The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[Baughn]

Or pray it fails to detonate. That should occasionally happen. It might get hit by a cosmic ray, y'know.

I don't believe in any gods, but under the circumstances I still think prayer is your best shot.

[iborg]

If you are at ground zero of a incoming nuke, all you can do is kiss your ass goodbye.

Or give it the finger to go out in a blaze of (useless, but gratifying) defiance.
Nah, I'd rather not be in that situation, ever. Nukes suck when you're the target !

[FireNexus]

Or give it the finger to go out in a blaze of (useless, but gratifying) defiance.
Nah, I'd rather not be in that situation, ever. Nukes suck when you're the target !

I think it's unlikely that you'll have time to experience the gratification the defiance would offer.

[Stuart]

If you are at ground zero of a incoming nuke, all you can do is kiss your ass goodbye.

This is true but remember, if the device is initiating over your head, it isn't doing so over somebody else's. Looking at it another way, if they're standing on Ground Zero, you're not. Close in, the only defense is to be somewhere else, but as you get further and further away from Ground Zero, you increasingly are somewhere else. With distance from GZ, relatively simple precautions greatly increase your chance of survival. Painting the windows is a good example. It sounds weird but if you're a few miles from the GZ, it's a major boost to your possibility of living.

[Atlan]

yah...you never hear about flying debris from a nuclear blast...I mean, at those ranges in the blast, you get temperatures hot enough to flash-boil lead. that fridge wouldn't have lasted more than half a second. as for riding the blast wave....not a chance, that thing's moving at hundreds of miles an hour, you might be able to if you started the fridge moving beforehand....

Actually, this is not quite true. During one test a metal sphere close to the initiation was found miles away: a relatively thin layer of it's outside had been vaporised, and the expanding metal plasma had acted both as a radiation shield, and a means of propulsion, flinging the ball away from the blast. IIRC it was the basis upon which the Orion Project (nuclear pulse propulsion for spacecraft) was based.

[JN1]

Painting of windows was long standing Civil Defence advice in the UK; you only have to look at some of the CD films from the '60s to see that and it appears as late as the '80s.
It, along with much of the other advice, was, IMVHO anyway, unfairly maligned. In many circumstances the advice in Advising the Householder and Protect and Survive would save your life.

[ChrisWWII]

Hey everyone. I'm a longtime lurker, whose been following this story for quite some time. I just want to say hi! As well as say that this story is honestly one of the most awesome things that I have ever read online. I love Stuart's descriptions of military weapons, and everything else. I honestly can't wait till I can buy the hardcover addition!

But yes....I may not know as much as I would like about nuclear weapons and their defenses, but nukes aren't the BOOM everyone's dead weapon Hollywood says they are. They're just an unusually large bomb, and need to be treated as such. (Sorry if this has already been mentioned.....I haven't read all the way up yet. )

[Edward Yee]

But yes....I may not know as much as I would like about nuclear weapons and their defenses, but nukes aren't the BOOM everyone's dead weapon Hollywood says they are. They're just an unusually large bomb, and need to be treated as such. (Sorry if this has already been mentioned.....I haven't read all the way up yet. )

No... no they're not. *points to the last few pages of discussion*

Although, it'd be darkly hilarious if even Michael-lan or other angels/demons/Second Lifers had thought that...

[Ryan Thunder]

Stuart, just something I've noticed is that in spite of the detail of your descriptions, I don't seem to be getting a good sense of the scale of things. Just numbers aren't enough to communicate it, really. I know in my head that this was an incredibly large army that was just totally destroyed, but the emotional part of my brain just doesn't pick up on it. As far as its concerned all that happened was "Oh, okay, some angels got nuked." I'm just concerned that it might have the same effect on some other folks.

Anyway, I hope you find that helpful.

[Ruadhan2300]

cool, hadn't heard about that metal sphere thing. makes sense though. I'm left wondering about the orion project....how would such a spacecraft stay intact long enough to get anywhere? beyond simple thickness of material, over time presumably the blast-shield will be eroded away. I guess in space though the heat-blast is less an issue, likewise the shockwave.
I recall a book called Footfall by Larry Niven, good fun stuff if a bit hammed up, but they actually have a -battleship- built to use the Orion style propulsion. and among other things, use that technique to get it off the planet....devastating the area in which the ship was built. lets face it, a few dozen multimegaton detonations at various heights over the same area has -got- to be nasty.

said ship apparently looks like this...http://www.up-ship.com/apr/michael.htm

yes, the ship was named for the Archangel Michael. said Magnificent Bastard would undoubtably be proud

[Captain Trek]

Hello everyone. I discovered the Salvation War relatively recently and have immensely enjoyed archive-bingeing my way through it. I had not, however, planned to register for this forum because, up until now, I didn't have anything I was all that desperate to say about the story...

