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 This is suppose to be the hero, folks  Yes, all the ships look like dicks Hate him, dislike him, and definitely never love him, David Weber has been an author for over 31 years. His first book, Insurrection, was published in 1990, and was based on the wargame Starfire III that Weber himself was the designer of. You can see all of the DNA of Starfire in basically all of his later books, especially in the Honorverse series that was his big name-maker. And Honor Harrington will be the main focus of this topic. However, if anyone wishes to Let's Read or talk about any of his books, positively, negatively, or don't-give-a-fuckly, then go right again. I may not like his books for a myriad of reasons, but I'm not here to tell you that you are wrong to like them. I'll be posting my own Let's Reads sporadically, and if someone wants to jump in with something, they can. We can even race and duel! Whatever. Just be nice to each other, please. I would write more about Weber, but I don't like Weber enough and this is mostly to draw the topic out of the MilScifi thread.
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Dec 17, 2021 13:44
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This just covering the Honorverse, or all of Weber's books?
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Dec 17, 2021 16:06
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Cobalt-60 posted:This just covering the Honorverse, or all of Weber's books? All of them! Any David Weber thing you want to talk about. I only had Honorverse pictures on hand so I used them, sorry.
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Dec 18, 2021 01:13
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Oh christ. So, the Honor Harrington books in specific, is what I file under 'guilty pleasure' riiiiight up until about the 8th book, Echoes of Honor. After that it takes a steep, steep dive off a cliff. Book 9 is ... wobbly, and then it just goes steadily more and more downhill from there at increasing speed, until you reach an absolute nadir in books 13 and 14. According to Weber himself, Honor was supposed to kick the bucket at the end of book 11... And I really, desperately wish that he'd actually done that, instead of change his mind, because by book 11, she has already overstayed her welcome as the main protagonist. She has notwhere left to go as a character, it's painfully obvious, and in an attempt to fix this issue, Weber launches two side-series to bring in more 'grounded' PoV characters. Which only makes things much, much worse due to the fact that you will need to pick up said side-series to get a complete picture of the overarching plot, and it's just... bad. Especially since several chapters are copied directly between books as the various plot-threads cross. Now. There are things to like about the books, to be certain ( and at this point, like any masochist, I am committed to the series with grim fatalism ), and the first books are quite good for what they are; Napoleonic Naval Warfare melodrama IN SPACE. It's just such a shame where it ends up, compared to where it begins.
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Dec 20, 2021 11:05
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TLM3101 posted:Oh christ. So what happened was, Weber decided to let his friend Eric Flint play around as a co-author, and he introduced his and Weber's self-inserts. They needed a plot to gently caress around with, so he decided to let Eric Flint kick off the plot intended for the second half of the story. But for some reason he let Eric Flint go whole-hog with it and basically start smashing the people intended to be the big bads of the entire setting off super early, so Weber panicked and kept Honor around so the Solarian League and Mesan plots could be done together instead of the huge time skip to actually set those plots up. Weber basically cornered himself because he is a bad writer. I'm tempted to just skip to the last few books, because they are insane and awful, and yes there's like a dozen chapters repeated between the last five books.
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Dec 20, 2021 11:14
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Like, the Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki stories start out as fun, cheesy, action-spy romps, but the trouble is, as noted, that Weber jumps on the opportunity to have this move the story forward so he doesn't have to kill his cash-co- er, I mean, beloved character, even though by book 8 Harrington's pretty much got nowhere left to go. And it results in everything subsequent to that decision just getting worse and worse, and that's not even taking into account the multiple loving retcons that are inflicted on an originally quite likeable and sympathetic character. That said, if you're going to do a Let's Read, please, start off with On Basilisk Station and do them in order, because you can't really appreciate how bad the final four books are unless you've seen the build-up and fall that precedes them. Like, the first books are uneven, but for me at least land solidly in guilty pleasure territory, and I think it's only fair to show just how badly and thoroughly Weber hosed up.
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Dec 20, 2021 16:47
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I really liked these as a cheesy space opera, until the last two books.
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Dec 20, 2021 18:41
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TLM3101 posted:Like, the Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki stories start out as fun, cheesy, action-spy romps, but the trouble is, as noted, that Weber jumps on the opportunity to have this move the story forward so he doesn't have to kill his cash-co- er, I mean, beloved character, even though by book 8 Harrington's pretty much got nowhere left to go. I actually have already done OBS and half of Honor of the Queen for exactly that reason. I was just doing them in the Milscifi thread which was originally more focused on that kind of thing, but then turned into a more general thread. So I decided to move all the Weber stuff here. I didn't bring over what I had done because  .Early-books-wise I didn't like them because I think they're boring and pretty thoughtless in terms of plot and the like, but you aren't kidding that they are masterpieces compared to what's to come. I'll probably do chapter 18 of HoTQ tomorrow when I'm not preparing for an eight hour day out. Kchama fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 23:27
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The first two books are decent space opera. Then they vacillate between space opera and military sci-fi for several books, with some cringy attempts at relationships thrown in, and fall apart around the whole bullshit TOP SECRET PRISON PLANET arc. Or maybe that's just where I lost interest/patience. I f you want a vastly superior ending (of sorts), check out Mission of Honor: Retold, which fixes/improves/actually makes sense of most of the book's problems.
