How much damage would a LAW even do?
Presumably a fuckton, but potentially enough to OHK even Molly through soak? Definitely enough to OHK Harry or Tiffany, though I would expect Shintai!Molly with max soak to be able to tank one at least.
Still seeing the best option to head to the military base, put some demons in the military hardware, and scry her location with the crown, and level her location with some missiles.
Still seeing the best option to head to the military base, put some demons in the military hardware, and scry her location with the crown, and level her location with some missiles.
How much damage would a LAW even do?
Presumably a fuckton, but potentially enough to OHK even Molly through soak? Definitely enough to OHK Harry or Tiffany, though I would expect Shintai!Molly with max soak to be able to tank one at least.
We would likely be better off trying the parry a LAW rather than soaking it. They just aren't designed with the idea that people might successfully parry them so there to-hit dice are way lower than their damage.
Can we just get these missiles carrying lunatics stopped by the cops before they even get to us? We know what they look like and what route they are going to have to take.
Still seeing the best option to head to the military base, put some demons in the military hardware, and scry her location with the crown, and level her location with some missiles.
Can we just get these missiles carrying lunatics stopped by the cops before they even get to us? We know what they look like and what route they are going to have to take.
At least it will mean that the police force will be concentrating their energies in the right place. Also given to understand that military surplus has militarized the police. I would not expect them to be helpless. They can even call on the local military bases if they feel the need.
This is exactly the sort of terrorism that huge amounts of tax dollars have been spent on stoping.
[X]Plan Focus on Sandra let the Police handle this
-[x]You know what is coming and can guess the route quickly call the Library and get an anti terrorist squad to interpret well you go and handle Sandra.
obody who has seen the results of such a thing used, even in media seriously suggests using military ordnance in a friendly city. Those are real "destroyed the city to save it" vibes
There's a point at which I'd say it's worth destroying Vegas to save the continent, but that should never be a first choice. It shouldn't even be a plan you switch to so much as something you do after trying and failing everything else.
Doesn't mean drones aren't viable, those sword missiles the pentagon uses to kill one guy in a full car would make moving her goons hard, and if push comes to shove this is the exact time you send in troops/agents even knowing the likely casualties.
She could well be a focused sorcerer herself; I didnt get the impression she was White Council-tier, but I could be wrong.
Or one of the many sorcerers who dont make White Council tier, but are broadly capable.
Possible, but I was under the impression that age was a strong indicator of talent type. A strong sorcerer with the right focus can get a pretty good lifespan boost from it, but you only tend to get so strong before your abilities start to broaden instead at a base level.
If she was 150 sure; likely just Binder but with time. At 300 and still looking less than middle aged? Without black magic twisting her around with power that wants to seep in and change you? That says wizard to me.
It's very speculative, but we just saw them poach a wizard and DP said "not often" instead of "never" in the follow up.
So she still gets 2- or 3- shot, which means a massed volley from ambush or with magical concealment/support could absolutely party wipe us, or at the very least kill some of our party members and maim the rest enough to let the follow-up finish the survivors off.
So she still gets 2- or 3- shot, which means a massed volley from ambush or with magical concealment/support could absolutely party wipe us, or at the very least kill some of our party members and maim the rest enough to let the follow-up finish the survivors off.
I mean we can just parry them. They don't provide to hit bonuses. The people shooting are just humans. Spend a round on full defence and just parry them all. And they are very unlikely to be able to ambush us, our crown is the greatest tool of infor gathering imaginable.
Viserys smiled as Lya shot a ball of water at a sleeping Dany. She wasn't being mean, Dany had asked her to wake her up once they were at their destination.
It was a new habit for Dany not to wake up on command but the new world they had found themselves in had a much easier to reach and tangible dream realm. It was the only plane they had found that wasn't the sealed domain of gods or monsters, a natural underlying layer of magic that reflected the nature of humanity and the world. It was a weird combination of the few wild and the dreamlands.
As a Dreamer Dany had vast sway over this realm, shaping it into a demesne of their own likes of which could only be contended by the greatest of the fey lords and ladies of this realm. Her demesne was a pale copy of their home, Sorcerer's Deep recreated from their scattered yet perfect memories. The city was empty of course, haunted by dream constructs that simulated the people of the city. The Great Tree was but a shadow of its true divine might and temples of their allied gods were but stone buildings.
