Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[icekatze]

hi hi

Of course, we all know the real reason why humans simply aren't going to be the best.

SpoilerShow

Seriously though, the beginning half of chapter 2 goes into pretty good detail about Alex's strengths. He's apparently got an excellent sense of strategy in space combat, and I have a sneaking suspicion that he'll get an opportunity to put that to use before the story is finished.

[RedDwarfIV]

Seriously though, the beginning half of chapter 2 goes into pretty good detail about Alex's strengths. He's apparently got an excellent sense of strategy in space combat, and I have a sneaking suspicion that he'll get an opportunity to put that to use before the story is finished.

Unfortunately, that sense of strategy is based around spacecraft that can, at most, accelerate at 6G. At those low accellerations, compared to Loroi craft anyway, its going to be hard to keep a formation.

Plus, Loroi spacecraft will carry a lot of different weapons from human craft, anf since humaniity knew nothing about the Umiak or the Loroi, they won't have been able to practice tactics or strategy that would work against those races' psychology. A strategy won't work if the target does something completely different from what a human would do because it has different motivations.


Not that Alex couldn't learn to command fleets. In any case, he's currently in a diplomatic role, not a military one, so the Loroi probably aren't going to stick him back on the steppes any time soon.

[icekatze]

hi hi

Alex didn't memorize strategies from a book. He came up with them on the fly, reacting to the circumstances, and also taking a pro-active role in shaping the conflict, not waiting for his opponents to make the first move.

Acceleration is relative. Vessels of comparative ability are going to be able to keep formation with others of comparable ability. Even psychology must give way to the practicalities of physics. There are some very basic limitations about space combat that every opponent is going to need to observe, like the speed of light, and the conservation of momentum.

As for assessing the Umiak. Judging from what we've seen so far, the Loroi are somewhat biased when it comes to interpreting the Umiak and their behavior. A fresh perspective might do them some good.

[RedDwarfIV]

All fair points, especially from what we've seen so far.

Though the accelleration of spacecraft can definitely affect strategy.

Do I run at the enemy and fire when I'm close, or do I launch a rock at them?
Do I fight in a single battlezone halfway between Jupiter and Saturn, or do I fight from the Moon's orbit with a defender orbiting Earth?
Do I try to force my opponent into a trap, or do I use the planet/moon I'm orbiting as a shield and stealthing* instrument while I plan my next move?
Do I conserve delta-V for when I'll need it to dodge something I see coming, or do I charge them at full pelt while using maneuvering thrusters to avoid possible enemy fire?


It also affects whether a battle is fought for days or hours or minutes or fractions of a second. In a low accelleration situation, you might be firing weapons for days hoping the enemy slips up or runs out of maneuvering propellant.

In medium accelleration, with torchships for instance, the battle might only last a few hours as they get into stern chases or 'static' standoffs where they sit still relative to each other and slug it out, relying on their armour and radiators. The Terrans are at this level.

In high accelleration, like the Loroi and Umiak have, you can get to an enemy pretty much wherever they try to flee, though that does depend on the setting. In one of the book series I've been reading, ships come at each other with a relative velocity of about .2 lightspeed, and firing is over in miliseconds. Another series with a similar premise had the fighting be done mostly by fighters which had the same kind of thruster as bigger spacecraft, but their tiny mass alllowed them to out-accellerate anything else. The most prestigious spacecraft were carriers, which had anti-ship and anti-ground weapons, but mostly used the anti-ground ones. Meanwhile in Outsider, battles seem to be protracted onslaughts between large spacecraft with many weapons.

So even with similar accellerations, you can get a lot of different interpretations of strategy.



(* This assumes you've destroyed all enemy surveillance systems on the far side of the moon/planet from the target planet. If you have, then the target won't know if you've burned to change orbit, launched rocks, fired railguns, etc.)

[Arioch]

It also affects whether a battle is fought for days or hours or minutes or fractions of a second. In a low accelleration situation, you might be firing weapons for days hoping the enemy slips up or runs out of maneuvering propellant.

Why would low acceleration extend the battle once you were in weapons range? If anything, I would think the lessened ability to dodge should make this phase of the battle shorter rather than longer.

In medium accelleration, with torchships for instance, the battle might only last a few hours as they get into stern chases or 'static' standoffs where they sit still relative to each other and slug it out, relying on their armour and radiators. The Terrans are at this level.

In high accelleration, like the Loroi and Umiak have, you can get to an enemy pretty much wherever they try to flee, though that does depend on the setting.

