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Gnoman posted: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. Actually they say straight up several times that they would not like a war and offer various investigations and stuff and Manticoreans variously BARE THEIR TEETH SMUGLY and basically tell them they want a war and Manticore is shockingly the ones much more interested in escalating than the Solarians.
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Mar 27, 2020 01:06
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The Solarian League plays the narrative role of Reginald Houseman writ very large.
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Mar 27, 2020 01:37
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Kchama posted:Actually they say straight up several times that they would not like a war and offer various investigations and stuff and Manticoreans variously BARE THEIR TEETH SMUGLY and basically tell them they want a war and Manticore is shockingly the ones much more interested in escalating than the Solarians. Sometimes I think you're gimmickposting as a character from the books who uncritically believes all the Solarian propaganda. General Battuta posted:The Solarian League plays the narrative role of Reginald Houseman writ very large. Yes, because David Weber only has two types of antagonists: a) pure evil that is evil because it loves being evil  and b) total idiot who is both convinced of their own righteousness and totally oblivious to the protagonist being much more powerful than them causing them to escalate a confrontation to the point that they get punched in the face (figuratively or literally) by the protagonist.
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Mar 27, 2020 01:52
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Kchama posted:Actually they say straight up several times that they would not like a war and offer various investigations and stuff and Manticoreans variously BARE THEIR TEETH SMUGLY and basically tell them they want a war and Manticore is shockingly the ones much more interested in escalating than the Solarians. The Manticorans demand investigations. The Solarians actively refuse to consider any, because negotiating with "neobarbs" would present a dangerous precedent. Instead, they send battle fleets to crush the impudent Manticorans. The response to "We demand an investigation into the incident where your ships destroyed three of ours that were resting at "anchor" with no warning: quote:"All right." Kingsford let his chair come back upright with an air of briskness. "I haven't had an opportunity to thoroughly review the data myself, but I've skimmed the summary and read the 'note' that came along with it, and I find myself pretty much in agreement with our civilian 'colleagues' . . . even if the assholes didn't even do us the courtesy of mentioning it to us before they settled on 'our' response." Their response to the fact that said fleet decided to attack when a Manticoran fleet dared to insist on an investigation. quote:"No, Agatá," he said, moving his gaze to her. "No, they weren't. And just over a T-month ago—on November the seventeenth, to be precise—Admiral Gold Peak arrived at New Tuscany . . . to find Admiral Byng still there." After a Solarian admiral decides to react to this incident by unilaterally attacking a Manticoran sector capital with a massive fleet: quote:"Sure, we 'discussed' a whole range of possible responses," Kolokoltsov said bitingly. "But what we didn't for even one minute consider was simply going ahead and admitting Byng was a frigging idiot who'd hosed up, murdered the crews of three Manticoran warships with absolutely no justification, and then gotten himself and everyone else aboard his flagship killed doing something even stupider. And unless my memory fails me, Nathan, a great deal of the reason we didn't consider doing that was the fact that we agreed with Rajani that we couldn't afford to let a batch of neobarbs 'get away' with something like New Tuscany because of the way Jean Bart's destruction would undermine the Navy's prestige."
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Mar 27, 2020 01:57
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It's fascinating how the "Honor Harrington Let's Read" attempt is slowly morphing Kchama into a discount bin BravestOfTheLamps, as the Lament Configuration prophecy foretold long ago. It's even more interesting, to me, how John Ringo and Peter Watts both have degrees in the same field (marine biology), but have had wildly different writing careers. The one mil-scifi book/game novelization Peter Watts wrote, Crysis: Legion, wasn't half bad, and now I kind of want Watts's version of the Posleen War/Aldenata Legacy, and Ringo's version of the Starfish series + Blindsight/Echopraxia.