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Dec 20, 2021 23:40
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A big part of the problem is specifically the Solarian League, wherein the first half of the series does everything it can to hype them up as the invincible sleeping giant that will smash you if you piss them off with everyone in Manticore (who is revealed to basically have the only actual effective/at all spy ring in the universe) shaking in their boots at the thought. But then it turns out that in order to actually be defeated, Weber had to reduce them to something that could be defeated by having it turn out that not only is the vast bulk of their fleet 300 years out of date by the time of the first book but also their fleet was that much bigger than Manticore's, much less Haven's. Their actually up-to-date fleet was still older than Haven's and smaller than Manticore's. So they turned out to be a defenseless paper tiger that someone no one noticed, despite being the most prominent polity in the universe. It was like if it turned out the USA was still using steamboats in the modern day. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 00:14
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The front-line stuff in the Solarian Navy is pretty much state-of-the-art at the start of the series, possibly better than Manticore's. There's a whole big thing in the early books where the Haven navy is getting small amounts of Solarian tech and it comes very close to closing the tech gap between the two sides. It is only the mothball fleet that is massively obsolete, and even that isn't too bad by start of the series standards. The two warring powers just tech up massively over the course of the fighting and the Solarians don't copy them. Note that HMS Fearless in the first book was something like 80 years old, and still in front-line service even before being used as a testbed. Ships in mothballs for a century or so still being relevant is not an absurd conclusion at the start of the series. Or in the historical time periods he's emulating - HMS Victory was close to sixty years old at Trafalgar, and served in active duty for almost thirty years more (albiet as a second-line unit). For that matter, modern ships are going in the same direction - USS Nimitz is 50 years old and on active duty, and the Ford-class carriers are expected to last most of a century. When the basic technology is stable, ships last a long time.
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Dec 21, 2021 04:04
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The Solarian League would make sense if we got a longer perspective. For centuries, their Battle Fleet has been the near-mystical Ultimate Weapon, to be used only against violators of the sacred Eridani Edict. In other words, doing nothing. Meanwhile, any actual violence is done by the Frontier Fleet, their colonial protection So we get a long and complex campaign across the League. With battles as various Solarian commanders find/cobble together/drag out loyal ships. The Manticorans keep winning battles, but there are so many of them...and it gets worse the further into Solarian space you get. Political warfare; the other full members of the League may not agree with Terra, but they don't want anyone rampaging through THEIR space. Do you want to fight Beowulf? Meanwhile the junior members are throwing their colonial overlords off-planet...literally. And they all want to help/be helped. Who is Manticore fighting for? While this happens, the grand nabobs of Earth sit around like the Song Dynasty in 1209, moving virtual navies around the board without any knowledge of what is actually happening. Trying to fight the impending doom of everything they've ever lived and filed TPS reports for, when a new player appears: "Esteemed ministers, I represent Manpower, Inc, and I would like to discuss solutions to your...troubles." Except Weber couldn't decide if they were the American or the Chinese stand-in. And he doesn't really give a poo poo. So we got a turkey shoot instead. With the Mesans as some kind of cartoon villain.
