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Cobalt-60 posted: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. It doesn't help that Frontier Fleet isn't allowed to have anything over a battlecruiser, so the extent of its power is actually very low. It is fine for them normally because 99% of single-system polities don't have more than a single ancient BC, so a BC squadron isn't ever going to come up against anything that's a threat. Also if I remember correctly, all of the Battle Fleet upgrade is either useless cosmetic garbage that will only do anything in the future, or is actually purely (secretly) Mesan ships.
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Dec 23, 2021 04:37
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Speaking of the Mesans, that's where the series goes completely off the rails, in large parts because Weber pulls some poo poo that just ruins everything about HH's characterization wholesale. Like, from the first book when we're introduced to her, Honor is described as being from the yeomanry of Sphinx, so pretty solidly middle-class, independently wealthy and whatnot, but not part of the upper crust. And that background sticks for a good long while. All the accolades heaped on her, turning her into Duchess and Steadholder Industrialist-WarCrimes ( Thank you, Philosophy Tube ), makes her flustered, she has no background to deal with it, yadda yadda yadda. Like, it's set up as, if not rags to riches, then at least "Common person makes their own fortune". Except her mom is apparently one of the finest geneticists in the Star Kingdom, and her dad's one of the best surgeons. Ooookaaaaaaayyyy...? Followed by the revelation that the Harrington family was specifically genetically uplifted to be better adapted to high-gravity worlds... Which, you know, fine. It does get pretty weird when this is linked to them all being, like, super-smart and having Mensa-level IQ. Apparently. And then we find out that haHAH, no, her mother's family is actually one of the most prestigious on Beowulf, one of the founding star-systems of League, and Honor's family supplied one of the most well known of the League's Founding Fathers. Just... out of left field. As an aside. Before the loving Mesans begin to wax poetic about what a shame it is that the Harrington alpha-line slipped out of their control and now has become their nemesis and of woe, alack, alas. Like... Mother of gently caress, Weber, you just literally went full on Nazi and instead of a story of 'Common Human proves themselves against all that the explicit eugenicist racists can throw at her' we now have 'Nazis lose control of genetically engineered ubermensch and it bites them on the rear end, but the ubermensch is cool and good, and actually genetically superior, so the Nazis are kind of right, but just implemented it wrong'. gently caress. Like, how much has he hung out with Ringo and Kratmann, for god's sakes? TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Dec 23, 2021 |
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Dec 23, 2021 06:45
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Ok, you guys are still arguing about the plausibility of the technical gap and the Solarian League being out of touch dum-dums, and sure, fine, whatever, but it's ignoring the bigger point that ultimately Manticore having infinity missiles and curbstomping every single badman fleet serves to make the ultimate missile victim dramatic tension. Like, yes, sure, the Solarians are Qing dynasty idiots who can't conceive that their empire can ever collapse, fine, but why do I want to read about it? I don't really care so much if we follow Weber's invented timeline of imaginary space missiles - although it is a hilarious creativity failure that the future physics-defying spacecraft are just using rockets like modern aircraft - but if the entire conflict is "Manticore stomps the Solarians becuz Sollys are DUMM", and there's absolutely no threat or tension, how is this at all interesting? I can see enjoying the earlier books because it was very possible for Manticore to lose, and Honor had to get used to the weird prototype ship she was assigned, but later crap in the series where battles become "24000 missiles >>> 20 lasers" and Manticore just smashes everything is boring. Who cares what the actual missile history is, when the result it's going for is such tepid dogshit? The sad thing is, I can see the Solarians as a moderately effective parody of the US Pentagon's procurement system where you throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the F-35 only to get a plane that crashes driving off the carrier or where the results of the railgun program are "uh... gently caress" while the Chinese are driving their railgun boat around snickering like assholes. It's not an inherently terrible idea and in the hands of a competent author it could resonate pretty well today. The problem is that once again this idea gets into the hands of Weber, who is less interested in exploring it than in using it as fodder to write Stellaris Doomstack: the Novel. The Solarians would be much more interesting if the story was about the last five competent dudes in the Solarian government trying to unfuck it while the Manticorian Deathball came at them, or if the Solarians had enough strategic assets so there were, I dunno, three different fleets coming at Manticore and Manticore only had enough ships to stop one. Instead, Weber knows that the Solarians can't possibly provide interesting opposition, so we get space Pizzagate, which is the natural escalation from Weber's usual flip a coin villain generator where you get either a completely irredeemable sexual predator or an honorable man trapped serving a country of badmen. Again, you could tell an interesting story where the government of corrupt idiots run by Pizzagaters is thrown into a collision course with a small country who needs to expose the Pizzagate conspiracy before it gets crushed by numbers (although this has some pretty overt fascist overtones so maybe don't do it) but that would once again require a writer of more competence than David Weber could ever be. EDIT: This Pizzagate (Mesan) crap has given me an idea...would anyone be interested in an effortpost of Eco's Ur-Fascism vs Late Honor Harrington? TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Dec 23, 2021 |
