Mandarins, heroes in another timeline...

I think it's the other way around - if the active fleet all gathered together they *could* defeat the dreadnaught... but anything less than that would be difficult.

I don't think it could have done the same job as the Sivar, since it lacks the 'soft kill' ability of the gravity weapon... it has planetary missiles that can crush everything on the world, but they won't leave it immediately ready for Kilrathi occupation.
 
Might be, as with everything been a while :) , under either situation though, Confed is going to have one hell of a time taking it out.

I didn't think about the "soft kill" potential. The Dreadnaught's do seem more like they were designed to make species extinct and leave nothing but burnt out cinders.
 
It doesn't exactly stand out as being obvious, but it does seem that there wouldn't even be skeletons of buildings left on Goddard if that wasn't the nature of the super-duper accelerator thingy that the Sivar's weapon was called (it was only ever given a name in the SNES version, wasn't it?).
 
I believe it's only ever given a name in Voices of War (Proton Accelerator Gun)... the SNES intro just calls it a 'graviton weapon.'

The idea is that it just crushes all the *stuff* on the planet... it doesn't leave radiation or biological agents behind like other planet-crushing Kilrathi weapons. Presumably the Kilrathi can go in and colonize Goddard immediately...
 
Possibly, although who knows how the Kilrathi economy works. :) Remember, though, that the Kilrathi started the war for the sake of conquest - they want inhabitable planets, resources, slaves, etc. What's more, much of their support base is built on the promise that the war will bring these rewards to the clans... which means that they can't just go around *destroying* every planet for the sake of simply defeating Earth.
 
Although they did end up going down that path with biological and nuclear weapons launched against Terran planets, didn't they? :(
 
Yes, when the war became desparate towards the end, Thrakhath ordered that it become a war of total destruction rather than a fight for conquest.
 
IIRC, the Vorgath's threat to fleets was due to the sheer volume it encompased which would allow for more CapShip-type missile weapons; the main damage done to Vorgath was the fact that his storage bays were penetrated, causing the munitions within to blow) and probably to carry larger (and presumably more powerful) reactors.

Remember that the main limitations regarding phase shield effectiveness, barring torpedoes, is the size and output of the reactor that can be enclosed by the hull - McAuliffe's claim to fame was that the ground-based reactors would supply the phase shield with enough power to shuck off any normal attack with impunity while supplying power to the gun turrets all over the base. With enough power and storage for munitions, a dreadnought would probably be enough to fight most fleets to a standstill, at least with the downsized fleet of the post-WC4 era. With the losing path in WC3, it was the fact that Confed not only had lost most of its carriers but that there were MULTIPLE 22-km dreadnoughts available to Thrakath which meant that he could repeat the previous year's success, as the Confederation had shot off its bolt repelling the last supercarrier attack and was out of capships to stop the juggernaut that the Emperor now had at its command.
 
Although they did end up going down that path with biological and nuclear weapons launched against Terran planets, didn't they? :(

And it was a very big deal when they switched over to this tactic. That wasn't really the way it worked for the first several decades of the war.
 
I suppose that would make Blair declaring Kilrathi bio-weapons to be a Rollins-style fairy tale a little more plausible (one of the options when talking to Vagabond in Locanda).
 
Blair *should* have known that Thrakhath had declared it a war of total destruction... since it happened several months before WC3. He probably didn't understand the significance of the claim, though, and considered it Kilrathi propaganda.
 
Plus, we don't know what information Blair had access to during and after his recovery - while Rollins was a comms officer, and would've heard all sorts of things. Whether High Command let everyone know it was such a war...

I don't recall if Jukaga's message to the Senate had said as much or not - just that he implored them to surrender to save themselves unnecessary casualties, after a video of planet Warsaw being nuked.
 
Blair *should* have known that Thrakhath had declared it a war of total destruction... since it happened several months before WC3. He probably didn't understand the significance of the claim, though, and considered it Kilrathi propaganda.

I'd always thought that he knew about the war of total destruction, but figured that the Kilrathi would go for something that would work quickly, like nukes, rather than something that might work slowly, like bio-weapons. Also, even the most deadly disease there is always a chance that there will eventually be a cure developed, and there's often people with natural immunity to it.
 
I'd always thought that he knew about the war of total destruction, but figured that the Kilrathi would go for something that would work quickly, like nukes, rather than something that might work slowly, like bio-weapons. Also, even the most deadly disease there is always a chance that there will eventually be a cure developed, and there's often people with natural immunity to it.

Rollins and Blair are initially distressed by the bioweapons rumor because a small number of raiders could deploy the weapon across the Confederation more easily than normal assault fleets with nukes. Tolwyn remarks that they managed to get twenty missiles through during the Battle of Earth, but the planet was still pretty much fine - but if just one warhead were one of the new bioweapons, the entire planet would be a lifeless desert. Systems that become infected would need to be quarantined so that the plague didn't spread. Part of Thrakhath's plan was also to make the bioweapon as horrific as possible to try to provoke Confed to using the Behemoth before it was ready.
 
I'd always thought that he knew about the war of total destruction, but figured that the Kilrathi would go for something that would work quickly, like nukes, rather than something that might work slowly, like bio-weapons. Also, even the most deadly disease there is always a chance that there will eventually be a cure developed, and there's often people with natural immunity to it.

A bioweapon works a little bit differently from a regular disease, mostly because it doesn't have to worry about a vector. The thing that stops there from being horrifically deadly diseases is that the average disease doesn't especially want to kill you... it wants you to help it multiply and spread. A disease that instantly kills a person doesn't have anywhere to go and thus doesn't spread. With the bioweapon, the vector is Kilrathi missiles. They engineer a new disease that kills instantly or horrifically or whatever they want... and then they spread it themselves.
 
on the other hand - there is no way for one missile to infect entire planet, so the desease caused by bioweapon must replicate and spread. if you just want to kill people instantly nuke is much more effective than any virus
 
on the other hand - there is no way for one missile to infect entire planet, so the desease caused by bioweapon must replicate and spread. if you just want to kill people instantly nuke is much more effective than any virus

This is the same universe which had nanomachines kill whole planets, despite the fact that the nanites probably have fairly limited mobility as well, and had to reproduce inside the cells of dying hosts (as well as those which it didn't kill). Nukes only hit one area - the virus bomb, if exploded fairly high up, could probably have done a good deal more 'damage' to the population. Or for that matter, a few strontium-90 nukes did a great deal of damage to whole biospheres as well.
 
This is the same universe which had nanomachines kill whole planets, despite the fact that the nanites probably have fairly limited mobility as well, and had to reproduce inside the cells of dying hosts (as well as those which it didn't kill). Nukes only hit one area - the virus bomb, if exploded fairly high up, could probably have done a good deal more 'damage' to the population. Or for that matter, a few strontium-90 nukes did a great deal of damage to whole biospheres as well.

I thought that the entire population of that planet in Telamon was situated in that one colony.
 
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