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  "okay we need to make her whiter and have huge boobs. and make the cat look more hosed up."
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Jan 19, 2020 07:07
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Kchama posted:
From chapter 18: quote:"Ma'am," Papadapolous said crisply, "I still have ninety-three Marines aboard ship. I have battle armor for a full platoon—thirty-five men and women—with pulse rifles and heavy weapons for the remainder of the company. We can handle any bunch of Stilties armed with flintlocks." He stopped, jaw clenched, and added another "Ma'am" almost as an afterthought. The text is explicit. The battle-armored troops aren't any danger whatsoever - the danger is to less armored troops and civilians. quote:Yes, but the justification is going to literally be the same whether the natives actually pull the triggers on the rifles or not, because the natives have the rifles and they have proof that they have rifles that they couldn't feasibly make themselves. It doesn't make sense as they already HAVE the proof needed to justify what they are doing. quote:The Soviet Union's ploy was super flimsy and wasn't really meant to actually ever hold up, and to the point that the place shelled was an isolated guard post and none of the casualties were ever confirmed, just claimed. That's afar cry from what Haven did. There's basically no reason for Haven to have established bases in places that they intended to be attacked by natives, and Honor and co even talk about how the bases are small and seem intended to be used as sacrifices from the start. This isn't Space America fighting Space Russia. In terms of relative scale and importance, it is more like Space Iran fighting Space Saudi Arabia. Major regional powers with significant economic muscle, but still something of a backwater region. Haven's plan is to claim that a massacre of offworlders and the friendly natives by hostile natives, provoked by Manticoran mishandling of the planet, forced them to take control of the planet. Then they will insist that they now have the moral right to the entire system because of this intervention. To be successful in this, they would have to convince the major powers to back them up. Manticore would have to be able to prove Havenite involvement to those same major powers to justify taking action to stop it. If the only evidence is "This weapon is too advanced for them to have come up with it", they're going to have a hard time selling it - especially if they fail to stop it and Haven takes a lot of losses.
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Jan 19, 2020 07:09
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Gnoman posted:You couldn't be more correct here. Almost everyone uses the exact same slang and has the exact same verbal habits (for an extremely obvious example, everyone except the Graysons and Masadans use their own pronouns when referring to an unknown officer). They even use the same military ranks terminology, which doesn't make sense even within the groups that come from English-speaking cultures, which at least two of the major powers don't. Personally I like the pronoun thing you point out here; it serves as a linguistic demonstration of how (most of) the setting's cultures have embraced gender equality: if the default person has a gender, they have same one you do, regardless of what role or position they occupy. It could be argued that the singular they would be even more progressive, since it includes nonbinary folks, but given when Weber started working on these novels I'm inclined to forgive him for that oversight.
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Jan 19, 2020 08:09
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Gnoman posted:From chapter 18: ... But that's talking about a different deal. In this case they're wanting to attack them out in the open with their battle armor. They shouldn't even need to be talking about any of the other advantages because a squad of battle armor troops should be completely invincible to whatever they have. They shouldn't need to worry about needing their longer ranged guns and air support to carry them through. They're worried about that much less tangling with them in close quarters. Anyways the problem with their plans is that it's dumb and would be pretty trivial for the Manticoreans to both stop the massacre and also prove that Haven was behind it because Haven has done very little to actually to prove that it was an outside force trying to cause it. Also, what major powers? Even now Manticore pretty much outpowers everyone else even though the story does it's best to pretend it isn't QUITE the case. That's explicitly why Haven is doing such a dumb plan to try and get an invasion foothold because they, the other biggest power around that gives a gently caress about anything, can't take Manticore in a straight fight. The other biggest power around is just absolutely loving useless and has no way to force anything.
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Jan 19, 2020 08:22
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Gnoman posted:You're fundamentally correct here. Passive sensors involve using the radars to "listen" for emissions, and using infrared and visual cameras to look directly at the ship. To this, we can add the fictitious gravitic sensors that are so important in this setting. As you say, this isn't something that you can "turn up" very easily except by providing larger (or better designed) antennas and lenses. You can also add neutrino, neutron, and <magic space particle> detectors that could, among other things, spot a fusion reactor that isn't where it's shown on the blueprints. And trying to measure the exact mass and density of the freighter to see how loaded it is. So doing a more "intensive scan" presumably just means loading up the cutter that's going to make the flyby with a lot of gear it wouldn't normally be equipped with because it's basically a space minivan.