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Dec 23, 2021 06:57
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Honor's mother is the single worst character in the entire series
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Dec 23, 2021 07:26
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FuturePastNow posted:Honor's mother is the single worst character in the entire series Not helped by Weber's pretty open, uhm... How do I phrase this... obvious personal penchant for petite women, and especially of east-asian descent. To the point where it is well into disturbing. e: Oh. And all of them "sassy". Please imagine I made the quotation-marks fill the entire screen and blink neon-red. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Dec 23, 2021 |
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Dec 23, 2021 07:58
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Honestly, the only remotely interesting characters in this whole series were those few decent commissars/SS (ffs weber) officers scattered around the place in earlier books
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Dec 23, 2021 10:59
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TLM3101 posted:Speaking of the Mesans, that's where the series goes completely off the rails, in large parts because Weber pulls some poo poo that just ruins everything about HH's characterization wholesale. The "Harrington Genome" being a lost Mesan alpha line came out of nowhere and didn't amount to anything. I have no idea what Weber was thinking when he put that in, and it doesn't really make any sense whatsoever. At best, it ties into the "Detwiler was fundamentally right in that banning genetic engineering to improve the species was a step too far, but everything he's done to try proving that point was evil and wrong" idea that's fairly central to the last third of the series. But it doesn't really contribute to that either. Before that, her genetic mods were fairly reasonable - increased tolerance for higher gravity, including enhanced speed and reaction time at the cost of a much higher and more demanding metabolism. Kchama posted:Also if I remember correctly, all of the Battle Fleet upgrade is either useless cosmetic garbage that will only do anything in the future, or is actually purely (secretly) Mesan ships. Not entirely. The "Fleet 2000" initiative did have a lot of "look more like the movies" design to it that wasn't optimally efficient, but it was also a real hardware upgrade. There's even a mention that some of the new EW systems were "probably" better than what Haven had at the time. They just weren't up to the frontline standards of the people who had been at cold and hot war for decades. As for two-thirds of Reserve Fleet being obsolete, that's an explicit result of them being sent straight into mothballs as soon as they were built for decades, even centuries. There's a line (which I can't bring up for a quote because I don't remember which book it was in) about the need to modernize the reserve as part of activating it. Given the sheer size of their active fleet - they have more capital ships active than Manticore or Haven have ships according to the appendix of book 3 - they almost certainly never meant to be bringing the Reserve directly into action. More likely, the purpose is that if they start losing ships to accident or hostile action it will be quicker to replace them from the Reserve than just building new ones. Gnoman fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Dec 23, 2021 |
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Dec 23, 2021 11:13
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Gnoman posted:The "Harrington Genome" being a lost Mesan alpha line came out of nowhere and didn't amount to anything. I have no idea what Weber was thinking when he put that in, and it doesn't really make any sense whatsoever. At best, it ties into the "Detwiler was fundamentally right in that banning genetic engineering to improve the species was a step too far, but everything he's done to try proving that point was evil and wrong" idea that's fairly central to the last third of the series. But it doesn't really contribute to that either. Yeah, I have no problem with Honor's mods as things start out, because they seem pretty reasonable all things considered, and the drawbacks come into play in books 7 and 8 in a big way. My problem is the asspull of the 'Harrington Genome' being a lost Mesan alpha-line, because at best, like you said, it ties into the arguments around genetic engineering and that a full ban on any of it was a step too far, but at worst, whether intended that way or not, it is actually an endorsement of the Mesan plan. After all, here they have a lost alpha-line ( and of loving course it's an alpha line, couldn't be a gamma or delta-line, which would at least have added some interesting ideological tension, nope, it's an alpha-line ) kicking their rear end up and down the settled galaxy, being generally perceived as tough, heroic and a shining example of exactly the kind of genetic Ubermensch the Mesans want to turn everybody into. It is incredibly unnecessary, wildly out of left field, and at least for me, it retroactively taints all the preceding books and makes them worse. Bad enough it turns out she's from the closest thing Beowulf can have to noble blood, now she's part of literal genetic aristocracy too? loving hell, Weber. I am genuinely hacked off at this bullshit so-called "Plot point" all over again. TLM3101 fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Dec 23, 2021 |
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Dec 23, 2021 13:49
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Maybe he was going for it being proof that it wasn't the genetic engineering that makes the Mesans evil. That's the most charitable interpretation of it that I can come up with. It really makes no sense on several levels both as a plot point and in-universe.
