Couple things

They left the Pentaurus cluster with several Takaran comm-drones powered by ZPEDs. Although they were not KKV's, they could have been turned into KKV's. However, the ZPEDs were pulled to experiment with enhancing the Aurora's jump drive in episode #7. Then, when that didn't go so well, two of them were used to power the super-jump shuttle that took the Data Ark's cores back to the PC. So, they had no functional comm-drones to turn into KKVs.

As for Nathan not being willing to glass an entire planet, just how quickly do you expect a man who has only been in command for less than a year (without any real preparation for said command) to be willing to commit such acts? A moot point, really, since he didn't have the KKV's with which to strike, and he doesn't have a Jung planet to target. I do however believe that he has shown a willingness to destroy the enemy by the thousands in one fell-swoop, as evidenced by his destruction of the battle platform without any attempt to capture.

As for the emitters, they have been damaged on more than one occasion, which has resulted in a temporary inability to jump. Also, their enemies thus far have known little to nothing about the Aurora's jump systems. When compared to the size of the Aurora, the emitters are quite small. Imagine trying to target something the size of a filing cabinet on a ship that is over 1400 meters long, while it is traveling at the speeds at which she travels...and with a rail gun from tens of kilometers distance. Any hit on an emitter would be dumb luck.

Thanks for reading,

Ryk

"That's nothing, back home we used to target womp rats from a T-38!"

🙂

Anyone that can randomly find ways to make Star Wars quotes relevant in a conversation is okay with me. You rock Eric.

I didn't mean to sound accusatory or confrontational Ryk, I just came looking for answers. I had the vague memory that they had KKV's and was troubled by it, and then I saw a review that had the same question. In Book 10, when Earth is being bashed in, there is this exchange between Randeen and Nathan:

"We still have four KKV's in the cargo deck," Mister Randeen suggested. "They would have to be prepped first though. They're partially disassembled in order to fit them in the cargo bays." "That will take too long," Nathan said. "You heard him; they're nuking another city every thirty seconds."

It doesn't say disassembled comm drones missing ZPEDs, it says KKV's partially disassembled for storage purposes, and hints that they could be prepped in a somewhat short time period, if not 30 seconds.

Maybe Randeen doesn't know what he's talking about, but he sure confused the hell out of me.

And, destruction of the battle platform without attempt at capture...well the battle platform was in the process of exterminating the planet's population so I should hope so.

Not a moot point if he had listened to Telles and sent the Falcon looking for targets. It's definitely not my story or my book and I don't want to sound like i'm arguing with the author over the decisions of his characters, that is absolutely not my intent. But I do hope that after watching the death of BILLIONS of innocent earthlings at the hands of the Jung, Nathan slaps the piss out of Cameron or Jessica the next time they turn bleeding heart for the poor unfortunate Jung.

It's very similar to today's nuclear situation, deterrence through assured mutual destruction. China/Russia won't nuke us because we'll nuke them back. If China nuked us, we'd have to nuke them back just to stop them from nuking us more, and to stop Russia from jumping in. Nathan has to do something to show the Jung he's serious, and that he can make them pay for the way they conduct war. Anything else, to me, would feel contrived and unrealistic.

I write here because I love the series and want to stay in love with it for all 75 books. I don't want to get turned off by the classic downfalls I have seen other series succumb to. Stay consistent. Make sure the decisions your characters make are logical, or at least debatably reasonable. Don't lose sight of the awesome pace your first 6 episodes set(that was amazing, it didn't end too soon or take too long, but rescuing the Celestia took 3 books). I honestly had to stop reading Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet because his pacing fell off so badly and his books were just too damned expensive.

This is only my opinion and if you don't agree I am not even remotely offended. I'll keep reading with both high hopes and expectations.

Thanks for recognizing that, Gary. I should have googled the exact quote to be sure. 🙂

It is really hard to say what Nathan's mindset is. I've seen some studies that even 500 years is enough to introduce some genetic drift, such that Shakespeare's peers were not 100% "just like us". This society is set over 1000 years away. Plus, Ryk has introduced some genetic drift elements where non-Coranairians feel the nanites when people from Coranair don't, and also intentional drift with the Ghatazhak. Who knows what effects the plague would have inflicted on the survivors...

So that having been said, Ryk has laid the groundwork to allow himself the freedom to have Nathan do any damn thing that he wants.

Having said that, so far Nathan's actions have seemed "normal" enough to me.

Comparisons to MADD doctrine doesn't really work here. Relativity gets in the way. Remember, Jung command is too far away for them to even know what is going on yet. Nathan doing something for psychological effect is pointless. The only people who would get the message are the ones that he kills. He didn't try to capture the battle platform because he knew that he had neither the resources to contain so many Jung, nor the personnel to utilize the resource. The risk that the platform could somehow once again be turned against them was too great. There was no more to it than that. Take what you can use, destroy the rest so it doesn't bite you in the ass later. Simple enough.