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Jan 19, 2020 08:29
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In this book, high-ranking officials.on both sides are explicit that Haven could probably win in a straight fight at this point in the timeline, but doing so would be very expensive. Haven is trying this plan because it costs them virtually nothing even if things go badly wrong, and if it succeeds they gain an advantage that would reduce the cost of conquest. As for other powers, the Andermani empire mentioned in this book is a peer to both, while it is later stated that most of the member states of the Space EU were on the same level even if the Space EU itself was apathetic. Equally important, they are supposed to be at the same technology level - the vast gulf in ability seen later doesn't exist yet.
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Jan 19, 2020 08:37
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Gnoman posted:In this book, high-ranking officials.on both sides are explicit that Haven could probably win in a straight fight at this point in the timeline, but doing so would be very expensive. Haven is trying this plan because it costs them virtually nothing even if things go badly wrong, and if it succeeds they gain an advantage that would reduce the cost of conquest. It costs them nothing except of course Manticore becoming very aware that they plan on conquesting Manticore instead of being vaguely unaware despite the Queen agitating to kill Haven NOW (though I don't think that's been brought up in this book, even though it's a thing the later books say was always going on). I don't really pay much stock in Andermani and Asgard because they're pretty largely non-actors or complete non-actors for most of the series. EDIT: Also even though high officials in this book say it now, it's made pretty clear that this has not really ever been the case and Weber loves talking at length about how super amazing and impressive Manticore is compared to everyone else. It really just comes off as being a thing because there needed to be tension. Kchama fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jan 19, 2020 |
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Jan 19, 2020 08:54
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Kchama posted:It costs them nothing except of course Manticore becoming very aware that they plan on conquesting Manticore instead of being vaguely unaware despite the Queen agitating to kill Haven NOW (though I don't think that's been brought up in this book, even though it's a thing the later books say was always going on). This may be my memory of later events coloring things, but I don't think Manticore is "vaguely unaware" of Haven's intent to conquer them. They don't know any of the specifics, but my impression was that Manticore's government was definitely assuming they were on Haven's list of intended victims and trying to gear up for the fight. They're definitely aware of it by the second book, since that's all about coalition building in anticipation of the war which begins in the third.
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Jan 19, 2020 09:02
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Anshu posted:This may be my memory of later events coloring things, but I don't think Manticore is "vaguely unaware" of Haven's intent to conquer them. They don't know any of the specifics, but my impression was that Manticore's government was definitely assuming they were on Haven's list of intended victims and trying to gear up for the fight. They're definitely aware of it by the second book, since that's all about coalition building in anticipation of the war which begins in the third. Yeah I mean, that's why I said the downside to their plan was Haven being super obviously exposed as trying to invade Manticore, whereas in this book there's no real awareness that Haven intends to invade. All the Policy Talk we see is largely just focused on Honor's tax-collecting efforts and if they had an idea that Haven intended to invade they wouldn't still be treating Basilisk System as a hole to throw losers to since it's literally a massive hole in their defenses.
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Jan 19, 2020 09:07
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Manticore's previous king, the current queen's father, was assassinated by Havenite agents and that information was kept from the public because Manticore wasn't ready for war at that point. The queen knows, though.
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Jan 19, 2020 09:08
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FuturePastNow posted:Manticore's previous king, the current queen's father, was assassinated by Havenite agents and that information was kept from the public because Manticore wasn't ready for war at that point. The queen knows, though. That's probably a retcon overall, since I don't think it gets revealed for a while. Like, I don't think the concept comes up for a while.
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Jan 19, 2020 09:17
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I keep forgetting Asgard was even a thing. And I've read nearly all of these stupid novels.
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Jan 19, 2020 12:47
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Libluini posted:I keep forgetting Asgard was even a thing. And I've read nearly all of these stupid novels. Nobody blames you, as I'm pretty sure it only gets mentioned like three times total in the entire book series and then Weber forgets about them himself, as they're never mentioned after this to the point that the only known system in the alliance is Midgard.