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Dec 23, 2021 14:11
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TLM3101 posted:Speaking of the Mesans, that's where the series goes completely off the rails, in large parts because Weber pulls some poo poo that just ruins everything about HH's characterization wholesale. I seem to remember that Honor's even related to the First Family, so she's basically a princess too. I always disliked how Weber deals with politics, especially with regards with Honor. He initially presents it as something she can't effectively do well in, because it's out of her domain of "defeating stuff with violence", but then it turns out that the societies she lives in both actually have it enshrined in law that you can, in fact, defeat your domestic foes with superhuman violence and not even suffer any consequences that she actually isn't fine with. Gnoman posted:Not entirely. The "Fleet 2000" initiative did have a lot of "look more like the movies" design to it that wasn't optimally efficient, but it was also a real hardware upgrade. There's even a mention that some of the new EW systems were "probably" better than what Haven had at the time. They just weren't up to the frontline standards of the people who had been at cold and hot war for decades. It's actually outright said that it was just a PR campaign to get more funding, and so almostall of the 'upgrades' were cosmetic and PR fluff, with the only REAL advantage being that the consoles and stuff were more modular for future upgrades and CIC was somewhat improved. Also "We instantly mothball the new ships we build" is kind of an issue since that means that effectively, they don't have them! And they have a big active fleet, but most of it is explicitly ancient near-useless crap, with only 300 ships even being effective in the modern day. Also it's heavily implied that they can't actually afford fielding all of them, considering in the final battles of the latest books they could only muster 600 SDs total to invade Manticore AND defend Earth, a number which is matched by the Grand Alliance easily despite them exploding each other's entire spacys multiple times in the past decade. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Ok, you guys are still arguing about the plausibility of the technical gap and the Solarian League being out of touch dum-dums, and sure, fine, whatever, but it's ignoring the bigger point that ultimately Manticore having infinity missiles and curbstomping every single badman fleet serves to make the ultimate missile victim dramatic tension. Like, yes, sure, the Solarians are Qing dynasty idiots who can't conceive that their empire can ever collapse, fine, but why do I want to read about it? I don't really care so much if we follow Weber's invented timeline of imaginary space missiles - although it is a hilarious creativity failure that the future physics-defying spacecraft are just using rockets like modern aircraft - but if the entire conflict is "Manticore stomps the Solarians becuz Sollys are DUMM", and there's absolutely no threat or tension, how is this at all interesting? I can see enjoying the earlier books because it was very possible for Manticore to lose, and Honor had to get used to the weird prototype ship she was assigned, but later crap in the series where battles become "24000 missiles >>> 20 lasers" and Manticore just smashes everything is boring. Who cares what the actual missile history is, when the result it's going for is such tepid dogshit? Go for it. Also hey now, he's not writing Stellaris Doomstack: The Novel. It's STARFIRE Doomstack: The Novel, because his books are all based on his tabletop game series, which is why it has the goofy naming conventions for the ship classes. Kchama fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Dec 23, 2021 |
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Dec 23, 2021 14:31
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Eeeegh. I really use 'Like' too much. I need to stop posting when tired, I guess. The point stands, though. On the other hand, I am now trapped on a train for the next.... five hours, with nothing better to do, so I'm going to open up A Call to Duty and start reading.
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Dec 23, 2021 14:39
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TLM3101 posted:Eeeegh. I really use 'Like' too much. I need to stop posting when tired, I guess. Your posts are fine. Like, I use like way more than you do.
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Dec 23, 2021 14:41
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Kchama posted:Also "We instantly mothball the new ships we build" is kind of an issue since that means that effectively, they don't have them! And they have a big active fleet, but most of it is explicitly ancient near-useless crap, with only 300 ships even being effective in the modern day. Also it's heavily implied that they can't actually afford fielding all of them, considering in the final battles of the latest books they could only muster 600 SDs total to invade Manticore AND defend Earth, a number which is matched by the Grand Alliance easily despite them exploding each other's entire spacys multiple times in the past decade. Instant mothballing is a thing that has historically happened - HMS Victory is one famous example, and several end-of-WWII ships got the same treatment. As for the active fleet numbers, they don't automatically have them all in the same place. Just because they don't have all 2000 in the attack on Manticore or the later attack on Earth doesn't mean they aren't active any more than the Manticorans only having a small Home Fleet present when Haven attacked Manticore meant they couldn't afford their ships. As for the number of ships the Grand Alliance has, nations in an existential war tend to devote a somewhat higher portion of their wealth to weapons than one that's comfortably at peace and knows that nobody will ever dare to fight them. Kchama posted:Also hey now, he's not writing Stellaris Doomstack: The Novel. It's STARFIRE Doomstack: The Novel, because his books are all based on his tabletop game series, which is why it has the goofy naming conventions for the ship classes. While the books do have a lot of starfire influence, only two ship classes (the LAC and the derivative CLAC - the RW analog to those are defined more rigorously according to the primary armament) aren't straight from the real world. Granted that "dreadnought" and "superdreadnought" didn't stick because the Dreadnought made regular battleships not be a thing (regular battleships did the same to ironclads), and superdreadnoughts came along right after so everything just got called a "battleship", but they're not game creations. He doesn't even use some of the odder designations such as CB ("cruiser, Big"), AKA ("Auxiliary, (K)argo, Attack" (C was already used), or TR ("Torpedo Retriever").
