Pilothouse OOC

Soysauce:

Unless you can provide a post wherein Israel agreed to let you through unmolested, you are required to actually RP at least two points before docking in Gaza is possible:

1) Entering "Israeli" Contiguous Zone
2) Entering "Israeli" Territorial Waters

These are the main points where Israel has both the right and capability to make a move against you. As such, basic RP etiquette requires that you make an individual post specifying each, and wait to give Israel a chance to respond. Skipping them altogether is a serious enough infraction to warrant direct moderator intervention.

Ideally, you'd also make individual posts for the docking at each port for refueling, as well as transit through the Red Sea and entering the Mediterranean through Suez. Israel could strike at the convoy in the Red Sea or Med (the Turkish one was over 70nm from Israel, and 105nm from Gaza, well beyond the Contiguous Zone), and could also theoretically pull an intelligence or specops mission in port to sabotage or damage vessels.


And before it goes there, the initial post is vague enough to warrant interpretation. Based on the fact that you had not, at that point, even finished setting up the convoy (no refueling stops), it cannot be a precurser to entering Israeli waters.

As a minor technicality, Israel did give clearance (or one can draw the assumption that they did) from this post...

My apologies then. That's an uncharacteristically weak response from Israel, and I'd still like to see a bit more RPing out of this, but oh well.

I was even tempted to deploy the Italian navy over there just to prove how unwavering Italian support for Israel is. But alas Israel and Vietnam came to an agreement.

@Afghan War

All fine here.

Thanks!

The Afghan war summary is all good for me, no disagreements here! Expect a less than enthusiastic response by the Pakistani govt with regards to the unfolding chaos however

I look forward to it!

I probably won't be able to respond until friday night or sometime saturday, I have 3 finals between now and then, one of which in my much detested physics

Historian, I'm skeptical of 357,000 people dying, even in massive chemical attacks on the unprepared. Even nuclear attacks in WWII weren't killing that many people. Admittedly, Aleppo is a bigger city than Hiroshima, but it also seems unlikely one could actually drench the city in enough gas without running into serious problems (in terms of stocks, delivery, scale of target and weather patterns), so by necessity smaller portions would be affected, only.

I think I agree with X. Gas attacks have traditionally killed only a fraction of those initially hit. It's rare for gas to kill upwards of ten percent of the population (see: Halabja), much less more.

Plus Aleppo's been in the midst of a civil war for years now. It's not going to have the population it did in '11.

There is no "traditionally" for chemical warfare. That fraction is of military personnel in WW1 and Iran-Iraq with proper NBC equipment or crappy gas being used to try and kill people. More casualties than kills.

For Aleppo, though, these are specialized death agents designed to slaughter people *coughjewscough* en-masse. You're going to see at least twenty-five to thirty percent casualties at minimum from a single strike against unshielded people. Couple that with war scars across the cities, you've got buildings with enough perforations to flood them with gas. More dead, so shoot it to maybe 45%. That's initial.

Aleppo is a warzone, so the remaining 55% that weren't killed outright now have serious injuries or complications that will scar them for life and impair them, if not kill them slowly and painfully over the remaining weeks. That's minimum, too.

There's a reason chemical weapons are called WMDs even though they're effectual against combat forces in such low numbers: They're designed to slaughter civilians and rear-echelons, and bog down mobile forces to be destroyed. With the chaos in Aleppo, I figure 100-400k casualties are likely.

Granted, of course, you're mods and I'm not, but this is not the kind of chemical warfare we've seen in history. This is the largest deployment of modern death gases -ever-, and it is suitably death-filled.

The event mentions Sarin. Sarin was employed at Halabja; the highest estimates say 10% immediate fatalities (lower say 7%). When it has been used in impure forms, the fatality rate is a lot lower. Sarin also degrades relatively quickly in storage -- and very quickly once deployed. In Syrian weather, for instance, Sarin will disperse in about 30 minutes. This means that in order to effectively cover the entire city you need to use a lot of the stuff. And I somehow doubt that Syria has the capability to churn out enough material to blanket a city the size of Aleppo given how quickly the material dissipates. You'd essentially have to produce all of this stuff in less than a month (provided it's not impure like Iraqi Sarin), not counting the time required to weaponize, transport, and deploy it.

It's simply not possible to affect the entire population. Assuming a population of 2 million (down ~150,000 because of refugees seems fair to me), you'd probably only be able to actually put gas on target of about half of those. And since people tend to run and not sit and bask in the gas, you're probably looking at a mortality rate of about 10%. So a 100,000/900,000 split. Giving you poetic license to affect more people, we're somewhere around 150,000/1,250,000. Which strikes me as high but it also strikes me as more realistic than what we're seeing thus far.

