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Kchama posted: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. "We screwed up by using a ship that is much too capable" is extremely mild compared to some of the screwups real operations had.It is an error, but it is a very believable one. As for the journalists, there's plenty of times that the press is mentioned doing exactly what they are supposed to do, or operating quietly in the background. The tabloid journalism, political attack dogs diguised as journalism, propaganda, and yellow journalism are loud because their existance is majorly plot-relevant, while "the press uses careful judgement in what they publish and accept when we tell them that something's too secret to talk about, in exchange we make sure to brief them intensively and avpid using any of our wartime censorship powers except in direst need" is a one-off lone that doesn't need tp be repeated over and over again. If anything, the way the news media is depicted rings truer in the era of "fake news" and Fox "discussion panels" than it did when the books were written.
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Jan 29, 2020 18:18
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Gnoman posted:"We screwed up by using a ship that is much too capable" is extremely mild compared to some of the screwups real operations had.It is an error, but it is a very believable one. It isn't that the ship is much too capable, the problem is that the ship's capabilities are extremely obvious to anyone who pays attention and actively harms the operation. This isn't 'we used a ship that was too good', this is 'we intentionally built a ship that stands out under scrutiny and negatively impacts the operation in a way that flat-out ruined it', since there's no way they just had this thing just sitting around. If this was suppose to be another aspect that was suppose to be caught and scapegoated, it'd actually make sense, but this was suppose to be the aspect that gets away without being detected. So we're just suppose to accept that all the bad guys are incredible morons and also their plan's linchpin is 'the other side is incredibly stupid'. And this is more akin to sending a barely disguised battleship with only-vaguely-disguised turret mounts. As for the journalism, I'd like to see an incident of the press doing what it's suppose to, as opposed to being pure propaganda. You say that kind of thing is a one-off, but it needs to be done at all. If it continuous comes up that the media is pure propaganda, then that's kind of sending the message that yep, the media is pure propaganda. Just expecting an aspect of your universe to get across by never mentioning it is why the book has so many issues. Kchama fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jan 29, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 19:03
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And it's not to say a Q-Ship couldn't work, but the problem is they went with an overly-large Impeller Node that even people who aren't engineers could tell that there was something suspicious about it after actually looking at it, and not, you know, a properly-sized Impeller Node that they don't need to open up the ship to expose and make clear that it's a Q-Ship.
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Jan 29, 2020 19:30
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my understanding of Honorverse tech is that the strength of your sidewalls is proportional to the strength of the rest of your wedge, which depends on how beefy your drive nodes are meaning that, in order to have military-grade defenses, you need military-grade nodes since merchantmen without sidewalls are elsewhere shown to be so wimpy that they can be bullied around by cutters and pinnaces, it makes sense to me that you might want to awkwardly cram a military-grade drive into your Q-ship for sidewall purposes as well as speed, even if it increases the risk of detection significantly I don't think the havenite play here is that bad in and of itself, if you're someone who shares or accepts weber's assumptions about the corruption of the media, the ineptitude of military personnel in backwater stations, etc Although it would have been smarter for an author to focus more on the ground part of the Havenite op, since colonial and cold war fuckery gives us a lot more subject matter to draw from there as Gnoman points out, there is no real-world equivalent to these spaceship mechanics, so there's no non-asspull way to extrapolate how you'd do commerce raiding with them whereas there are plenty of real-world examples on how to arm indigenous rebels for proxy war purposes
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Jan 29, 2020 20:08
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I figure the closest equivalent to this would be putting high performance turbine engines in your Q-Ship so that it can move much faster than one might expect a merchant vessel of its size and shape to move at, probably at the cost of fuel efficiency. But in order for this to work properly you also need to have screws with a different design than would be normal for a merchant vessel. 90% of the time nobody is going to notice or care but if somebody really closely peers at the back of your ship then they can figure out something odd is going on.
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Jan 29, 2020 22:39
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PupsOfWar posted:my understanding of Honorverse tech is that the strength of your sidewalls is proportional to the strength of the rest of your wedge, which depends on how beefy your drive nodes are Patrat posted:I figure the closest equivalent to this would be putting high performance turbine engines in your Q-Ship so that it can move much faster than one might expect a merchant vessel of its size and shape to move at, probably at the cost of fuel efficiency. But in order for this to work properly you also need to have screws with a different design than would be normal for a merchant vessel. The closest real-life comparison is probably putting a carrier's nuclear reactor on your merchantship. Honestly the idea of putting 'military-grade' impeller nodes on the ship is just fine. The problem is that they put over-sized ones that actively couldn't fit on the ship. They point out that the drive is actually sized for a SUPER DREADNOUGHT and not a freighter, which is why they had to gently caress up the ship in a very obvious way to make it fit and also meant the ship couldn't use it without exposing its Q-Shipness. This is also generally less of a problem because Q-Ships are just designed to use their merchantship-lookingness to get in close and then attack, so not having a very durable disguise or having to shed it to do is absolutely fine. BUT, this ship was meant to sit around in orbit for months and hope nobody takes looks at the ship at all, because even Honor could tell there was something suspicious with the impellers with even a sneaky glance at the Sirius. It wasn't a commerce raider, it was just a spy ship. And the Sirius's captain, IIRC, even later questions why they made it into a Q-Ship at all as it's suppose to flee the moment trouble hits and the comically over-sized impeller nodes is why they were caught in the first place. Honestly I'm not entirely sure what the play is suppose to be here. Like they want to make the international community give up custody of the Medusans due to not being able to handle them, which is fine I guess but it's never really