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Dec 23, 2021 15:44
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Gnoman posted:Instant mothballing is a thing that has historically happened - HMS Victory is one famous example, and several end-of-WWII ships got the same treatment. Uh, which HMS Victory? The famous one was only 'mothballed' because it was basically built like crap and they had to spend a decade fixing that. A lot of historical mothballed ships are used for various things like training, and aren't just "We're building this just to toss it into a closet and never think about again!" They were built for a PURPOSE that ended up not existing. That's completely different from the idea that you're building these ships to just stash somewhere and never use because they're too expensive to bring back into service. If the Solarian League was devoting like .0001% of the wealth that the Grand Alliance was devoting to their navy, then the Solarian League should just be casually drowning them in ship hulls, able to use SDNs as ramming ships to run over the Grand Alliance. It's only through Weber deliberately hamstringing the Solarian League as hard as possible in every without just having them hit the self-destruct button every time a non-SLN was in the same star system. The Solarian League is on a scale that Manticore and Haven shouldn't even be able to sniff at the Solarian League in any way, shape or form. Just the Core Worlds are, according to Weber, like a thousand Manticores alone. Also I was less referring to the names themselves and more the fact that they use real-world names as more or less pure 'indicates this relative size' and much less what their specific role is. In the Weberverse and Starfire verse, bigger pretty much always equals better at everything.
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Dec 23, 2021 17:29
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Kchama posted:Uh, which HMS Victory? The famous one was only 'mothballed' because it was basically built like crap and they had to spend a decade fixing that. A lot of historical mothballed ships are used for various things like training, and aren't just "We're building this just to toss it into a closet and never think about again!" They were built for a PURPOSE that ended up not existing. That's completely different from the idea that you're building these ships to just stash somewhere and never use because they're too expensive to bring back into service. When the first-rate ship of the line Victory was built in 1765, the Royal Navy decided that the war was being won and a new first-rate was not needed. So she was put directly into storage, and didn't go on active duty until the French declared war in 1778. You're thinking of the period between 1797 and 1803 where battle damage and general wear and tear had degraded the ship to the point where extreme repairs were needed. I don't know about starfire, but Weber's classifications very much indicate role, not a strict size comparison. Ships are given different missions based on what kind of ship they are, but the reader mostly sees the big fleet battles, not the various other things ships do.
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Dec 23, 2021 17:38
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Gnoman posted:When the first-rate ship of the line Victory was built in 1765, the Royal Navy decided that the war was being won and a new first-rate was not needed. So she was put directly into storage, and didn't go on active duty until the French declared war in 1778. So yes, that happened because circumstances (and the long building time of the ship) meant that it no longer had a purpose to fulfill. That's entirely different from 'Well, might as well just keep crankin' them out and throwing them in the storage locker' that the SLN does. And I mean, sort of? Like, they do have various roles, but this has nothing to do with their ship classification and entirely to do with their ship size. Destroyers and Light Cruisers do the same things, but Light Cruisers are bigger. Heavy Cruisers and Battlecruisers do everything that Destroyers and Light Cruisers do, but both do it better and are also Ship of the Wall screens. Battleships are specifically obsolete as Ships of the Wall because people figured out that DNs and SDs are literally the same thing but better in every way, and as time goes on, the focus becomes entirely on the SDs.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:09
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:EDIT: This Pizzagate (Mesan) crap has given me an idea...would anyone be interested in an effortpost of Eco's Ur-Fascism vs Late Honor Harrington?
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Dec 23, 2021 18:56
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:...would anyone be interested in an effortpost of Eco's Ur-Fascism vs Late Honor Harrington? I'm interested. All military SF has a tendency to slide towards authoritarianism, and fascism slips in. some day, I'll re-read Starship Troopers.
