Trinity RPG - Coalition and Earth ?

[metaphysician]

1mT was the largest warhead for use in an operational theater, any thing larger was designated as a stratigic weapon. Remember, back during the cold war we Americans (and probably the Russians too) had no problems with the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons during a battle. We even had low kT ranged nukes that were designed to be fired out of long ranged artilliary pieces. Now if we still have them now that the cold war is over, I don't know, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make.

And that 50 mT bomb was the Tzar bomb I was talking about.

I think the distinction needs to be made between a tactical nuke, and a nuke used for tactical purposes.

You *could* use a megaton warhead as a theater weapon ( if you needed to get rid of a mountain, say ), but I think when people hear and use the phrase "tactical nuke", they mean a weapon intended for battlefield use, or deployment by short range means ( hand, tactical bombers, artillery, etc ). The megaton range warheads are all *big*, requiring a fairly hefty missile or aircraft to carry them ( and I'm not sure whether any aircraft can safely deploy one as a gravity bomb ).

[Alex Green]

In theory there is no upper limit for how big a fusion bomb you can make (witness the sun).

[Anon]

Alistaire:

Out of curiosity, what statistics are you using for an average population density? I'm just wondering since you say that you would need 100 kM (btw: Cubic or Square?) to house less than a million people at that density, but according to the 2005 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, there are 1,593,200 people, 738,644 households, and 302,105 families residing in Manhattan, and Manhattan is only about 20 sq. miles.

metaphysician:

I'm not sure if your aware of it, but we have (or had) one mT nukes that were mounted on Tomahawk missles, which are actually a little bit smaller of a delivery systems than a rocket from an army MLRS system. The warheads in a MIRV on a ICBM are fairly small and each warhead is far more powerful than the ones detonated during WWII. With the refinements and advancements made during the nuclear proliferation of the cold war, we were able to shrink the size of nukes or make regular sized ones more powerful. The Tzar bomb had almost four times the yield of the Castle Bravo bomb detonated by the U.S., but was actually quiet a bit smaller than the U.S. bomb that had been detonated a few years before. This is most noteably seen in the fact that the Castle Bravo had to be ground detonated because it was to big and heavy to be dropped by any of our bombers, while the Tzar bomb was air-dropped on its target. Just because something is powerful doesn't necessarily imply big. Remember that there are certain handguns that have more stopping power than some rifles.

[Alex Green]

The problem with using Manhattan pop stats is they don't grow their own food (etc). The Arc is an arcology.

However this may have made the question unanswerable.

[Blue Thunder]

Also remember that Taint affects psi powers. If the Coalition was smart, it would have either its Furies or Aberrant allies around the ship, leaking all kinds of Taint radiation, messing up most teleport attempts.

Also remember that a teleporter has to either see where he is going or have been there before, so I doubt the Upeo can just pop in anywhere they want. A clear can help guide him to his destination, but if there's Taint radiation everywhere (which is a damn fine Storyteller tool, I must say) then his visions would be blurred or blinded enough to make teleporting impossible. Heck, all the Coalition really needs is to have Tainted Aberrants and Furies in all the important parts of the ship to prevent clears and porters from mucking things up.

[Anon]

The problem with using Manhattan pop stats is they don't grow their own food (etc). The Arc is an arcology.

However this may have made the question unanswerable.

Good point. But the question isn't necescarily unanswerable, it just has new variables. Food production can be listed as done in probably one of three ways:

1. HUGE tracts of land (go Monty)

2. Hydoponics (ala Battlestar Galactica) and/or meat tissue culture

3. Synthesis (ala Star Trek)

Of the three of them, 1 most likely isn't happening and 2 or 3 would probably depend on the actual technological advancment of the coalition. 2 is much superior to 1 in several aspects, such as it can be made into a 3 diminsional volume rather than a flat plain and it can be used over and over again rather than having to be rotated in order to avoid becoming fallow. Taking into account the necessery storage space for the water, nutrients, minerals, etc. the volume it would probably take up would be around or less than one or two cubic miles. And if it's option 3 it would be even smaller as all that would be needed would be storage for the raw constituant materials that would be processed.

Alistaire

Just went over your post on the first page again and saw the numbers you crunched. The reason that I'm asking all this is I've had similar discusion about the staffing of the Death Star from Star Wars. The original Death Star was 160 kM in diameter. The formula for the volume of a sphere is (4/3) x pi x radius(cubed) so its: 4/3 x 3.14 x 80(3) = 2,143,573.3 kM(3). Now if we assume that the Death Star is 60% hollow, that makes it 1,286,144 kM(3), so with the 1,000,000 crewmembers erroniously reported in many RPG and fansources, that would make it less than 1 person per cubic kM, meaning that there would be vast portions of the Death Star (multi cubic kM) that would have nobody in there for an infiltraitor (such as the heros) to come across. With the size of the ark being 84 kM on a side (again using a cube for ease of refrence), that comes up to 592704 cubic kM, again say 60% hollow would give 355622.4 cubic kM of open space and for 800,000 people that works out to less than 2.25 people per cubic kM. At that low of a population density, the characters from the descent scenario could walked from the hangers to the progineitors lab without worrying about running into any phyles.