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Jan 19, 2020 13:03
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C.M. Kruger posted:
Also this is late, but I actually think the latter one is more in tune with Weber's image of Honor and Nimitz. Since they're suppose to be huge six-legged things and that actually looks closer to how Nimitz is described in the book. Which makes it kind of funny that they're constantly sitting on Honor's shoulder like it's no big deal. Also Weber has gone on record to say that the closest person in looks to Honor is  , which kind of kills the whole "She's not actually pretty, she's BEYOND pretty" by just making her a supermodel. So I guess that new cover is probably more accurate to the intent.
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Jan 19, 2020 13:11
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Y’all got an unhealthy hardon for this dude and his Mary Sue masturbation fantasy. For something completely different; where can I find some good battle scenes, both ground and space. I’m trying my hand at writing a space opera novel, and I need to jazz up my action scenes. I figured Mil-SciFi is genre adjacent enough.
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Jan 19, 2020 17:45
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My friend, have you heard of Warhammer 40,000!
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Jan 19, 2020 18:57
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Deptfordx posted:My friend, have you heard of Warhammer 40,000! I said good battle scenes. Not bolterporn. (  I've read so much of the horus heresy series)
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Jan 19, 2020 19:15
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Deptfordx posted:My friend, have you heard of Warhammer 40,000! joking aside, dan abnett is probably a solid reference point for comrade dizzy if he wants to do ground battles
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Jan 19, 2020 19:22
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DJ Dizzy posted:Y’all got an unhealthy hardon for this dude and his Mary Sue masturbation fantasy. It's definitely not a hard-on, lemme reassure you that. Anyways if you want good battle scenes don't bother with Mil-Scifi! There's nothing good here, unless you count Gundam or something, which I don't.
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Jan 19, 2020 23:22
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DJ Dizzy posted:Y’all got an unhealthy hardon for this dude and his Mary Sue masturbation fantasy. Kchama wanted to become a Cenobite (Hellraiser version) IRL, and this was the easiest way to do so for them. More serious answer: Mil-scifi is 50% terrible writing and 50% explosions/WarCrimes. Steal from Brian Jacques Redwall series instead, or go deep into fencing terms (Roger Zelazny style) that maybe 1-in-23 people will understand for your action scenes. On the other hand, if you need to jazz up any WarCrimes for your villains and heroes to commit/obsess over, well then start reading page 1 of this thread.
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Jan 20, 2020 00:07
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Well, your evil is my good. I assume that is the justification for 75% of all warcrimes commited by aliens.
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Jan 20, 2020 15:55
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DJ Dizzy posted:Well, your evil is my good. I assume that is the justification for 75% of all warcrimes commited by aliens. I thought the traditional justification was that humans are just that delicious?
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Jan 20, 2020 16:30
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No lie, one of the first mil-scifi books published had a humans vs aliens setup with a "Our WarCrimes against each other cancel out"..."So let's team up and inflict slave-hood status on every new alien race we meet" ending (Triplanetary) written by the really loving creepy in retrospect EE "Doc" Smith, PhD Food Science. The Mil-scifi genre from it's inception has never been filled with quality, but it delivers what the readers want and sells enough to keep it a distinct sub-genre of Sci-Fi and Mil-Fiction. Welcome new reader/poster to this thread DJ Dizzy. What is your favorite book/author (genre doesn't matter), what is the worse book/author (genre still doesn't matter) that you've read? My favorites are Harry Harrison/Bill the Galactic Hero, worse author I've read is Neal Stephenson, followed closely by Neal Asher.