But there was a method to her madness. After a year of coming here they had succeeded in making a connection back to their world. Using the sympathy of a city crafted to resemble its living counterpart, Lya and Viserys had created a ritual of joining that had brought them closer to their lost empire. They couldn't go back of course, the death curse of the defeated Void could not be so easily circumvented. But the ritualistic joining of the dream city had been enough to connect to the metaphysical infrastructure of their realm. The Imperial Divinity Reservoir was at full integrity again and the spells that the Imperial Clerics could cast would work again.
They had even learned about the civil war that had broken out after their "Deaths" and their survival had pacificed a good chunk of that. Now the imperial Legion needs to conquer a much better armed Westeros and Essos alone but they could do it with their divine allies' help.
It hadn't really helped Viserys and his Companions much but at least the Citizens of Sorcerer's Deep dreamed of this facsimile and the city was becoming realer every day. In about a 1000 years they might even be able to bring it back into reality of this strange plane.
But that was the good news, just as it had been in his previous life, no good news came without a caveat. Their little ritual had made their dream demesne into a beacon for the wild monsters of the nevernever. They have started to constantly attack the city and they have to constantly defend it. They can do it of course, Vee is very capable of taking on armies by herself and Sir Richard has already beheaded a few lords and ladies of the few if they got too close but it was a tedious bother. Even now Garin, Waymar and Vee were holding the fort right now as the rest of them can get time to meet with their curious little spy ring
They had noticed the intrusion since they had started being tailed by ghosts, it becomes really obvious to an accomplished necromancers as Lya and all of them had doubled up on their divinatory defenses but still it gets annoying to be observed whenever you aren't in warded location, it was their lot in life but that had improved when they had come to this world and used some of their gold to fund a consortium of companies for them to utilize. It was fascinating the level of sophistication that people of this realm had pushed completely mundane technology. Lya had just used simple enchantments, nothing even magical really to assemble and craft devices and Vee had used light touches of magic to grow some of the more useful herbs she always had on her. Training people of this world to be novice Mage-wright was really easy, the level of general education in this world and overall cultural and healthcare advantage meant people had an easier time connecting the concept once they had it explained to them.
Apparently in this world the magic is hidden and his company had been attacked by a bunch of vampires hoping to dissuade him from his path and he had turned them into red turtles. Then some wizard from local arch-mages councils had come to politely ask him about the masquerade and he had accepted that in return for a binding promise to protect his secret. He had protested against a human using mind magic and after learning the local laws of magic and the reason for them he had assured the young mage, who was older than Viserys in years, by transforming into a dragon and then putting a geas on him with his consent. Then he had to do it to all of his employees and make it a standard part of his employment contract but most people had been happy enough to do it once they learned magic in the first place and how to make magical devices with absurdly advanced tools that this world's technology allowed. Minor magical items were trivial to make with skilled users, the runic schema and ritual enchantment taking a tenth of the time that it took in his world.
But back to the matter at hand, someone is spying on him and while he had done his research on this Molly Carpenter he had not found the organization that was supporting her and that was pinging the instincts he had gained from interdicting devils from an entire material plane.
But that was the purpose of this meeting and to assess the threat of Molly Carpenter. After all he was an Emperor and a Dragon, he knew how to deal with threats. Defeat them with kindness and diplomacy. There was no better way of beating a foe than making them a friend.
I don't like this omake because it is an info dump, and it doesn't feel like viserys and the dream copy of sorcerer's deep is cop out so they aren't constantly trying to return and hopefully that part of the omake makes sense magic wise. it felt like a dany thing to do. apolgies for any mistakes.
I mean we can just parry them. They don't provide to hit bonuses. The people shooting are just humans. Spend a round on full defence and just parry them all. And they are very unlikely to be able to ambush us, our crown is the greatest tool of infor gathering imaginable.
You are assuming that we'll get the first shot, and that the first that we know of it wouldn't be a fusillade of rockets slamming into us.
And that still doesn't account for mental fuckery, as not all of us have a perfect mental defense (only Molly, Lydia, and Tiffany(?), and for the former two it costs essence to activate), and Harry could do a whole lot of damage before being incapacitated if he gets whammied.
There is more that needs to be done shortly, but making a phone call is quick and easy enough that we can take care of it without slowing our response appreciably.
[X] Call the Library again. Now is about the time you need some federal aid
Leaving our troops here would be a bad call and I do think we can ignore them. At least on a personal level.
We're talking baselines with mortal weapons; powerful ones, but still in the scope of what mortal authorities have the capability to handle if they're aware of it.
They're just dangerous enough that we can't subdue them without injury, not without a serious cost in time that will create even more victims given the chance, so our presence doesn't implicitly make things better.