parlayed into how this will result in Haven getting control over Medusa, or what control of Medusa itself will really do. Like I get the idea is that it'd give them an in on attacking Manticore but they... really already have it, and gaining control of the system is just going to convince Manticore to actually beef up the systems, and I'm pretty sure ships can be moved in faster than 'international community' support can be gained. Never mind that there's no actual guarantee that the 'international community' will give Medusa to HAVEN. After all, Haven has quite a reputation for being conquerors and it's likely someone else with more clout than them will 'graciously' accept taking custody of Medusa, to teach those 'neo-barbarians' a lesson. It just doesn't seem like there was much point at all to the whole Medusa plot ecept to pad things out, and I guess to fall in line with Horatio Hornblower's story. Of course, in that story, it was Horatio arming the natives and sending them off to fight someone in a big powerful ship only to find out that the people he sent them to attack, as he had been ordered, are now his country's allies so now he has to save them. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 00:41
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Kchama posted:The closest real-life comparison is probably putting a carrier's nuclear reactor on your merchantship. If they just send in ships, they've started a war. They're OK with having a war, but want to have all the advantages they can get before they start. Gaining control of Basilisk will give them a huge advantage, because they can theoretically sneak-attack instantly into the Manticoran home system with twice the forces that the defenses are set up to handle. So the plan is to manufacture a crisis to justify them moving into the system. When the shooting starts, Sirius and the dispatch boat fly of screaming HELP! HELP! SOMEBODY HELP!, and once they jump into hyperspace they just happen to encounter a Havenite battle fleet that just happens to be cruising by in "international waters". The fleet then uses this emergency distress call to justify heading straight to the planet to "restore order". Meanwhile, the Manticorans in-system are supposed to be caught by surprise and being overwhelmed by everything coming at them too fast. The battle fleet comes in, takes control of the planet, and chases off the light forces in-system. At this point, things can go three ways: 1. Manticore backs off, and they ask the Solarian League to arbitrate. If the arbitration gives the system to Haven or a third party, Haven gets their attack route. 2. Manticore sends in their own battle fleet and attacks the Havenite one. No matter who wins this engagement, this attack on a "mercy mission" allows Haven to present Manticore as the aggressor, gaining the moral high ground in the coming war. 3. The units in system engage at hopeless odds and are destroyed. WIth the war already started, Haven moves to the terminus and massacres the reinforcements as they come in, beginning the war with a decisive victory. All three of these are "high reward". Meanwhile, if it fails spectacularly wrong and they lose everything committed,they lose a few million dollars in goods, an auxiliary warship, and a courier boat along with a few hundred lives on-planet. They've got enough cutouts in the plan to make it hard to use it as a casus belli, and most Manticoran factions are trying very hard to avoid the war anyway. This makes the plan "low risk".
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Jan 30, 2020 01:09
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Gnoman posted:If they just send in ships, they've started a war. They're OK with having a war, but want to have all the advantages they can get before they start. How does having Basilisk let them double the forces they can sneak attack in? They're still reliant on the wormhole as the easiest path into Manticore, as the other route to Manticore is literally three times further at the least, and the wormhole has specific limits in how many ships can go through at a time. And at most, I'd see Medusa itself given over, because it'd be pretty hard to expect Manticore to give up its borders to someone who has literally been conquering everyone around. 1. If it goes to a third party, then Haven does not get their attack route. It's definitely not more than one than they already have. So there's a strong chance of 'no reward' 2. Losing your battle fleet and making it clear to Manticore (who now has extremely clear evidence that you've been up to poo poo) if not everyone that you plan on a real invasion real soon means that not only have you lost a fleet, but the system is getting heavily reinforced and you've lost your chance. 'Moral advantage' doesn't mean poo poo, especially when you're so transparently planning an invasion. This is extremely high risk for potentially no reward! 3. This is basically the only one with a high reward, and it's also the one that could have also been done with "Sirius relays the best time to attack and they just roll in". Also, the Sirius being a Q-Ship ruined all of this, because it was found out and was destroyed anyway, Basilisk Station's garrison was heavily beefed up, and everyone involved was killed. Every inch of the plan failed, and it really wasn't that good of a plan to begin with.
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Jan 30, 2020 01:50
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Kchama posted:How does having Basilisk let them double the forces they can sneak attack in? They're still reliant on the wormhole as the easiest path into Manticore, as the other route to Manticore is literally three times further at the least, and the wormhole has specific limits in how many ships can go through at a time. And at most, I'd see Medusa itself given over, because it'd be pretty hard to expect Manticore to give up its borders to someone who has literally been conquering everyone around. quote:A single four-million-ton freighter's transit window was a bare twenty-five seconds, but a two-hundred-million-ton assault wave would shut down its route for over seventeen hours, during which it could neither receive reinforcements nor retreat whence it had come. Which meant, of course, that if an attacker chose to use a large assault wave, he'd better be absolutely certain that wave was nasty enough to win. They have one terminus, which gives them the ability to send X amount of ships at once. If they have a second one, they can send X amount of ships at once in addition to what they can already send, doubling the attack force. quote:1. If it goes to a third party, then Haven does not get their attack route. It's definitely not more than one than they already have. So there's a strong chance of 'no reward' 1. A third party can be bullied, bribed, quietly annexed, or simply rolled over unless they gave it to the Andermani or some other major power. Granting the system independence or giving it to some minor power is the same as giving it to Haven. 2. Haven outnumbers Manticore militarily. Equal losses is a net win, and moral advantage is extremely important, especially when you're going through this whole charade to make it look like you're not transparently planning an invasion. For one thing, the tech embargo pushed later on in the series would be much harder to get if the galaxy as a whole thinks Manticore's wearing the black hats in this fight. 3. Even here, Haven has a chance of looking like they're not the ones starting the fight. That's valuable.