[metaphysician]

In theory there is no upper limit for how big a fusion bomb you can make (witness the sun).

Yeah, but there's probably a point of diminishing returns, and there's especially a limit here, that that a Teleporter has to be able to move it.

[Alex Green]

meaning that there would be vast portions of the Death Star (multi cubic kM) that would have nobody in there for an infiltraitor (such as the heros) to come across....At that low of a population density, the characters from the descent scenario could walked from the hangers to the progineitors lab without worrying about running into any phyles.

The vast unused portions of the DS could be (and probably are) solid, exposed to vacuum, exposed to energy concentrations that make it unliveable, unconnected, filled with droids, without life support, etc. And this ignors that the writer might have dropped a zero or two with the population. I.e. the population is only that of the awake warriors or something.

For a counter example, the land area of the USA is 6 million square miles, the population is 300 million, so that's only 50 people per square mile on average... so the highways are statistically empty and I should be able to sneak into the Pentagon without meeting anyone with little difficulty.

[Finbar]

Also remember that a teleporter has to either see where he is going or have been there before, so I doubt the Upeo can just pop in anywhere they want.

Bear in mind that the Upeo just need to work with clears/telepaths in order to deal with that particular problem...

FR

[BlueNinja]

The vast unused portions of the DS could be (and probably are) solid, exposed to vacuum, exposed to energy concentrations that make it unliveable, unconnected, filled with droids, without life support, etc. And this ignors that the writer might have dropped a zero or two with the population. I.e. the population is only that of the awake warriors or something.

I think this is fairly well demonstrated in A New Hope, since there are a number of times where they are walking through virtually abandoned corridors, empty rooms, etc. Then there's the trash compactor - that's a hundred cubic meters or so with no people at all! ::biggrin Stargate SG-1 does this slightly better in some of the earlier seasons, as the team goes through lots of corridors with only the occasional patrol to avoid. Compare that to something like the 1701-D, where the only places usually devoid of people seem to be Jeffries tubes and personal quarters.

As for the Coalition Ark, a sphere 100km across sounds, IMO, too small to hold most of a billion 'people' for interstellar travel. 1000km sounds more likely, and it's a size where one nuke is not likely to hurt it, but a dozen probably could.

[Alistaire]

Anon,

Actually, it's 800 million people, not 800,000. So, using my original estimate of 86 km per side, if you were to make it a sphere, that makes 444'050 km^3, which is about what one would expect given my calculation was for a 600'000 km^3 cube with the same length (like a ball fitting inside a box doesn't fill it). Therefore, 444'050 km^3, divided by my estimated 3 metre deck height, makes 148'016 square kilometres. 800'000'000 people / 148'016 = 5'404 people per square kilometre, just above my 5000 I originally picked. So no, not 1 person per cubic kilometre. 1 million people and close to a billion makes quite a difference. We're talking basically all of India or China (today at least) in the space of Los Angeles ::blink (just a 50 km+ high Los Angeles ::wink ).

As for the Coalition Ark, a sphere 100km across sounds, IMO, too small to hold most of a billion 'people' for interstellar travel. 1000km sounds more likely, and it's a size where one nuke is not likely to hurt it, but a dozen probably could.

Well, you can make whatever assumptions you like, mine was just a quick and dirty 'minimum'. It could be less, given a higher population density and assuming their super-tech doesn't take up that much space. Or it could be more. But let's try this 1000 km idea of yours. (1000km)^3 = 1 billion km^3 (a lot more than my 600'000!). Now, 800 million / 1 billion = 0.8 persons per cubic kilometre. I guess you'd have to assume a lot of otherwise used space. But of course this is using my "cubic" assumption, which from our best pictures of the Ark (and they aren't that good), it isn't. So assuming a more realistic perhaps 4*3*2 aspect ratio, at 1000 km long we get 1000*750*500 = 375'000'000, and therefor a pop density of about 2 per km^3. That's still a lot of otherwise used space, since if you assume a 3 m deck height, that leaves each person with about 333 square kilometres of area to themselves.

I used an average city population density as a middle-of-the-road estimate. Being all one "building", one could assume one much higher, but as mentioned, there could likely be large areas devoted to machinery, drives, that singularity thing, or even open spaces for parks, etc. So I cut it down. Remember that a city often has as much as half or more of it's land area taken up by roads and parking lots alone, nevermind parks, industrial areas, etc. So you can really assume whatever you like. For me, the city I live in seems like a perfectly "crowded" modern city of a million people, but our pop density is only 974/km^2, one of the lowest in North America! (By comparison, Guttenberg, New Jersey has 22'000, and Malé in Maldives has over 48,000! How do they do it???)

