks to self: "And look up what the Islamic version of Armageddon /is/.">"



I know that everyone is expecting Yahyah to get splattered at the end of Pantheocide in a violent gornfest orgy... but here's a thought: can you just imagine the /massive/ headaches that would ensue if humanity manages to take him /prisoner/?

[Stuart]

Look at succubi. I've actually devoted some time (not as much as I like) to thinking on the biochemistry of their pheromone powers and what little time recently I've been able to devote to it has come to the conclusion that their "pheromones" aren't in fact what we think of as pheromones, but rather a psychotropic drug that effects the brain like beta-endorphines* the absorbs though all possible pathways (inhalation, oral, and skin absorption) and moves across the blood-brain barrier with ease. *(think a runner's high, which has the physiological effects of an extreme sense of well being and deadening of aches and pains, which I believe combines with intonations in the succubus' voice such that person associates the glow with them and thus is favorably inclined to listen to them) In terms of hard science, there actually exist compounds that absorb though all pathways like this and have powerful physiological effects in trace amounts. Thinks like nerve gas, for example, have really really low LD50s. Given that similar air scrubbing schemes for combatting chemical warfare agents have to be deployed against succubi to prevent their miasma from functioning on people, they have the psychotropic happy drug equivalent of VX vaporizing off their skin. That's pretty ridiculously powerful an ability.

I'd agree with all of that. It's fairly obvious that we're dealing with something that is much more powerful than any known human pheremones here and given the possible applications of the basic science it's fair to bet that a lot of people are studying exactly what the chemistry is (and, being humans, how they can make some money off it). In fact, we have a story segment in that area coming up shortly (which acts as foreshadowing of an important section of the third book). Being able to affect human emotions by means of a chemical exudate is an incredibly powerful weapon, there's a good reason why people are ebginning to realize that the Succubae are indvidually the most dangerous of the daemons.

Frankly, Stu has hot-rodded the powers of alot of daemons and angels beyond what is actually feasible, to make them more potent, not less. The snag is that Stuart also doesn't treat superpowers as an automatic win button, the way alot of fiction does.

I think this is a lot of the problem. People generally have been schooled to believe that having a superpower is automatically a devastating advantage. Rather like a lot of people actually believe the "German uberweapons win WW2" nonsense. Running into a situation where having superpowers simply doesn't do enough good to matter is a heck of a wrench. People wait for the superpower that will win the war and there isn't one. Also, I was tending to try and avoid a "superpower of the Chapter" approach where the daemons kept revealing new "powers" and humans had to keep scrambling to find "solutions".

[Stuart]

Are the humans living their Second Life in heaven physically pretty much the same as the ones in Hell?

Yes

That is, are they unable to go back to Earth... and can Heavenites survive in Hell, or vice versa?

Unknown at this time. Doubtless this will be revealed in due course. We know that Angels and daemons can survive in both.

Has anybody tried even something as simple as sticking a camera on a stick through the Minos Gate, through which all Hell's incoming dead are arriving through?

Sure. And sent robots through. Nothing (and I mean nothing) ever came back.

If Yahweh becomes more of an actual character than a lightning-flinging temper tantrum... I can imagine something along these lines being said: "The prophecies of the Christian religion are not being fulfilled! I declare that Christianity is a /false/ religion! Michael, what other faiths revere Me but declare Christianity to be false?" "Uh, well, sir, <thinking fast> there's Islam, but-" "Very well! I now declare Islam to be the One True Faith. Do not bother pouring the final Bowls; we will switch to the Islamic version of the End of the World. The humans will not be expecting /that/." "Uh... yessir, you are great, oh Lord. I'll have someone go tell Jesus that he's not your son, just a prophet... <thinks to self: "And look up what the Islamic version of Armageddon /is/.">"

Remember Yahweh has wrapped up on humanity, he's done with us and consigned us all to Hell. he's got a new race to play with,

I know that everyone is expecting Yahyah to get splattered at the end of Pantheocide in a violent gornfest orgy... but here's a thought: can you just imagine the /massive/ headaches that would ensue if humanity manages to take him /prisoner/?

Oh yes, I've imagined it