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Weber set up a really complicated situation and a bunch of little side plots and little of it amounted to anything. The end of the series (if it has ended) really feels like the final episodes of a show that was canceled when everyone expected it to get a couple more seasons.
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Mar 17, 2020 15:59
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Everything after they made peace with the Peeps was the series going on longer than it ought to have, imo.
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Mar 17, 2020 17:51
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I think that right there is the problem. This is pretty much why I stopped reading most Urban Fiction books. The authors of the Rivers of London series and Alex Verus series do this hard. Getting burnt out on Honor Harrington minutiae chat, so I'd just like to mention that David Drake exists. Drake pretty much has a diametrically opposite writing style and views on warfare in comparison to David Weber. http://baencd.freedoors.org/ has 2 different browsable David Drake themed Baen FreeCD's
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Mar 17, 2020 19:22
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quantumfoam posted:This is pretty much why I stopped reading most Urban Fiction books. Bujold's books are great but they got taken out of the FreeCDs, sadly.
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Mar 18, 2020 23:59
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Blame Bujold for that, the DRM takedown notice came from her. Personally not into Bujolds stories (Miles sucks (but his parents are cool), space romance is boring), however do respect the amount of work Bujold puts into her world-building and side-characters in her stories. David Drake managed to chill some-what out, and he attributes part of the chill-out to writing Redliners, which is included in both of the David Drake themed BaenCD. Actively blocked out most of John Ringo's and David Weber's work from my memory so seeing each of them had multiple Baen FreeCDs was wtf. All I remember about Eric Flint is the Harry Turtledove grognard-y writing style.
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Mar 19, 2020 02:40
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quantumfoam posted:This is pretty much why I stopped reading most Urban Fiction books. I’ve given up on most book series because of this. So much wheel spinning to milk that built in audience for as long as possible. Even the Expanse, which is a pretty good series, has two books (3 and 4) where you can tell they had to spin their wheels because their contract got extended substantially.
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Mar 19, 2020 02:46
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quantumfoam posted:Blame Bujold for that, the DRM takedown notice came from her. Ringo, Weber, and Flint alllllllllllll suck hard. I hate his stuff in the Honorverse more than I hate Weber's stuff. And yeah I saw that Bujold was the one who required they be removed from the free CD. David Weber posted:(A) Manticore, despite its aristocratic political system, is basically a raving meritocracy. People with merit and ability can rise as high as their talent level and industriousness will take them. Achieving success, whether professional, economic, or academic, is the key to increased status, wealth, respect, and power in this society, especially for someone not born into the ranks of the aristocracy. Which, even on Manticore, is the vast bulk of the population. Manticore is also a star nation whose ruling dynasty has considerable power and has deliberately pursued a policy of strongly encouraging basic education and scientific and technological advancement. This is a policy which long predates the collapse of the original Republic of Haven into the People's Republic of Haven, and it is part of what has created the "institutional mindset" of the entire society. In other words, this is a society which has always thought in terms of finding ways to do things better rather than accepting ways of doing them adequately. They aren't interested in simply doing them "better than anyone else;" they are interested in finding ways to do things better than they already do them. By the way I had been looking for this a lot earlier and finally found it and I just wanted to laugh at Manticore being a 'raving meritocracy'. Kchama fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Mar 19, 2020 |
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Mar 19, 2020 02:51
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Kchama posted:Ringo, Weber, and Flint alllllllllllll suck hard. I hate his stuff in the Honorverse more than I hate Weber's stuff. No, that part actually rings kinda true if you consider the reality of so-called 'meritocracies' rather than what their proponents insist they're like. Like everything else, Weber doesn't think about the implications of the poo poo he writes very much.
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Mar 19, 2020 06:35
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Aerdan posted:No, that part actually rings kinda true if you consider the reality of so-called 'meritocracies' rather than what their proponents insist they're like. Like everything else, Weber doesn't think about the implications of the poo poo he writes very much. Weber's idea of what a meritocracy is is super different from the reality of Manticore as a 'meritocracy'.