Sarin is a tricky beast. While powerful, deadly in even small doses with as little as simple skin contact, it is also a volatile compound (as in it breaks down quickly and easily) and difficult to maintain or deliver in high concentrations. In the cited Halabja attack, which is the only major use of the gas for which we have solid data, most sources peg the immediate fatalities as roughly 5-7% of the population, with some outliers claiming as high as 10%. That was a much smaller city and could therefore be more effectively covered. The larger the city, the lower the proportion that can be killed, owing to the simple logistical problems of gas. The Halabja attack is also believed to have included multiple different agents, including persistent nerve agents (VX), non-persistent nerve agents (Tabun, Sarin), blister agents (Mustard), and possibly blood agents (Hydrogen Cyanide). Iraq didn't have enough Sarin alone for the attack.

Most of the wounded (roughly twice the dead in number), however, were confirmed to have injuries consistent with Mustard gas, which is far less lethal than Sarin, but known to remain lethal several times longer - and also heavier and thus easier to maintain concentrations of.

In short, this is a somewhat inconclusive argument for the death toll from Sarin, as the significant presence of other agents makes it difficult to separate them.

The only pure Sarin attack I have solid data from is the Tokyo Subway Attack. This, like in Iraq, used fairly impure Sarin, but also had a less-than-stellar delivery method. On the other hand, it used confined spaces frequented by very large numbers of people, so the damage, or lack thereof, is quite telling. Of the only 13 deaths, at least 1/3 were people who directly handled the sarin containers after they were punctured. A further 50 people were hospitalized by not killed, and 6000 suffered more minor, but notable injury and disability. While the sarin was of questionable quality, the number affected compared to the death toll alone should give some thought to how difficult it is to cause massive damage with a chemical weapon.

An earlier experiment by the same group was testing the same gas in an open space: 8 dead and 200 injured. That had gas dispensed from several sites, with a deadly, but altogether less-than-stellar, effect.


I will say this: Sarin alone cannot and should not get that level of fatalities. While deadly, it's extremely difficult to deploy, and maintain, in sufficient concentrations in just the right places to cause that much damage. The combined approach, with fast-acting but short-duration agents like sarin, slower-acting but longer duration agents like mustard, and if you can get them, long lasting nasties like VX, is much more likely. But even then, I think even 10% fatality rate is a stretch if you don't add something like a mass stampede.



All that being said, I would believe, and even expect, inflated reports of casualties. Just be sure to make it clear that they are not genuine or confirmed.

Time of day will also effect, busy day time at a market or night time and every one is asleep. One Soviet tactic for invading Europe was to blanket the entire from with bio and chem weapons, both persistant and non-persistant, trick was it was the non-persistant areas where the soviet's would break through cause the agent would be gone by the time the pushed deep into enemy territory. As CSJ has pointed out one chemical alone won't do much now if you mixed in Nitrogen mustards like HN3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tris(2-chloroethyl)amine

Suddenly you'll have a heavily contaminated area, or is Skyenet agree's get your hands on some Novichok agents now no stats on those exist but its speculation of what they can do means death

Schwer and CSJ elucidate nicely I think on the salient points I brought up briefly. Don't get me wrong, chemicals can be extremely nasty, but they're not a very good way to kill people. As for the commonly attributed "WMD" category applied to chem and bio weapons, while they are not nice by any means, and they make excellent psychological weapons, their actual effects are not unusually deadly compared to other ways of killing masses of people (carpet bombing, Stalinist artillery barrage), and are a good deal more complicated.

harder to delivery as well, as for example arty shells, the heat from it being fired can render the agent useless. thus bomblets or by releasing as a gas upwind are the best ways. You will need a lot of this stuff though, and if large amounts start getting used Israel will be like "oh shit" even more then it probably is now

Now i just want to see another Chemical attack, just for the "wait...what?" as the FSA has NBC gear

Aww, Tez, I would have totally offered him asylum in Turkey. If Pakistan says no, by all means :-P

Haha, if Pakistan's government says no, maybe he'll be able to persuade some Pashtun friends in Pakistan to fly him over.

Novichok doesn't exist...










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...Or does it?

Hey Apollo, there a couple of problems with your RP:

1. It was never the intention of the rebels to create an independent Darfur, they just wanted equality under a banner of the "United Regions of Sudan".

2. The rebels are Islamist.

3. Darfur is 100% Muslim and all of them can speak Arabic.

Oh. I see. It seems I've been misled. I guess I'll have to fix that.

Thanks for your help!

Oh. I see. It seems I've been misled. I guess I'll have to fix that.

Thanks for your help!

No problem, feel free to contact me if you need any help in regards to internal politics or if you need any new ideas.