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Dec 21, 2021 04:07
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Kchama posted:A big part of the problem is specifically the Solarian League, wherein the first half of the series does everything it can to hype them up as the invincible sleeping giant that will smash you if you piss them off with everyone in Manticore (who is revealed to basically have the only actual effective/at all spy ring in the universe) shaking in their boots at the thought. In an attempt to be fair here, both Haven and Manticore have, by book 14, been at open war for something like 20 years, - with a small truce in the middle - and a cold war for decades before that. Manticore has explicitly relied on heavy R&D to keep themselves alive from the very first book, and Haven begins to rapidly play catch-up after Saint-Just is shot. The way combat evolves through the series is really striking, honestly, now that I've gone back and started re-reading it, with both sides embracing entirely new doctrines and radical changes to their materiel. Whereas the Solarian League, as noted, have always been so huge, and secure in the knowledge that they are the biggest, baddest thing around, that they haven't had to innovate to nearly the same degree, and end up spending lavishly on boondoggles like the 'Fleet 2000' program. But going back and comparing the armaments Haven and Manticore have at the beginning of the series, the League would absolutely have squashed both of them completely flat if they'd even blinked in Sol's direction, and not even noticed they'd done it. Now, if you want to argue that it's completely idiotic that the League would, in fact, ignore what's going on with Haven and Manticore on the R&D side, especially considering that there's a lot of references made to how public perception among League citizens and politicians influence the diplomatic situation vis-a-vis Manticore, Haven and the League, I am right there with you. edit: Reading through the Mil Scifi thread, I can see that this argument's already been done, so... I guess what I'm saying is that I can - kind of - suspend my disbelief here, because at least he's bothered with an in-universe justification, stupid and nonsensical though it is. Then again, this is where the series becomes truly atrocious, so. Yeah. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 06:32
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TLM3101 posted:In an attempt to be fair here, both Haven and Manticore have, by book 14, been at open war for something like 20 years, - with a small truce in the middle - and a cold war for decades before that. Manticore has explicitly relied on heavy R&D to keep themselves alive from the very first book, and Haven begins to rapidly play catch-up after Saint-Just is shot. The way combat evolves through the series is really striking, honestly, now that I've gone back and started re-reading it, with both sides embracing entirely new doctrines and radical changes to their materiel. I'm talking about at the very start of the books, where they are still laughably out of date. Like much less in 1921, at the start of the book their ships are actually more out of date and older than Grayson's on the whole. It's mentioned in MISSION OF HONOR that the Solarian League fleet has autocannon point defense, which was laughably obselete in /1800/. Like it sounds like they have a lot of ships. That 10,000 SD number is very intimidating, but then you find out that 8000 of them are long-term nonfunctional. 2000 were operable, but were extremely out of date. Like 300+ years out of date. Like Grayson's ships would have torn them apart. 300 were 'operable with "modern" refits" which amounted to them being on par with Grayson's fleet in Honor of the Queen. Like, he has the in-universe reasoning for why they are such a paper tiger, but it falls apart in the face of the setting's own logic. They were suppose to be super advanced to the point that the tech they sold Haven keeps them in the game against Manticore, but their own ships are helplessly out of date to the point that the isolation tech-haters would stand a chance against them. The crazy thing is that it isn't like military technology had been settled and there had been nothing new for centuries. Laser head missiles and laser PD were very new to the point that Manticore had only had them for the past 30 years and they had utterly revolutionized space combat. Gnoman posted:The front-line stuff in the Solarian Navy is pretty much state-of-the-art at the start of the series, possibly better than Manticore's. There's a whole big thing in the early books where the Haven navy is getting small amounts of Solarian tech and it comes very close to closing the tech gap between the two sides. But it hasn't been stable. The energy warfare era ended before the books even began, with laserhead missiles and laser PD changing everything and everyone switching over to them. It helped that Manticore always kept their units cutting edge, even 80 year old units meant for decomissioned have the latest and greatest units because of the nebulous infinite pirates for the RMN to train on. We haven't had a big naval revolution in warfare since those ships were built, but here the old broadside cannon-style ships were falling out of favor due to being utterly outmatched by missile-focused ships. The battles in the first two books are the last hurrah of lasers in the series and they're mostly relegated to finishing off brain-dead starships. When I mentioned the Solarian League fleet having autocannons, that's 2/3rds of it. The Frontier Fleet has relatively modern ships but they don't have anything of a big enough size to be worth a drat. And size is important. Anything that isn't a ship of the wall is screwed against a ship of the wall unless in immense numbers, and Frontier Fleet doesn't have the numbers to actually fight the Grand Alliance. And all of this "The Solarian League's actual fleets suck" is kind of a big issue as their supreme dominance is a major underpinning of the setting's combat. Fear of them coming over and loving your poo poo up is what kept systems in line and planet fragging from occuring. But it seems to strain credibility that Manticore wouldn't be aware that their fleets suck and have no bite to them considering it is made supremely clear that Manticore the vast majority of merchants in the universe (despite what the story previously established) and merchants are the best and it sometimes feels like only spies. Also it's still dumb that they consider Manticore, the supreme hubs of wealth in the entire universe to be a backwater barbarian hell, when they're close allies to one of the founding Solarian League nations and in relative terms effectively inside the Solarian League core. Kchama fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 10:02
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It is heavily implied in the first book (and outright stated in later works) that the laser warhead is new. Harrington wasn't certain that Sirius would be using laser heads until the first ones detonated, and Fearless ran out halfway through the battle. They weren't default issue at the start of the series. Meanwhile, explicit in-universe statements are that point defense is good enough to stop most missiles, restricting fleet actions to long-range "smile and wave" encounters with limited effect. This is borne out by a lot of ethe early fighting - it takes a massive amount of missiles to get through defenses even with the standoff potential. Without it (as was the case when most of Battle Gleet was built and mothballed) missiles are not a serious threat. When Solarian ships start showing up, they're quite explicitly described as "great energy weapons, respectable electronics, horrible missile defense". By people who would consider any ship in the first half of the war as a missile-vulnerable death trap.