Campus is empty right now. Inform Von Trier and do what we can to help get them going in the right direction while we handle the looming problem that needs our attention.
Yes and no. It's worth noting that when you evaluate this stuff that in real life magic doesn't exist and wasn't planned for, but that in the DF even though most don't know about it plenty are very aware. The Library advising congress on security requirements would fit.
Even without that the current standards monitor people with key access for stuff like signs of blackmail or other irregularities so that someone who just had a schizophrenic break who happens to be a quartermaster can't use military grade weapons on civic infrastructure. Which would also catch the side effects of long term enthrallment.
Consider the fact that the obscene numbers of mass killings that happen in the US have functionally never* involved someone taking or buying real military hardware to do it. We have stuff sold as luxury killing devices for civilians that really should be marked military and kept locked up, but not the ones classified as proper weapons of war.
There've been more idiots living in their parents' basement and working as part time IT to the national guard posting state secrets on discord than crates of lost anti tank weapons in the CONUS.
I can buy her breaking in and taking stuff, but getting it quietly and keeping it secret for any length of time?
What happens when someone half a continent away processing paperwork calls to ask about the persistent inconsistency? You can't just say they're broken and you threw them away or something, you have to pay for a special contractor to come and dispose of explosives even if they're completely neutralized. Who themselves has to demonstrate they got risk of the stuff.
Expended during training? Better have the reports and an explanation of why you used an armored column of them.
Just keep reporting the fake numbers? The buy in is everyone working in the armory if you want to be sure someone won't try whistleblowing over what looks like corruption from their boss.
Pretty much every explanation for how that would work requires you to have the ability to issue orders to whatever base you're drawing from, and if she did I'd expect a mechanized battalion instead of mobsters.
* Some people shooting up part of a base with their service weapons, but not stuff like this.
never been impressed with his magic. dude is not good at things beside thaumaturgy and blasting. like even winter knight harry is basically an energy bender. and seriously you are saying radar is the one big weakness to magic, thats where you draw the line at magics capabilites. Forces 3 should easily able to defeat any amount of radar. he just doesn't have the skill to do it.
and we paid points for future tech, i don't see why that wouldn't include stealth tech or magic as it were. like paint can beat radar bro its not unbeatable.
Yeah, well, your prerogative. You're just wrong though.
Man didnt earn the fear respect of the older White Council members by being bad at magic.
The list of people who have lined up to try to recruit him in canon, from Mab to Nicodemus to He Who Walks Before, seem to think he's not bad at this magic shit either.
=
No, Im not saying radar is one big weakness to magic. Im saying that veils will usually stop visible light, and thats it. Wont stop sound, or smell, or air pressure. It wont stop invisible radiation either; you cant hide yourself from radar or protect yourself from radiation by trying to bend non-visible parts of the spectrum around you, like you can do with visible light.
According to Dresden, who should know, the only person we've heard of who can maybe bend radiation at that end of the spectrum was Winter Lady Molly, and only when she became Winter Lady. We saw her prior to that when she was a mortal, and her veils are very good, but not that good.
=
You generally block things you can perceive or visualize.
It doesnt matter what Forces 3 can theoretically do; humans can neither see nor sense radar naturally, so how do you expect a wizard thats essentially a Traditions mage to know how to bend it?
There's theoretically supernaturals out there who can perceive other senses from radar to cosmic background radiation, and hide themselves from them. I would not be surprised if Seeker and his kind could; angels certainly can.
But I doubt a wizard could.
=
We paid points for future tech. We got it.
And yet our soldiers are not all running around in late model Alanson hardsuit equivalents. The Empress calls for aid and her special forces teams dont have power armor.
So clearly there's limits to be expected in a game thats supposed to be a game, not a stomp.
We have had transient radar contacts since the early 40s. That isnt new.
Those that are in sensitive areas get followed up on. You know, like an unknown radar contact over a major US city, close to an international airport and less than 10 miles from a major AF base.
perscision guided bombs that can hit moving enemies were what devastated the republican tank troops.
they weren't smart bombs in the sense of self guiding which is mia culpa but the capabilties are basically the same.
No, I am reasonably sure that is factually incorrect.
Back in Gulf War 1, they used GPS- and laser-guidance.
Self-guidance was not available for bombs that Im aware of. Missiles, sure, like the Maverick, but not bombs.
And the capabilities are not the same; if the lasing aircraft loses track for whatever reason, thats all she wrote.
*crosschecks again to be sure*
The Gulf War Air Power Summary says that the US aircraft used up around 4500x GBU-12s, which were laser-guided 500 pound bombs. These were apparently the bulk of guided bombs.