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Mar 27, 2020 02:16
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Gnoman posted:An argument that the Solarians are being artificially stupid is a defensible one. An argument that "Oh, the only reason that Solarian fleets keep getting blown up while attacking Manticoran planets is that the Manticorans are being aggressive" is not. I agree, mostly, but what I keep coming back to is that the first choice to escalate was Manticore's. A Solarian officer blows up a bunch of your ships: that's really bad. (Imagine it kind of like the US shooting down Iran Air 655. Completely unprovoked murder based on misinterpreted data.) So how do you react? Send an extremely angry diplomatic note? This is probably the reasonable thing to do. You are in a life and death war with a suddenly resurgent opponent (Haven), you can't afford to provoke the giant gorilla who takes up 99% of the room. Get an apology and reparations. Send a bunch of warships to the scene, request all the sensor logs and access to the 'crime scene'? Yeah, I can buy that. It's a strong response to a local problem, it might turn into shooting, but it doesn't really require the other side to escalate. If the Solarians do come at you, record everything, make a big fuss, threaten trade sanctions. Do the above, plus demand the responsible officer's extradition immediately, at gunpoint? This is probably starting to cross into 'unreasonable' territory. Extraditions are a process handled by law. Even if you strongly believe this Josef Byng guy needs to face The Queen's Justice or an impartial tribunal, you should let the Solarians either hand him over or (as per book stereotype) protect him and put all the blame on you, at which point you pull your ambassadors, your trade, whatever it takes. I think this is roughly the event horizon of reasonable behavior. What the Manticorans actually do is send warships to the scene, demand that the Solarian crews abandon all their ships and turn them over to Manticore until a Manticoran tribunal has decided who is guilty, and then, as part of the same message, without waiting for any response, tell the Solarians that if they refuse to meet these conditions they will be shot and killed until they comply The Solarians turn on their engines, and before even waiting to see what they do, the Manticorans tell them that if they either attack or attempt to flee they will all be killed! This is a direct quote from the character's internal monologue, you know, rendered in Genre Thought Italics: "So if we can't convince them to stop and begin immediately decelerating themselves, I'll have no choice but to take them all out before they pull out of range." I mean, look at that! "If the Solarians won't surrender to me, I'll have to kill them all!" Would it be so disastrous if some of these Solarian ships left? Would it do any real harm to anyone? Then, when the Solarians do see fit to come out and fight, the Manticorans blow away the Solarian flagship. They don't fire a bunch of missiles with unarmed warheads to demonstrate how trivial it is for them to punch through the Solarian defenses, or spread out fire to damage a number of ships, or launch on some random asteroid to demonstrate their insuperable range advantage. They just execute the Solarians! This is not the behavior of a military under reasonable civilian control, operating as an instrument of state policy. This is just vigilante revenge killing of thousands of people. Everything after that is a consequence of this decision. The Manticoran commander (Michelle Henke) could have averted the entire war here if she'd just let her diplomats and civilian leaders do their work. I'm not surprised the Solarian bureaucrat-leaders are stunned and bewildered by Manticore's behavior. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Mar 27, 2020 |
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Mar 27, 2020 06:43
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General Battuta posted:I agree, mostly, but what I keep coming back to is that the first choice to escalate was Manticore's. A Solarian officer blows up a bunch of your ships: that's really bad. (Imagine it kind of like the US shooting down Iran Air 655. Completely unprovoked murder based on misinterpreted data.) So how do you react? Let's look at the exact demand issued (narration and description removed for clarity): quote:"Neither Prime Minister Alquezar nor Governor General Medusa desire additional bloodshed," Gold Peak continued. "However, they would be derelict in their duties and in their responsibilities to my Queen if they did not take the strongest measures to clearly establish responsibility for these actions, and if they did not demand accountability of those who are, in fact, responsible for them. Accordingly, I am instructed to require you to stand down your vessels. I am not demanding their permanent surrender to the Royal Manticoran Navy. I am, however, informing you that you will stand them down; you will make arrangements with the New Tuscan government to transfer all but a