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Jan 30, 2020 02:33
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Thought the bigger Impeller in OBS was Weber doing another half-assed Also, PupsOfWar: Until you produce your Ringo-manifesto or disavow it ever having actually existed, consider yourself soft-banned from posting in this thread. Let me re-quote yourself for clarity's sake. Feel free to post in here with whatever parachute accounts you have until then though. PupsOfWar posted:Aug 16, 2019 19:46
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Jan 30, 2020 04:59
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Kchama posted:Honestly I'm not entirely sure what the play is suppose to be here. Like they want to make the international community give up custody of the Medusans due to not being able to handle them, which is fine I guess but it's never really parlayed into how this will result in Haven getting control over Medusa, or what control of Medusa itself will really do. Like I get the idea is that it'd give them an in on attacking Manticore but they... really already have it, and gaining control of the system is just going to convince Manticore to actually beef up the systems, and I'm pretty sure ships can be moved in faster than 'international community' support can be gained. Haven wants Medusa because control of the planet gives them a territorial claim on the system in general. They also don't have to rely on the "international community" granting them title to Medusa, because under their plan, they would already be in physical possession of the planet, and if possession is nine tenths of the law in civil affairs it must be at least ninety-nine hundredths of the law in international ones. Furthermore, I think you're greatly overstating the obviousness of the drive modifications to Sirius. IIRC, it took a detailed visual examination to detect, and they had to manufacture an excuse to set up the orbit that gets them close enough to collect that information.
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Jan 30, 2020 05:13
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Gnoman posted: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. I think the masts and rigging on sailing ships are the real-world equivalent- because a merchant and a warship might very well look different. This is a very general oversimplification, but I think the equivalents are a barque-rigged ship to a fully-rigged ship. A barque has a larger number of smaller sails, which requires a smaller crew to handle, and is optimal for long-distance voyages. Fully-rigged ships, with large sails (but fewer of them) were faster but needed a bigger crew, and this was the arrangement used by frigates and ships of the line. ...and that's pretty much exactly how Weber describes the different types of impellers
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Jan 30, 2020 06:18
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DJ Dizzy posted:Y’all got an unhealthy hardon for this dude and his Mary Sue masturbation fantasy. All the best MilSF authors crib from real life examples, so read some milhist and get cribbing ! Start with WW2 and branch out. Be diligent about filing the serial numbers off of your sources; mix things up.
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Jan 30, 2020 08:13
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Gnoman posted:From Chapter 5: Yeah I forgot about Trevor's Star being in Haven's hands already, so you're one hundred percent correct that they'd have that terminus at least to send stuff through. It's just been long enough that I thought they got it in HH3, where it gets mentioned a lot more. But, with only two terminus possible terminus, that doesn't make sneak attacks THAT effective since there's only two places you can show up, and you wouldn't be able to get reinforcements from that terminus. You'd have to hope the other terminus wasn't super well-garded. Also, thanks for confirming my rememberance that it's a cooldown, not an up-front problem. 1. Basically that's why I said it's as good as gone for Haven, as if the interstellar community had to get it, someone like the Andermani or Solarians would take it since they have the clout to and especially the Solarians aren't one to turn their nose up at bringing more people into the Solarian League to one day pay them money. 2. I looked it David Weber's answer because On Basilisk Station don't put down anything hard beyond "We think Haven has more ships", but you are correct in terms of Haven outnumbering Manticore militarily. But like, they transparently are. That's why I was scoffing at the idea that there was moral advantage to care about. The idea of them having a battlefleet just 'innocently' cruising way outside of their territory (because it's not THAT close to Basilisk from Haven space. Closer than to Manticore, sure, but the wormhole will give them trouble there). 3. It's not a very good chance since 'oh we just happened to have this large invasion fleet sitting close enough to Basilisk to beat Manticore here and we've left a lot of evidence that we were up to something' kind of ruined that. Plan wasn't great and it was executed abysmally. Though, thanks for at least telling me there was a plan, as that whole idea is better than the impression I got from it. Anshu posted:Haven wants Medusa because control of the planet gives them a territorial claim on the system in general. They also don't have to rely on the "international community" granting them title to Medusa, because under their plan, they would already be in physical possession of the planet, and if possession is nine tenths of the law in civil affairs it must be at least ninety-nine hundredths of the law in international ones. Anshu posted:Haven wants Medusa because control of the planet gives them a territorial claim on the system in general. They also don't have to rely on the "international community" granting them title to Medusa, because under their plan, they would already be in physical possession of the planet, and if possession is nine tenths of the law in civil affairs it must be at least ninety-nine hundredths of the law in international ones. It was basically a sneaky-glance stolen at the Sirius, and they only had to engineer an excuse to look at the Sirius at all because everyone was too incompetent at their job to have inspected the freighter that had been sitting there for months. FuturePastNow posted:I think the masts and rigging on sailing ships are the real-world equivalent- because a merchant and a warship might very well look different. Yeah I think you're probably correct.