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Mar 19, 2020 10:23
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Kchama posted:Weber's idea of what a meritocracy is is super different from the reality of Manticore as a 'meritocracy'. The sheer amount of poo poo that Young (born a noble) and Hauptman (inherited wealth) get away with simply because of who their families are shows how merit based Manticore is.  Hauptman, at least, took his father's wealth and managed to grow it to the biggest fortune in a the richest star nation in the area, but Young in particular shows how bullshit the system is since we know he's a serial molester and rapist, as well as an incompetent captain whose ill-considered actions cost lives, who constantly gets away with it just because he's a powerful Earl's son.Meritocracy, my rear end. 
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Mar 19, 2020 12:11
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Space-Royal Navy is as much a meritocracy as real Royal Navy; patronage is everything, and your fellow Captains and Admirals are more dangerous than the enemy.
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Mar 19, 2020 14:47
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What I was pointing out here is 'merit' is extremely fluid and can be interpreted to mean 'has the right connections' just as easily as 'meritocracy' proponents' 'pro-society achievements'. Because the people who are already at the top dictate what 'merit' means. In an open aristocracy where leadership is founded in the aristocracy, that inherently prefers the bullshit we see in the Star Kingdom. So Weber is absolutely right in the dumbest loving way.
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Mar 19, 2020 22:29
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I think all he really means is that his main character is the smartest and best and everyone loves her, therefore she gets to be their highest ranking officer and friends with the Queen. Like sure it's a meritocracy... of this one person he created to be as perfect as possible.
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Mar 20, 2020 01:45
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Aerdan posted:What I was pointing out here is 'merit' is extremely fluid and can be interpreted to mean 'has the right connections' just as easily as 'meritocracy' proponents' 'pro-society achievements'. Because the people who are already at the top dictate what 'merit' means. In an open aristocracy where leadership is founded in the aristocracy, that inherently prefers the bullshit we see in the Star Kingdom. There's a reason why I phrased my response the way I did. Now, the stuff with the nobility all being shitheads and got their position through connections is, as stated, totally accurate to the era that Honorverse is an In SPACE of... but it goes absolutely against the picture of what Weber wants to paint about how Manticore is different from Haven and later the Solarian League, who both had the exact same problem as Manticore is written as having, but Manticore-As-Described-By-Weber does not: Corruption. But this doesn't actually harm Manticore in the long-run, because... Relatedly, David Weber posted:Bear in mind that the bureaucracies in question have had literally dozens of centuries to be created, balloon into nightmares which laugh at the very thought of meaningful reform, and be taken out of the electoral process because they've been so thoroughly institutionalized. The people actually working within the various bureaucracies may have an excellent idea of what's going on, but they (and their clients) are thoroughly insulated from contact with the mainstream societies around them. Some -- indeed, many -- of the bureaucrats are genuinely attempting to do their very best for their charges, but that degree of insulation and isolation means that they will probably never receive the degree of public support and demands for change that the repair of the system would really require. "The Solarian League's problem is its institutionalized unelected bureaucrats. Manticore does not have this. Ignore its bureaucracies and also the unelected officials that run it."
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Mar 20, 2020 04:28
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Actually, my favorite part of the Sollies is how their secret cabal of people running the show is just five "Permanent Undersecretary of Whatever". It's extremely on-brand for a bureaucratic hell.
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Mar 20, 2020 13:38
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Radio Free Kobold posted:Actually, my favorite part of the Sollies is how their secret cabal of people running the show is just five "Permanent Undersecretary of Whatever". It's extremely on-brand for a bureaucratic hell. Someone elsewhere brought up that it's most likely that the five Permanent Undersecretaries is suppose to be a references to the five permanent seats on the security council the UN has, since the Solarian League morphs from being a walking question-answerer (the question being 'why does no one siege the planets?') to being a seen-from-right-wing-eyes fusion of the UN and EU, with the British, ironically, modern bureaucracy taped in. Though the actual view on the innards of the Solarian League doesn't give off any sort of impression of a bureaucratic hell, to be honest. You never actually see these bureaucrats who are supposedly mucking things up. The Permanent Undersecretaries are just treated as nobility or perhaps kings by another name. Which makes it pretty ironic when Weber spends five hundred pages on unelected Manticorean bureaucrats and nobility. sneering at the 'unelected bureaucrats' running the Solarian League. EDIT: Also the Solarian League went from the foe you never want to cross because they are light years from everyone else and everyone being glad they don't care about what's going on to the foe who is actually completely useless and stupid and Manticore immediately starts pushing for war against them. Kchama fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Mar 20, 2020 |
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Mar 20, 2020 18:24
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When I'm not tapped of all creative spirit by my day job or cripplingly depressed or spending hours on video games I've been remixing and rewriting the series from Mission of Honor onwards. Basically the whole Solarian League arc. There's a lot that can be cut, and I figured out some ways to get the Solarians back into the 'interesting and novel opponents' zone without introducing yet another layer of super missiles.