The unguided bombs they used were:
=77,000 unguided 500-pound bombs,
=19,000x unguided 1000 pound bombs,
=12,000x unguided 2000 pound bombs
=90,000x other unguided bombs of various sizes
And thats not counting the 3,000x Hellfires and 5,000x Mavericks.
Or those that got murdered on the ground by Allied tanks.
This is not to say that precision weapons didnt prove themselves in the Gulf War.
Pound for pound, inordinately effective.
Just that you are overstating their role in breaking Iraqi tank forces.
This is like being shown a coherent radiation emitter and calling it basic because Einstein established the theoretical basis for lasers and masers in 1917.
Or like calling an electric car basic because the first one was invented back in 1827.
Furthermore, we know that Sanctuary tech is optimized for Sanctuary conditions.
It was explicitly stated that some of what we use works nothing like Earth tech, like the strategic mag-skimmers that fly with the magnetic flux of Sanctuary in order to launch strategic balefire elementals:
Over the next day Warden Morgan dedicates himself to what at first seems a very narrow and technical investigation of the armed forces of the Five Cities, from the crises teams on call to backup detectives in over their heads to the Aug-infantry brigades in full exo-suits sheathed in Sub dermal Impact-Enhanced Gel to the point where they seem almost a species apart to the Stonebreaker artillery designed to shatter field bunkers and deliver fragmentation munitions into the middle of enemy formations. That morning you are looking over Glory class mag-skimmers, long range high payload bombers which were never even designed to come within sight of the enemy not to launch strategic missiles high enough in the atmosphere that they could ride the magnetic winds until they are near their target then with minimal fuel usage turn and unleash their payload. What is saved for on fuel is more than made up for with the balefire elemental that provides much of the destructive power and the rudimentary intelligence behind the blast.
Yet for all the dreadful power of these machines that is not really what the senior warden seeks, the questions that sharpen his gaze the most have to do with rules of engagement, past conflicts and expectations of future ones. For a while there you wonder how he would eve bring himself to trust the testimony, but then as you ponder the nosphere searches you realize he does not, at least not on their own. instead he has chosen to cast a wide a sphere as possible reasoning, correctly, that no conspiracy on your part could perfectly encompass an entire world at least not without limiting his access to information sources.
You're making assumptions about how things work with Sanctuarytech that I dont think are warranted.
bro you are moving the goal post so much, having some drones for support isn't going to kill civilians, that's a bad faith argument if i have ever seen it.
we do have a brain. If there is a significant risk of casualties we just won't do it. having the capabilities as well as drones surveillance capabilities is well worth it. it doesn't need fire a single shot to be worth the risk.
Maybe you're not understanding what you're proposing. Look back over this conversation.
You have proposed putting armed drones with multi-ton bomb capacity (for reference, the MQ-7 Predator can carry ~100kg of weapons, and the MQ-9 Reaper maxes out at 1.7 tons of ordnance, so you're talking something bigger) over a civilian First World city and metro area of more than 2 million people.
Less than 10 miles from a major AF base, with at least two major ground-based radar systems scanning the sky and I dont know how many air systems in the sky from Nellis AFB next door.
You have further suggested using these weapons in this city, in the middle of civilian infrastructure, like power, water and gas lines. In order to hit an underground target of unknown location.
And you say I'm moving the goal posts?
the 5,000-pound BLU-113. It can go through some 22 feet of concrete or over 100 feet of earth. MOP will go a lot deeper - 200 feet of 5,000 psi concrete.
Thats the GBU-28, and I thought they only built them for Gulf War 1 using the barrels of old 200mm howitzers.
Didnt realize it was still in service after that.
So yeah, you're right that this is still in service in 2007.
But tell me that you arent proposing using a 5000 pound bomb-equivalent, twice the size of a standard bunkerbuster, in the middle of Las Vegas. In the middle of underground gas and power lines, with hundreds if not thousands of homes and offices in the local area around the impact point.
COMMENTARY
Genuinely less worried than I originally was.
LAWs are essentially secondline weapons now.Id have been a lot more worried if I'd seen Milkor M32 40mm grenade launchers there. Or machine guns. Those would kill a lot more people.
Little Tommy is kinda fucked here.
And while Im not particularly fussed about the Mafia getting fucked over, losing the Shadowkillers as a factor in Vegas will make things materially worse in the aftermath of this series of attacks.
More pertinently to us, it empowers Daedalus and their backers, which will come back to fuck us in the future.