I wouldn't call it pointless. Even if the message is delivered in six months, it's still better than no message at all. Who could contemplate the war with the Jung being over in six months? This is a struggle that is shaping up to take years, so I would argue that MADD comparisons are certainly appropriate. I'm not saying that he should go destroy a civilian homeworld, but a major military installation, if one could be found. A simple demonstration of their power so the Jung will stop operating with the mindset that they can do anything without repercussion.

Six months? More like six years.

Space is BIG, REALLY REALLY big.

Jung ships can go 20 lights. For them to get from earth to the Pentaurus Cluster would take 1000/20 or 50 years. Even news of the first defeat would get no more then 20 light years away from earth in a year. We don't know how far out the Jung world is other than it is at the edges of what humanity did 1000 years before. The Jung masters do not know what happened at earth. Heck, they don't know that Alpha Centauri was conquered yet.

So, Destroying a major military installation is pointless when the Jung masters don't know there is a problem yet. So far as I know, the only Jung that know much of anything about Earth are the ones at Alpha Centauri. One way travel at 20 lights is about 80 days. (love wolfram Alpha! http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+Alpha+Centauri%2F+20c) And that is the next door neighbor.

Mind you, communicating all that to Civilians or even to some space personnel in the books would be very good to do.

I do not remember any mention of whether or not the Jung have message drones.

One other thought. The 20 Light speed is for those ships that are near earth. The closer you get to the Jung worlds, the better the ships are. The chances they need 50 years to get to the Pentaurus Cluster is low. Their ships could go much faster. Can this fact be pounded into the nobles heads? Once the Jung home world learns of jump ships and where the tech is, they will change their conquest plans to get their hands on it.

general bacca stated the jung use messenger craft somewhat like the edf com runners.

much of this thread is speculation, and Ryk has the artistic license for us to stop thinking modern tech and wait for him to give us 35th century tech.

don't leap to conclusions and make posts that have been answered in other threads, im sure RYk and the admin will appreciate us not causing unneeded clutter.

Ok in book 11 Ryk you talk about how if a ship with antimatter reactors were to overload that it would talk the planet that the ship is near out. But wouldn't crashing said ship on said planet cause the reactors to go boom? And wouldn't all the energy from the reaction of the antimatter combining with the matter of the earth make an explosion big enough to wipe out part of not most of the planet.
"Albert Einstein found a formula that can show how much energy a certain amount of something has, whether it is matter or antimatter. This formula is E=mc^2, and is one of the most well known equations. In simple terms, if you take the mass of something and then multiply it by the speed of light, and then multiply it by the speed of light again, you will get how much pure energy a given piece of something has. Since the speed of light is such a big number, this means that even a small amount of matter can have a lot of energy (it has been projected to be 4 times more effective per mass than nuclear fission).

Antimatter was predicted from the expanded form of E=mc^2, which is E^2=m^2c^4. You can take the square root of each side of the equation, since it is equal. However, any real square root has two answers. You can think of the negative root as being antimatter.

The reason this is important to understand antimatter is because scientists found that when matter and antimatter touch each other, the amount of energy that is released comes very close to the amount of energy E=mc^2 says should be all together in those two pieces. The reason is that each particle of matter, when it touches its antiparticle in the antimatter world, both change over into pure energy, or annihilate each other." - cited - http://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

So when a ship with antimatter reactors explodes either from overloading or from combat wouldn't the net explosion be twice the size due to containment failure at the last second? I don't really know I haven't really studied particle physics. I just read a lot. And used to watch shows about science.

If anyone else knows anything more about this please feel free to comment. Or if you think I am over thinking it let me know.

Also Eric Luke Skywalker blasted wramp rats in his T-16. Just had to throw that out there.

Love this book series.

Yes, breach of antimatter containment would result in a reaction with whatever matter was nearby. The more matter with which to react, the bigger the boom. However, it stands to reason that one would do everything possible (and I mean everything) to create a containment vessel that could withstand anything other than a direct impact with the containment vessel itself. So we can't assume that just because the ship goes boom, or that it collides with something (like a planet) that the containment vessel would breach.

Ah ok I guess if some of the Jung antimatter containment units are not destroyed then should help the alliance when they want to build more ships. Just fly out to the debris field and pick them up. Saves on trying to create more antimatter if any ship needs to replace or refuel.

"GO green and recycle your enemy's ships!" - bumper sticker idea for the Aroura's fabrication teams.

the reason anti matter wasn't destroyed is that not all ships had anti matter reactors.