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Mar 22, 2020 19:56
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General Battuta posted:When I'm not tapped of all creative spirit by my day job or cripplingly depressed or spending hours on video games I've been remixing and rewriting the series from Mission of Honor onwards. Basically the whole Solarian League arc. There's a lot that can be cut, and I figured out some ways to get the Solarians back into the 'interesting and novel opponents' zone without introducing yet another layer of super missiles. Oh that's got to be quite a joy. The Solarian League arc is when the books REALLY go off the rails and become incredibly boring to the point that the book cover of the final book is Honor looking like the big bad because she's so smug and invincible and the book cover tries to get that across.
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Mar 23, 2020 05:17
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General Battuta posted:When I'm not tapped of all creative spirit by my day job or cripplingly depressed or spending hours on video games I've been remixing and rewriting the series from Mission of Honor onwards. Basically the whole Solarian League arc. There's a lot that can be cut, and I figured out some ways to get the Solarians back into the 'interesting and novel opponents' zone without introducing yet another layer of super missiles. Do share your thoughts when you're ready.
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Mar 23, 2020 11:14
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I'll go one better and post what I've got once I've reached a good battle or somesuch. Maybe once I hit Space Pearl Harbor. My basic principles so far: -The Solarians are still technologically inferior to Manticore in the area of 'kill it with missiles', but have tactical strengths in other areas which let them deliver their own surprises, including a far superior understanding of hyperspace and Warshawski sails, wedge fuckery, and tremendously powerful AI. -This is because Solarian military doctrine is oriented around system defense against relativistic impactors, and, offensively, around punishing Eridani Edict offenders by ramming huge walls of dreadnoughts into their core space. This requires a lot of survivability in the face of unexpected and novel defenses. The SLN is a 'simulator navy', which has its disadvantages in terms of real-world experience - but it also means they have a huge library of untested tactics and weird one-off technologies that were procured, deployed, and then canceled a hundred years ago as part of some briefly ascendant philosophy of warfighting. -The League's military establishment is aware of basic facts from the earlier Honor Harrington books, because it's clear they did have observers at some of these battles. Impeller signatures are incredibly easy to detect. You just need one freighter watching the Battle of Manticore to confirm the existence of multi-drive missiles and very long engagement ranges. ECM emissions would also be at the top of their list for collection. This doesn't mean they've done anything *about* that intelligence yet, but it's available. Sure, the SLN as Weber's written it is hidebound, but even if it's totally consumed by bureaucratic infighting, intelligence that could justify new procurement is a very powerful bureaucratic weapon. -Strategically and diplomatically, this is a war between Manticore and the Solarian League Navy as a bureaucratic organization, rather than the League as a whole. The SLN's absolute imperative is to maintain its posture of deterrence as unchallenged enforcer of the Eridani Edict, which means *any* unanswered military defeat is, in their eyes, opening the door to galaxy-wide chaos. They genuinely believe that unilateral Solarian military superiority is necessary for civilization to continue, and that this unilateral superiority must be signaled and oversignaled. They are determined to win the conflict using the military and political resources they have, without drawing in the huge System Defense Forces belonging to the Core World member nations. -Manticore loses the war if they get the League's member nations involved. This is not because individual Core Worlds can necessarily defeat Manticore in battle, but because their economic and technological output is so huge. Once an individual Core World is pissed off at Manticore, it will call directly on its allies to impose diplomatic sanctions and commerce lockdown, followed (eventually) by military action. The League legislature may be ineffective, since Beowulf can veto even the slightest censure against Manticore, but once the member worlds see themselves as involved, they'll bypass the League and act on their own. Manticore as a nation depends on external trade. The League