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Dec 21, 2021 11:43
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Gnoman posted:It is heavily implied in the first book (and outright stated in later works) that the laser warhead is new. Harrington wasn't certain that Sirius would be using laser heads until the first ones detonated, and Fearless ran out halfway through the battle. They weren't default issue at the start of the series. Then I have horribly misremembered the first books. Still, that does make later developments slightly more sensical, with both Manticore and Haven going for a full-on missile-doctrine. Gnoman posted:Meanwhile, explicit in-universe statements are that point defense is good enough to stop most missiles, restricting fleet actions to long-range "smile and wave" encounters with limited effect. This is borne out by a lot of ethe early fighting - it takes a massive amount of missiles to get through defenses even with the standoff potential. Without it (as was the case when most of Battle Gleet was built and mothballed) missiles are not a serious threat. This might be where I got my wires crossed, since I distinctly remembers comments being made about one of the 'Nike' ships being almost brand new and also already obsolete, thanks to the new developments in doctrine and whatnot. They kind of glossed over that the laser-heads were as new as the other improvements made to the missiles. Or I just didn't think to consider it, which is equally possible. I honestly think part of the problem is the accelerated timeline, coupled with the fact that Weber doesn't seem to understand how, uhm... economies work? How both Haven and Manticore can suddenly conjure fresh and ever larger fleets after repeated 'vital' stabs to their infrastructure, and just everything that happens after War of Honor and At All Costs when the Mesan idiot-ball really starts going, makes no loving sense at all, unless one assumes - as I do - that Weber just decided to crack on with the plot that he envisioned, and just compressed what should have been some 20 years of rebuilding with a handwave. e: Actually, I'm kind of wondering if I should do a let's read of the least tension-filled and low-stakes series ever, the Manticore Ascendant series that Weber and Zahn are collaborating on. Would that be okay for the thread, or...?
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Dec 21, 2021 15:50
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The "Ship is already obsolete" occurs after the big jump in tech level completely rewrites the tech paradigm of the setting. It is equivalent to HMS Dreadnought or stealth aircraft in actual history - everything before it is instantly obsoleted. Economically, Haven's main shipyards never get destroyed, and their economy is too huge for the systems that get wiped out to totally cripple them. Meanwhile both Manticore and Grayson face serious issues rebuilding their fleets after they get hit - which is why the Grand Alliance plans to put Manticore-made fire control in Haven-built warships firing Beowulf-built missiles. There's also several times where the timeliness jumps forward by six months or two years that are hard to notice if you don't catch the reference to "X event happened y years ago" or whatever, That's something that Weber is extremely bad at.
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Dec 21, 2021 17:32
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Manticore Ascendant series is good, as it keeps everything at a believable level. And Weber's contribution was pretty much "slap name on front."
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Dec 21, 2021 17:33
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Cobalt-60 posted:Manticore Ascendant series is good, as it keeps everything at a believable level. And Weber's contribution was pretty much "slap name on front." The trouble it has is that I don't feel like there are any real over-arching tension outside of "will our plucky heroes overcome their current predicament?*" , since, well... We already know how things turn out, if not the specific. That said, it's certainly better than the main series ended up being. So far. Gnoman posted:The "Ship is already obsolete" occurs after the big jump in tech level completely rewrites the tech paradigm of the setting. It is equivalent to HMS Dreadnought or stealth aircraft in actual history - everything before it is instantly obsoleted. Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm referring to with the 'Nike'. The part I missed was where the laser-heads themselves were relatively new tech for... whatever reason. Gnoman posted:Economically, Haven's main shipyards never get destroyed, and their economy is too huge for the systems that get wiped out to totally cripple them. Meanwhile both Manticore and Grayson face serious issues rebuilding their fleets after they get hit - which is why the Grand Alliance plans to put Manticore-made fire control in Haven-built warships firing Beowulf-built missiles. Haven not getting hit is a fair point, it's just that the logistics of slapping Manticoran fire control in Haven-built ships seem - to me, at least - to ignore a lot of travel time and logistical challenges even with the wormhole junction, not to mention the manpower-requirements which are brought up several times. And trained workers becomes especially relevant with the Yawata and Blackbird strikes where a lot of the workforce is just straight-up murdered, not to mention the Beowulf-strike later. Like, yes, Haven can take up the slack in hulls, but by the time Grand Fleet has become a thing, Manticore is still just starting to rebuild their capacity. Even with Weber being bad at noting time-skips, and me being terrible at noticing them. *Yes, they will ed: Deptfordx posted:Oh? Are they any good. As well as totally checking out on Weber, Timothy Zahn doesn't fill me with overwhelming confidence either. I mean, I am being pretty unfair when I called them least-tension, low-stakes series; the overall stakes certainly are - this is the story of just how Manticore became what it is, not if it'll happen - but for the protagonists the stakes are quite high indeed. It's better than the main series, to be sure, though, mainly because so far it's actually stuck to its premise; portraying Manticore as a backwater, single-system monarchy that is pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 18:50
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Cobalt-60 posted:Manticore Ascendant series is good, as it keeps everything at a believable level. And Weber's contribution was pretty much "slap name on front." Oh? Are they any good. As well as totally checking out on Weber, Timothy Zahn doesn't fill me with overwhelming confidence either.