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Dec 23, 2021 19:52
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David Weber's Fascist Adventure In Ur-Fascism, Eco lays out 14 points that he says are common to all fascist regimes. Many of these appear in David Weber's work as heroic Manticorean traits. Now, I want to emphasize that I don't think Weber is a fascist - he might be more of a libertarian, but ultimately I think he's a lousy writer who's too lucrative for editors to touch his nonsense. We're going to be looking at A Rising Thunder, which I read a long time ago and fortunately a let's read has already been done that I can quotemine. Should I reread the drat book? Probably. Am I going to waste time and money on it? No. Now, to be fair to Weber, he attempts to deliberately invoke these things as despicable enemy traits. The bizarre combination of Revolutionary France, Soviet Russia, and Nazi Germany that comprises the Republic of Haven fits nicely under Eco's cult of tradition, the Havenites speak Newspeak, and so on. A surface reading of the books shows that fascists are bad and deserve to be blown up by steely-eyed women with missile launchers, so you can imagine my surprise when a bunch of the Manticorean heroes started engaging in fascist nonsense. Eco posted:Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others. I've compared the Mesans to Pizzagate before, but ultimately they could have stepped right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or some crap. Yes, they are evil eugenicist genetic slavers instead of just being a bunch of offensive Jewish stereotypes, but they fill the niche of an enemy that is simultaneously very evil and strong (by having super secret evil hyperdrives) and weak (by being easily blown up by Honor Harrington when she presses the missile button). Eco posted:The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy. The Solarian League is the same - they have a massive number of star systems, innumerable legions of ships, and a huge and well funded military, but they are simultaneously too strong and too weak because they represent the QAnon Deep State. Weber posted:On the face of it, it was ridiculous, and Pang would be surprised if as much as five percent of the total Solarian population had a clue—yet—about just how vulnerable the League really was or how bad it was actually going to get. Something the size of the Solarian League’s internal economy? With literally hundreds of star systems, system populations running into the tens of billions, and the mightiest industrial capacity in the history of mankind? That sort of Titan couldn’t possibly be brought to its knees by a “Star Empire” which consisted of no more than a couple of dozen inhabited planets! But it could, if its pigmy opponent happened to control the bulk of the shipping which carried that economy’s lifeblood. And especially if the pigmy in question was also in a position to shut down its arterial system, force its remaining shipping to rely solely on capillary action to keep itself fed. Even if Solarian shipyards got themselves fully mobilized and built enough ships to replace every single Manticoran hull pulled out of the League’s trade, it still wouldn’t be enough to maintain the shipping routes without the termini. The two even feed into each other, with Weber aware he's created an idea fascist propaganda enemy and thus having to invent the evil cabal of merchants to maintain the illusion of a villain who is both strong and weak. We can keep going on and on in this vein, because Weber provides a ton of reinforcement for these ideas of Manticorean popular elitism and how the Solarians are strong and weak at the same time. We could probably bring in the idea of the fascists playing with weapons, but why?
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Dec 23, 2021 19:59
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Realistically (I know), Manticore should have become a member of the league long ago. Thanks to the wormhole junction it's basically next door to Beowulf and a Core world anyway. The league seems to be an incredbily loose confederation, where everyone has veto power. So all the Worlds and Star Nations that make it up are still entirely self-governing. It's basically just a glorified UN meets NATO. The league gets to integrate the junction into their territory permanently and all Manticores security concerns with Haven immediately go away. Canonicly (and you can see Webers Libertarian leanings here) members don't even have to pay taxes. The league is all funded by tarrifs and shipping fees etc.
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Dec 24, 2021 00:08
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Ok, you guys are still arguing about the plausibility of the technical gap and the Solarian League being out of touch dum-dums, and sure, fine, whatever, but it's ignoring the bigger point that ultimately Manticore having infinity missiles and curbstomping every single badman fleet serves to make the ultimate missile victim dramatic tension. Like, yes, sure, the Solarians are Qing dynasty idiots who can't conceive that their empire can ever collapse, fine, but why do I want to read about it? I don't really care so much if we follow Weber's invented timeline of imaginary space missiles - although it is a hilarious creativity failure that the future physics-defying spacecraft are just using rockets like modern aircraft - but if the entire conflict is "Manticore stomps the Solarians becuz Sollys are DUMM", and there's absolutely no threat or tension, how is this at all interesting? I can see enjoying the earlier books because it was very possible for Manticore to lose, and Honor had to get used to the weird prototype ship she was assigned, but later crap in the series where battles become "24000 missiles >>> 20 lasers" and Manticore just smashes everything is boring. Who cares what the actual missile history is, when the result it's going for is such tepid dogshit? Gnoman posted:Before that, her genetic mods were fairly reasonable - increased tolerance for higher gravity, including enhanced speed and reaction time at the cost of a much higher and more demanding metabolism. TheGreatEvilKing posted:David Weber's Fascist Adventure 
Drakyn fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Dec 24, 2021 |
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Dec 24, 2021 00:40
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I need to do a lot more rereading of Weber's political nonsense, but a lot of it is going to come down to how much the aristocrats actually run the Star Kingdom. If it's all unelected bureaucrats all the way town we have a shoo-in. This sadly means I'm slogging through Weber, which I find to be deeply unpleasant.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:19
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Deptfordx posted:Realistically (I know), Manticore should have become a member of the league long ago. Thanks to the wormhole junction it's basically next door to Beowulf and a Core world anyway. They should have been, yes. Hell, they've been a permanent ally of one of the Core Worlds, though it seems like every single Core World has hated the SL since its foundation and has spent all of their time undermining it on purpose. Also when I mentioned it was based on the Articles of Confederation And Permanent Union, I wasn't joking. Weber has explicitly cited that as for why it's going to crumble one day. But somehow it's held on for 800 years. TheGreatEvilKing posted:I need to do a lot more rereading of Weber's political nonsense, but a lot of it is going to come down to how much the aristocrats actually run the Star Kingdom. If it's all unelected bureaucrats all the way town we have a shoo-in. It's set up like the British Parliament. There's a House of Lords that is unelected (and until the final books had basically the final say in matters) and a House of Commons that is elected and only recently gained the Power of the Purse. After the High Ridge government collapsed, the new government had 100% approval rating, all the opposition parties collapsed and many of them even joined the the new Grantville government. Corruption and cronyism is completely stamped out in the government, and it was politically invincible and able to do every reform needed to make Manticore unstoppable in every way forever and ever. THE END. The Prime Minister, by the way, is Honor's brother-in-law.