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Jan 30, 2020 13:32
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On Basilisk Station Chapter 27quote:Lieutenant Frances Malcolm, Medusan Native Protection Agency, stretched and yawned in her bucket seat. The skimmer swept onward above the rugged foothills, humming across the endless kilometers of moss on the quiet whisper of its turbines, and something thumped behind her. She turned in her chair and looked back just as Corporal Truman, the skimmer's gunner, dropped down out of his dorsal turret. I'm pretty sure cops like formality and ranks as much as soldiers do. Maybe why he got dumped on the NPA. Anyways, they're out looking for where the dead nomad came from, and they come across something. quote:"What's that?" Sergeant Hayabashi's voice broke into her thoughts, and Malcolm raised her head. The sergeant was frowning down at his own instrumentation, and Malcolm felt her lips purse as she saw the bright blip shining from Hayabashi's screen. They go out and check to see what cut off the scan, and suddenly a bunch of natives appear out of nowhere and begin shooting the aircar, which apparently isn't rated for .650 caliber rounds, which Weber erroneously describes as 18mm. It's 16.5mm. Also, beyond Weber's fetish, I'm not sure why Haven gave them the Ferguson rifle if they wanted them to be effective, because Ferguson rifles are noted for actually being very fragile and would just plain break constantly. quote:The skimmer wasn't armored. Its composites were tough and elastic, but they weren't armor, and more bullets punched through its thin skin. She heard Truman cursing in a high, incredulous falsetto, but his pulser turret was already in action, each barrel spitting fifteen-millimeter explosive darts cased in ceramic frag jackets at a cyclical rate of over a thousand rounds per minute. His fire cut across the ground like a lash of flame, shredding moss and Medusan with equal abandon, yet he could fire in only one direction at a time, and still more armed natives were erupting out of other holes in the ground. This is actually the most action this book has gotten so far. I have to have some skepticism that the Ferguson rifles could have shot down the air car like this, because frankly, even if it wasn't armored the actual materials it's made of would probably handle the relatively poor penetration of a Ferguson rifle a bit better than that. Otherwise, seems like a real mistake to have sent such a lovely aircar out. It kind of feels like he had the Mogadashu raid in mind here. Stromboli calls Honor to tell her about the NPA skimmer getting shot down quote:"Ma'am, I thought you should know—we copied some message traffic from an NPA skimmer about fifteen minutes ago. They said they were under fire from Stilties and going down. Then they went off the air. Air Control is still trying to raise them, but we're not getting anything back." Honor sounds the alarm, and quote:"Bring the drive up—now, Lieutenant!" she snapped. Also Weber really doesn't know how a kimono works since you're not shedding them in one flowing motion, no matter how cool you are. Nimitz flees into his Safe Room box, which is a good thing to have. I'd have one for my cat. quote:The courier boat and Sirius begin taking off. I don't get the '...' like the line after that is really important at all. Of course it has an inertial compensator that would allow the Sirius to survive that kind of acceleration! Also, how has the Sirius been getting around the system in the first place without exposing its impeller? Honor sends in the marines, and Estelle has a message from The Bad Guys. quote:"The courier boat?" Her voice was sharp, and McKeon frowned. Gosh, who could have ever seen that your genius plan involving getting the natives drugged out of their minds would have made them hard to control? Well, I guess it's not this guy's fault. Just his higher-ups. I dub this guy Horatio Hornblower. Honor wants to know if the Marines are away. quote:"Yes, Ma'am. And Commander Suchon. Lieutenant Montoya came aboard an hour ago." Haw haw Suchon's in danger. Anyways they almost literally run over the courier boat, and does that thing where a hero acts like a complete rear end in a top hat and it's suppose to be cool. quote:Her screen lit with the image of a very young officer in the green and gray of the People's Navy. He wore a lieutenant's insignia, and his face was a curious, mottled blend of furious red and terrified white. It's never cool. quote:"You stopped the courier, Skipper," he said quietly, under cover of the others' laughter, "but what about the freighter?" quote:She paused and began punching numbers into her maneuvering systems with an unaccustomed speed and accuracy that amazed McKeon. The results flashed on her screen, and she pointed at them. She's awful with hyper math, except when it matters. quote:McKeon paled. "That would be an act of war," he protested. So actually losing an equal battleforce would in fact basically end the war right here because of public opinion back home, and they're just hoping Manticore would accept their bluff. So the risk for actually fighting was an actual potential loss, and the hope was, at all, that they could disavow the scapegoats they sent in - except in this case their own agents made it clear that the Haven government was part of it, and so the plan basically has no chance of succeeding as it is. quote:"Yes." There was no more doubt in McKeon's voice, and his nod was grim. So if Haven has everything planned out absolutely perfectly, then they have roughly three hours to set up defenses on the terminus and at that point they really might as well have just done this in the first place, as Manticore's alerted now. quote:"We're still in Manticoran space, and what's happening on Medusa certainly constitutes an 'emergency situation.' Under the circumstances, I have the authority to order any ship to heave to for examination." I believe this, but I also believe everyone does the same thing, and not just Haven. quote:"If he won't stop willingly, then I'll stop him by force," she said. McKeon looked at her in silence, and she returned his gaze levelly. "If Haven can disavow the actions of an admiral or vice admiral, Her Majesty can disavow those of a commander," she pointed out in that same quiet voice. Next time: The actual space battle of the space battles book. Kchama fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 14:35
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You have a broken quote tag at your last intermediate break. Most of your criticisms here are valid - the plan is flawed, and it is pointed out as flawed in-universe. The only debate is whether it is a realistic error, and a comparison to history makes it seem plausible.