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Dec 21, 2021 18:56
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Deptfordx posted:Oh? Are they any good. As well as totally checking out on Weber, Timothy Zahn doesn't fill me with overwhelming confidence either. Nah, they're pretty good. Battles are a handful of ships on each side using tactics more complicated than "FIRE ALL THE MISSILES" that you get in the later Weber books.
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Dec 21, 2021 20:35
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They're standard issue Zahn sci-fi in the Harrington setting. This makes them the best books in the setting by a large margin, because while Zahn is very formulaic he's also pretty competent inside of that formula and avoids all the big Weber problems. Doesn't get tangled up in million-missile duels, doesn't get hung up on CAPITALISM GOOD SOCIALISM BAD, etc.
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Dec 22, 2021 02:03
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I honestly don't know why you guys are still doing this. Don't get me wrong, Weber sucks, but half the arguments in the thread are about various made up technologies of fictional missiles, but that's just window dressing on the core of these books. Ultimately, Weber's works come down to recycling one generic formula endlessly and selling it to gullible nerds who have poor taste because that's what the fantasy-industrial complex does. Take a protagonist who is either royalty or believes strongly in a good royal family. Make them come from a kingdom that has advanced military technology. Pit this heroic kingdom which is vaguely capitalist but also loves its royalty - who is never prone to any abuse of power associated with real world royals - against a collection of evil bad men who are either religious zealots, communists, or both. Spend 700 pages explaining how the men and women of Heroic Kingdom slaughter the Bad Empire of Swordsmen with rail cannon. Bullshit about fictional technology for 50 pages. That's it. There's not much more to Weber than that. Sure, goons get very offended when Weber criticizes socialism, but it's not like Weber has any actually valid or interesting critiques about how communism or religious fanaticism cause people to do terrible things. Like, sure, it might be funny if you compare the promised revolutionary utopia that is totally around the corner to the Rapture and try to argue that they're similar, but Weber fails that extremely low bar. Terry Goodkind has a more cogent and interesting critique of socialism than David Weber, and that's such a low bar you could crush an anthill with it. These are supposed to be pulp adventure stories, but any sense of dramatic tension is leached away by having the main bad guys always be incompetent morons blinded by <bad ideology of the week> and also heavily outgunned. I say this as someone who abandoned the Let's Read of Safehold in the milscifi thread, just don't read Weber! Don't buy his books, don't obsess over them by doing long mock threads on the internet, just yeet his crap into the used book bin and go read something good!
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Dec 22, 2021 04:23
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Gnoman posted:It is heavily implied in the first book (and outright stated in later works) that the laser warhead is new. Harrington wasn't certain that Sirius would be using laser heads until the first ones detonated, and Fearless ran out halfway through the battle. They weren't default issue at the start of the series. They're new but they're not THAT new. Laser warheads were invented around 1800 and were in their modern form in 1860. Manticore had all already switched over to laser warheads on all their ships, even ships that were 60 years old at the time. And it seemed like at the start ships carried a mix of laser and nuclear warheads, even though I don't think this is ever seen again. It probably was just a consequence of Weber having not really thought that hard about it. His later worldbuilding says that the 1860 model laser warheads were capable of damaging any armor, even stuff thought to be immune to nuclear warheads. So there's not really any reason to have nuclear missiles if laserheads are better in every single way for the past 40 years. The only reason they might retain nuclear missiles is the whole thing about Manticore's leadership being painfully conservative about using new things at the time, but that's not actually borne out in the books. TLM3101 posted:I mean, I am being pretty unfair when I called them least-tension, low-stakes series; the overall stakes certainly are - this is the story of just how Manticore became what it is, not if it'll happen - but for the protagonists the stakes are quite high indeed. It's better than the main series, to be sure, though, mainly because so far it's actually stuck to its premise; portraying Manticore as a backwater, single-system monarchy that is pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't help that Weber will set books months before the previous one ended but during the events of them, and fill in stuff that previous books should have had, and will repeat chapters constantly. Honestly that 'premise' was never once an actual thing despite Weber repeating it a lot. It's connected directly to the heart of the Solarian League and it drives pretty much all wealth in the universe single-handedly and is one of the richest if not the richest system in the universe. It'd be like if the real life British Empire at the height of their power was thought of as a worthless backwater by France (beyond France just wanting to stick it to the British). TheGreatEvilKing posted:I honestly don't know why you guys are still doing this. It's fun to make fun of them. That's pretty much it. And some people actually like them, and this thread is for them to talk about why they like it too. It delivers fresh posting foes to me. Honestly I wouldn't bother if they weren't insanely popular, or at least once were.