skeleton anchor watch of your personnel to the surface of the planet; you will stand by to be boarded by parties of Royal Marines and Royal Navy personnel, who will take temporary possession of your vessels and custody of your tactical data; and you will not delete any tactical information relevant to this incident from your computers. Your vessels will remain in this star system, under Manticoran control, until a Manticoran board of inquiry has determined precisely what happened here and who bears the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Manticoran personnel." quote:"Special Minister Bernardus Van Dort is here aboard my flagship as the direct representative of the the Talbott Quadrant's Prime Minister, Governor, and Cabinet. He will present a formal note to you, recapitulating the points I've just made. He will also present a similar note to the New Tuscan government, informing them that the Star Empire of Manticore requires its cooperation in this investigation, that none of our requirements are negotiable, and that, should New Tuscany prove wholly or partially responsible for what happened here, it, too, will be held to account by the Star Empire." quote:"I will reach New Tuscany orbit approximately one hour and thirty-five minutes after your receipt of this message. I require a response from you, accepting my requirements, within the half-hour. Should you choose to reject my government's requirements, I am authorized to use deadly force to compel you to change your mind. I have no more desire to kill Solarian personnel than anyone else, Admiral Byng, but Manticoran personnel have already been killed in this star system. I will not hesitate, should you choose to resist, to employ whatever force is necessary and inflict whatever casualties are required to compel your compliance. I will expect to hear from you within thirty standard minutes of now. They didn't demand any extradition - they merely demanded that the ships allow themselves to be boarded to copy off the sensor logs, and that the crews be interned with a neutral party until an investigation can be concluded. Yes, they demanded that it be done under a Manticoran court - because there's no independent organization or neutral party to carry it out. This settings version of the Geneva and Hauge conventions is enforced by the Solarians themselves, after all. They didn't even explicitly say "if you run we will shoot you", only that resistance would be met with deadly force. As for a warning shot, they mention after the actual shooting that their missiles do far better than they really expected. Now, if you want to argue that this was too aggressive response, fine. That's a valid line of criticism. It isn't exactly "The Maine blew up, now we're beating up on Spain" levels of overreaction either.
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Mar 27, 2020 07:08
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General Battuta posted: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 Well, this is more thought than Weber put into it at least. I can't say I followed the Solarian battle arc aside from picking up A Rising Thunder or whichever book it was where the Solarians sent a pedophile admiral on a sneak attack against Manticore that Honor knew about in the prologue and trashed (it's been a long time). I just remembered it being yet another setup for Weber's godlike protagonists to crush more of his uninteresting stock antagonists. quantumfoam posted:It's fascinating how the "Honor Harrington Let's Read" attempt is slowly morphing Kchama into a discount bin BravestOfTheLamps, as the Lament Configuration prophecy foretold long ago. This is what Weber books do to people. Don't read Weber! I'll grant I'm guilty of this, but if you subject the drat things to any kind of analysis there's nothing underneath and it's a paint by numbers money factory catering to an apparently obsessive audience with the patience to read 1000 page doorstoppers where the heroic royal protagonist crushes evil rapist badmen. If you'll excuse me I need to go work on the fourth book of my Robot Sexwarrior trilogy.
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Mar 27, 2020 08:23
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Gnoman posted:
You can't roll up to a foreign fleet of warships and make those demands though. No commander could possibly agree to such a thing and the commander making it must know that. Edit: Imagine if a Iranian Frigate rolled up to the USS Vincennes in 1988 and made those demands. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Mar 27, 2020 |
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Mar 27, 2020 12:23
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blackmongoose posted:Yes, because David Weber only has two types of antagonists: There's a third type, the competent and dangerous enemy who is a career military officer and has studiously avoided the capital-p Politics of their terrible star nation, and is Just Doing Their Job for the homeland. If they survive their first book, you know they'll be Honor's friend in the end.