doesn't. The Core Worlds will happily trade with each other and the rest of the League while freezing Manticore out. -The story can't be a series of meetings. It's a soap opera. Honor needs some personal drama. Her whole appeal is her fundamental righteousness, and I think people read these books for the catharsis (no matter how silly and simplistic) of Honor staggering under unjust, vindictive public treatment and then rallying to exonerate herself (and win a big space battle.) Similarly, every other character Honor meets can't just intuit right away that she's unimpeachable. -Nimitz is an alien. If Honor's got to be empathically aware of people's feelings on top of all her other advantages, it's only through the relay of this alien. This bond needs to create problems as well as solve them. How do you negotiate with a foreign head of state when you're acutely aware of all the emotions that person is repressing? When you start losing the distinction between her resentment and your own? There are a bunch of other unexamined aspects of her personal life that can be turned into drama. What if Mesa, through a Beowulfan front, offers a regenerative therapy for Honor's wife? Would Lady Emily be willing to accept treatment, when she must be an icon and advocate for the permanently disabled in a society that's used to waving disabilities away with regen? If she did accept (after much guilt and angst) how would she react when Mesa leaked the origin of the treatment - and Honor's ancestry as a Mesan supergenetic superwoman? -Grayson's economy crashes after years of wartime spending. Just fuckin dies. Go invest in some infrastructure on your poison planet instead of superdreadnoughts. -Delete or minimize everything that's coming in from the side series. This is supposed to be a main series sequel to At All Costs. Nothing about the Maya Sector or Victor Cachat's sexual predilections or 'seccies' or whatever's happening on Torch or the personal life of Abigail Hearns. -At this point in the series, although it happened in a side book, Honor Harrington has put on record her plan to destroy the entire Solarian League. Storm from the Shadows posted:"But even that won't be enough," Honor continued. "We can blow up Solarian fleets every Tuesday for the next twenty years without delivering a genuine knockout blow to something the size of the League. The only way to actually defeat it—and to make sure that we've put a stake through its heart and it doesn't just go away, build a new fleet, and then come back for vengeance a few years down the road—is to destroy it." She goes on to outline her plan for the political destruction of the entire League, the largest, oldest, and most peaceful political system in human history. Bear in mind that at this point all that's happened is an SLN fleet blowing up three Manticoran destroyers over a misunderstanding. Nothing else. This is a supervillain speech. Holy poo poo I just typed a lot of words 
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Mar 23, 2020 15:55
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I guess my cynical question is why do you see this series as salvageable? As far as I can tell, the core appeal is: 1) Space Battles are cool. I really can't argue with this. 2) Honor (and the rest of the Weber protagonists) are perfect self-inserts as you kind of alluded to earlier. Honor is a highly competent and technical person invested with righteousness as a direct result. She can fight the Manticorean idiot bureaucrats because she knows what she's talking about and they're a collection of inept morons, and she can trivially stomp Haven/Solarian/Slavemaster Illuminati vessels because she's such a competent captain and super genius. Its standard self-insert genre protagonist crap, no one understands them because they're so special and awesome. 3) Going by what Weber wrote, enough people like or are willing to tolerate long descriptions of made up technologies as long as this segues into destroying strawman communists/rapists/obviously bad guys who deserve to die hard. 4) It's Horatio Hornblower in space, so nerds who can't digest books without spaceships or wizards can read Horatio Hornblower. You can fix the mechanics of the space battles all you want and have the Solarians put up a decent fight, but it doesn't solve the core issue that the entire series is just another David Weber wankfest about how Honor is so awesome and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I like that you're actually trying to turn the books from a boring masturbatory stompfest into a struggle, but I'm not sure what you get out of taking Honor Harrington and trying to rehab her rather than writing your own awesome space series that could actually be about something rather than pretending to be a cool spacewoman destroying all the liebruls forever.