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Jan 20, 2020 19:12
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I'm uh. Relatively new to the genre. Having followed all of two series. Expeditionary Force and Galaxy's Edge. It's pretty obvious in the latter series which parts is written by Nick Cole, and which ones is written by Jason. I'm not a fan of Nick. He unironically had one of his female characters complain about "beta males" and generally has a hardon for raging against diversity. (He also writes articles about left-wing bias in publishing and how he is sick and tired of authors bringing their political agendas to the fore through their writing, which is pretty hilarious)
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Jan 22, 2020 02:27
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DJ Dizzy posted:I'm uh. Relatively new to the genre. Having followed all of two series. Expeditionary Force and Galaxy's Edge. Haven't done the "Hello new poster"/("what's your favorite book/author(genre doesn't matter)?" "what's the worse book/author you've come across?") thing in awhile. Reason why I did so is because A) it helps to find out what new-2-this-thread people like/hate, no matter the genre, before giving them recommendations, and B) it helps to weed out/disarm trolling attempts in this thread. My personal favorite book ever, Bill the Galactic Hero, just happens to be a mil-scifi book. The main reason I love it(BtGH) so much is because I had previously read it years before, enlisted in the usmc, then stumbled across BtGH again in Amsterdam a week after getting out of the Marines. Re-read BtGH during downtime on that Amsterdam trip....and everything, i mean EVERYTHING in BtGH was true. The pettiness, lower ranks enlisted being nameless cogs in the machine, never volunteering, mil-industrial complex, etc. The bizzaro vietnam-vet burnout cover art of that edition didn't hurt either. So once again, genre doesn't matter....DJ Dizzy, What is your favorite book/favorite author? What's the worse book you've read or the author you just can't stand reading? quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Jan 22, 2020 |
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Jan 22, 2020 03:47
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Favorite book is probably, (and this is 100% nostalgia speaking) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was my first real encounter, atleast that I can remember, with "adult" litterature. The worst book i've ever read. Hmm. Probably one of the 40k books i've devoured throughout the years. They aren't the best writing in the world. Most of these days, my reading is non-fiction due to work. There is some truly bad writing in the field of military history too. 
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Jan 22, 2020 04:41
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quantumfoam posted:No lie, one of the first mil-scifi books published had a humans vs aliens setup with a "Our WarCrimes against each other cancel out"..."So let's team up and inflict slave-hood status on every new alien race we meet" ending (Triplanetary) written by the really loving creepy in retrospect EE "Doc" Smith, PhD Food Science. The Mil-scifi genre from it's inception has never been filled with quality, but it delivers what the readers want and sells enough to keep it a distinct sub-genre of Sci-Fi and Mil-Fiction. Favorite book/author is incredibly hard for me to pin down, I've spend most of my life reading and I've probably forgotten more good books then most people read in a lifetime. Even the list of my current favorites is easily a dozen or more books, ranging from science stuff (The Hadal Zone, by Alan Jamieson; Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich) to science fiction (Atomgewicht 500 by Hans Dominik - I loved that book as a kid; Alarm für die Galaxis*) Worst books ever is easy. Tom Kratman. Everything he wrote is utter poo poo and the book of his I hated most was some horrible garbage about SS-soldiers getting rejuvenated to go fight evil bad aliens. Everyone who has a different politic opinion to the author is evil, dumb or both and gets killed or beaten up, and the book ends with positively depicting a genocidal attack on completely different aliens. Even today, many years after I read it, simply thinking about Kratman makes me mad. I eventually put Watch on the Rhine into my paper trash and threw it away. And I regret it, because later I got a cat who loves it to piss on books I leave too long on the ground. That would have been a far more fitting end to that thing masquerading as a book.  *Alarm für die Galaxis is No. 44 of a long running series of "Silberbände" / silver volumes, a special re-edited edition of Germany's long-running Perry Rhodan novella series. Every silver volume has a nice, silvery hardback cover and a holographic, semi-3D version of one of the covers from the original novellas contained inside. The novellas published this way range wildly from something like 4-12 or more, since this is a series which started in 1963, so even volume No. 44 was still in the late 60's and PR had been running for 400+ volumes already. Now try to imagine dozens of authors in the 60's trying to coordinate with each other without the internet, and you can imagine why rewrites could get so extensive entire story arcs were cut for this special edition. (Or, even funnier, sometimes entire novellas (60+ pages) got reduced to a paragraph, or even a single sentence of exposition. )This weird thing with the number "44" on it was my first contact with both SF and Perry Rhodan, and by pure coincidence, it was the climax of a long, 100-volumes long story arc. It started with its weird protagonists (like