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Mar 27, 2020 13:51
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Gnoman posted:They didn't even explicitly say "if you run we will shoot you", only that resistance would be met with deadly force. They totally do! quote:"Be advised that I have the capacity to destroy your ships from far beyond any range at which you can possibly threaten us. Be further advised that if you do not immediately cease your attempt to close with my ships or flee the system rather than accept my government's requirements and standing down, I will demonstrate that capability to you in a fashion which not even you can ignore." You can't just waltz up to a foreign fleet and perform a citizen's arrest. You certainly shouldn't tell them that if they try to de-escalate by leaving, you will kill them all. This is what I mean about Manticore's escalation problem; they act as if their military advantage gives them a moral license to dictate terms at gunpoint, rather than engaging in the diplomacy and statesmanship - or even the most elementary caution and restraint - which could have ended all this before it even began. Which is kind of the philosophy of the whole series, right? The good guys will tell you very plainly how hard they can hit you, and when you ignore them, they're going to hit you until you cry uncle. They will sigh and unsheath their Katana light assault craft. Gnoman posted:As for a warning shot, they mention after the actual shooting that their missiles do far better than they really expected. Generally you don't aim warning shots with intent to kill! "We fired several warning shots, killing the suspect" is a painfully true cop joke, not well-handled interstellar crisis management. FuturePastNow posted:There's a third type, the competent and dangerous enemy who is a career military officer and has studiously avoided the capital-p Politics of their terrible star nation, and is Just Doing Their Job for the homeland. If they survive their first book, you know they'll be Honor's friend in the end. A good part of the Solarian League arc is that nearly 100% of these characters are obliterated by Manticoran missiles on their first appearance. I doubt it's on purpose, but it's an effective piece of storytelling about how Manticore's technological advantages have cost it the ability to convert the enemy into friends.
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Mar 27, 2020 14:33
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General Battuta posted:They totally do! Missed those words when I was skimming, sorry. General Battuta posted:
You misunderstand what they meant. They didn't fire a warning shot because they did not expect their missiles to be nearly as effective as they were, and they had a huge weakness in total numbers. There's a later encounter where the scenario is similar and they call it out - any warning shot powerful enough to convince the Solarians of their firepower would use up enough of their firepower to make the fight much less certain. They didn't expect to erase a ship in the initial exchange. As for your other point, I think you're thinking too modern. You referenced the Iran Air 655 incident, but that took place in a context where a nominally impartial third party (the United Nations) exists, and you can communicate directly from Tehran to Washigton DC instantly. The incident was eventually adjudicated by an international court, with the US agreeing to pay an indemnity. In this setting, there is no third party - the political organization who would normally adjudicate is the one that committed the crime in the first place. There's no quick, direct communication - it takes days at a minimum to get messages back and forth between the governments, and longer for many of the fleets involved. Let us take what you consider a reasonable response: quote:Send a bunch of warships to the scene, request all the sensor logs and access to the 'crime scene'? Yeah, I can buy that. It's a strong response to a local problem, it might turn into shooting, but it doesn't really require the other side to escalate. If the Solarians do come at you, record everything, make a big fuss, threaten trade sanctions. Ok, you do this, and the Solarians tell you to gently caress off. You record this, and release it to the press, along with your sensor recordings. Then they release sensor recordings to the press showing your ships opening fire on the space station that blew up, or even preparing to shoot the Solarian warships. They also release a version of the communications from your fleet that show you as a total incompetent, and the Solarian officer on hand as being calm, reasonable, and gracious. This is, explicitly, well within the technological ability of the setting - similarly doctored reports were the key to setting off the confrontation in the first place. This puts you in at least as bad a position as the canon events, except with even less pressure from the media. This all ignores the fact that the Solarians had already decided that they would not negotiate and would not admit fault - Henke had no way of knowing that at the time, so it can't be used as justification.
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Mar 27, 2020 14:59
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General Battuta posted:You can't just waltz up to a foreign fleet and perform a citizen's arrest. You certainly shouldn't tell them that if they try to de-escalate by leaving, you will kill them all. This is what I mean about Manticore's escalation problem; they act as if their military advantage gives them a moral license to dictate terms at gunpoint, rather than engaging in the diplomacy and statesmanship - or even the most elementary caution and restraint - which could have ended all this before it even began. Plus, this all happens in a star system that is, in theory at least, an independent Nation (and that also had a legit cause to investigate the behaviour of the RMN and SLN forces in the system when their main space station exploded) Gnoman posted:There's a later encounter where the scenario is similar and they call it out - any warning shot powerful enough to convince the Solarians of their firepower would use up enough of their firepower to make the fight much less certain. They didn't expect to erase a ship in the initial exchange. But compare this to Honor's last salvo in the Battle of Manticore: She explicitly fired a single salvo of Apollo missiles at the havenite force while they were completely out of her range, but which was enough to trick the RHN forces to surrender because the chance that Apollo could reach that far was too great to take.