So what am I here for, then? Well, put simply, I just read through chapter 70 of Pantheocide and Uxhalar's story left me feeling incredibly sombre... After finishing it, I found myself reaching for, of all things, my Civil War Generals II CD, on which there is a piece of music I thought would fit the scene depicted in the last few paragraphs of the chapter perfectly, particularly the revelation at the end that Uxhalar is now almost certainly in for a world of suffering, likely followed by death (indeed, I find myself feeling unusually sorry for the character, given that we just met him).

Turns out, the piece of music does indeed fit perfectly, so I thought it only right that I share it with you guys... Consider it a tribute to Uxhalar-Lan-Sarael, a redshirt who has gone above and beyond the call of duty by being able to make me feel specifically for him (rather than just the scene in general)...

http://www.mediafire.com/?xy0w3trumhy

...try to picture that music set to the scene detailed in the last few paragraphs of chapter seventy. Uxhalar walking among the charred and burnt human levies, the unnamed angel looking up at him and telling him the son of Yaweh is dead and finally his wing feathers falling away behind him as he trudges off with the rest of the (former) soldiers... It might not have the same effect on you as it had on me, but I thought it was a powerful image...

[Simon_Jester]

Before everyone can scream for your blood, iBorg, let me say: No. Just No.

The fridge worked against radiation because it was lead-lined, but I'm thinking that if you're ground zero on a ground blast, the radiation's going to be enough to be lethal, lead shielding or not. Secondly, it's a major "wallbanger", to quote TV Tropes, because Indy was effectively at ground zero of the blast -

No he wasn't. He was at least a mile away, probably more, and given the size of the series of nuclear tests that actually happened that year, we'd be looking at a device around the 10 kt range.

Now, granted the fridge was absurd; I think the real absurdity was the idea that it could be thrown enormous distances without reducing Indy to meat paste (and, yes, the idea that he'd be able to open it from inside, though it's at least remotely plausible that he could have somehow blocked the latch

the fridge would get crushed like an empty soda can, turning one idiot adventurer into pulp, which would then be cooked to a crisp by the intense heat and radiation.

Well, looking at the sequence Stuart describes, the direct pulse of infrared radiation and such would be a problem. Don't know about overpressure crushing the fridge; we can probably look at real evidence from places like Hiroshima for that.

I'd guess that what's really likely is that he'd end up trapped in the fridge as the house burned down around his ears, which would probably not be survivable unless the house was very lightly built. Being trapped inside might actually be a good thing, because it means he gets less fallout in his system before soldiers find him while checking the site- reduced physical activity and such.

Thinking it over, I've heard of the phenomenon in a different context; the cosmic microwave background started out as the heat pulse of the Big Bang, currently estimated as originating 380 thousand years after the event.

Different mechanism entirely. The cosmic microwave background has not been absorbed and re-emitted; the 380-kiloyear horizon for it is specifically because before then, it was.

Its current low wavelength is purely due to red-shifting from an expanding universe.

Ahem. The heat pulse from Terwynn's description emerges when the fireball cools to the point where it can start emitting direct blackbody radiation, without that radiation being automatically absorbed and re-emitted by the surrounding medium. Or am I mistaken?

Stuart, just something I've noticed is that in spite of the detail of your descriptions, I don't seem to be getting a good sense of the scale of things. Just numbers aren't enough to communicate it, really. I know in my head that this was an incredibly large army that was just totally destroyed, but the emotional part of my brain just doesn't pick up on it. As far as its concerned all that happened was "Oh, okay, some angels got nuked." I'm just concerned that it might have the same effect on some other folks.

Anyway, I hope you find that helpful.

Well, it's hard to avoid that; most of us aren't good at mentally processing "holy shit that was half a million people." Now, you could do it. Say, have footage of a huge marching column that stretches for miles, compare it to other massive crowds, that sort of thing. Done carefully, it might work.