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Jan 30, 2020 17:59
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Gnoman posted:You have a broken quote tag at your last intermediate break. Blargh I thought I fixed all of those. I did them while being very tired. Thanks for letting me know. And as for whether it's realistic or not, I won't say it's implausible, I just don't like them being incompetent as their introduction. That's why I was calling it terrible writing. Having your main villains be introduced by having a dumb over-complicated plan that blows up in their face really kind of defangs them, you know? EDIT: There, fixed. Kchama fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 21:02
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You know what saps my will with this book more than anything? Any and all scenes concerning Suchon. I'm skipping the next chapter because honestly I despise it. Like, you know how I went 'Haw haw Suchon's in danger?' in my comments two chapters ago? The chapter has a big part about how they're forcing the surgeon to play the role of medic BECAUSE it puts her in danger, and forcing her to the front lines at literally gunpoint. It sucks and I hate it so bad I'm skipping the chapter. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jan 31, 2020 |
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Jan 31, 2020 00:00
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FuturePastNow posted:I think the masts and rigging on sailing ships are the real-world equivalent- because a merchant and a warship might very well look different. This is what I was trying to say about "more masts + different sail riggings = Military Impeller in Weber-land". Thank you FuturePastNow for the help. And for fans of Kchama's "Let's Read David Weber's Honor Harrington series" attempt, On Basilisk Station is the most "grounded" of all of the Honorverse books, at least the ones
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Jan 31, 2020 03:05
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quantumfoam posted:This is what I was trying to say about "more masts + different sail riggings = Military Impeller in Weber-land". Thank you FuturePastNow for the help. Pretty sure I don't have fans. But otherwise this is correct. The next book is a huge uptick in it.
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Jan 31, 2020 03:53
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Ugh, I will get Safehold...4 up this weekend? I feel like there's honestly not much to say about it that I haven't already said.
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Jan 31, 2020 07:27
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I read through the rest of the Poor Man's Fight series by Elliott Kay, hits most of the usual plot/character points for this stuff (eg the obligatory boot camp sequence, the badass senior NCO who refuses promotions, officers instantly getting hit when a fight starts, etc) but I thought it was good enough. Generic but entertaining action series that goes at a good clip. (or at a minimum far better than I expected from a self-published author who's other work is some UF "my girlfriend is a succubus and my other girlfriend is a angel" series.) War crimes content: the protagonist kills a lot of people, gets PTSD, and gets called a war criminal by corporate propaganda. The "hard men" in his planet's government end up getting arrested/impeached for some of their actions. As a bonus, the anti-corporate tone of the books provided some additional amusement:      The first book also had a few 1 star reviews on Amazon complaining about the amount of blasphemy and swearing including: quote:He also takes Christ's name in vain on another planet. Stupid! mllaneza posted:All the best MilSF authors crib from real life examples, so read some milhist and get cribbing ! Start with WW2 and branch out. Be diligent about filing the serial numbers off of your sources; mix things up. IIRC in one of the RCN books there's a afterwards where David Drake basically goes (paraphrasing) "I borrow from folk tales for my fantasy stories, and I borrow from history for my science fiction, because often the most interesting stories already happened." C.M. Kruger fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Jan 31, 2020 |
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Jan 31, 2020 10:20
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The Short Victorious War (HH book 3) has a 12 page infodump at the end with the basics of how the universe works. Plus a list of starting Manticore and Haven naval strength. Manticore has 309 Dreadnoughts and Super Dreadnoughts. Haven has 460. In addition Haven have almost 400 Battleships, which are an older class, significantly smaller and less capable than Dreadnoughts but are still considered capital units that you could use in a wall of battle if you were desperate. Think pre-dreadnoughs still in service in WW1. Manticore have scrapped theirs.
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Jan 31, 2020 10:23
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C.M. Kruger posted:
You might be pleasantly surprised by the quality of that one, too. It also garners a lot of hate because Kay "ruined the harem fantasy" by portraying an honest and loving open relationship where the succubus has sex with men other than the protagonist, and he doesn't care.
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Jan 31, 2020 19:49
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Safehold Chapter Three I know, it's been a while since I've done these. Remember our not-naval officer from the prologue, Nimue Alban? With the expensive toy robot her rich parents bought her? We do a cinematic cut to Weber posted:The Mountains of Light She's back! Weber posted:Nimue Alban leaned back in the comfortable chair and frowned. Uuuuuugh. These sentence clunkers are part of the reason I've been unenthused about doing these. Anyway, Nimue has spent the last three days "studying the data files Pei Kau-yung had left for her the hard way, because Elias Proctor's modifications to her software had inadvertently disabled her high-speed data interface." Ok, sure, fine, whatever, keep meandering about the software problem in the fictitious robot. Weber bluntly hammers us that this is partially because Nimue chooses to be human despite being put in a robot. We get introduced to OWL as Nimue asks it to bring a "ground-based surveillance" system online. Care about my worldbuilding posted:Nimue shook her head. Owl - the name she'd assigned to the Ordoñes-Westinghouse-Lyton RAPIER tactical computer Pei Kau-yung had managed to "lose" for her-wasn't exactly the brightest crayon in the cybernetic box. The AI was highly competent in its own areas of expertise, but tactical computers had deliberately suppressed volitional levels and required higher levels of direct human command input. Owl wasn't precisely brimming with imagination or the ability-or desire-to anticipate questions or instructions. In theory, Owl's programming was heuristic, and something more closely resembling a personality ought to emerge eventually. On the other hand, Nime had worked with a lot of RAPIERS, and none of them had ever impressed her as geniuses. Ok, so Nimue is a robo-racist. Joking aside, this is something that could easily be shown rather than told. Nimue constantly expressing frustration and repeating things to OWL would have gotten the point across as easily as making up brand names and acronyms for fictitious technologies that will literally never come up again because the Ordoñes-Westinghouse-Lyton company got blown up by space aliens. The fact that Weber actually does this in the next few paragraphs makes me question if the editors assigned to Weber just kind of rubber stamp the traditional Weber