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Mar 24, 2020 02:51
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General Battuta posted:-At this point in the series, although it happened in a side book, Honor Harrington has put on record her plan to destroy the entire Solarian League. You might want to rethink your attitude on this a bit, or at least explain that you're totally changing the backstory because otherwise it comes off as super colonialist to call the SL the most peaceful system in political history given the extreme levels of exploitation Weber depicts as happening in the frontier security zones. It's like calling the Belgians the most peaceful state in Europe while they're lopping off hands in the Congo. I agree that Manticore/Harrington have some real "the actual bad guys" moments (count the number of times there's something like "The customary laws of war allow the surrendering side to do X, but HH threatens to murder them all unless they surrender without doing X"), but most of those are when Haven (the actual good guys of the series) are on the other side. Also, describing the destruction of another nation's military vessels as "all that's happened" is a little weird considering most countries would consider that to be tantamount to a declaration of war. I understand where you're going with introducing the moral ambiguity, but starting from that late in the series means that Weber has already introduced the elements that make the SL incredibly over-the-top evil which means you have to do a lot of retconning for that angle to work. I actually think that it makes more sense to rewrite from a couple books back and keep the SL out of the opponent zone altogether because anything dealing with it is where Weber's total political idiocy and complete inability to understand scale just throw any kind of suspension of disbelief completely out the window. Plus Republican Haven vs. Manticore is an actually interesting conflict because the bad guys (Manticore) aren't totally evil and the good guys have internal elements working to make things worse. You just have to extract the Mesa thing completely and leave the SL as a background detail. It probably makes sense to pare back some of the more ridiculous tech leaps (or at least make them not work perfectly right away) too, but that might get too far into rewriting things. The one thing you absolutely must change though is to remove having a prefix of "Star" on everything. Every time someone says "star nation" instead of "nation" or "country" I die a little inside and calling something the Star Kingdom is absurd.
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Mar 24, 2020 03:09
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Battuta, save your time and sanity on the Weber rewrite. Since Manticore is Space England just steal how England historically took over the Dutch Netherlands Empire. It was 40% warfare and 60% Everyone else: If you don't want to waste money, the best joke in Bill the Galactic Hero book 3 (Planet of Bottled Brains) happens in the first chapter/first 6 pages of the book, so you can safely preview it via amazon.co.uk kindle storefront and not waste any of your money on the book. It's the alligator foot/replacement footbud scene, which paints an accurate picture about military healthcare and the boredom levels of enlisted military life.
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Mar 24, 2020 05:14
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I already have a day job writing books about how colonialism is terrible. This is just fanfic to relax. e: Don't get me wrong colonialism is still bad General Battuta fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Mar 24, 2020 |
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Mar 24, 2020 14:33
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blackmongoose posted:You might want to rethink your attitude on this a bit, or at least explain that you're totally changing the backstory because otherwise it comes off as super colonialist to call the SL the most peaceful system in political history given the extreme levels of exploitation Weber depicts as happening in the frontier security zones. It's like calling the Belgians the most peaceful state in Europe while they're lopping off hands in the Congo. I agree that Manticore/Harrington have some real "the actual bad guys" moments (count the number of times there's something like "The customary laws of war allow the surrendering side to do X, but HH threatens to murder them all unless they surrender without doing X"), but most of those are when Haven (the actual good guys of the series) are on the other side. Also, describing the destruction of another nation's military vessels as "all that's happened" is a little weird considering most countries would consider that to be tantamount to a declaration of war. I understand where you're going with introducing the moral ambiguity, but starting from that late in the series means that Weber has already introduced the elements that make the SL incredibly over-the-top evil which means you have to do a lot of retconning for that angle to work. The funny thing is that the Solarian League is, by Weber's own words, the most peaceful system in the universe, despite how the Solarian League is also suppose to be the most expansive polity in the universe too. The comparison to Belgian is also off since it's agreed that they never shoot anyone to convince them to join the Solarian League, and the Solarian League grants them big benefits that leads to an increase in their Quality of Life. Of course, this is still depicted as pure evil of an argument. Unlike when how Honor is satisfied by the argument