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Dec 24, 2021 03:54
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Drakyn posted:This is the 'sometimes I work TOO hard' interview character flaw of genetic modification. Oh ho no, I have a comically big appetite, allowing for a few jokes at my own expense as I flex my super muscles. Why don't they go full Jinxian from larry niven's Known Space and have Honor be like four feet tall and four feet wide with congenital heart problems and a drastically shortened maximum lifespan. It becomes a major problem in a book where when she gets captured and nearly starves to death on standard rations.
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Dec 24, 2021 03:57
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Gnoman posted:It becomes a major problem in a book where when she gets captured and nearly starves to death on standard rations. There, now she has consistent problems large and small to deal with, some inbuilt social friction that can provide people for her to shout at/obliterate in duels (if she can get inside their reach - short arms, but she can absolutely TANK a shot or two), a major medical issue that can crop up more than once, she's superhuman in a few very specific ways, and she's less openly fetish bait for eugenicists. Hell, she can even still have a crazy appetite. That's a lot of muscle mass to keep running.
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Dec 24, 2021 15:36
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Don't forget that Unelected Bureaucrats are BAD when they have to work for that position in the Solarian League, but GOOD when they're born into it in Manticore. That said, lets not forget that our very own General Battuta has his fetish for "Secret quasi-religious covert organizations vaguely inspired by the Hashashim." Fivemarks fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Dec 24, 2021 |
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Dec 24, 2021 18:06
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TLM3101 posted:Speaking of the Mesans, that's where the series goes completely off the rails, in large parts because Weber pulls some poo poo that just ruins everything about HH's characterization wholesale. lmao i am so glad I checked out of this series before that little 'revelation' TheGreatEvilKing posted:the bigger point that ultimately Manticore having infinity missiles and curbstomping every single badman fleet serves to make the ultimate missile victim dramatic tension.  Weber can't help himself from self-sabotaging dramatic tension like this in all of his series, far as I can tell. I'm not sure he even knows he does it but when the situation looks dire for Our Designated Heroes, out comes the tech advantage that'll save the day...
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Dec 25, 2021 00:21
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Psion posted:lmao i am so glad I checked out of this series before that little 'revelation' It's to the point that in the very final battle of the series (so far) Manticore rolls up on Sol to find the Solarian Navy with one million missile pods waiting (this comes out to about 500,000,000 missiles) and it is the Solarian League that is curb stomped so hard by Honor's FROZEN GAZE that they never fire a single one and instead blow up their own fleet in terror without a single shot fired.