brick and take their paychecks to spend on things that are good. We get a bunch of dialogue about clearing the ice off some sensor array that is connected to Nimue's hideout by landline. More wasted words posted:"All right," Nimue nodded. "In that case, I want you to bring it up, passive systems only, and initiate a complete standard sky sweep for orbital infrastructure. And give me an estimate for time required to complete the sweep." Isn't this riveting? This is quite literally just modern tech support, but with no tension, humor, or anything that would make at all invested in this scene. We know what the world outside looks like and we know that no Gbaba battleships bombed our suspiciously European nobles. There's a patented David Weber infodump about how her facility is hidden under the mountain and runs on geothermal power and blah blah blah, and you know what? I'm cutting it. It tells us nothing about what Nimue is actually trying to do or anything about her character. She has a pile of supersonic stealth spy drones and a library and a modern medical facility and we finally get what she's doing after 2 pages of made up technology: Editors, where art thou? posted:She had sixteen of them [SNARC drones] up at this very moment, hovering invisible to the eye, or to any more sophisticated sensors (had there been any), above major towns and cities. We know that's not true because of "Dynnys" and other abominable names. Weber uses this to assure us Nimue is a really good linguist and to meander into muttering about robot sleep cycles, being a woman in the land of Space Sexism, the evilbadmen who made a fake church to their egotism, and a bit here that lacks all self-awareness. Isn't this supposed to be about the Taliban? posted:But whereas the cultures on all of those other planets had been created by blending different societies, belief structures, ideologies, philosophies, and worldviews into a pluralistic whole, Safehold had begun with an absolutely uniform culture. An artificially uniform culture. The human beings who made up that culture had all been programmed to believe exactly the same thing, so the differences which existed here on Safehold were the consequences of eight standard centuries of evolution away from a central matrix, rather than towards one. Literally everything we see of the old society is that it's all English with a few token Chinese people, but OK I will indulge Weber this once. While this precedes the explanation of how the evil egotists turned themselves into false gods it's a very meta take on how this situation doesn't actually map to anything relatable on Earth at all. It's like Axe Cop, which is literally a meme written by a five-year-old that thrives on absurdity, but rather than chuckle at how an angry hobo with an axe chops off mermaids' heads we are supposed to treat this as a deadly struggle between good and evil. Anyway we get pages and pages of telling us about the church's evil. The Temple is a powerful space fortress made with sci-fi technologies so that "She'd seen planetary defense command bunkers which had been flimsier than the Temple". We get a page long reiteration that the Temple grants kings their power in the name of God and Chief Egotist Langhorne, has a huge land grant, and... So powerful! So much monies! posted:Every single person on Safe-hold[sic] was obligated by law to deliver a tithe of twenty percent of his income every single year. Secular rulers were responsible for collecting that Tithe and delivering it to the Church, the Church then used it for charitable projects, the construction of yet more churches, and as capital for a profitable business lending funds back to the local princes and nobility at usurious rates. Plus, of course, the lives of incredible wealth and luxury it provided to its senior clergy. Remember when we saw that the wealthy and powerful vicars lived in a golden temple with big jewels, plenty of servants, and political power they can casually throw around because they're bored? Did you not understand the blatant symbolism? Did you tune out when Dennis mentioned he enjoyed wielding power? Is David Weber paid by the word? Anyway, Nimue realizes she's in a David Weber novel and that these are the Badmen who exist to be righteously crushed by superior technology wielded by attractive people. Tell, don't show posted:It doesn't look like anyone's challenging the basic theology-not yet, she thought. But the population's grown too large, and the Church has discovered the truth of that old saying about power corrupting. I wish I could get the SNARCs inside the Temple proper, but even without that it's obvious this Council of Vicars is as corrupt and self-serving as any dictatorship in history And even if it doesn't realize that itself, there have to be plenty of people outside the Council who do. Remember Harold and Caleb discussing this exact same poo poo? Did it sink in then, reader? Did you skip all that to get to those tasty Weber infodumps? Do you have a thing for robot girls and are zoning out from the rest of the text fantasizing about a dark-haired mechanical beauty from Arthurian legend? (I won't blame you). Did you imagine you were reading something competently written, with artistic merit? Nimue's expression tightens and that ends the chapter. What a pointless waste of readers' time. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 02:00
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Safehold Chapter Three He really loves his "chapter showing a bunch of stuff" "Chapter from another POV, of character finding out about all the stuff from the previous chapter with nothing new included." It gets really tiring.
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Feb 2, 2020 05:42
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Thought this might interest a few people who dislike reading mil-scifi but love listening to podcasts. A free audiobook version (no idea how much of the book is covered) of Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero thanks to the internet archive project and BBC Radio 4. https://archive.org/details/billthegalacticherobyharryharrison Warning: The book is hilarious quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Feb 7, 2020 |
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Feb 7, 2020 04:45
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Kchama posted:Also, beyond Weber's fetish, I'm not sure why Haven gave them the Ferguson rifle if they wanted them to be effective, because Ferguson rifles are noted for actually being very fragile and would just plain break constantly. Not really sure about that. There is some indication a fair bit of that was because the reproductions were using a flawed understanding of the design. Deptfordx posted:Think pre-dreadnoughs still in service in WW1. Manticore have scrapped theirs. And only ever had like a dozen IIRC.
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Feb 7, 2020 12:41
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VhenRa posted:Not really sure about that. There is some indication a fair bit of that was because the reproductions were using a flawed understanding of the design. There's references to the fragility in the 1800s as being why it wasn't adopted beyond just the production issues. So I assume that even back in the day it was enough to make it not a reliable weapon in the eyes of the people evaluating it.
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Feb 7, 2020 18:28
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Cool sounding implausible weapons are a core piece of mil-fiction and mil-scifi. Mens murderporn-adventure novelettes tend to go with more grounded "realistic" weapons but compensate for that with ludicrous action scenes that would fit right into "Commando" or the sadly forgotten "American Ninja" movies.