a four-armed giant robot shaped and skinned like one of the aliens they were fighting, piloted by tiny green men, or some strange humanoid alien with a trunk and looking like glass, capable of using a five-dimensional sonic attack and so on) exploring an alien base infiltrated by the four-armed aliens who can take over bodies, by the way. There also was a giant space battle in our system, which nearly ends all Human life and we only win because yet another alien race, related to the huge, four-armed monster aliens, comes to our aid in the last second and blows up the remaining 5000 enemy ships. There's some more poo poo happening in the epilogue, like a fleet arriving from the galaxy M87 who blow up the entire evil bad guy system. The protagonists try to rescue some innocent slave race from the evil planets but get their poo poo kicked in and they have to run before the sun goes nova. Then the protagonists have to bluff a lot to keep the extragalactic aliens from blowing up their bodies, because space racism. But the bluff works, and the extragalactic forces move back home, now that the evil bad "Uleb" are all dead. This relentless storm of events then ends with the two main protagonists hugging in the ruins of Earth's capital (which is, obviously, in China) and swear that mankind and its allies will rebuild from the ashes. Sadly all that poo poo and the other German book got never translated, so you'll have to live with my dumb recap here. Edit: It would probably help if I mention real fast some points about why this weird anthology of short novellas from the 60s impressed me so much back then, and why I still think it's great, especially when held up against military SF of today: -A lot of time is spend on talking about how the protagonists from the Solar Empire found this one weird trick thanks to time travel to nullify the enemy's technological supremacy. Then poo poo hits the fan when everyone realizes the enemy just needs to send an update patch to their servant race to make them nearly invulnerable again. -The main battle not only pulls out all the stops and rages across the entire Solar System, the enemy is made up of a fleet of biomechanical horrors with invulnerable shields, using a weapon which can pierce all shields with some sort of hyperspace sonic wave to turn everything into dust, and they're wildly outnumbered. It's ca. 10k monster ships against 50-60k Human ships. -Even though they're nearly impossible to destroy, the forces of the Solar Empire manage to destroy most of them, but then the remaining fleet arrives over Earth and threatens to break through the planetary shield. -Yes, someone thought about what would happen if you have genocidal aliens with super-weapons, and made it so they can't instantly win after reaching Earth, so the drama gets better. -Humans eventually win the battle, but only because they can make friends better. -The protagonists do their damnedest to protect all life, even if it means wading through the withering fire of four-armed super-monsters to save weird owl-aliens they have literally known for less then a day, or are willing to bluff a fresh fleet of another alien threat with their shot-to-poo poo garbage fleet, just to save the allies which just saved all their asses earlier. It has good drama, good action and a lot of strong morals and ethics. It's basically the anti-mil sf novel. Effectively Star Trek before Star Trek was even a thing. Edit2: Some pictures, and if you use Google Translate, a probably better summary then my insane rambling. Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 22, 2020 20:14
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DJ Dizzy posted:Favorite book is probably, (and this is 100% nostalgia speaking) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was my first real encounter, atleast that I can remember, with "adult" litterature. 20-K Leagues holds up pretty well on a re-read. Nemo is the real star of it, with the Natilus pretty much being the ur-godfather of all steampunk devices. Just don't bother reading the unofficial sequel to 20-K Leagues, it is boring, aged badly and has more deus ex machina scenarios than any sane modern reader would want to go through. Warhammer/Warhammer 40k fiction: I remember liking individual authors (Sandy Mitchell), but Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghost series (specifically the 1st omnibus Gaunts Ghosts story collection) managed to kill off my entire interest in Warhammer/Warhammer 40k fiction and the associated wargames too. Gaunts Ghosts stories were the 1960's Combat! tv series mixed with the Lemmings video-game series, all narrated by David Weber, to me. Unlike most of this thread, I mainly remember David Weber for his super autistic running-battle action reports aka "11000 missiles were launched....37 missiles failed to arm their warheads and auto-detonated, 200 missiles failed to lock on.....etc". Non-fiction: I read roughly 5 non-fiction books to every 1 fiction book. Almost never read mil-scifi, so me ending up as the person who created the SomethingAwful Mil-SciFi/Mil-Fiction thread will always be hilarious to me. Think my initial recommendation of the Redwall books for action scenes might be good for you. Another good source for action and adventure is Jack Vance, just be aware Vance was a ground-breaking 60's/70's fantasy and scifi author and can be frustrating sometimes. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 15:10
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quantumfoam posted:Almost never read mil-scifi, so me ending up as the person who created the SomethingAwful Mil-SciFi/Mil-Fiction thread will always be hilarious to me. the rest of us all refused to do it because we knew it was a bad idea!