that it's actually good for them to divvy up the Silesian Confederacy with the Anderman Empire because it'll raise their quality of life, so the people they're taking over with no choice to them will greet them like liberators (and they do). So it's not like the Solarian League actually out-exploits everyone else. Which is pretty hosed up when you think about it. And the Solarian League has not been in an actual battle in 300 years, and before that it was 400 years of no battles. Because, of course, only Manticore and Haven could be allowed to have actual experience in combat. And pirates don't count! (Unless it's Manticore, whose navy is incredibly experienced in combat due to fighting pirates for centuries.) Also if you count Michelle Henke, AKA Honor When Honor Is Too High Ranked To Do Low-Level Stuff, the Solarian League probably is the one with the most war crimes inflicted on them. Especially given how the series finale involves Honor obliterating all civilian and military facilities in the Sol System before she dictates how the Solarian League will change their government or be genocided.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:41
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I think the League's foreign policy (such as it is) is clearly one of rapacious corporate pillage of periphery states, with economic absorption followed by political integration. They can't really run an extraction economy because space is just too absurdly full of stuff to make extracting material from distant colonies worth it, but they can still undercut all local production and turn the whole planet into the equivalent of Amazon.com warehouse workers. That's bad. I don't think it is good. It is clear that the Office of Frontier Security is suffering from total corporate capture and needs to go.
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Mar 24, 2020 19:32
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Kchama posted:The funny thing is that the Solarian League is, by Weber's own words, the most peaceful system in the universe, despite how the Solarian League is also suppose to be the most expansive polity in the universe too. The comparison to Belgian is also off since it's agreed that they never shoot anyone to convince them to join the Solarian League, and the Solarian League grants them big benefits that leads to an increase in their Quality of Life. They certainly do shoot people who don't allow corporations to run their entire planets economy, I remember reading about something called "intervention battalions" which are basically like if the CIA had Army divisions on call to launch their coups with. Also I'm pretty sure SL intervention is almost always portrayed as decreasing quality of life due to the above mentioned Amazon warehouse worker effect. Certainly if you're jumping off from a post-Battle of Manticore point you have to take into account that ~20ish planets voluntarily surrendered their sovereignty to another country just to avoid the SL (yes that's dumb, but it's what's written in the books) which speaks to how people feel about the "opportunity" to join up.
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Mar 24, 2020 20:05
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The Solarian League is depicted as an awesome place to live if you're on one of the full member worlds and not someplace Frontier Fleet has jurisdiction.
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Mar 24, 2020 20:23
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blackmongoose posted:They certainly do shoot people who don't allow corporations to run their entire planets economy, I remember reading about something called "intervention battalions" which are basically like if the CIA had Army divisions on call to launch their coups with. Also I'm pretty sure SL intervention is almost always portrayed as decreasing quality of life due to the above mentioned Amazon warehouse worker effect. Certainly if you're jumping off from a post-Battle of Manticore point you have to take into account that ~20ish planets voluntarily surrendered their sovereignty to another country just to avoid the SL (yes that's dumb, but it's what's written in the books) which speaks to how people feel about the "opportunity" to join up. This is a real problem that Weber retcons and changes his mind constantly. But at one point they specifically point to the increasing quality of life as an actual thing that happens from the Solarian League takeovers, but how it doesn't excuse them basically telling people to join them and not taking 'no' for an answer. And then later on when they're divvying up the Silesians, Honor even points out that this takeover they're doing is just like how the Solarian League gains new members, and is pacified by the "Well we're increasing their quality of life" argument. Also if I remember correctly the it's actually mentioned that the Talbot Sector votes were actually rigged in Manticore's favor, and also involved suppressing anyone who didn't want to join Manticore as well. So that's probably not the best use of 'voluntary'. But it's okay, that was in the service of Manticore, and their quality of life assuredly would go up, so of course it was the right thing to do. Those books made me hate Manticore more than anything ever. FuturePastNow posted:The Solarian League is depicted as an awesome place to live if you're on one of the full member worlds and not someplace Frontier Fleet has jurisdiction. It is mentioned as actually better than it 'use to be' for pretty much all of the new members too. Which is dumb, too. Somehow the Solarian League has never had any sort of warfare in centuries but has simultaneously constantly invaded and conquered through hook and crook.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:03