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Dec 22, 2021 05:08
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Kchama posted:. I mean, yeah, this does absolutely not hold true in the main series, but is actually true in the Ascendant series. If the thread's agreeable, I think I will do a Let's Read of the first book, A Call to Duty, to compare it to the main one. Kchama posted:It's fun to make fun of them. That's pretty much it. And some people actually like them, and this thread is for them to talk about why they like it too. It delivers fresh posting foes to me. It also gets this out of the MilSci-Fi thread. And, well, the books seem to sell well enough that they're still popular. Like I've already said, I quite like the first books for what they are; Napoleonic Naval Warfare Adventure Melodrama IN SPAAAAAACE! It's the literary equivalent of junk-food; Terrible for you, but enjoyable there and then, and requires no effort, which I appreciate given that my job is quite literally to read serious books books about serious topics ( I am a reference-librarian in a public library ). Sometimes I just want something that will let me switch my brain off and indulge in empty literary calories.
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Dec 22, 2021 06:43
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TLM3101 posted:And, well, the books seem to sell well enough that they're still popular. Like I've already said, I quite like the first books for what they are; Napoleonic Naval Warfare Adventure Melodrama IN SPAAAAAACE! It's the literary equivalent of junk-food; Terrible for you, but enjoyable there and then, and requires no effort, which I appreciate given that my job is quite literally to read serious books books about serious topics ( I am a reference-librarian in a public library ). The publisher also gave most of them away for free in ebook form, so they were very easy to read if you were both poor and bored. I've read a lot of terrible Baen books for this reason.
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Dec 22, 2021 07:15
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TLM3101 posted:I mean, yeah, this does absolutely not hold true in the main series, but is actually true in the Ascendant series. If the thread's agreeable, I think I will do a Let's Read of the first book, A Call to Duty, to compare it to the main one. Go ahead if you want. That's what this thread is for. I have no trouble with you doing that. I actually haven't read those books myself. I should, I guess. And honestly, I'm not against that. I may criticize them all to hell and argue that they suck and I dislike them but I sure as hell won't say that you can't still enjoy them. Khizan posted:The publisher also gave most of them away for free in ebook form, so they were very easy to read if you were both poor and bored. I've read a lot of terrible Baen books for this reason. 
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Dec 22, 2021 07:46
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Kchama posted:They're new but they're not THAT new. Laser warheads were invented around 1800 and were in their modern form in 1860. Manticore had all already switched over to laser warheads on all their ships, even ships that were 60 years old at the time. And it seemed like at the start ships carried a mix of laser and nuclear warheads, even though I don't think this is ever seen again. It probably was just a consequence of Weber having not really thought that hard about it. His later worldbuilding says that the 1860 model laser warheads were capable of damaging any armor, even stuff thought to be immune to nuclear warheads. So there's not really any reason to have nuclear missiles if laserheads are better in every single way for the past 40 years. The only reason they might retain nuclear missiles is the whole thing about Manticore's leadership being painfully conservative about using new things at the time, but that's not actually borne out in the books. The naval steam turbine was invented in 1884. Aside from a few experimental destroyers, it wasn't put into a warship until 1907 (on Dreadnought). High caliber guns capable of punching through even battleship armor were introduced in 1893 (on the Majestic-class predreadnoughts) but didn't become a primary weapon until 1907 (on Dreadnought). The all-or-nothing armor scheme (in which all of a ship's armor is devoted to protecting the ship's vitals, with none wasted on non-critical sections) was used on a few ironclad classes in 1876, but didn't come back until 1911 (on the US Navy's Nevada-class superdreadnoughts). Or, in other words, there are critical developments that, in real history, took 23, 14, and 35 years to even become a real thing (and many of them were far from universal for some time afterward). The books are set in 1900 PD, 40-ish years after the laser head became capable of posing a threat to capital ships. Comparison to actual history shows that this isn't an unreasonable amount of time for a new system to get fully adopted.
