How was Haven supposed to fight the SL (Detweiler Plan)?

tlb wrote:Another Sorites Paradox: how many civilian nukes does it take to change something that is not an EE violation, into something that is. I cannot answer that, since I thought one such nuke was a violation.

My understanding is that an EE violation has to have certain conditions to be considered one. It doesn't need to be intentional, it can be accidental(stray missile during combat), large piece of space station into planet, small piece of space station into freighter, into planet etc... that's why the RHN, PN, GSN, RMN and the IAN always took care when blowing up industry near an occupied planet and no matter how bad, the committee would have tried to limit casualties in the civilians simply out of self preservation not decency.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
You can make the case that there was a military threat. Hajdu was specifically worried about completing his job before the RMN showed up. If the RMN were visibly in system, would he be allowed to target the civilian infrastructure with civilians inside?

Due to the threat of the RMN I would argue he would be more inclined to say that it is less of an EE, but it still leaves that he is attacking what amounts to a neutral system, it wasn't to deny the enemy industry it was to terrorize people.

Let me ask a different question: commerce raiding is allowed during war, but those are civilian ships that are doing the jobs they had been doing before the war started and presumably would continue after the war too. Why are nations allowed to attack them?

Commerce raiding in the Honorverse is done by military ships at least when it concerns Manticore, Grayson, Erewhon, Haven and the Andermanis, I don't think they outsource it to anyone because they don't need to, they have plenty of light combatants to do the job.

That would only lead to the question of how many is too many, but we can't answer that.

To me if a government is committing mass acts of terror on foreign soil it should be considered an EE violation. The whole point is to prevent someone from killing billions of people to force the government to do something. If HMSS Vulcan had been damaged during the OB attacks and it slammed into Sphinx would it be any different than if it blue up and large pieces fell to the planet and killed millions or billons of people?

tlb wrote:Another Sorites Paradox: how many civilian nukes does it take to change something that is not an EE violation, into something that is. I cannot answer that, since I thought one such nuke was a violation.

Sigs wrote:My understanding is that an EE violation has to have certain conditions to be considered one. It doesn't need to be intentional, it can be accidental(stray missile during combat), large piece of space station into planet, small piece of space station into freighter, into planet etc... that's why the RHN, PN, GSN, RMN and the IAN always took care when blowing up industry near an occupied planet and no matter how bad, the committee would have tried to limit casualties in the civilians simply out of self preservation not decency.

In the books they take particular care about firing missiles near a planet, to prevent an accidental impact. They do not (and can not) calculate whether debris will hit the planet. When Haven blew up the orbitals at Basilisk there may have been debris impacts, but the book is silent about that.

No, David defines it pretty clearly in the pearls. It is space to ground, doesn’t cover orbital platforms at all, and is an attack that directly causes civilian casualties. If everyone starves next winter or a city gets crushed when your orbital factory falls to earth that doesn’t count.

tlb wrote:

Sigs wrote:smaller stations than Beowulf

Boy is that wrong! From Mission of Honor, chapter 28:

For that matter, there'd never been a single, comprehensive construction or expansion plan of any sort for Hephaestus. The station had simply grown, steadily and inevitably, adding additional lobes and habitats—cargo platforms, personnel sections, heavy fabrication modules, shipyards—as they were required. Taking advantage of the flexibility microgravity made possible. Expanding into a huge, lumpy agglomeration of raw industrial power which had its own peculiar beauty as it floated in orbit, by far the brightest single object in the planet Manticore's night skies. It stretched over a hundred and ten kilometers along its central spine, and tentacles reached out in every direction, some of them the better part of forty or even fifty kilometers long in their own right.

Beowulf lost 50,000,000 people, Manticore lost like 5 million on the stations, 10 max on two of them. I doubt HMSS Wayland had 40,000,000 people in it.

When I said smaller I meant compared to Beowulf's not small in general.

kzt wrote:No, David defines it pretty clearly in the pearls. It is space to ground, doesn’t cover orbital platforms at all, and is an attack that directly causes civilian casualties. If everyone starves next winter or a city gets crushed when your orbital factory falls to earth that doesn’t count.

So you can kill as many people as you want in terror strikes as long as you play pool with their orbital infrastructure?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Let me ask a different question: commerce raiding is allowed during war, but those are civilian ships that are doing the jobs they had been doing before the war started and presumably would continue after the war too. Why are nations allowed to attack them?

Sigs wrote:Commerce raiding in the Honorverse is done by military ships at least when it concerns Manticore, Grayson, Erewhon, Haven and the Andermanis, I don't think they outsource it to anyone because they don't need to, they have plenty of light combatants to do the job.

That misses the point by ThinksMarkedly: its involves attacks by military warships upon purely civilian ships, with a resultant loss of civilian lives.

tlb wrote:

kzt wrote:There are forts at Trevor’s Star. Can’t remember if they are at the junction and/or the planet, but there is a line somewhere that compares fortifications to that of Trevor’s Star.

We know there are forts at the junctions, but those planetary forts have been very elusive.

And turns out are ornamental because they are never used. Except in Barnett and they just surrendered there.

tlb wrote:That misses the point by ThinksMarkedly: its involves attack by military warships upon purely civilian ships, with a resultant loss of civilian lives.

Transporting Raw materials and goods to support the war effort of the enemy. As far as I know you still cant kill passenger ships, but freighters are good to go and you still have to give them a chance to surrender or maybe not, I don't know?

Sigs wrote:smaller stations than Beowulf

tlb wrote:Boy is that wrong! From Mission of Honor, chapter 28:

For that matter, there'd never been a single, comprehensive construction or expansion plan of any sort for Hephaestus. The station had simply grown, steadily and inevitably, adding additional lobes and habitats—cargo platforms, personnel sections, heavy fabrication modules, shipyards—as they were required. Taking advantage of the flexibility microgravity made possible. Expanding into a huge, lumpy agglomeration of raw industrial power which had its own peculiar beauty as it floated in orbit, by far the brightest single object in the planet Manticore's night skies. It stretched over a hundred and ten kilometers along its central spine, and tentacles reached out in every direction, some of them the better part of forty or even fifty kilometers long in their own right.

Sigs wrote:Beowulf lost 50,000,000 people, Manticore lost like 5 million on the stations, 10 max on two of them. I doubt HMSS Wayland had 40,000,000 people in it.

When I said smaller I meant compared to Beowulf's not small in general.

What you really mean is smaller in number of casualties compared to Beowulf; because physically Hephaestus is probably bigger than the orbitals destroyed at Beowulf combined.