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Dec 25, 2021 02:05
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A friend of mine has been reading DREADNOUGHTS (Yes all caps), and we've determined that if Honor Harrington's manticoran naval politics were anything like the stuff written in this book, it'd be amazing. Ahem: quote:Even as the committee inquiry was beginning, a powerful private effort to discredit Fisher was under way. Early in May when Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman arrived in London to join the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord, he went to Grosvenor Street to pay a courtesy call on Lord Charles, who had been his Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. The butler, not knowing that this admiral was different, took his hat and ushered him into a room where seven other admirals, including Lord Charles, were seated around a table, conspiring against Fisher. Astonished, the plotters looked up -then one dropped his pen and crawled under the table to look for it, another turned his back and poked the fire, a third bent over to retie his shoelaces. Lord Charles leaped to his feet and hurried Bridgeman into another room. Several Weeks later quote:On another occasion when the King warned Fisher, "Do you know I am the only friend you have?" the Admiral replied with that trace of pixieish impertinence which King Edward found so captivating;, "Your Majesty may be right, but, Sir, you have backed the winner!" And have some more Beresford quote:The responsibilities of the Channel Fleet, which Fisher redesignated the Atlantic Fleet in December 1904, ran from the western end of the English Channel down to the Strait of Gibraltar. During Beresford's tour of command, the Channel Fleet almost became involved in hostilities with the Russian Baltic Fleet. This ill-fated flotilla, bound on its voyage of doom for the Strait of Tsushima, had fired on the British trawler fleet off Dogger Bank, then proceeded to the port of Vigo in Spain. The Channel Fleet was at Gibraltar. While London's popular press demanded war and Sir John Fisher, then fulfilling his first day as First Sea Lord, met with the Cabinet, Beresford's fleet prepared to deal with the Russians. Lord Charles did not have much stomach for the assignment: "The Russian ships were so loaded with coal and stores that their upper-deck guns could not have been worked and a fight would have been murder," he explained, ever the sportsman. Beresford's tactic, had he been ordered to engage, would have been to use only four of his eight battleships: "It appeared to me that this would be only chivalrous, under the circumstances. If the Russian ships had commenced to knock my ships about, I would have engaged them with the whole eight Channel Fleet battleships." This statement did not sit well in London. "If… [Beresford's] statement became public property," noted the Director of Naval Intelligence, "the taxpayers would probably enquire why they were paying for the other half of the fleet." And even more! quote:Lord Charles might not have been able to look defeat in the eye, coolly cut his losses, and save what was left of his fleet for the next day's battle. As a peacetime admiral, he was enormously popular both with officers and, men. Lamed by gout, he would be carried by four Royal Marines, "looking very like a Roman Emperor," and enthroned on the bridge of his flagship. From there, he ruled his fleet with benevolent despotism. Everything centered on his own person. "My principal recollection," recalled a former Channel Fleet officer, "is of endless piping, callings to attention, and buglings." A stickler for the old navy rule that the senior officer present make every decision, including what uniforms all officers and men were to wear, what awnings the ships were to spread, when the men were to wash their clothes, when the washed clothes were to be hung up, and when they were to be taken down, Lord Charles watched his fleet with an eagle eye. Whatever his flagship did, the rest of the fleet had to do; if the flagship forgot to do something, the other ships must forget it too. And then there's the Roxburgh incident. Imagine Honor having to deal with this kind of shenaniganry! quote:In the presence of the Commander-in-Chief, the movements of all ships of the Channel Fleet were dictated by Beresford.... By Monday, the fourth, Scott's flagship, Good Hope was already was anchored inside the breakwater at Portland but one of his ships, Roxburgh remained outside, practicing the independent gunnery exercises which Scott had enthusiastically encouraged. At some point during the morning, a message arrived from Beresford directing that all ships of his fleet terminate exercises at sea and come into harbor in time to clean and paint ship by the eighth, on which day they would be inspected and reviewed by the German Emperor. Scott was eating lunch on board Good Hope when he was handed a signal from Roxburgh’s captain, asking permission to remain outside the harbor a little longer to finish a round of gunnery exercises. Scott was sympathetic, but, bowing to Beresford's command, ordered the cruiser to come in immediately. His signal, intended to be read solely by Roxburgh had an irritated, sarcastic tone: "Paintwork appears to be more in demand than gunnery so you had better come in in time to make yourself look pretty by the 8th."
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Dec 25, 2021 06:46
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I feel like one part where Weber really messes up a lot is that he wants to mimick the Age of Sail battles, but also has it where a fleet admiral can basically perfectly move his fleets. There's very little confusion and the only issues tend to be crew skill, so outside of small scale engagements, the ability of individual captains is pretty limited when it comes to matters. It is generally a Great Man version of leadership, even though a lot of Age of Sail battles were extremely chaotic and the historical admiral she's based had to trust his captains a lot to improvise. EDIT: Cleaning it up so it isn't one long run on sentence like you'd find Picard making fun of. Kchama fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Dec 25, 2021 |
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Dec 25, 2021 09:21
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That's a fair critique. Even in the more modern naval combats that are also a major inspiration, the admiral doesn't have quite as much influence as Weber's do. This is probably his gaming background showing.
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Dec 25, 2021 09:31
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Is that from Robert K Massies Dreadnaught? That's a great book, highly recommended.
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Dec 25, 2021 09:35
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Gnoman posted:That's a fair critique. Even in the more modern naval combats that are also a major inspiration, the admiral doesn't have quite as much influence as Weber's do. Oh absolutely it is background showing. I mean, in a way I sympathize a lot because it's very hard to write stories with lots of characters all happening at once, so limiting it to just the admiral being who matters simplifies stuff.