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Jan 23, 2020 19:47
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PupsOfWar posted:the rest of us all refused to do it because we knew it was a bad idea! This wasn't a post about John Ringo or John Ringo's posleen war so I am requesting that any mod who reads this thread hit PupsOfWar with a 6er for posting in this thread. PupsOfWar posted:Aug 16, 2019 19:46
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Jan 23, 2020 20:04
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quantumfoam posted:This wasn't a post about John Ringo or John Ringo's posleen war so I am requesting that any mod who reads this thread hit PupsOfWar with a 6er for posting in this thread. He is working on this since August last year? That's some dedication! Now I'm contemplating to make my own let's read thread, to show people some weird German SF that never got a translation. Like that book from Hans Dominik were stupid people accidentally set the world on fire. Atomic fire, and the entire novel is a growing list of dumb gently caress-ups until even the moon is on (atomic) fire. That book is a wild ride, and I think it's a drat shame it's 100% unknown outside of the German-speaking sphere of influence. Hard to tell though if there is any interest in foreign SF like this
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Jan 23, 2020 20:58
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I vaguely recall that premise being used in David Drake's "Seas of Venus" miniseries which was itself built off a early 40s story by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner where "atomics" had burned away Earth's atmosphere or something to that effect, and humanity only survived in undersea domes on a teraformed Venus and their wars are fought by mercenary fleets on the surface. IIRC Drake took it further and made the teraforming a failure that had turned the surface into a dense jungle of rapidly evolved hyper-predators that has to be constantly burned back, and then of course the narrator's hovercraft-PT boat gets hit during a battle and they have to make a overland trek to safety.
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Jan 24, 2020 07:26
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On Basilisk Station Chapter 26 Sorry I've fallen behind on these, but these chapters are getting even sloggier. This chapter is literally entirely confirmation of stuff we already know except for apparently physically-impossible impellers. quote:She was a big ship, Honor mused, watching her own visual display from her command chair. Fearless herself could have been stowed comfortably in one of the freighter's main holds, and that sort of carrying capacity lent weight to Santos's observation. Letting that much ship sit idle any longer than you had to was like pouring money straight out the airlock. No owner—not even a government bureaucracy like Haven's Ministry of Trade—would do that without a very good reason. GOVERNMENT SUCKS!!!!!!! This is basically another theme where any sort of government bureaucracy sucks because bureaucracy in and of itself sucks and apparently mind-controls people into making bad decisions. Never-mind corporations can make incredibly dumb decisions like that or even worse. But no, here, corporations are always superior, except to royalty. quote:She leaned back and glanced across at the tactical station. Cardones and McKeon had their heads together over the main sensor console, and Webster was equally intent on his communications panels. If any message traffic was going out from that ship, it was on a tight beam, and tight beams were hellishly hard to detect, but the com officer's fingers moved like a surgeon's as he gentled his computers through the search. If there was even a whisker beam out there, Webster would find it. Honor was certain of that. I'm sure Honor knows how all impeller nodes should look. Though I guess that is another thing about the Honorverse. There's very little difference in anything. There's not multiple types of impeller nodes built by different companies with their own quirks that never makes that sort of thing easy. quote:"It's a lot bigger than it ought to be, that's what it is, Ma'am, and the whole thing's shaped wrong," Santos replied. "Look." A cursor blipped onto the display, indicating the point at which the node passed through Sirius's outer plating, and Honor cocked her head as she noted the wide, soot-black band of shadow. "See that gap around the base of the node head? That shouldn't be there. And look here." The cursor vanished, and a bright green line arced up the side of the exposed node. It started out flush with the node's base, but then it curved much more sharply inward. By the time it reached the node's rounded apex, over a third of the node's total mass lay beyond the