[Anon]

Actually, it's 800 million people, not 800,000

Ah, my mistake. I thought the population was in the thousands, not the millions. Sorry about that.

The vast unused portions of the DS could be (and probably are) solid, exposed to vacuum, exposed to energy concentrations that make it unliveable, unconnected, filled with droids, without life support, etc. And this ignors that the writer might have dropped a zero or two with the population. I.e. the population is only that of the awake warriors or something.

For a counter example, the land area of the USA is 6 million square miles, the population is 300 million, so that's only 50 people per square mile on average... so the highways are statistically empty and I should be able to sneak into the Pentagon without meeting anyone with little difficulty.

Going by the Star Wars: Internal Cross-Sections, the cut away of the Death Star shows that it isn't solid, it's a vast honycombed structure that is filled with work and maintainence sections. Our arguing was about how the listed crew in earlier non-cannon sources were way off the mark. For a technological device that large, complex and intergrated, it would require a maintanince crew far larger than the original listed entire crew, probably by something of at least two orders of magnitude if not more. Adding to that the personnal for the gunners for the superlaser and surface guns, technical support, logistics support, personnal for the starfighter and transport corps, communications, sensor, operations, conn, security and all the other required fields for day to day operation of the Death Star, would drive the personnal numbers into the billions. Thats the point we were trying to make, not that the Death Star could house that many people, but that it needed that many simply to operate.

Your counter example is good at illustrating the flaw in using density averages, since density is not uniform. I live about 90 miles from D.C. in Virginia, but to get into D.C. takes at least four hours on a good day, simply due to the centralization of population around the metropolitian area (and the poor roadway infrastructre in northern VA, but that's something else). But conversely, there are large areas in the mid- and southwest portions of the U.S. were you can ride for an hour and not see another car on the road.

But using this model would make it even easier for the characters, if the populations were concentrated around several areas of the ship, than all they would have to do would be to get the drones or sasq to lead them around these areas, and they would only have to worry about the pheromone problem when they were led to the population area with the promogenitors chamber.

But your point is still made.

[Blue Thunder]

I wonder if pointing this out helps anything: there are "food" Coalition phyles. One of the books mentions that one of the Coalition phyles exists purely as a food source for other phyles, much like cattle.

[BlueNinja]

I wonder if pointing this out helps anything: there are "food" Coalition phyles. One of the books mentions that one of the Coalition phyles exists purely as a food source for other phyles, much like cattle.

But cattle still eat something (grass, grain, etc) and therefore either they have to stock up at planets, or grow their own on board the Ark.

[Alex Green]

But cattle still eat something (grass, grain, etc) and therefore either they have to stock up at planets, or grow their own on board the Ark.

Photosynthasis. Cow Plants. Given the size of the ship and the technologies involved, in theory it should be possible to make a balanced environment.

Which doesn't mean they have, especially since they go from planet to planet harvesting.

[metaphysician]

No system is perfect. Though there's something of a circular logic here: they probably need to planet raid to support a higher intensity production and larger population on the Ark than their tech can support freely. And the reason they need the higher production and population, is so they have to resources to fight wars and engage in planet raiding.

[Alex Green]

No system is perfect. Though there's something of a circular logic here: they probably need to planet raid to support a higher intensity production and larger population on the Ark than their tech can support freely. And the reason they need the higher production and population, is so they have to resources to fight wars and engage in planet raiding.

Not the whole reason. Just because you don't have an army and don't oppress people doesn't mean you get left alone by the people who do have armies... in fact the opposite is usually the case. If the arc were all peaceful the colony would have simply rolled over them.

[metaphysician]

Not the whole reason. Just because you don't have an army and don't oppress people doesn't mean you get left alone by the people who do have armies... in fact the opposite is usually the case. If the arc were all peaceful the colony would have simply rolled over them.

True, but there's also alot of stuff that the Coalition wouldn't even have to bother with, if they were only interested in defense. Namely, any kind of ground forces would be irrelevant if you don't actually want to take ground, and alot of antisurface weaponry would be of almost as little value.

( and I have the sneaking suspicion the Colony could have probably rolled over them anyway; its just that as is, they provide a useful pawn for attacking and weakening Earth )

[metaphysician]

And, something that might be relevant:

Space Nuke Damage Calculator

As this demonstrates, one of the best defenses the Coalition could have against internal nuking is to include large spaces in hard vacuum inside the outer hull, greatly reducing the ability of explosive shockwaves to propagate beyond their vicinity. That plus supertech building materials. . .