[CaptainChewbacca]

cool, hadn't heard about that metal sphere thing. makes sense though. I'm left wondering about the orion project....how would such a spacecraft stay intact long enough to get anywhere? beyond simple thickness of material, over time presumably the blast-shield will be eroded away. I guess in space though the heat-blast is less an issue, likewise the shockwave.

Once it's clear of the atmosphere, you only get a plasma striking the kick-plate. Various Orion designs actually included some mechanism which would spray a coating on the hull between blasts, which would ablate instead of the actual surface.

[Sea Skimmer]

Once it's clear of the atmosphere, you only get a plasma striking the kick-plate. Various Orion designs actually included some mechanism which would spray a coating on the hull between blasts, which would ablate instead of the actual surface.

Yeah the idea was the initial launch from earth would just eat up the plate, since the blasts had to be very rapid to gain any height. But once the blast rate could be slowed down and you simply needed to add speed to leave earth orbit, oil sprays would keep coating the plate. The vaporization of the oil would also add thrust, helping make up for the mass penalty of hauling it along which is nice. If the craft was assembled in orbit then the plate could of course be coated from the onset. God help them designing the spray system. Orion is one of those things when math says it should work great, but the practical engineering is pretty insane.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah the idea was the initial launch from earth would just eat up the plate, since the blasts had to be very rapid to gain any height. But once the blast rate could be slowed down and you simply needed to add speed to leave earth orbit, oil sprays would keep coating the plate. The vaporization of the oil would also add thrust, helping make up for the mass penalty of hauling it along which is nice. If the craft was assembled in orbit then the plate could of course be coated from the onset. God help them designing the spray system. Orion is one of those things when math says it should work great, but the practical engineering is pretty insane.

I've heard a proposal where they bolt about a zillion SRB's to the Orion ship to get it into the upper atmosphere (not sure how close to orbital velocity); that would help with the eating up of the plate, and also with the fallout because you're not vaporizing hundreds or thousands of tons of steel with point blank nuclear blasts in the Earth's atmosphere.

[Bayonet]

Painting of windows was long standing Civil Defence advice in the UK; you only have to look at some of the CD films from the '60s to see that and it appears as late as the '80s.
It, along with much of the other advice, was, IMVHO anyway, unfairly maligned. In many circumstances the advice in Advising the Householder and Protect and Survive would save your life.

Indeed it would, contrary to the moronic rantings of the naysayers who delight in mocking "Duck and Cover."

Granted, there is no defense if you are close enough, no more than there is if a grenade goes off in your hole. But if you are far enough away, and many-many people will be far enough away in an urban initiation, not being cut to ribbons by flying glass seems a worthy goal.

None of this addresses the issue of the devastation of society and its death toll, greater than that from the initial lay-downs, , which is covered in TBO and its follow-on works.

[Simon_Jester]

Indeed it would, contrary to the moronic rantings of the naysayers who delight in mocking "Duck and Cover."

Granted, there is no defense if you are close enough, no more than there is if a grenade goes off in your hole. But if you are far enough away, and many-many people will be far enough away in an urban initiation, not being cut to ribbons by flying glass seems a worthy goal.

None of this addresses the issue of the devastation of society and its death toll, greater than that from the initial lay-downs, , which is covered in TBO and its follow-on works.

I think that's what led to the mass mockery of "duck and cover." Not so much the idea that it wouldn't work to some degree, as the idea that being alive after the bombs go off wasn't necessarily all that desirable a state of affairs.

[Bayonet]

I think that's what led to the mass mockery of "duck and cover." Not so much the idea that it wouldn't work to some degree, as the idea that being alive after the bombs go off wasn't necessarily all that desirable a state of affairs.

Yes, destroying hope and the will to resist, is an effective way to demoralize and weaken the enemy.

[Ruadhan2300]

Well, there's presumably a mechanism already in place to launch nuclear devices to a location over the blast-plate, would it be so hard to alternate between nukes and shaped explosive charges with large oildrums built into them? blast a spray of oil over the dish? I imagine in space it'd be easier to make it an even-coating than in air.
-could- possibly work methinks.

[Baughn]

Ignoring the possibility of space elevators for the moment, ways to make Orion's thrust high enough to escape earth's gravity make an interesting thought experiment, but not much else. There's no way in hell anyone would ever be allowed to run such an engine close to Earth.

Have a look at nuclear thermal engines as well. Their mass-efficiency is a good deal lower than Orion, but in return for that you get higher thrust (under reasonable assumptions such as not wanting to ablate your engine too much, or irradiate spaceports), and the mass-efficiency is about twice that of chemical rockets. There's also at least one working protype.