line. Okay, so the Impeller is impossible due to physics but... quote:"I see." Honor stared down at the display, rubbing her nose. "On the other hand, they've obviously built what we're looking at, and they got here under their own power." ... it's also how military-grade impeller nodes are? What? If it's an impossible profile then wouldn't it just be physically impossible? Do military-grade impeller nodes just routinely violate the laws of physics? Also I'm not sure why this freighter NEEDS a military-grade impeller node. It seems weird to have a giveaway on your ship whose entire job is basically sitting there waiting to run. I know it's just to introduce the whole Q-Ship thing and to make Honor even more the under-dog, but in-universe-wise it seems out of place when it's suppose to be the part that's not suppose to be caught. It even apparently has a super-complicated mechanism where it turns into a military ship by opening up it's hull and pushing the impeller node out. Considering the ship is big enough that it massively out-weighs the military ships in the system, it seems like it'd be better served with just having normal freighter impeller drive, or a military-grade one that isn't for apparently a ship class bigger. quote:"Very good, Dominica," Honor murmured. She gazed at the imagery for a moment longer, then nodded. "Make me the best estimate you can of their actual acceleration capability—impeller and Warshawski mode—and write it up. Make sure you save all your data, too. We'll want to pass it on to BuShips for evaluation." Which is why having this over-designed fake freighter is actually a bigger liability than just having a regular freighter that can actually pass inspection! Isn't the entire point of the operation that the Haven side remain specifically undetectable while the scapegoats have this sort of issue intentionally so they can be caught and provide misdirection? Stop being incompetent, Haven. Stop right now. quote:"Maybe, and maybe not." Honor nibbled her lower lip and felt Nimitz nip her earlobe as he detected her worry. She grinned and hoisted him down into her lap to protect her ears, then sobered once more as she looked back up at McKeon. They'd have to know that they weren't completely in the clear, considering they just made several passes of their barely-disguised warships with 'passive' scanning. You'd have to be on high alert for ANY Manticorean ship getting close. quote:She closed her eyes, making herself stand back and consider the options with all the detachment she could muster. The real problem was that, under interstellar law, the freighter's master could still refuse her inspectors entry, whatever she cited as probable cause, unless she had evidence that they'd violated Manticoran law or posed a direct threat to Manticoran security, and nothing she had constituted an actual criminal violation. If Captain Coglin refused her the right to board his ship, her only options would be to accept the slap in the face or expel Sirius from Manticoran space. She had the authority to do that to any ship which refused to allow her examination, with or without probable cause, should she so choose, but it was an action she would have to justify to the Admiralty, and she could just see the headlines it would provoke. "rmn expels merchant ship with defective drive." "freighter sent to die in hyper by heartless manticoran officer." "haven protests harrington's inhuman expulsion of damaged freighter." This is a theme that will never ever end: Journalists are bad and evil. All of them. He hasn't yet started deploying his dumb slur 'newsies' yet, thankfully. It's really cringe-worthy. Also the lower-case in the headlines is in the official digital copy I have. quote:"Captain?" I'm not sure how this is any more suspicious than having giant military-grade warship impellers in your freighter that are constantly revved up. It seems like if a lawyer could talk their way out of that, they could talk their way out of 'a consulate's messages are done in a very high-security way' even more easily. Honor tells them to keep the Fearless on standby too and ready to pursue. The next part is just more or less Honor relaying everything to Estelle and Estelle revealing that her department has been bugged and so she can't trust anyone there, blah blah. Oh and Honor is sending a message to her superiors in hopes they send some help. quote:"You're right, Honor. They're definitely up to something." Dame Estelle looked tired on the com screen, and Honor wondered if she'd gotten back to sleep at all after their midnight conversation. The rest of the chapter is "Suchon sucks." "Suchon sucks?" "Suchon sucks." It's such worthless poo poo I'm not going to reproduce it, but I will complain because she's her entire point seems to be an All Evil In This World scapegoat. gently caress this book.