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Feb 9, 2020 08:31
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Anshu posted:You might be pleasantly surprised by the quality of that one, too. It also garners a lot of hate because Kay "ruined the harem fantasy" by portraying an honest and loving open relationship where the succubus has sex with men other than the protagonist, and he doesn't care. Probably not since I don't really read UF or romance stuff, but that's pretty funny nonetheless, I can easily picture the impotent rage and fury at the waifu's ~betrayal~ just going by how anime fans react. Though that reminds me there was also a middling GR review for one of the Poor Man books where the reviewer spent like 5-6 paragraphs complaining about how one of the main female characters was in a relationship with another space marine, and that inter-service relationships never work, and that because of this she should instead dump him and get back with the protagonist. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Do you have a thing for robot girls and are zoning out from the rest of the text fantasizing about a dark-haired mechanical beauty from Arthurian legend? (I won't blame you). Girls Frontline is thread topical I suppose, it's got you putting down a robot slave revolt and then in the most recent story event you set off a dirty bomb full of alien T-Virus to distract the military after being betrayed and the Big Boss character defecting.  quantumfoam posted:Cool sounding implausible weapons are a core piece of mil-fiction and mil-scifi. The "Phoenix" series is one of the best/most hilarious examples I've found of ludicrous action: https://www.tor.com/2016/05/20/were-all-going-to-die-screaming-in-phoenix-dark-messiah/ quote:Set in the year 1989, Phoenix begins with the evil Luther Enoch engineering a nuclear conflagration between American and the USSR from his secure “combat crib,” beginning with the assassination of the American President in Syria and ending with bombs falling on American cities. The end comes when over San Francisco we see the “flesh-roasting glare of the nuclear fireball rising on a churning phallus of smoke.” quote:Too much violence? Well, then, Shakespeare’s got too much talking. This is pulp art, as riveting as a picture of the Grim Reaper riding a Harley, surrounded by screaming zombie Vikings, tattooed on the back of a serial killer by his prison cellmate. It’s Lee Child’s Jack Reacher in a weird diaper, drunk on moonshine and tearing up parked Corvettes with a chainsaw. quote:Rawlings and Magnus drive into San Francisco, blow through a SCORF roadblock, high five each other, then lose the pursuit vehicles by leaping their Hummer over a giant hole in the middle of the ruined Golden Gate Bridge. A few minutes later, they arrive in downtown San Francisco where a Scav Mob pelts their gleaming Hummer with dead rats, then Magnus rescues a naked Chinese girl named September Song from where she’s being kept on a leash by Klaatu, the flamethrower-wielding, leather-chaps-wearing leader of the Pagans, who is violating her with his “big purple dong.” Magnus runs him over with a bulldozer. The totally naked September Song grabs Klaatu’s weapon and “Bodies dropped dead as the naked girl expertly swung the Madsen 380 ACP in a figure eight capture-and-move pattern that turned the front ranks of the onrushing goon squad into pulverized human jelly.” http://glorioustrash.blogspot.com/search/label/Phoenix quote:Everything I loved in Dark Messiah is here: the gun-porn, the ultra-gore, the purple-prosed sex, the dark comedy. The action is spectacular and violent, even though it's really all simple: some guy usually just shoots at Trench, who "somersaults" out of the way and then fires back. But in Alexander's hands it becomes a sort of hyperkinetic poetry: quote:But little need to worry about our hero. When we meet Trench in Death Quest he's already got his hands wrapped around the throat of an orderly who is about to cut him up. Killing the man, Trench stumbles about in a "purple haze" of drugs that have been put into his system over the past few weeks of captivity.
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Feb 9, 2020 09:34
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My gold standard for men's murderporn-adventure novelettes is the Destroyer series. The main character in them gets constantly dunked on by the old-mentor character, the ultra-violence action in them is suitably ludicrous and subtlety went out the window on page 3, book 1 of the series (there is roughly 130+ On another subject: Keep up the good work TheGreatEvilKing + Kchama on your self-volunteered tasks. Be happy, TheGreatEvilKing..you only have another The other Cenobite acolyte (Hellraiser movie variant) has another 2 chapters(?) and thirteen more books left. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 22:36
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quantumfoam posted:My gold standard for men's murderporn-adventure novelettes is the Destroyer series. The main character in them gets constantly dunked on by the old-mentor character, the ultra-violence action in them is suitably ludicrous and subtlety went out the window on page 3, book 1 of the series (there is roughly 130+ If I include the 'side-stories' that all the main books assume you've read and in fact will leave out huge chunks of important information out as a result, then it's more like 22 books left. And four chapters left. Assuming I don't skip any more. On Basilisk Station CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE So we start today with the beginning of the epic cha--- Oh actually haha gently caress you, it's time for a long ramble about how hyper-space works, at literally the worst time possible, when it would have been far better to have shove this massive infodump literally at any other point. It starts off like we're actually getting into the nitty gritty of what's going on and then... quote:Commander Honor Harrington sat in her command chair and watched her displays as HMS Fearless tore through space under maximum emergency power. The cruiser accelerated at a steady five hundred and twenty gravities—more than five kilometers per second per second—in pursuit of the freighter Sirius; Honor's face was still and cold, a mask against her own anxiety, while her mind churned behind her eyes. Psyche! Infodump time! quote:She chopped off that train of thought and made herself lean back. The timing of Sirius's departure could mean only one thing, she told herself, and Brigham's projection of her course confirmed it. Sirius was, indeed, headed for the Tellerman wave, and the Tellerman was one of the "Roaring Deeps," the most powerful grav waves ever charted. More than that, it headed almost directly towards the People's Republic of Haven. If there truly was a Peep battle squadron out here, the Tellerman would take Sirius to meet it at two and a half or three thousand times the speed of light. By the way out of that entire massive wall of text, only the last couple of paragraphs actually matter at all. The rest of it is poo poo that doesn't matter and has no place in the rest of the book. It's loving ridiculous. quote:Captain Johan Coglin sat on his bridge. He'd run out of curses ten minutes before; now