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Dec 25, 2021 10:07
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Besides characters, trying to write it out as more than the standard "the formation loosened as ships began to move independently for best firing angles and to block attacks" gets really clunky really fast.
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Dec 25, 2021 11:26
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Another problem is that he can never decide if he's writing space opera or military SF.
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Dec 26, 2021 04:22
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Cobalt-60 posted:Another problem is that he can never decide if he's writing space opera or military SF. I agree, but I think you should do your best to expound on that, so I don't have to. Gnoman posted:Besides characters, trying to write it out as more than the standard "the formation loosened as ships began to move independently for best firing angles and to block attacks" gets really clunky really fast. You know this is making me think I should read the Legend of the Galactic Heroes books to figure out how they write it.
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Dec 27, 2021 05:51
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While doing some research for the upcoming Let's Read chapter, I came across some interesting information. So, the average age of the Solarian Battle Fleet is 200 years old. Why? Because technology and combat doctrines hasn't changed or advanced significantly in 300 years. But that's interesting because that doesn't seem to be the case. According to Weber, two hundred years ago, the Battleship was the main combatant, and battleships fought using missiles primarily because point defense was garbage so it was relatively easy to get missiles up or down the gravity walls. BSes were specifically better suited for this because they were built and armored completely differently than bigger or smaller ships, specializing in this sort of combat. But that changed as PD advanced greatly, and decisive battles became impossible. This brought about the rise of DN and SDs as the main combatants, with the energy-heavy armaments we hear about so much. Laser heads were then invented, which caused the SDs to become even more dominant due to being able to be armored well enough to take shots from Laser heads, up until they were perfected, at which point no amount of armor really helped. But this didn't decrease their prominence as the amount of missiles they could leverage allowed them to overwhelm PD, and being big meant they were still tougher than a smaller ship and had space for everything else. But despite all this, Weber doesn't seem to see any of that as major change in warfare. EDIT: Also it turns out that the reserve fleet being worthless doesn't matter, as not only can the SLN not afford to reactive any of them in any form (and do not have the personnel for it either!), but the SLN can't afford to actually deploy the Battle or Frontier fleet in significant numbers. The 400 ships they sent to attack Manticore itself was the most they could handle at once. The Frontier Fleet doesn't have any problem with this since they only deploy a couple of BC squads at most. Kchama fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Dec 27, 2021 |
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Dec 27, 2021 21:08
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Where are you drawing that from? The only battleships we see in the main series are missile-heavy, because they're said to be primarily intended for internal security and warding off lighter raiders. There's a comment from Weber to the effect of "the PRH battleships were missile heavy, even though missiles aren't great against SDs, because it is impossible for a BB to engage a SD with energy weapons at all". I can't find anything anywhere that backs up your interpretation.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:00
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Gnoman posted:Where are you drawing that from? The only battleships we see in the main series are missile-heavy, because they're said to be primarily intended for internal security and warding off lighter raiders. There's a comment from Weber to the effect of "the PRH battleships were missile heavy, even though missiles aren't great against SDs, because it is impossible for a BB to engage a SD with energy weapons at all". Pearls of Weber, where Weber himself talks about a lot of stuff that is never mentioned in the books. It's even mentioned that the reason why Weber mentions that PRH battleships were like that, as that is how battleships use to be, and they never changed because energy duelling SDs was insane for anything smaller than an SD. There's a lot of stuff in these postings that are considered canon and what Weber officially draws from when writing. Choice Quotes from David Weber posted:
This also makes clear that effectively a smaller ship is always at a huge disadvantage against a bigger ship (though this is very flexible, since later on Manticore's Destroyers have no problem wiping out Solarian Battlecruisers.
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Dec 28, 2021 13:42
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OK, I wasn't finding that section - I was looking at other portions of the same site. Most of the stuff on there is collected responses to specific questions, rather than random lectures by the author (I'm the way the preface and postscript sections of the books are). That makes them spotty, and whoever collected them (notnsure if it was Weber himself or Joe Buckley) organized things poorly. In this case, there's a bigger timeliness issue than you've pointed out. The Republic of Haven became the PRH in 1700 or 1795 depending on source, and begins conquest I. the 1850s. There's references to Dreadnought in service with the Havenite Navy I. the 1700s, and late 1600s for the Manticorans. Meaning the exceprt you posted makes absolutely no sense with what's on the page. As for the "smaller ship vs, bigger ship" thing, that held true in real life up through WWII. Incidents like HMS Glowworm or The Last Stand Of The Tin Can Sailors are famous because things don't usually work that way - and Glowworm still sank after doing relativelylight damage to Hipper.
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Dec 28, 2021 14:45
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