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Dec 22, 2021 11:29
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Gnoman posted:The naval steam turbine was invented in 1884. Aside from a few experimental destroyers, it wasn't put into a warship until 1907 (on Dreadnought). Not 40ish years after they were capable of posing a threat. 40 years after no amount of capital ship armor could stop them. There's a big difference between those two lines. It's more like 100 years after they were capable of posing a threat, and 40 years after armor became unable to protect against them in any sort of way. Like 10-20 years to be doctrined in to be primary weapons sounds fair. 40 years after it was clear that they were the pinnacle weapon seems to be taking quite a bit of time. And it's not people hadn't noticed them at all. The Fearless, an 80 year old CL that was being decommissioned in a few scant years and used as a testbed for new non-missile weapons was armed with laser warheads despite the fact that it wasn't ever expected to see real combat again. So is 80 year old ships are being armed with laser warheads, why wouldn't they be primary weapons on the whole? And in fact, it is stated to be such, as in OBS they mention that nuclear warheads were only kept on board for warning shots and freebie kills against ships without any defenses. And again, 100 years since introduction, 40 years since they've gained superiority even over the toughest ships. That's a slightly different time-table than what you're talking about.
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Dec 22, 2021 12:42
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Fearless having them isn't all that telling of anything. You don't keep the same ammunition the ship was built with, you load it with whatever's standard at the time you send it out. For capital ships, "able to punch through any armor" is roughly the same as "capable of posing a threat". More importantly, even if you notice "hey, these things can hurt even the strongest ship now", that doesn't mean you immediately realize all the implications. "Can do damage" doesn't automatically translate to "will now be the main means of damaging other ships". To use a different historical analogy, ships were being built on the eve of WWII with incredibly anemic anti-aircraft weaponry, twenty years after General Mitchell demonstrated the ability of airplanes to sink ships. Not because the designers hadn't heard of the well-publicized tests. Rather, it was because they still underestimated the ability of aircraft to actually hit and destroy an active moving target as opposed to a moored target ship, especially with some doubts about the rigorousness of the tests that were done. There was also a fair bit of conservatism involved about what kinds of aircraft would be attacking and how easy it would be to hit them. To compare this to the situation in the books, it isn't really that odd to imagine Solarian admirals looking at the laser head and thinking "well, this is enough to make missiles a bit more dangerous, but our existing point defense setups will still keep it out" for a while. Then, when they start to realize they were wrong, they not only have to adapt the designs for their newest and prospective ships, but go back and apply the updates to all ten thousand units they have. And note that the "the laser head is not a magic bullet and we can still stop it" notion is strongly supported by the books. The early fleet fights in the series only have missiles getting through with long engagements, when one side greatly outnumbers the other, or when they somehow throw way more missiles than normal for fleets of their given sizes. Everything in the books (even discounting the explicit "the Solarian stuff is fine by our prewar standards" mentions) supports the notion that the Solarian ships are only this obsolete because of the huge leaps made during the war, and they are every bit as much a threat as they are said to be until that leap happens.
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Dec 22, 2021 13:03
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Gnoman posted:Fearless having them isn't all that telling of anything. You don't keep the same ammunition the ship was built with, you load it with whatever's standard at the time you send it out. Yes, that is what I was saying. Laser heads were standard before 1900, hence even the Fearless, a ship never expected to do any actual combat, being armed with them as its primary missile weapon. You were arguing that they weren't standard because they were TOO new and pointing at the Fearless using nukes when they ran out of laser heads. The nukes that are explicitly only there to be harmless warning shots. And the point of the laser head is that it could, in fact, breach any armor at a very long range, unlike nukes which had to be drat close and couldn't be relied on against the biggest ships, which is why they basically just relied on energy weapons at that point since they were much more likely to work. It's a complete and total upgrade, and were again proven to be totally superior 100 years ago, much less 40. The fact that the Solarian League isn't even starting to use them and laser clusters on ships period until the 1900s proves how woefully obselete they are. What I'm getting at is that the Solarian League hasn't just missed the technological leaps and bounds happening literally next door of THIS war, but also of the past 100+ years. The Solarian League just doesn't make sense that it could be this believed to be unstoppable juggernaut that nobody would dare strike at (or even attempt to leave) for 1000 years when they've largely been riding off of the coattails of a single battle 600 years ago. Hell it is amazing they made it that long considering they're explicitly based off of the Articles Of Confederation and Perpetual Union, a government that didn't even last a decade in the real world. Kchama fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 13:30
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Kchama posted:Yes, that is what I was saying. Laser heads were standard before 1900, hence even the Fearless, a ship never expected to do any actual combat, being armed with them as its primary missile weapon. You were arguing that they weren't standard because they were TOO new and pointing at the Fearless using nukes when they ran out of laser heads. The nukes that are explicitly only there to be harmless warning shots. Fearless has laser warheads because you load your ship with the latest weapons in your inventory no matter how old it is. They don't have a stockpile of 80 year old missiles for their 80 year old ship. The weapons used in the first book are the front-line state-of-the art equipment of the Royal Manticoran Navy. That front-line equipment only contains a portion of laser heads because those are not yet the standard issue weapon. It is also never stated that laser clusters and laser warheads aren't used at all by the SLN before the 1900s. Only that some of their ships haven't yet been upgraded to laser point defense. I'm actually able to pull up quotes now. quote:For that matter, assuming the stats we've pulled out of the computers are really accurate—which, to be honest, in some instances I find a little difficult to believe—at least two thirds of their reserve fleet's still equipped with autocannon point defense, not lasers." "Reserve fleet" meaning the 8000 ships that are sleeping in storage, and are fully expected to need refits before being used. Which means that all the ships in active duty have been upgraded. You're reading something into the text that simply isn't there.