Whether both sides can accelerate at 6G or 30G, the relative ability or inability to catch a fleeing enemy is pretty much the same. The higher the acceleration, the less important starting velocity is, but as long as both sides have the same acceleration abilities, if one side has a velocity vector pointed away from you, then he can disengage and you can't catch him. This is true whether both sides have 1G or 30G acceleration. Also, higher accelerations won't always mean higher velocities; in Outsider, efficient system transit velocity is going to be around 3,000 km/s regardless of whether you're accelerating at 6G or 30G. The important difference is going to be in the time it takes to cancel that velocity out; at 6G it takes 14 hours, and at 30G it takes 2.8 hours.

In an actual battle, accelerations of the two sides are never going to be exactly the same, and the specifics of the tactical situation will determine whether the fleeing side can get anywhere useful (like a jump point) or just the depths of empty space, and so the higher the acceleration realm, the better the chance that the side with a slight acceleration advantage will be able to catch the slower one. But, the lower the acceleration realm, the higher the significance of gravity-assist from local masses, and the greater the importance of positioning relative to these masses. So if anything, combat at the 30G realm is less complicated than the 6G realm combat that Alex learned, because the benefit of performing slingshot maneuvers and the like is lessened.

[GeoModder]

Doesn't sound like a "gravity assist" from a Jovian planet would alter your trajectory by much if you're whizzing past it at 1% lightspeed.

[RedDwarfIV]

The lower your accelleration, the more gravity will affect your ability to choose a path. A spacecraft with very low acceleration, such as a scientific probe with an ion engine, will be forced to burn for a long time. Its path out of the gravity well of a plkanet looks like a spiral, and once out of the gravity well, it will make a Hohmann transfer to its target planet.

Meanwhile, a 6G or 25G spacecraft can burn straight at the target planet and arrive there in a relatively short amount of time.

Hence why I gave an example of an attacker orbiting the Moon and a defender orbiting Earth. They don't have the acceleration capability or the delta-V to go flying off into outer space just for a fight. They're going to be near the target, unless one side is happy to just bypass the fighting altogether and drop rocks toward the target. Though those can be intercepted, as NASA is trying to prove.

Anyway, more about the example. When they are both behind their respective planets, they can't fire DEWs at each other, they'd just hit the planets. But since neither can see the other, they can use this time to make a lot of heat doing important things. Changing orbital inclination, eccentricity, firing railguns that will fly through where you think the enemy is going to be, based on their orbit as you last knew it. A missile will both take a long time to reach its target and be highly visible to infrared scanners. Once both spacecraft can see each other, then you get the lasers and particle beams and such. Since travel time for light is 1.26 seconds, they'll be fairly accurate. Whether the enemy survives it is dependent on their armour, their radiators, where you hit them, whether you used a tight beam or wide beam laser (one is for penetration, the other for overheating the target), and probably some other things.

The thing is, DEWs are inefficient. You produce a lot of heat just getting them to fire, which your spacecraft has to expel. So they can't be fired for long. If they haven't done enough damage, you have to wait until the next time you're in sight of the enemy. Thinking about it, this probably does cut down battle time from days to hours, but it's still long.

I assume you mean effective weapons range, since I believe you know too much about science to assume weapons have arbitrary ranges like they often do in sci-fi. A railgun can be gotten out of the way of, but it's still moving at deadly speeds for a long time after you fire it. A laser beam is a laser beamm until it finally becomes too diffuse to damage anything. Pretty much only missiles have a set range, because they only have a certain amount of fuel to burn. There's also plasma weapons, like the planned-but-never-built ICBM defense system based on Shiva Star. That would hhave had a limited range based on how long the fusion reaction could continue happening in a toroidal shape. After a while, it just drifts too far apart and becomes harmless. Though in Outsider, we see completely different kinds of plasma weapon, such as the beam-like plasma focus that destroyed Bellarmine.


Though of course, how the fighting would actually happen defends on the setting and who you ask.

[saint of m]

This is going to be 2 questions for the price of one kinda of a thing but:


How Well Do Loroi, their Allies, and their Enemies think outside of the Box when it comes to strategy?


Part of this comes from mentioning Alex's strategic mind, and that sounds a bit a checkove gun. Unless his ability to quickly deduce things we've seen throughout the first chapter is part of this, how would that be different from how a Loroi think of a battle plan?

[GeoModder]

This is going to be 2 questions for the price of one kinda of a thing but:


How Well Do Loroi, their Allies, and their Enemies think outside of the Box when it comes to strategy?