he simply sat and glared at his display while anger flowed through his mind like slow lava. "Everything about this was loving dumb in the first place and I told them so and they ignored me." Huh, wonder where I've heard that before. quote:He queried NavInt's files for the readout on Fearless's armament. She was one of the last of the old Courageous-class ships, almost eighty T-years old and small for her rate, by modern standards. But that didn't mean she was senile. The surviving units of her class had been thoroughly overhauled over the years, and they packed a nasty weight of metal for their age and size. They were light on defense, virtually unarmored and with relatively weak radiation shielding (for warships), but they mounted a pair of grasers, two thirty-centimeter lasers, and seven missile tubes in each broadside. They lacked the magazine capacity for a sustained missile engagement, but they could throw surprisingly heavy salvos for their size while their ammo lasted—more than enough to reduce any freighter to glowing vapor. Or it should have been, anyway. Man where's that Navy Intelligence in a few books? Also can't stop worshipping Honor for even one paragraph, tsk. They continue chasing and Honor decides to send a cease and desist and also get the gently caress back here message quote:"Mr. Cardones." This is finally time for action so I'm just gonna give you all of it. Just so you can see that this is the heart-stopping pounding action that people praise about this book. Also my copy, which is an official digital copy mind you, still isn't doing any sort indicators of PoV switches. It's kind of annoying. quote:The missile belched from Fearless's number two missile tube and sped ahead at an acceleration of 417 KPS2, building on Fearless's own velocity of just over eighteen thousand kilometers per second. It could have accelerated twice as fast, but reducing its acceleration to 42,500 g raised its small impeller's burnout time from one minute to three, which not only gave it three times the maneuvering time but increased its terminal velocity from rest by almost fifty percent. Gasp, a Q-Ship! It was kind of the obvious thing after they figured out that it hiding military-level equipment, so I'm not sure why it's a GASP WE'RE DOOMED sort of thing, besides I guess trying to build up dramatic tension. Also 'racing like honed shards of ice'. He really loves his 'cold' and 'ice' descriptors for her in this book. Three chapters left.
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Feb 11, 2020 01:35
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Some people might argue you need threatening antagonists to bud dramatic tension. These people are not best selling author David Weber.
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Feb 11, 2020 01:44
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Some people might argue you need threatening antagonists to bud dramatic tension. I will be doing a post tonight after I get home from work. I guess I've had enough of a vacation from terrible.
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Feb 24, 2020 19:24
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Some people might argue you need threatening antagonists to bud dramatic tension. Even if he had managed to make any tension in the Safehold books, it would have been smothered to death by the fact there’s like ten of them that are all doorstoppers. I gave up at book... four, I think, and I was reading them when I had two hours of subway time every day, to do nothing but read. The aliens were kind of cool, but they straight up ceased mattering as anything other than a reason for the tech restrictions after page 100 of the first book. I kept hoping they’d be relevant again but nope.
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Feb 24, 2020 21:27
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Even if he had managed to make any tension in the Safehold books, it would have been smothered to death by the fact there’s like ten of them that are all doorstoppers. Supposedly they're going to return in the next series but that's still 10 massive books and knowing Weber they won't even appear in the first book. In fact it's more likely they'll appear in the last book of the series.
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Feb 25, 2020 11:26
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Read Andrew Skinner's Steel Frame over the weekend. Since kchama punked out with their promised "Let's Read Honor Harrington in series order" update, thread content incoming. Steel Frame was overall not bad. Steel Frame is definitely a mil-scifi book, more specifically a giant mecha mil-scifi with trappings of other mil-scifi series like: W40k, Gundam, Macross, Kenny MacLeod's Corporation War, etc (i am sure there is more allusions to other series that I haven't read or gave up on or blocked out). Storywise, Steel Frame held up (mostly) throughout the end.....increasingly traumatic amounts of backstory for the main character and most of the named side characters got doled out as the book continued. Don't expect a John Ringo/David Weber teflon-main character hero going into Steel Frame. The ending in Steel Frame was sort of abrupt but made 100% sense given the previous character development (pun not initially intended, but thematically it fits oh so well). quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 17:01
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I read Weber back when I thought his hard sci fi style tricked me into thinking they were good. I’m not very smart, so I’m easily tricked. They are not good. I’ve read almost every Harrington book, and the first few of the Safehold series. They are not good books. Not even good stories. I think the best Harrington book was the one where she was shuffled off to do pirate hunting for a while. It was still really bad. I wish there were more/better military sci fi that isn’t just marines on the ground. I’d like a good space naval war story.
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Feb 25, 2020 19:24
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quantumfoam posted:Read Andrew Skinner's Steel Frame over the weekend. Since kchama punked out with their promised "Let's Read Honor Harrington in series order" update, thread content incoming. Really? It alludes to Macross? That one surprises me, but I guess the American localization that strips out the entire defeating the enemy race by exposing them to music and the concept of fun that doesn't involve battles to the deathwould be more appealing to mil-scifi authors. Lucas Archer posted:I read Weber back when I thought his hard sci fi style tricked me into thinking they were good. I’m not very smart, so I’m easily tricked. Spaceship Yamato is kind of the ur-Space Naval War Story as it's literally about the frame of a WW2 battleship being used to build a starship on a dying, defeated Earth, so the fights are basically Weber's intended naval battles without writing a stupid setting to force it. Or you could just get into Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which does everything Weber wanted but infinitely better. Kchama fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 22:41
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