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Dec 22, 2021 13:50
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From my recollection I don't think that laser heads have a particularly long range, especially compared to actual ship mounted weapons and considering the high fractions of c they're closing the range at anyway. Nor that they were especially more destructive than a large Nuclear weapon actually detonating on top of you. The issue was that point defence had become sufficently lethal that regular nukes were almost certainly incapable of surviving to that point blank range, whereas the stand-off weapons had a better chance of doing at least some damage. Again, before Manticore could retain control of missiles and snipe out single ships EW meant Salvoes would tend to distribute themselves evenly over a close formation. So battle was more a case of death by a 1000 cuts, wearing down an opponents squadron. Which was another reason battles at the start of the books were so inconclusive. You could generally roll ship and gently caress off if you weren't tied to defend something vital.
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Dec 22, 2021 17:25
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The ability to target individual ships was there (though it was common for missiles to lose lock and target something else). Per-missile hit chances were pretty low, though. The "distribution across an entire formation" scenes were usually a result of the launching side screwing up. Everything else is almost verbatim from the text.
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Dec 22, 2021 17:58
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The Solarians expect any military contact between them and their primitive dirt eating neighbors to be handled by Frontier Fleet anyway. The old Fearless vs. a contemporary FF battlecruiser would not likely have been a one-sided fight. A later books modern Manticoran light cruiser could take out a whole FF task group. That's the tech advancement vs. stagnation in action.
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Dec 22, 2021 18:04
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Isn't it said somewhere that the SLN shut down it's R&D decades ago for embezzlement reasons?
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Dec 22, 2021 19:08
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Space Butler posted:Isn't it said somewhere that the SLN shut down it's R&D decades ago for embezzlement reasons? That doesn't ring a bell, and much of their R&D was done by contractors.
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Dec 22, 2021 19:14
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I want to say that the answer is something like "They had such a ridiculously huge conventional navy that they felt like any significant advances in shipbuilding/weapons/etc would only serve to weaken them comparatively because they had such a clear advantage when fights were grueling attrition matches". Not saying that's a good reason, just that I think that's what their reasoning was.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:28
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Gnoman posted:Fearless has laser warheads because you load your ship with the latest weapons in your inventory no matter how old it is. They don't have a stockpile of 80 year old missiles for their 80 year old ship. The weapons used in the first book are the front-line state-of-the art equipment of the Royal Manticoran Navy. That front-line equipment only contains a portion of laser heads because those are not yet the standard issue weapon. I never said they weren't used at all before the 1900s, though the OBS quote you pulled up implied that, which is what I thought was ridiculous. Like, if the SLN was known for using laser warheads, then why would Honor be expecting nuclear missiles and hoping they hadn't upgraded yet. And yes, I actually outright said it was 2/3rds of their reserve fleet that still had autocannons that we know for sure. But that's also, in fact, the vast majority of their main forces! If 2/3rds AT LEAST of your reserve fleet is basically unable to handle a modern-day confrontation, then 2/3rds of your fleet is basically useless. That's only their info on the reserve fleet. Here's a fun fact, it's implied that while the main fleet is more up to date, but that 'up to date' is incredibly relative! Only 300 out of the 10000 ships are actually modern in any appreciable sense, but they're 'modern' according to a 300 year old procurement doctrine. Gnoman posted:That doesn't ring a bell, and much of their R&D was done by contractors. Gnoman is correct about this. They do all their R&D with contractors, who apparently sells everything they make to other nations, and the SLN basically gets nothing functional. Khizan posted:I want to say that the answer is something like "They had such a ridiculously huge conventional navy that they felt like any significant advances in shipbuilding/weapons/etc would only serve to weaken them comparatively because they had such a clear advantage when fights were grueling attrition matches". I have to admit I've been impressed that the Solarian League has a Navy that ISN'T chomping at the bit for new toys, money for said toys, and targets for said toys. That's not something you see in a super power very often!
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Dec 23, 2021 02:31
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Frontier Fleet gets all the cool new stuff. There's an ongoing effort to upgrade Battle Fleet, but the budget only goes so far... Add to that centuries of graft, and Battle Fleet gets shakier. I'm imagining an audit after war breaks out: "How could you MISPLACE 1000 ships?"
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Dec 23, 2021 04:25
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