SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread V

[Shroom Man 777]

Still, I am sure most factions have invested a lot in CBRN precautions and whatever. Simon's nation is leading the mineshaft gap ahead of Shepistan, for example.

[Simon_Jester]

Yep.

We can't stop them from just nuking their way down the mineshafts, of course, if they want to keep hovering over the place and dropping Really Big Bunker Busters one after the other until the armor and shielding over the shelters cracks.* The real point of the exercise is that if the Shepistanis nuke the planetary defenses thoroughly, the civilian population still has a chance of survival if they surrender to the occupying Shepistanimericans, because the bunkers give them a place to live while they reterraform the planet back to habitability.

Also, to draw a "line in the sand" between counterforce attacks on Umerian worlds and campaigns of genocide, in hopes of convincing potential attackers to stick to counterforce- the civilian population will give up and not suck millions of your troops into house-to-house fighting in the major metropolitan areas; the heavy defense weapons are all well outside the cities, and so on.

Beat the Umerian military and the population surrenders "to prevent a needless effusion of blood;" this makes mass-casualty attacks on the urban centers unnecessary unless the war is being fought by a vicious monster.
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*Said armor and shielding, at least in shelters under metropolitan areas, is designed along the same lines as our capital ship bow shields; it takes repeated hits by very large weapons to crack, even after the surface terrain of the cities is destroyed. But this is of course totally possible if someone with the firepower to do the job chooses to do so.

[Shroom Man 777]

If you go with 1960s graph thinking, building huge bunkers for your peoples will automatically consign them to death anyway because the thermonuclear attackers will have no choice but to nuke your bunkers just to be sure. They don't know if those bunkers contain civilians, or leadership guys, or military stockpiles, unless you give the Sheppos a manifest of what's inside your mineshafts, they can't tell if nuking them is either counterforce or countervalue. That's why, as Bart Blade really did say, bunkers also serve as additional targets and bomb sponges for the attackers who must make sure they catch them all, pokemon!

[Simon_Jester]

If you go with 1960s graph thinking, building huge bunkers for your peoples will automatically consign them to death anyway because the thermonuclear attackers will have no choice but to nuke your bunkers just to be sure. They don't know if those bunkers contain civilians, or leadership guys, or military stockpiles, unless you give the Sheppos a manifest of what's inside your mineshafts, they can't tell if nuking them is either counterforce or countervalue. That's why, as Bart Blade really did say, bunkers also serve as additional targets and bomb sponges for the attackers who must make sure they catch them all, pokemon!

We did give the Sheppoes a manifest of what's inside our bunkers. This is a matter of public record.

Furthermore, state policy is to surrender the bunkers once it is no longer practical to prevent an enemy from bombarding the planet at will or landing troops at will. Therefore, by the time an enemy gets into a position to drill the bunkers out, they are equally free to land inspectors to check and make sure the items in the bunkers match the manifest. We would not stop them.

The bunkers contain no weapons other than civil police equipment, and no tooling for the manufacture of meaningful* weapons on any reasonable timescale.** They're not there so the planet can keep fighting the war after the surface is conquered or nuked into a billiard ball. They're there so the population can stay alive after the surface has been conquered or nuked into a billiard ball.

To be sure, of course, there are planetary defense batteries, which are of course well dug in and organized to be fairly bombardment-resistant in their own right... but all the surface defense installations are far away from the civil defense shelters, and the locations of the civil defense shelters are clearly marked- again, a matter of public record. It is not necessary to destroy the civil defense shelters to destroy the planetary defenses.
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*As in, weapons with which one could conceivably prosecute an interstellar war, or make real trouble for an opponent capable of doing same. There are machine tools down there which could be used to turn out, say, bolt-action rifles easily enough... but bolt-action rifles are not a credible threat to Prussian missile cruisers or Shepistani battlestars.

**As in, years.

[Karmic Knight]

Man, I hate having writer's block on the one storyline I have actually made progress on, and thus want to move to a natural cut point on.

[PeZook]

*reads on treatment of tau*

Jesus christ...

And people complain about Collector practices

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

*reads on treatment of tau*

Jesus christ...

And people complain about Collector practices

We plead insanity.... seriously. We got way too carried away with our sadism.

[PeZook]

Frankly, if Collectors cared about human sadism beyond a clinically detached analytical interest, we'd be sending Special Circumstances RIGHT THE FUCK NOW to kill Guynald off

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Frankly, if Collectors cared about human sadism beyond a clinically detached analytical interest, we'd be sending Special Circumstances RIGHT THE FUCK NOW to kill Guynald off

? Why is that tinpot even worth an ounce of interest? We meant for the guy to be a nut, as he was in the movie after all.

[PeZook]

Well, his sheer invetinveness would get our attention.

But, well, we don't care. Hell, we don't even understand why we SHOULD care. It's all really puzzling. Especially since one of our Monoliths won't shut up about what it saw that one day.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Well, his sheer invetinveness would get our attention.

But, well, we don't care. Hell, we don't even understand why we SHOULD care. It's all really puzzling. Especially since one of our Monoliths won't shut up about what it saw that one day.

... Are you that disturbed by what we wrote?

[Simon_Jester]

Well, his sheer invetinveness would get our attention.

But, well, we don't care. Hell, we don't even understand why we SHOULD care. It's all really puzzling. Especially since one of our Monoliths won't shut up about what it saw that one day.

Just keep going over the curriculum Geppetto handed out, and you'll get it. Eventually. Maybe.

[Akhlut]

WAAARRGARRBLE!

Home internet is still out. >:(

I have about 3 or 4 ideas to write about too.

But, yes, I'm here and still interested. Just unable to write.

[Steve]

Time for a new Thread.