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Mar 27, 2020 15:16
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Gnoman posted:Ok, you do this, and the Solarians tell you to gently caress off. You record this, and release it to the press, along with your sensor recordings. No it doesn't, because in one of these examples, you haven't executed an enemy admiral and his entire crew! Seriously, compare the outcomes here. Above example: the Solarians frame you for blowing up a space station and make it all look like your fault. You are humiliated in the public arena and put on the diplomatic back foot. The Solarians are presumably satisfied with their frame job. Canon: you destroy a Solarian warship after threatening to execute its commander if he tries to run or does anything but surrender all his warships, full of state secrets and classified technology, to your custody. You push your nation toward a war with Space SuperAmerica while you are still locked in a life or death struggle with Haven. How is that in any world good strategic thinking? If I were in charge of Manticore I'd have recalled Henke for 'consultation' immediately and then fast tracked her to some desk job.
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Mar 27, 2020 15:33
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This is exactly the sort of situation that demands furiously worded diplomatic notes, pulled ambassadors, and economic pressure. "We want justice for this wrong but we don't want to get in a shooting war."
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Mar 27, 2020 15:35
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Coronavirus lockdown "cabin fever" is getting to people. Trying to preempt any thread meltdowns by referring to the OP text "The Mil-SciFi + Mililtary Fiction genres are defined by lovely to mediocre writing, main characters doing horrific WarCrimes, cartoonishly evil villains/threats, and near immediate plot justification for any WarCrimes the main characters have done or about to do in the books. Even the best written and least formulaic Mil-fiction/Mil-SciFi book series have cartoonishly evil villains/threats with WarCrime escalation events going off because otherwise everything would be resolved in 50 pages." Not even David Weber would call his work the best-written mil-scifi out there, so why not talk about the Freehold series by Michael Z Williamson or John Ringo or the grognard dice-rolls writing of Harry Turtledove instead?.
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Mar 27, 2020 17:55
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I don’t think there’s any risk of a meltdown.
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Mar 27, 2020 18:21
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The only thing melting down is the scrap that was formerly the Solarian League Navy.
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Mar 28, 2020 21:41
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Kind of thinking about giving Glen Cook's 1st Black Company trilogy(Books of the North) a 2nd re-read rather than re-install Project Magma(Myth 1/2 engine + Myth networking updated to run on 64bit systems) and play zombie-head football. Oh god, Crooker was an incel all the time, wasn't he.
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Mar 30, 2020 16:34
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No, he may have written weird
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Mar 30, 2020 16:38
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A 3rd read will probably have me noticing the flaws and plot railroading in Black Company books, so I figure it's best I just reinstall Project Magma and get my Black Company fix while blowing up stuff in-game. Anyone has any Myth 1/2 mods or maps that they''d recommend? Vaguely remember a few mods that shipped with the Myth Total Codex collection, however those mods are outdated in Magma.
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Mar 30, 2020 18:44
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quantumfoam posted:Not even David Weber would call his work the best-written mil-scifi out there, so why not talk about the Freehold series by Michael Z Williamson or John Ringo or the grognard dice-rolls writing of Harry Turtledove instead?. Mainstream Freehold I haven't read, but I did read the three Ripple Creek Security books as background for an RPG development project that fell through; Mad Mike got obnoxiously transphobic on Facebook and my publisher declined to renew the RPG license. They're a combination of very good milsf pageturners with an even more obnoxious "all leftists as idiot scumbags" than Weber ever indulges in. naturally the UN is always the bad guys, even if the actual opposition is a different group. Worse, the level of misogyny and transphobia really stands out; I had to tell my publisher that I'd add a surcharge of $1 per use of the b-word word if I had to read any more. Amusingly, he drops one bit early in the first book that transgender people are fully accepted by everyone except for members of obscure, old-fashioned religious sects. All of the main characters are then presented as being supremely uncomfortable when in close quarters with the one trans character; who was XXY and reassigned herself as female at her majority. I guess they all belong to obscure old-fashioned religious sects ! tl;dr Don't actually read anything by Mike Z, he's scum.
