From: "Pyrotechie"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
First off, don't expect to be able to use kaboomite. The process to make that is very complex, and I made less than a half-dozen warheads ever - including the one that caused the Kaboomite Incident.
Second off, we ain't got enough people to win a traditional war - we have thousands of people who could fight, they got millions who are already trained to fight. Best we can do is either not lose, or do a scorched-earth strategy. Scorched earth is easy from up here: just drop rocks on them the way Heinlein showed us in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". But that would burn our bridges with what's left of Earth after the war, and it would also piss off the folks at Ben Franklin and aboard the Stingray. It would also cause a lot of climate change - think the summers after Krakatoa turned up to eleven.
We've got a lot of advantages to help us not lose, though.
We can use drones a lot better than the 'Danelaw can. Theirs are almost all run by biological people using VR. We have more immersive telepresence for the biological people who run our drones, and we have a lot of drones that are run by electronic people. If it comes to a shooting match, electronic people almost always have better reflexes than biological people do - and most of us ain't got that "Three Laws" nonsense to worry about. (Of course, there's a big difference between letting Leonard da Quirm run the fight and letting Trigon run the fight and letting me run the fight. I wouldn't pick any of those three options.)
We got a lot of experience shooting down missiles during the Boskone War. I ain't worried about cruise missiles from Earth. And even the 'Danelaw can take out ballistic missiles nowadays.
Psych-ops: If we let Beta or Grovers Corners hover over DC for a few weeks, what are they gonna do besides worry? They can't shoot down something that big, and even if they could, the wreckage would take out some of their top sites. Yeah, they could move - but so could we. And in the meantime, they've got a morale problem of a multi-megaton rock hanging over their heads like Damocles's sword. Thing is, they got more big cities than we got big Unreal Estate, so we'd have to pick our "targets" carefully.
More Psych-ops: Hang a big transmitter in the GEO spot that covers most of the USA, and swamp their signals with our noise. They ain't got enough fibre or copper cable to carry all their cross-country traffic any more. Tell the civilians that they ain't allowed to watch the Kardashians on TV or buy from Amazon until the war's over, and suddenly there's a lot of pressure on their government to wind things up fast.
I can think of a couple of other things, but I don't want to give the Boskos any ideas.
K
From: "Koizumi-kun"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
> like Damocles's sword
It was Dionysis' sword. Damocles was the one who had to sit under it.
From: "Pyrotechie"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
>> like Damocles's sword
> It was Dionysis' sword. Damocles was the one who had to sit under it.
Yeah, but we all know the name the other way.
K
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
First off, don't expect to be able to use kaboomite. The process to make that is very complex, and I made less than a half-dozen warheads ever - including the one that caused the Kaboomite Incident.
Second off, we ain't got enough people to win a traditional war - we have thousands of people who could fight, they got millions who are already trained to fight. Best we can do is either not lose, or do a scorched-earth strategy. Scorched earth is easy from up here: just drop rocks on them the way Heinlein showed us in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". But that would burn our bridges with what's left of Earth after the war, and it would also piss off the folks at Ben Franklin and aboard the Stingray. It would also cause a lot of climate change - think the summers after Krakatoa turned up to eleven.
We've got a lot of advantages to help us not lose, though.
We can use drones a lot better than the 'Danelaw can. Theirs are almost all run by biological people using VR. We have more immersive telepresence for the biological people who run our drones, and we have a lot of drones that are run by electronic people. If it comes to a shooting match, electronic people almost always have better reflexes than biological people do - and most of us ain't got that "Three Laws" nonsense to worry about. (Of course, there's a big difference between letting Leonard da Quirm run the fight and letting Trigon run the fight and letting me run the fight. I wouldn't pick any of those three options.)
We got a lot of experience shooting down missiles during the Boskone War. I ain't worried about cruise missiles from Earth. And even the 'Danelaw can take out ballistic missiles nowadays.
Psych-ops: If we let Beta or Grovers Corners hover over DC for a few weeks, what are they gonna do besides worry? They can't shoot down something that big, and even if they could, the wreckage would take out some of their top sites. Yeah, they could move - but so could we. And in the meantime, they've got a morale problem of a multi-megaton rock hanging over their heads like Damocles's sword. Thing is, they got more big cities than we got big Unreal Estate, so we'd have to pick our "targets" carefully.
More Psych-ops: Hang a big transmitter in the GEO spot that covers most of the USA, and swamp their signals with our noise. They ain't got enough fibre or copper cable to carry all their cross-country traffic any more. Tell the civilians that they ain't allowed to watch the Kardashians on TV or buy from Amazon until the war's over, and suddenly there's a lot of pressure on their government to wind things up fast.
I can think of a couple of other things, but I don't want to give the Boskos any ideas.
K
From: "Koizumi-kun"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
> like Damocles's sword
It was Dionysis' sword. Damocles was the one who had to sit under it.
From: "Pyrotechie"
To: Soc.Fen.Military
Subj: RE: Worst Case Scenario
>> like Damocles's sword
> It was Dionysis' sword. Damocles was the one who had to sit under it.
Yeah, but we all know the name the other way.
K
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012