Part of this comes from mentioning Alex's strategic mind, and that sounds a bit a checkove gun. Unless his ability to quickly deduce things we've seen throughout the first chapter is part of this, how would that be different from how a Loroi think of a battle plan?

From the looks of it, we've already seen both ends of the scale in the comic. On the one hand, Stillstorm and her Umiak adversary Kikitik-27 in Naam. OTOH, the commanders of both precessing groups to 51, and the typical Umiak mass assault till destruction follows.

[Arioch]

How Well Do Loroi, their Allies, and their Enemies think outside of the Box when it comes to strategy?

The "genius" commanders of history -- Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Lee, Patton, Rommel -- didn't win battles through creative "outside of the box" tricks. There are a few examples in which a clever ruse provided an important advantage, but most of the great battles were won by very ordinary tactics. In my opinion, what made the great commanders great was:

1. They created a superior core fighting force that they could rely on.
2. They understood the enemy's strengths and weaknesses as well as their own.
3. They were able to accurately predict what the enemy would do and capitalize on this, while keeping the enemy guessing about their own moves.
4. They were confident and very aggressive, able and willing to seize opportunity and take risks.
5. They were lucky.

After 25 years of war, both the Loroi and Umiak have already lost most of their best commanders. Those that remain are a mixed bag; some are very capable, and others less so.

[Hālian]

Do loroi (traditionally) bury their dead? If not, what do they do with them?

[Arioch]

Do loroi (traditionally) bury their dead? If not, what do they do with them?

http://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/vie ... 214#p14214

[Southern Cross]

I recently watched Howard Hawk's The Thing From Another World and I have the following question: Can the Loroi read the mind of an intelligent plant creature?

[Arioch]

I recently watched Howard Hawk's The Thing From Another World and I have the following question: Can the Loroi read the mind of an intelligent plant creature?

That would depend on the creature. There isn't anything specific to plants that would prevent Loroi being able to read them.

[wasp609]

plant based sentient species are unlikely to exist unless predatory in nature. most higher thinking species are predators due to us having to be able to outsmart our prey.

[Arioch]

Plant vs. Animal is an Earth-specific distinction. There's no reason I can think of that an active animal-like creature couldn't also photosynthesize. And predation isn't the only activity that could be improved through intelligence. I agree that there isn't a pressing need for a tree to develop intelligence (though it might eventually occur anyway on a 10-billion-year-old planet), but I can easily imagine a motile photosynthetic organism on a planet with very high solar radiation that needed to move around and be clever about seeking shade at the right moments that could develop tool use and intelligence. Such a creature wouldn't exactly be a "plant", but it wouldn't exactly be our Earth definition of an animal, either.

There are also always exceptions to every rule. Herbivores are often assumed to be stupid (since it doesn't take much smarts to sneak up on a leaf, right?), but elephants and gorillas are herbivorous and among the smartest animals we know of.

[saint of m]

I think another part is what parts of their brain, or brain like thing, is most developed.

Aligators, crocodiles, and sharks can learn, remember, do tricks, and think stratigicly but their brains are relatively small, and still primitive by our standards. Yet you take a look at a human brain, and a number of social animals, the big spongy part is something that looks that way largly in social animals, with bigger brains tending to be more social creatures. It doesn't necessarily make them smarter, but there are so many nuances about being social with body language, facial movements (the average human has I think a little over 36 muscles in the face that do absolutly nothing but move it into the familiar facial movements such as smiles, frowns, scows, and so on), tone of voice, and either visual cues or smell cues.

That said, how big are we talking about. Most birds on earth have small brains due to small heads, yet many such as parots and ravens are very smart (to the point where city crows and ravens will often take a touch nut they can't crack, wait for the crosswalk signal to say walk, leave it in the middle of the street, then walk back to pick up lunch the cars so graciously opened up).

[UnoriginalUsername]

After 25 years of war, both the Loroi and Umiak have already lost most of their best commanders. Those that remain are a mixed bag; some are very capable, and others less so.

I wonder now, is Stillstorm the best commander the Loroi still have? You mentioned she was feared by the enemy and her own comrades to a certain extent for her ability to not die.

[Arioch]

After 25 years of war, both the Loroi and Umiak have already lost most of their best commanders. Those that remain are a mixed bag; some are very capable, and others less so.

I wonder now, is Stillstorm the best commander the Loroi still have? You mentioned she was feared by the enemy and her own comrades to a certain extent for her ability to not die.

Depends on what you mean by "best." She's certainly the Loroi commander that the Umiak have seen the most of.

[wasp609]

you see this is why keep coming to this site, just for the forum discussions.