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Mar 30, 2020 20:09
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I've been out of the thread because work ramped up hugely. I work in grocery delivery, so that should give you a clue about what I've been going through. Anyways General Battula has pretty much summed up why I've been so hard on Manticore there, and they have been sneering 'through bared teeth', a literal phrase repeated a lot. But yeah they really escalated at pretty much every possible chance. From showing up multiple times and wiping out fleets when the Solarians very blatantly did not want to fight to basically showing up for diplomatic meetings go to "Actually, we WANT war!". Because "I want to resume normal relations while the investigation happens" does not actually come across as er... sincere when at the same time you're informing them that you're committing full economic warfare on them. Which, pre-retcon, wouldn't be possible because pre-retcon, the Solarian League had three firms that were bigger than the Manticorean Marine Merchant in its entirety, but post retcon no longer existed and in fact the Manticoreans ran all of the trade in the universe for humanity. Even for Haven, who are given as why Manticore can commit economic war against 80% of humanity who is also their main trade partner without suffering, as apparently Haven has literally no trade ships in the latest book, despite being stated to in the previous books. (It was specifically mentioned that Haven state-insured its trade ships). mllaneza posted:Mainstream Freehold I haven't read, but I did read the three Ripple Creek Security books as background for an RPG development project that fell through; Mad Mike got obnoxiously transphobic on Facebook and my publisher declined to renew the RPG license.  I had been hearing from other forums that he had repented and Was A Good Guy Now and I'm glad my mistrust is validated.
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Mar 31, 2020 05:19
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Never read Michael Z Williamson (just remember re-requoting posts about their work for the OP), mostly have forgotten David Weber, never read Kratman (noped out at the bookleaf notes for that infamous Ringo/Kratman SS tank commander book), hate most Napoleonic War fiction but especially despise Naval Napoleonic War fiction (N-W fiction always seem to revolve around British main characters that are perfect-yet-unjustly ignored) and mostly remember John Ringo via the stuff I cringed at in his stories. Late writing career era Ringo's Troy Rising series had a interesting (for John Ringo, at least) opening then rapidly flipped between "Ringo main character OWNZ his mean personal enemies/alien confederacy with Mark Twain Connecticut Yankee ingenuity", "Ringo writes out his white supremacist fantasies" and "Ringo tries to do Hard Scifi/mines the archives of Analog SFF digest".
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Apr 1, 2020 16:25
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I can see why people like Honor Harrington, it seems like... Yugioh or maybe hellsing but with age of sail themed sci fi instead of anime. The climax of the novels really is the bit where the evil fleet realizes how utterly trapped his fleet is by the Manties or when the new super weapons obliterate them. I mean, the novels has gotten worse but the excerpts I read seem like Weber has lost his discipline (on top of his prior faults like being boring and the lovely politics.) and tries to write every scene like a mini climax.
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Apr 1, 2020 17:57
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you just activated my torp card! (the next ten pages are just tables and tables detailing the salvo)
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Apr 1, 2020 18:22
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Kchama posted:
If it's been in the last six months or so, maybe.
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Apr 1, 2020 18:27
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Monocled Falcon posted:I mean, the novels has gotten worse but the excerpts I read seem like Weber has lost his discipline (on top of his prior faults like being boring and the lovely politics.) and tries to write every scene like a mini climax. Most of all I think Weber lost interest and wanted to move on to his other series.
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Apr 1, 2020 20:40
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Mil-fiction stories I would eagerly read: -Some time travelling bastard equips the Megarians of 500 BC with kevlar armor, aluminum shields, and carbon steel swords/carbon steel headed pikes with aluminum shafts "just to see what happens next". -Some time travelling bastard dumps 2 billion pounds of currency into the various Welsh independence movements circa April 6th 2020 "just to see what happens next".
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Apr 1, 2020 21:31
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mllaneza posted:If it's been in the last six months or so, maybe. Nah this was dating back several years ago because book 3 apparently had the protag go "Man I was a dick back then" and that solved everything.