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Kchama posted:Also if I remember correctly the it's actually mentioned that the Talbot Sector votes were actually rigged in Manticore's favor, and also involved suppressing anyone who didn't want to join Manticore as well. So that's probably not the best use of 'voluntary'. I'm pretty sure this was mentioned in the same sense that "buses of illegal immigrants were shipped in to vote for Hillary" and "Black Panthers have been suppressing GOP voters at the poll" have been mentioned by Fox News. Weber would never have Manticore implicated in something as shady as outright voter fraud, even if only as the beneficiary.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:27
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Khizan posted:I'm pretty sure this was mentioned in the same sense that "buses of illegal immigrants were shipped in to vote for Hillary" and "Black Panthers have been suppressing GOP voters at the poll" have been mentioned by Fox News. I mean Manticore has a system to disenfranchise voters already, so I don't think rigging the votes would be out of line for them. It's even explicitly one of the queen's powers. Also the person mentioning it was a Manticorean collaborator.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:42
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No, you're flat wrong on this. The only people who claim that vote was rigged are the Mesa-backed terrorists trying to get the vote overturned and the Solarian League as part of their "We're actually the innocent good guys" campaign.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:46
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Gnoman posted:No, you're flat wrong on this. The only people who claim that vote was rigged are the Mesa-backed terrorists trying to get the vote overturned and the Solarian League as part of their "We're actually the innocent good guys" campaign. I'm willing to be wrong but my memory was that it was a Manticorean collaborator being all smug about their victory. And "Manticorean being a smug rear end in a top hat about their obvious victory" could sum up the last few books.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:52
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If you're going to workshop the Solarian/Manticorean conflict you need some kind of actual clash of ideas. Right now it's just The Good Space Feudal Imperialists vs The Bad Bureaucratic Mean Imperialists.
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Mar 26, 2020 17:35
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This War Will Destabilize The Entire Solarian League And Set Off A Galactic Shockwave Of Anti-Imperialist Anti-Manticore Sentiment Leading To A Catastrophic Period of Balkanization And Relativistic Genocide vs. No It Won’t
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Mar 26, 2020 21:18
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Actually a real problem I’m having is how comically easy it would be for Manticore to back down and get a negotiated settlement. You need to play up the Mesan manipulation and the League’s concerns about their deterrence posture to keep Manticore from growing a brain and just saying “let’s call it even and take this to court.”
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Mar 26, 2020 21:28
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Old Earth has made a lot more sense ever since 2016, and especially since the last few weeks. Every time I think "How could the Solarians possibly be so stupid? This is such clumsy plotting", all I have to do is watch the news and I'll see elected officials saying things like "Actually, have you ever considered that dying to boost the stock market is in fact good?"
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Mar 26, 2020 22:15
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General Battuta posted:Actually a real problem I’m having is how comically easy it would be for Manticore to back down and get a negotiated settlement. You need to play up the Mesan manipulation and the League’s concerns about their deterrence posture to keep Manticore from growing a brain and just saying “let’s call it even and take this to court.” I might be misremembering, but didn't Manticore make an essentially similar offer, first after beating Byng, and then again after beating Crandall, but the Solarian League rejected it both times in favor of escalating the conflict to preserve their position of hegemony?
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Mar 26, 2020 22:22
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Anshu posted:I might be misremembering, but didn't Manticore make an essentially similar offer, first after beating Byng, and then again after beating Crandall, but the Solarian League rejected it both times in favor of escalating the conflict to preserve their position of hegemony? Very much so. The people in charge decided that, even if they were in the wrong, daring to bend to somebody that destroyed one of their ships would weaken their "You shoot at one of our ships, we flatten you" policy and thus encourage others to resist, since their detached units often won't have local superiority even with a tech advantage.
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Mar 27, 2020 00:00
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That's basically Roman policy. You destroyed the army we sent? Okay we'll send a bigger one.
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Mar 27, 2020 00:04
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