They'd probably work rather well for a new shuttle design.

[Sea Skimmer]

I've heard a proposal where they bolt about a zillion SRB's to the Orion ship to get it into the upper atmosphere (not sure how close to orbital velocity); that would help with the eating up of the plate, and also with the fallout because you're not vaporizing hundreds or thousands of tons of steel with point blank nuclear blasts in the Earth's atmosphere.

I've heard that one too, it would be a rather expensive option though given how massive even a 'small' Orion was expected to be. Pretty quickly you'd have to ask why not just launch a ship in pieces totally conventionally. Once you are in space, much less reason exists to use an Orion drive instead of a nuclear reactor powered ion engine. Another idea for reducing fallout was to make the first blast be a big pile of conventional high explosives on the launch pad.

[Atlan]

I've heard a proposal where they bolt about a zillion SRB's to the Orion ship to get it into the upper atmosphere (not sure how close to orbital velocity); that would help with the eating up of the plate, and also with the fallout because you're not vaporizing hundreds or thousands of tons of steel with point blank nuclear blasts in the Earth's atmosphere.

I've heard that one too, it would be a rather expensive option though given how massive even a 'small' Orion was expected to be. Pretty quickly you'd have to ask why not just launch a ship in pieces totally conventionally. Once you are in space, much less reason exists to use an Orion drive instead of a nuclear reactor powered ion engine.

Except if you want to go places relatively quickly. Remember that Orion drives were concieved in a time when complex robot missions were still very much a pipe dream. Orion was manned. And you don't want your crew to suffer microgravity for any longer than needed, nor do you want them to spend a decade in space.

[Simon_Jester]

I think that's what led to the mass mockery of "duck and cover." Not so much the idea that it wouldn't work to some degree, as the idea that being alive after the bombs go off wasn't necessarily all that desirable a state of affairs.

Yes, destroying hope and the will to resist, is an effective way to demoralize and weaken the enemy.

...?

I do not see the relevance of this comment.

I mean, if people consider carrying on in a society where the transportation infrastructure is hash (causing massive famines due to breakdown of food distribution), where major urban areas have been wrecked by virtue of being colocated with key military targets (to the point where the entire US population has taken, I don't know, 10% to 20% casualties), and so forth... they may rationally decide that it is simply not worth the trouble to "win" a nuclear war this way. Human beings are not ideal utilitarian robots who automatically fight to the last gasp so long as there's a possibility of continuing to gasp a few seconds longer. Any model of war or policy that doesn't take that into account is too flawed to be applicable. And yes, that includes one that is sanguine about nuclear war because civil defense measures can reduce civilian casualties to "only" the people who live in major metropolitan centers.

[EdBecerra]

Iborg, Stuart et al:

Back in the 1970's, a student at Harvard wrote a senior paper titled 'How to design an Atomic Bomb'. As part of the writing process, he called Dupont and got them to tell him what kind of high explosive (major whoopsie on their part). He ended up getting an 'A' for the paper.
Two items of importance here are that his academic adviser was Dr. Freeman Dyson, and that once the Government saw what he wrote, they seized all copies and backup materials and classified them Top Secret.

Mike Garrity

Then there was the collage kid in Florida who did it in '79, and managed - according to the newspapers - to get some Pakistani agents chasing him in the supposed "hope" of recruiting him for the Paki nuclear weapon design team. Whether he wanted to be recruited or not.

Fission only weapons are (relatively) easy to design if you stick to the gun-style device and use U-235 or U-233. Of course, U-235 is hard to produce, and U-233 is hard to handle safely.

Ed.

[Sea Skimmer]

Except if you want to go places relatively quickly. Remember that Orion drives were concieved in a time when complex robot missions were still very much a pipe dream. Orion was manned. And you don't want your crew to suffer microgravity for any longer than needed, nor do you want them to spend a decade in space.

Well it would really depend on what you want to do. Since you need as much thrust as you use to speed up to slow down, and you can only haul so many nuclear weapons, an Orion craft has a very limited mission profile. Its great for going from one point to another, and that's it. If you want to come back, or stop at many planets it wont work so well. An Ion drive is much slower to speed up and down, but its nuclear reactor core could last for decades, and you could find more propellent as you go. So on a long range mission the ion drive ship might end up being faster because the engine is always running.