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Apr 2, 2020 09:44
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Well I was curious whether aluminium would be a good material for making pikes. The increased weight vs having to make it thinner etc. But no, apparently aluminium Pike Poles are a thing. Not for actual use of weapons of course. But you could make the pointy end of one of these even pointier. https://www.loggingsupply.com/products/copy-of-1-diameter-aluminium-pike-pole-with-forged-steel-pike Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Apr 2, 2020 |
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Apr 2, 2020 09:52
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You got to keep in mind this aluminum & kevlar armor (and carbon steel blades) throw-off idea would be going up against pre-historic bronze era armor + weapons, not modern anything. Giving the 500 BC Megarians aluminum baseball bats/clubs to DINK! break skulls 24/7 was my original idea, however it overlapped too much with the other "time travelling bastard" scenario I proposed (the Welsh chav uprising of 2020). e: sorry DINK! quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Apr 2, 2020 |
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Apr 2, 2020 15:17
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Kchama posted:Nah this was dating back several years ago because book 3 apparently had the protag go "Man I was a dick back then" and that solved everything. Yeah, no.
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Apr 2, 2020 15:42
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   The tonal whiplash in Girls Frontline is amusing, goes from "android death squads setting off dirty bombs laced with T-virus" and Metal Gear "show me how much you've grown" fights on top of trains, to "meanwhile, the B-team death squad gets stuck in a mystery mansion."  quantumfoam posted:You got to keep in mind this aluminum & kevlar armor (and carbon steel blades) throw-off idea would be going up against pre-historic bronze era armor + weapons, not modern anything. IMO aluminum is too ductile to really make good weapons/armor out of, and Kevlar isn't super effective against attacks with edged weapons unless a vest is specifically designed to be stab proof. And the Indians were making Wootz steel c. 600 BC that is relatively close to modern tool/spring steel. Now on the other hand back in the 1960s the Soviets had titanium scale armor for their tax enforcement agents. If you look into it post-WW2 they mostly lead the west in personal body armor up until Ranger Battle Armor started getting rolled out in the 90s, largely due to their greater reserves of titanium but during the Afghan war they also made great leaps in developing ceramic armor and rolled out multiple different types of vests with different protection levels and coverage areas. And this ties into the late 80s PDW craze that lead to the P90 and MP7 getting developed because the US and European states collectively realized rear echelon bases would probably end up getting attacked by armor-wearing paratroopers/Spetsnaz, and that the Air Force marching band at Ramstein is only going to be carrying M9s or whatever. mllaneza posted:Yeah, no. His most recent blog post is a bunch of the typical chud whining about how coronavirus is liburul plot.
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Apr 4, 2020 10:10
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All good points. Mil-fiction works best with attention to detail but not too much attention to detail (that ends up as 10 pages of Weberian battle-damage reporting). The only Napoleonic Warfare story I've able to stand was less than 20 pages, was a direct parody of C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower which also managed to work in a alien from outer space/alien spacecraft.
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Apr 4, 2020 16:01
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I've been thinking more on the Solarian League deal, and it just makes less and less sense that the Solarian League hadn't done something to gobble up Manticore a long time ago. Manticore is not very far away in absolute terms. Hell, it's technically close enough in a sense that it should by all rights be considered right next to Sol. It's basically Beowulf's bestest buddy in the universe and all they do is to improve Manticore with no care for themselves (despite being a corporate dictatorship), so why has the Solarian League been either neutral or surreptiously allowing its own people to give Haven help. Especially considering that according to A Rising Thunder, the vast majority of Solarian League internal trade is facilitated by both Manticore's Wormhole and the Manticorean Merchant MArine. The latter is a massive retcon, but the former was basically the cornerstone of the whole plot of how MAnticore is so wealthy that they are able to turn cash directly into materials like a Real-Time Strategy game. Or a Tabletop Game. Also I remember seeing someone research that Manticore's wormhole couldn't be all that important to internal core Solarian League trade because the furthest possible distance between any core world was 192 light years and in general the travel time to and from Manticore-controlled wormholes and then to the systems would be about 197 light years, plus multiple toll-boothed jumps. So they were baffled about how it could be in any way preferable to pay a bunch of tolls and not save any time. I'll find the post as soon as possible. Also I'll try to do the next chapter tonight or tomorrow. I was taking part in a book club about Dan Brown's Digitial Fortress.