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Jan 29, 2020 15:42
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"The hostile government will use the state-controlled media to carry out a smear campaign if we give them an opportunity" does not translate to "Journalism bad!". That's exactly what they're claiming will happen if Sirius is expelled. The ship is allegedly there because the drive is on the edge of failure, so expelling it from the system gives Haven a gold-plated propaganda opportunity on a silver platter. As for the nodes, I think you're misinderstanding what's being described because Weber describes it very poorly. The "impossible" profile is because only the tip is sticking out of the hull, so if you look at what's exposed the shape is wrong. To actually operate, they shove it out on a ram to expose the whole thing. There's no real-world equivalent to this that I can think of - real merchant cruisers did not have disguised drives, and the only form of drive that you realistically could ID on visual anyway is masts on a sailing ship, which are very hard to disguise. Using Sirius is a bad idea, and is called out as such in a later chapter. How plausible this mistake is can be left to the reader to decide, but it isn't particularly outlandish compared to real-world screwups.
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Jan 29, 2020 16:21
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Yeah, I feel bad about defending Weber, but you're really unfair to him here.
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Jan 29, 2020 16:29
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Not only that, but Haven assumed (quite reasonably) that they'd be able to get away with slipping a Q-ship in, since nobody could have foreseen that a competent captain would be assigned to a poo poo post. Even if, on paper, the post should have been a plum assignment.
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Jan 29, 2020 16:32
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Gnoman posted:"The hostile government will use the state-controlled media to carry out a smear campaign if we give them an opportunity" does not translate to "Journalism bad!". "Journalism Bad" is a legit theme that the books have. Honor was pointing out that even the MANTICOREAN journalists would be running with it thanks to Hauptman. Whenever the news comes up it's entirely about how it's all propaganda to make Honor/Manticore look bad. "The newsies will make me look bad" is a very common refrain. I was pointing out that this is the start of it. And maybe you're right about the incredibly poorly described profile, but the fact of the matter is, that's not well-disguised at all, because apparently it has to very obviously open up the ship to poke out the over-sized impeller so it won't explode the ship if they're to use it. So yes, I was right to call out Haven as incompetent for bring this dumb-rear end ship. Also I'm not convinced that you're right because of how poorly written it is. Aerdan posted:Not only that, but Haven assumed (quite reasonably) that they'd be able to get away with slipping a Q-ship in, since nobody could have foreseen that a competent captain would be assigned to a poo poo post. Even if, on paper, the post should have been a plum assignment. The thing is they never really had any need for a Q-Ship. Everything they were expected to do was on the ground and they were literally just sitting around in orbit for months doing nothing. Nothing about it serves their plans, especially since when the Sirius is actually confronted by a warship a tenth of its size it's job was to flee anyways. All they did was be suspicious and bring attention onto themselves by being a Q-Ship. Kchama fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Jan 29, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 16:40
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...Yes? The book addresses that very issue. It's supposed to not make sense, because "heehee half-assed totalitarian welfare state make dumb leaders lol". EDIT: missed a thing. Aerdan fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jan 29, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 17:29
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Aerdan posted:...Yes? The book addresses that very issue. It's supposed to not make sense, because "heehee half-assed totalitarian welfare state make dumb leaders lol". That doesn't mean I can't call it out for being stupid, since I feel "The enemy is completely incompetent" is a negative. It hurts the book because it completely undermines any sort of victory because Honor was just lucky that the bad guys were complete losers. Which is a real problem with the books. If a villain shows up who isn't blatantly evil loser, then you can be sure that they'll eventually become a good guy. Basically, 'X is written intentionally dumb' is a thing you can carry so far. If it's an underpinning of your serious space-battles story then your protagonist is not going to be particularly impressive when they win by easily kicking them over because they were too dumb to not gently caress up a plan. Kchama fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Jan 29, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 17:43
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The impeller thing is interesting because it looks like it's an artifact from Starfire, Weber's game and previous novel series. In the game, there's two different kinds of enginers--military and commercial. Military engines are faster, but can burn out if you use them continuously at speed for long periods of time. Commercial engine are bulkier and have a slower top speed, but can't burn out. So your freighters can run forever but they're capped at 2/3rds the top speed of the military ships.
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Jan 29, 2020 17:47
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