Jesus Christ, that's way more than what can just "fall off the back of a truck" That's an entire crate of anti-tank weapons just evaporating, even disregarding the regular firearms and grenades which would be eyebrow raising in themselves. It's not even obsolete, that's the standard anti-tank infantry weapon in use by the US Army.
Getting that would have required a significant amount of focused effort. One or two, I can buy. "Enough that I can shoot ten into an offensive attack and still have enough to ruin the day of any attacker". Not so much, not without having Help in High Places.
The LAW has largely been replaced in that role by the AT4 since the 1980s.
250mm RHAe penetration isnt killing any modern tanks.
Its still in use in the US Army, but largely as a cheap shortrange anti-emplacement, antivehicle weapon
This could be current stuff, or it could be ordnance that hasnt been decommissioned yet.
Or it could be from outside the US, even. For example:
A few rockets could have come from the ill fated ATF Castaway Operation in Honduras, the little known sideshow of the Fast and Furious debacle, which ended up supplying weapons to MS-13 and other Central American criminal organizations. The weapons could also come from local arsenals as well. What is certain is that around 2007, a number of M72 rocket launchers had gone missing from the elite Honduran 2nd Infantry Battalion (parachute). Some of the rockets were recovered in Mexico and Colombia 12 months later. The LAWs belonged to a lot of 50 examples delivered to the elite TESON (Honduran Ranger) training unit in 1992; of the fifty, 26 could not be accounted for. The Hondurans were also missing a number of M433 40mm cartridge high-explosive dual purpose (HEDP) grenades from a stockpile transferred to Honduras in 1985.
A crate of RPGs? That could be explained. This can't, this is US Army restricted military hardware in enough numbers to arm a battalion, this isn't even a red flag, it's Crimson. Because if an unauthorized party could secure hardware on that scale, what else do they have?
Meh.
The LAWs are maybe enough to resupply a platoon.
Gratuitous amounts of boom, dont get me wrong, but not tank-killing power, or battalion-strength numbers.
The real question is what they have in reserve.
In any case Molly now suspect that Tommy and company were not suborned as a source of cheap muscle (that was a secondary aspect), but as people who knew where the weapons were and what you should be stealing to enact her plans (since there is no indication she has any kind of military training) so that she could enhance their operations to get a lot more out of it in preparation for this endgame.
Frankly, given Red Court influence in Latin America, and Outsider influence in the Red Court?
Easier to simply get some of this shit out of the Mexican or Colombian military, or one of the Central American militaries, and ship it back into the US along with some of the New Blood recruits.
Dont understand the faffing around with Mafia goons.
Not unless specificially involving the Mafia fulfills some additional purpose of hers.
War on Terror shit.
You'd be surprised about exactly what has fallen off the back of a truck IRL in the course of those fifteen to twenty years, both domestically and abroad. For example:
Government records covering the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force show pistols, machine guns, shotguns and automatic assault rifles have vanished from armories, supply warehouses, Navy warships, firing ranges and other places where they were used, stored or transported. These weapons of war disappeared because of unlocked doors, sleeping troops, a surveillance system that didn't record, break-ins and other security lapses that, until now, have not been publicly reported.
Weapon theft or loss spanned the military's global footprint, touching installations from coast to coast, as well as overseas. In Afghanistan, someone cut the padlock on an Army container and stole 65 Beretta M9s -- the same type of gun recovered in Albany. The theft went undetected for at least two weeks, when empty pistol boxes were discovered in the compound. The weapons were not recovered.
==
Source:
Yeah, it definitely could've been a whole lot worse (mortars firing WP, to re-enact that scene from The Line(?), anyone?)
Even HE would do a helluva lotta damage, though.
Also, there isn't a damn thing that the US Military or Government can do if the Enemy has something like a Perfect UMI/Mind Control ability that they can use (and we do know that far lower-level characters (Kattrina) have had and used perfect attacks before, and Sandra seems to specialize in mind magic, so it's not out of the question) to mind-control anyone who starts asking questions.
[X] Call the Library again. Now is about the time you need some federal aid
[X]Plan Focus on Sandra let the Police handle this
-[x]You know what is coming and can guess the route quickly call the Library and get an anti terrorist squad to interpret well you go and handle Sandra.
[X]Yog
I don't like this omake because it is an info dump, and it doesn't feel like viserys and the dream copy of sorcerer's deep is cop out so they aren't constantly trying to return and hopefully that part of the omake makes sense magic wise. it felt like a dany thing to do. apolgies for any mistakes.