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Apr 4, 2020 23:47
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Kchama posted:I've been thinking more on the Solarian League deal, and it just makes less and less sense that the Solarian League hadn't done something to gobble up Manticore a long time ago. Manticore is not very far away in absolute terms. Hell, it's technically close enough in a sense that it should by all rights be considered right next to Sol. Manticore is 475 light years from Beowulf, which is 40 light years from Sol according to Weber (this is wrong - he places Beowulf in the Sigma Draconis system, which is 18.8 light years away according to our best astronomical data - but we'll use Weber's figures). This means that Manticore is 435-515 light years from Earth (I don't recall any of the books clarifying the exact relative positioning, but there is a mention somewhere that it isn't possible to determine the direction of a terminus before transiting). The Solarian League is mentioned to be a roughly 100 light year sphere around Sol (which is the source of the 192 light year figure). This means that Manticore is 3-4 times as far from from the Solarian border as Earth is. That is not close in any terms. The wormhole does bring them into close proximity, but it doesn't really affect the situation much. Officially, the Solarian League does not conquer - their forces on the frontier intervene in local disputes and form protectorate governments that eventually attain Solarian membership. Ignoring the fact that there's no significant local disputes (which is unimportant, as they're perfectly happy manufacturing some), they're extremely far from the frontier. Not only would invasion by the wormhole be extremely bloody because it would form an interstellar Thermopylae, they don't have the fig leaf they'd need to invade in the first place. I can't critique the other point without details, but the fact that a huge percentage of the trade we see is external trade rather than "League Member to League Member" is already a point against it.
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Apr 5, 2020 00:33
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What should have happened is that Frontier Security would have invented a reason to jump all over Manticore within a year of the Beowulf-Manticore wormhole opening up. That said, if they ever do more of those Manticore Rising books that Zahn was writing, those could explain why and how that didn't happen.
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Apr 5, 2020 03:05
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The books imply that Frontier Security had only become a conquering force a century or two before the main series.
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Apr 5, 2020 03:36
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Gnoman posted:Manticore is 475 light years from Beowulf, which is 40 light years from Sol according to Weber (this is wrong - he places Beowulf in the Sigma Draconis system, which is 18.8 light years away according to our best astronomical data - but we'll use Weber's figures). This means that Manticore is 435-515 light years from Earth (I don't recall any of the books clarifying the exact relative positioning, but there is a mention somewhere that it isn't possible to determine the direction of a terminus before transiting). I'm not talking about invasion. I'm talking about /caring about/. Like the "Manticore is 500 light years away' is basically the reasoning that books and defenders I see to say that Solarian League doesn't care about Manticore because they're 'neobarb 500 light years away' but... They are literally Beowulf's best friends, and in charge of the wormhole that the books say are vital to Solarian League core trade, to the point that Manticore threatening to close it got the Solarian League to roll over at least once in the first book. And that threat of economic devastation of 85% of humanity would, in fact, be more than a fig leaf anyways. And they should have been interested in incorporating Manticore into the Solarian League much sooner. The idea that they're 500 light years is hogwash as they're only, in practice, 40 light years. They should have a much easier time watching and dealing with Manticore, who is a literal best friend of a Solarian League core member and supposedly the life blood of their entire economy. The Solarian League just dismissing them for centuries and not even having any real diplomatic ties is baffling. They should have been telling Haven to back the gently caress off, not intervening on Haven's behalf, even if it was secretly by some rogues. External trade shouldn't really even matter for the Solarian League's economy. Almost all the richest systems in the universe are in the Solarian League core. Manticore's entire economy is described as being merely a significant fraction of just Earth's economy. And Weber specifically says that a lot of the internal trade goes through Manticore which is why Manticore is so rich, much less external trade. Kchama fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Apr 5, 2020 |
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Apr 5, 2020 17:42
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